Ethiopia's Prisoners of Blood
Packer, George
I have come back here to die," DestaAbdissa told me inAddis Ababa, "and the sooner the better." Desta is an Oromo, the largest of Ethiopia's eighty ethnic groups, comprising as much as half the...
...An Oromo and Amhara peasant were the same, and landlords were the same...
...I found this out when I left the capital to see for myself...
...Their bodies were now back with the families and the waiter had gone to pay condolences...
...We had heard enough...
...On the campus of Addis Ababa University, which overlooks the city center from the north, nationalism comes in simpler form...
...When we were outside, Solomon said, "The same thing that caused the failure of the Dergue is now starting with the Woyane: going to bars, boxing with local people for girls, getting drunk, undisciplined...
...120 • DISSENT Ethiopia In the following days I got to know something about Desta Abdissa's life...
...Then, with a faint pen, you draw the map"—lightly he sketched the ethnic boundaries—" with afaint pen...
...Info it, he told me, he poured all of his rage at Ethiopia, the revolution, the Abyssinians, the Oromo, himself...
...Kill Me Quick In Addis Ababa my Ambo story was received with varying degrees of belief...
...And we have come to identify with this ghost...
...Urji ran an article on its front page that omitted the third victim and was off by two days on the date but otherwise reported the story as I had heard it from many people in Ambo...
...They had been detained in several jails, including the ammunition factory, where, he said, he was kept in solitary confinement and tortured by Tigrayan soldiers in the manner in which Desta Abdissa was tortured two decades ago, the manner customary in Ethiopia, both under the Dergue and today: his cuffed hands forced over his knees, he said, he was hung upside down from a rod and his legs and buttocks flogged...
...There is also enough freedom for someone like me to learn what I did in a single weekend...
...Is there a war going on in Ethiopia...
...There he was taught that everything he'd learned from his grandfather was the devil's work...
...Another minute I think, no, I cannot leave my children behind...
...I said no...
...In spite of "these letters in front of my name," the university hasn't provided him the house it SUMMER • 1996 • 121 Ethiopia gave other returning professors ("Trying to frustrate me into leaving again"), so he sleeps on the floor at the home of an old comrade from the halcyon days of land reform...
...Solomonic dynasty, Orthodox Church, Pan-Africanism, revolution: none of these ideas had held Ethiopia together, and in 1991, when the Woyane, the Tigrayan teenagers with Kalashnikovs and rags tied around their wild hair, marched into Addis Ababa, their leaders had already decided on another idea for the country they had just liberated...
...I don't know," the Oromo woman said...
...The Dergue was a military dictatorship...
...A few months ago Desta returned to Ethiopia with a doctorate in social anthropology from the University of London and the nihilistic air of a desperado...
...Solomon rejected this...
...He sat back and fell silent...
...Solomon was still reeling from the funeral...
...In 1896, Emperor Menelik rewarded the neftanya, or gunmen, who had repelled an Italian invasion at Adowa, by making them landlords over the pagan Oromo in the newly conquered south...
...That phrase, trailed by the suffix "up to and including secession," is the beginning and end of OLF political thought...
...Later he said, "Still only a dream...
...The Oromo will not be a beneficiary of an all-fronts war with eighty ethnic groups...
...Urji's staff struck me as an earnest, dedicated group...
...He, his wife, and his four children share everything: this, he said, is his own private socialism...
...Why turn to Europe for a script when Amharic itself had an ancient and perfectly wonderful one...
...I struggled to keep up with Desta across the mud and slippery stones, amid the thronging Oromo traders and children and their mules...
...All my life I have been a coward...
...There is the old political class, dominated by Amharas (30 percent of the population), which calls for "genuine" democracy, an end to ethnic politics, and a return to Ethiopian unity amid warnings about another Rwanda or Yugoslavia...
...This created some problems for the older children who had already been schooled in Amharic, and for the children, Amhara and mixed, whose first language was Amharic (including Solomon's own...
...But when he was growing up, he said, ethnicity didn't matter...
...I don't mind being outsmarted given there are some underlying principles as a point of reference...
...I hate the Abyssinian system because it's breeding fanatic Oromos...
...He went to Canada...
...They had the scars here...
...China...
...On my last day we drove out of Addis Ababa an hour northeast to a small town called Sendafa, where former officials of the Dergue had been detained at the Ethiopian Police College...
