He has never concealed his presidential ambitions, and leadership of the UDF would give him a power base from which to stand in 2002.This, however, assumes both that Mr Leotard agrees to stand down and that the UDF is still a fighting force after the 1998 parliamentary elections.Both Mr Giscard d'Estaing and Mr Madelin, along with many French political analysts, agree that without a strong, unifying and radical leader with popular appeal, the UDF risks fragmenting into the small parties from which it was formed.. Speaking of the "crisis" afflicting France, he said it was not just a crisis of jobs or Aids but " a formidable crisis of civilisation".Mr Bayrou, however, will want his reward. He is believed to have backed Mr Leotard only on condition that he vacates the leadership in three years' time. He used his position as a candidate for the UDF national council to deliver a ruthless and highly personal attack on Mr Madelin, painting him as a believer in US-style welfare cuts and cheap employment.Mr Bayrou's intervention saved Mr Leotard whose own campaign speech had been lacklustre and pessimistic. Mr Madelin sees himself as that leader, and in his upbeat address to delegates yesterday he presented himself as someone who would be able to restore the good name of politicians and politics in the eyes of French voters and maybe return the UDF to its 1978 position as the largest political grouping on the right.Public opinion polls among French voters generally, and among rank-and- file UDF members gave Mr Madelin a large majority before yesterday's election.Francois Leotard, however had the backing of the UDF apparatus and the complicated voting mechanism for the leadership - a three-part electoral college - gave him a relatively easy victory.But he also had a hidden weapon in the shape of a running mate, Francois Bayrou.Mr Bayrou, education minister for for the past three years, is a political bruiser equal to Mr Madelin but more canny, as he showed yesterday. Their fears have been exacerbated in recent weeks as the overwhelming majority of local and parliamentary by-elections have gone against them.One consideration of UDF members was to elect a leader who would minimise the losses in 1998. By his friends and supporters he was seen as the "legitimate" candidate who merited the succession and would be able to keep the UDF - a loose federation of diverse political parties, each too small to have influence in its own right - united through a potentially difficult period for the political right.All eyes are on the 1998 parliamentary elections, when the right - Gaullists and UDF alike - fear a sharp fall in their massive parliamentary majority, if not its outright loss.
He toured the country portraying Mr Leotard as the candidate of the status quo and the UDF's inexorable decline.In his speech at yesterday's election convention, Mr Madelin said: "Today's status quo is, I fear, tomorrow's defeat." Ramming the point home he asked: "How can the French trust the political parties to reform French society when those parties are not capable of reforming themselves?"Mr Leotard was regarded by his enemies as the candidate of the party apparatus. MARY DEJEVSKY Lyons France's former defence minister, Francois Leotard, won one of the most bitter and personal contests of recent French politics yesterday to be elected leader of the country's second largest political group, the Union pour la Democracie Francaise (UDF).He succeeds Valery Giscard d'Estaing, who founded the UDF 18 years ago as a parliamentary base for his centre-right pro-Europe policy when he was President of France.Mr Giscard d'Estaing, who is 70, says he is stepping out of the national political limelight to concentrate on his adopted local region, the Auvergne, in central France.As almost his last act as UDF leader, however, and one that summed up the acrimony of the two-month leadership campaign, he used his valedictory speech to endorse the candidacy of Mr Leotard's chief rival, the aggressive former economy minister, Alain Madelin.Mr Madelin, whose popularity with the French public soared after he was sacked from the first government of Alain Juppe in August, had stood on a platform of change, renewal and modernisation. Until the guilty are punished, the survivors cannot be released from their suffering".No one knows how many people died at the hands of the Dergue. The names of some 54,000 victims have been registered with the Committee in Addis Ababa but the real tally could be several times as high.Kebede Ademase and his wife, whose three dead children are on the Committee's files, are even more forthright: the members of the Dergue must be given the death penalty, they say There can be no other justice for their victims.. The prisoners, who are about to enter their fifth year of detention, wile away their days in an octagonal courtyard, reading, learning languages, playing chess and table tennis.
They all proclaim their innocence."We want the guilty to face what they have done", says Manyahelishal Gisau, chairman of the Anti-Red Terror Committee, which was set up to catalogue the Dergue's atrocities."People have suffered terribly, people have been disabled by torture, parents of victims have lost their minds. They have been divided into three different categories: the political masters and decision-makers, among them those whose cases will be heard in April; the "middle management" - some 800 policemen, soldiers and administrators who carried out the day-to-day running of the Red Terror; and, finally, the alleged perpetrators of the crimes - some 900 individuals who are said to have tortured, drowned, strangled and shot thousands of their fellow countrymen.The most prominent defendants are held at World's End, a prison and former Dergue death centre in the capital. The evidence we present will amaze not only our own people, it will amaze the whole world".About 1,900 people have been arraigned and it is the intention of the special prosecutor that all should stand trial. "We've got limited staff and resources and we're dealing with issues completely outside the previous experience of Ethiopia's legal system".However, the government of the Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, is receiving considerable international support. Argentina has provided forensic investigators to examine mass graves, the US Bar Association has given legal advice, Sweden has donated computers, and Britain and Holland have provided financial assistance.In addition to thousands of testimonies from survivors and victims' relatives, the special prosecutor has had access to many thousands of detailed documents, including orders for executions, torture and a litany of other crimes."The Red Terror was organised in a very systematic and bureaucratic manner", says Mr Wakjira."Records were meticulously kept and every last bullet used for executions accounted for. But there is little doubt that the 46 facing trial have been involved directly or indirectly in the atrocities committed during the Dergue regime".The trials, which could last for years, will constitute the most extensive judgement of human rights violations since the Nuremberg trials at the end of the Second World War.
If they are deemed a success by international observers, they could be used as models for similar actions in Rwanda."The Dergue trial is a huge and complex task", says Girma Wakjira, the state's special prosecutor. Forty- six members of the Dergue ("committee" in the main language spoken, Amharic) will stand in the dock to answer charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.A score of others, including President Mengistu who fled as rebels approached the capital in May 1991, and now lives in Zimbabwe, will be tried in absentia They face the death penalty if convicted. "It would be wrong to say the judiciary is totally independent", says Tsehai Wada, a lawyer with the Ethiopian Human Rights Centre."It's under quite a lot of pressure from the politicians to secure convictions. On 4 April, the trial of the Dergue, the military junta which ruled for 17 years after its overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974, is set to resume. After interrogation by the authorities, he was taken to the lane leading to his parents' house and shot in the head."I don't know why they were killed", says Mr Ademase, a retired hospital worker "They said my daughter wrote a subversive document.