...He comes from Wallega in the west, born into the generation of students that rose up against feudalism, intoxicated itself on Marxism, and was in turn nearly destroyed by communist dictatorship and factional fighting...
...Something breaks out here or there and OLF claims credit...
...Amhara, Oromo, Tigrayan...
...Within three years of the revolution everything had gone to pieces...
...What you hear and see," DestaAbdissa and many others warned me, "what things seem and are, have nothing to do with each other...
...The place where we were traveling had long been a "hot area...
...Merera himself implied to me that, instead of debate, his articles will lead to the least promising of Ethiopian outcomes— another political faction...
...Ethnic autonomy on paper has produced ethnic conflict on the ground...
...The first time I met him he told me, "I have enjoyed a horrible life...
...The prisoners had been moved to Addis...
...And there are the armed political movements of the country's other ethnic groups, most important the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), which regards both Tigrayans and Amharas as "Abyssinian colonialists," Ethiopia itself as a dubious concept, and calls for "genuine self-determination up to and including secession...
...I remarked on the occupational handicap of having INFORMER tattooed across their foreheads, but the research assistant was in a serious mood and missed my irony...
...The government has invented its own shadow—the OPDO will repeat the slogans they give them...
...While the TPLF in the rugged northern mountains turned itself into a disciplined fighting force capable of overrunning the Ethiopian Army, the OLF, with twentyfive million Oromo spread across an area almost as large as Texas, remained a loose collection of guerrillas and sympathizers who controlled little territory and had no coherent program...
...He asked me if I knew anywhere such a socialism existed...
...In the evening Solomon and I met up again with the waiter...
...In the Oromo region, the government's party is the Oromo People's Democratic Organization, or OPDO, which supporters say will win over the Oromo by bringing schools, seeds, development...
...But the feeling didn't go away...
...Forster's reputation, has grown with every year that it failed to take power...
...The Christian was a worldview, and Marx was a worldview—I thought, maybe Oromo is a worldview too...
...But the Dergue wasn't interested in criticism from the peasantry and threw Desta in prison for the first of seven times...
...First you have to acknowledge the individual is paramount...
...I also wanted to see the inside of a prison, which by now seemed to be Ethiopia's most important institution...
...The opposition simply has nothing to say on economic or social questions...
...The language of instruction was Amharic...
...Oromo wanted selfdetermination, just like anyone else...
...But you create a shadow, you use it...
...Is the ethnic identity of most Ethiopians mixed...
...Desta's slow deadpan voice was raspy from a cold...
...Cuba...
...Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said as much when he met Amnesty representatives last year in Geneva...
...The organization ("a clique and a ghost") came out of an earlier movement of Oromo army officers called MachaTulama, which was crushed by Haile Selassie in the late sixties...
...But Urji's staff (whose Oromo nationalist paper has to publish in Amharic because it's the lingua franca of the major towns) insisted that certain Oromo long vowel sounds had no equivalent in the Amharic script...
...He was getting on with his life—a life outside politics...
...We ducked into a dim little room where a young girl served us the local liquor called Kill Me Quick...
...the OLF pointed out that its leaders were being arrested and its fighters attacked...
...When I was in detention after the war, the TPLF told us that the Dergue was Amhara, anti-Oromo...
...The whole country suffered...
...And yet the whole weekend we had seen no soldiers other than the four at the bar, we had never been stopped on the road, we had been questioned by no officials, and now we were free to leave...
...All their leaders are outside the country...
...A friend of his, a policeman, had seen them being led out of Ambo jail by soldiers yesterday evening...
...If you don't open your mouth, a fly won't enter it.'" Ambo had a provincial town's quiet watchfulness, and I felt noticed as we strolled among others along the main road at dusk...
...Soviet-made T-55," Solomon murmured...
...Did the OLF recently kill 581 TPLF soldiers in Oromia or is the region peaceful...
...124 • DISSENT Ethiopia "If You Don't Open Your Mouth...
...Ethiopian history has always swung violently between centralization and rebellion...
...Instead of burying ethnic differences in Africa's most diverse country, the new regime would acknowledge them, emphasize them, enshrine them in the Constitution...
...Ambo seemed as thoroughly mixed as sergegna...
...Of Ambo's hotel owners, one, Derara, had been killed, apparently by soldiers...
...but his father, a rich peasant, packed him off to a Seventh Day Adventist mission school in order to be educated in the modern world...
...But the people in Ambo felt anything but free...
...Oromo teachers and students now hold separate post-graduation parties, frown on mixed marriages, and tend to have only other Oromo as friends...
...Two informers, he said, had just sat down at the next table...
...As we passed through a village, one of the teachers remarked that a few days ago a government militiaman here had been killed outside his house...
...Solomon now lives south ofAddis in Nazret, but he was born in a village on the ridge above Ambo, the son of anAmhara farmer and an Oromo woman: his first language was Oromo, his second Amharic...
...He pointed to his gut...
...In a restaurant, the waiter and barman told us that ethnic politics had hitAmbo hard...
...When we returned to the road a teenage boy waylaid us...
...Menelik's mausoleum and palace stand just over the crest of the hill...
...He hasn't seen his father in seventeen years...
...In the morning I called my friend: 'Go, good luck, I cannot leave.' I didn't wait, I hung up...
...They didn't do anything, they're not OLF, but they were put in jail after I came back into the country...
...He started coming to me for money, which humiliated me...
...Three versions that clash with each other and cancel each other out...
...There should be no one exploiting and oppressing and no one oppressed...
...I lost not only my time but my health...
...But as we turned back toward town a man in a baseball cap caught up with us...
...Later, he understood that nationalization had simply replaced local Amhara landlords with the allpowerful state...
...Were the Amhara pushed by Oromo pastoralists out of central Ethiopia into the northern highlands several hundred years ago Reprinted with permission from Ethiopia: Accountability Past and Present—Human Rights in Transition (AI Index #AFR 25/06/95...
...One of Desta's best friends has withdrawn into mysticism, telling me, "I'm trying to convince Oromos that the peaceful way through Christianity will lead to power if God wills...
...In the failure of that dream, younger Ethiopians have turned back to the old consciousness of blood...
...He left behind the continent's most brutal tyranny under Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam—at war with two rebellious armies in the north, slaughtering thousands of suspected political opponents and causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of peasants by famine and forced resettlement...
...Even in a de facto single-party system, he said, competition would come from the natural tension between the center and the regions...
...Oromos didn't merely lose their land: their language, unrelated to Amharic, and their culture acquired secondclass status...
...Desta said in reply to a question of mine...
...But he was treated well and eventually released to return home to Nazret and his wife and children...
...Desta had visited him once and brought a bunch of bananas...
...One of the dead, named Tilahun Gebretsedik, was an exsoldier with a wife and four children...
...Solomon's slender frame and melancholy features and decent, straightforward manner didn't fit my notion of the Dergue military...
...Why...
...For me it's despair...
...Colonel Mengistu, who had vowed to fight to the last man and the last bullet, fled to Zimbabwe...
...It explained everything...
...God Killed Them" On Sunday it became clear that pro-OLF elements in Ambo had not arranged a masquerade for my benefit...
...The Tigrayans, ancient rivals of the historically dominant Amharas, now monopolize power, not just at the center but all over Ethiopia through satellite ethnic parties the TPLF set up in each of the new regions...
...I knew that this was unusual, because yesterday there had been another funeral in Ambo: a hotel owner, who had been imprisoned as an OLF suspect following the funeral of his fellow hotel owner Derara, had contracted tuberculosis in jail and died after being released...
...Solomon and I fell in with the procession...
...It touches a wound...
...The three camps are static and mutually hostile...
...and OLF support was now as strong here as anywhere in Oromia...
...He had been arrested at yet another funeral—that of the hotel owner Derara in 1994—on charges of illegal demonstration and incitement...
...He turned to me to explain...
...Desta Abdissa was fond of quoting an Oromo proverb: "When two elephants fight, it's the grass that suffers...
...No one else made a sound...
...When I asked about other ethnic groups within the region, about the problem of common resources like rivers, about widespread intermarriage between Oromo and Amhara, about where exactly Oromia was, the level of indignation rose...
...and a third was in jail on a murder charge...
...He traced, not the government's new Region 4, not the OLF's imaginary independent state, not the population distribution of Ethiopia, but the way Oromo tradition itself conceives the map...
...My brothers are in jail in Mendi," Desta told us...
...Where did they live...
...It felt like a silent protest march...
...embassy confirmed), Eshete laughed it off as a problem of economics and literacy...
...By the time we drove out of town, Solomon and I fully expected to have our way blocked by security vehicles...
...Over a year later there was a thin scar on his wrist...
...He had ambitions to be a scientist and even completed a year at the university, but his family's poverty forced him into a military career...
...The Amhara elite have claimed him as one of their own, Oromo newspapers launched personal attacks ("His ideas are nothing," an Oromo nationalist told me, "and he is nothing"), and one government supporter dismissed him as an anachronism from left-wing student days...
...I could have gone shifta," Desta wryly told me—led his own rebellion...
...Now that the region was autonomous, at least on paper, the language of elementary education was no longer Amharic but Oromo (in secondary school students are taught in English, which no one can speak...
...So written Oromo made its contribution to inflaming ethnic feelings...
...But some things are true even though Urji says they're true...
...And in the end I had nothing...
...There's a problem to speak...
...Two men had recently been released with fresh wounds from a "secret" detention center everyone seemed to know about, an old North Korean ammunition factory fifteen miles to the west...
...They were absorbed into the Orthodox Christian Abyssinian empire...
...Maps and Identities In the current stalemate, the most basic questions and facts remain in dispute...
...I think I have done my bit...
...As an organization they don't exist—they're a clique...
...This seemed a very important point for Solomon...
...Two years ago, in London, he finally completed his dissertation on Oromo identity and thought...
...Prison was the one thing that united Ethiopians in all three political camps...
...His mood was already darkening...
...He was speaking Amharic...
...With the same singleSome of the names in this article have been changed to protect the people involved...
...And how could I be sure they had been killed for being OLF, as everyone claimed, and not, say, to settle some personal score from the end of the war...
...It's like a warning...
...He pointed next to his eye, where some Tigrayan men bear two vertical incisions...
...If individual rights were the only basis it would make for much greater division.You'd have this enormous backlog of nationalist questions...
...It was the language of the town, as Oromo was the language of the countryside...
...Feigning ignorance, I asked an educated-looking man who had died...
...Ethnic politics would either bind the wasted country together or finally tear it to pieces...
...They were informers because they were Tigrayans...
...He now lives on his hard-won disability pension of $32 a month, and on a small livestockfattening business that he runs out of his yard with the support of an American friend...
...An Oromo, he has written articles advocating 118 • DISSENT Ethiopia rapprochement with other ethnic groups in a common democratic opposition...
...He spent over a decade in exile...
...Some demon energy had come over him...
...The mud walls were decorated with old magazine articles in English that celebrated socialist solidarity between the people of Ethiopia and the people of the German Democratic Republic...
...There's one more irony to the story...
...they have all lost their youth to "the struggle" and now seem at sea...
...And then, at forty, it was time to go home...
...Compromise is regarded as collaboration...
...Opponents say the TPLF has imposed a dictatorship every bit as repressive as, but much subtler than, Mengistu's...
...I will die here...
...As he slouched in his chair his sardonic manner became edged with anger...
...Struggling against myself, this way, that way...
...Amharicization became SUMMER • 1996 • 117 Ethiopia the formula for survival and success...
...On my first day in Ethiopia, at the lunch where I met DestaAbdissa, a topographic map was fastened to the wall by our host, Getachew Kumsa, an Oromo economist from Desta's hometown and a supporter of the government...
...The third was apparently a separate case, a young farmer named Alemu Sory from a village on the ridge— a distant relative of Solomon's...
...A government supporter interpreted the incident as an administrative problem: the center needed to let the new regions make their SUMMER • 1996 • 127 Ethiopia own mistakes on the way to genuine autonomy...
...Desta spent the next seventeen years trying to understand "this feeling...
...He joined the student move .ment, in which there was "common purpose— to fight against injustice, and for common land, equality...
...Back in Ethiopia, he landed in jail for eighteen months...
...As rational human beings you go beyond—but because of the smartness they hold me there, they don't let me go beyond...
...At first he had believed in the Dergue's revolutionary promise and welcomed the nationalization of land, until, like Desta Abdissa, he saw that his own father gained nothing...
...He knew at least thirty people in jail...
...Oromo is a predicament...
...I met a family of six former fighters and activists, all in their thirties and forties, none of whom ever married or had children...
...Oromo language, names, the gada system, the culture itself had a despised status in public life...
...When Desta was a raw young student in Addis in the early seventies, Getachew guided his intellectual development in Marxism—he was not only Desta's mentor but also his elder in the Oromo social system calledgada, which classes men and their duties in eight-year age groups (not women: Oromos are joined with other Ethiopians by their monumental sexism...
...Shortly afterward the research assistant abruptly led me out of the coffee shop where we'd been talking...
...There was a pause...
...There was a moment's pause...
...He had been trained to operate these tanks...
...It was a shallow Marxist idea of mankind and I regret it...
...But he agreed that the worst fate of all was to be a hotel owner in Ambo...
...His old mentor Getachew had intervened with the Oromo regional government to secure their freedom...
...I don't want to talk about politics any more," she said wearily...
...The bodies were still lying there—the families were afraid to collect them...
...Andreas Eshete, the philosopher and government advisor, demanded rhetorically...
...Some Ethiopians claim that the OLF's organizational weakness reflects the relative ease of existence in the fertile south, or the Amharicization of many Oromo, or the gadu social structure, which is less hierarchical and more open than Abyssinian culture...
...In these heady times, barely twenty years old, his brain stuffed with Marxist readings, he was assigned to propagandize the Dergue's land reform in his home region...
...Around noon another of Solomon's uncles appeared and told us what everyone else in town apparently already knew: two Ambo men, OLF cadres who had fled town several years ago and had been arrested recently in Addis and taken back here, were shot to death last night in the bush outside of town...
...Over twenty years and thousands of corpses later, the words still had the simple incantatory power of belief when Solomon Abera spoke them...
...People are not discussing issues," Merera Gudina, a political scientist at Addis Ababa University, told me...
...They had a cooling system in the Russian Library, so I used to go there to get away from the heat...
...I asked if there was OLF activity in the area...
...Ethiopia appeared on its cover as a solid green shape, including Eritrea, which became independent in 1993...
...Instead, he listened to the peasants' complaints about land nationalization and took them back to Addis...
...I stayed up all night in my office, I didn't sleep...
...As for the suppression of the Oromo newspaper Urji in some towns outside of Addis Ababa (which even the U.S...
...He was walking alongside me and staring straight ahead...
...It's based on geography...
...He felt no bitterness, but his only concern now was his family...
...God killed them...
...One man in rags, either too poor or too crazy to be afraid, was trailing the hearse and sobbing: "Asefa, my brother, I haven't seen you for so long...
...And what did these questions of identity matter to the peasants growing the Ethiopian grain called teff there...
...Ambo appeared to be a town under enemy occupation...
...Solomon's own uncle had been arrested twice, but not tortured, and had lost a lucrative job looking for contraband coffee at checkpoints...
...In early 1991 the EthiopianArmy, the largest in Africa, swiftly collapsed...
...Is Ethiopia's history three thousand years old, as pan-Ethiopianists say, or a hundred, as Oromo nationalists say...
...I was struggling against myself...
...When he called from Canada after the Woyane took over he had only one question: 'Is Solomon alive...
...One older man had served eight years in a cell so crowded that the prisoners had to sleep side by side, head to foot...
...When I asked about Amnesty International's recent report cataloguing human rights abuses by the government, including illegal detention, torture, and killing of OLF suspects, Eshete dismissed it as a biased work based on flimsy allegations...
...Since its founding in 1974 the OLF's prestige, to paraphrase the gibe about E.M...
...Identity, after all, it's prescribed, it's given as a birthmark, you have no choice...
...By now everyone was much too frightened...
...the other, I was told, was too frightened to talk to me, his house was being watched...
...I don't know," he said quickly and moved off Solomon interpreted for me with an old farmer...
...A ghost is there because somebody has died, there is a reason for it to be there...
...Sooner or later, most conversations about Ethiopia lead to a map...
...From a cow dung.' Oromoness is inescapable for me...
...Solomon's father had come down from the hills on horseback to meet us in town, heard about the killings on the way, and recognized Alemu Sory's name...
...O.K., it could help give you a sense of identity and pride, an acknowledgment of who you are...
...I realized what I had done...
...I don't know...
...The square itself is actually a vast dirt amphitheater, now overrun by flocks of sheep...
...When he stopped and turned, he was beaming...
...And it was at this time, during his longest and harshest imprisonment, in Jimma, where he entertained less educated prisoners by embellishing on the plot of a movie called The Blue Train every night for three weeks, that he began to think of his grandfather again and what had been left behind...
...Opponents say this means an Ethiopia dominated by Amharas, as it has been throughout its modern history...
...This void allows all sides to offer for foreign consumption essentially whatever picture of the country they choose...
...I always kept reading, thinking I just needed to know more, to be more objective, more mature, and then this feeling would go away...
...You have the Amhara version, the Oromo version, the Tigrayan version, and probably you are left with nothing...
...There, presumably, is where the truth can be found...
...He called it "sour intercourse...
...Solomon and our passenger were having an argument...
...That night Solomon and I were drinking beer in a bar that was getting rowdier as closing time approached...
...Every time he tried to go home under the Dergue he was arrested...
...Can you imagine the fear, George...
...Did you hear...
...A ghost is real—much more real than a shadow...
...One morning I visited the newspaper's office: it turned out to be a tin-roofed mud and straw house, in a hillside slum near the university, whose rooms were dark because power in the neighborhood was off...
...In the last months of the war he was commanding teenage forced recruits who wore civilian clothes under their uniforms, surrendered in droves at the first opportunity, climbed out of their tanks "with the engines running...
...He is now training to be a medical doctor...
...Still a teenager, he fled the country into Sudan one step ahead of the imperial police...
...Our passenger claimed that the shooting, the culmination of a feud dating back to the Dergue years, had ethnic causes...
...Alone in Africa, Ethiopia was never colonized (Fascist Italy occupied it from 1936 to 1941), and as a result the relation between its ethnic groups is unique...
...By then Solomon was imprisoned in a TPLF detention center for Ethiopian officers, where he spent five months being told what he already knew: that he had fought for a "fascist" regime...
...I am Desta...
...Over the course of the day the number of victims increased to three, then four, then back down to two, before finally settling at three...
...But Merera Gudina, the Oromo political scientist, brought out the same map in his office at the university to show all the complications that would follow if Oromia became independent...
...Who was included...
...We stopped walking...
...Oromos were neither left alone nor wiped out...
...If Oromo is serious about an Oromia republic, the country will turn into a madhouse...
...But a more democratic...
...As we passed the eucalyptus groves nearAddis Ababa it started to rain...
...To Bind or Tear...
...In the town before Ambo we picked up three hitchhiking schoolteachers, two Oromo and one Amhara...
...In the century that followed, ethnic division has been concealed under a variety of unifying ideas, and you can see them all if you stand in what was once called Maskal Square, after 1974 renamed Abiot or Revolution Square, which is what the minibus touts still shout at passengers...
...Urji readers are asked to believe that most of Oromia is a war zone in which every jailing and murder is politically motivated...
...Soon after his release he suddenly found himself a young cadre in the agriculture ministry of the revolutionary government that had just overthrown Haile Selassie...
...The fact that the government has brought a nonstop succession of criminal charges amounting to harassment against Urji and other opposition papers actually enhances their credibility...
...Critics regard the OPDO as papier-mache nationalism that has only inflamed "genuine Oromos" against the government...
...Around Ambo the Ethiopian Army and local militias had put up the fiercest resistance to the Tigrayan rebels at the end of the war...
...a second had died of TB he caught in prison after Derara's funeral...
...Everyone in the office had been in prison, under the Dergue or the present government...
...The argument was about blood and class...
...Both," he answered...
...By any means I say I want it to appear today...
...It is your blood...
...The Ethiopia he came back to live, teach, and die in is now under the control of a victorious northern rebel group, the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF...
...Bad memories," he told me as we drove on...
...You can tell the Tigrayans," the research assistant's friend said—as if this were the real advantage...
...In the early eighties Desta (the name means "happiness") slipped out of Ethiopia, first for Kenya, then England...
...These details troubled me: if the soldiers wanted to cover up the nature of the deaths, why were the men brought back here from Addis...
...At its simplest, the political landscape has divided into three camps...
...Desta Abdissa's ex-wife, once a student revolutionary, is trying to set up a cooperative among twenty Oromo women...
...Just before eleven, four men walked in...
...Everything else suggested that the murders were intended as a warning to people in Ambo...
...what's clear enough is that people in the countryside are caught in a spiral of worsening violence, that 122 • DISSENT Ethiopia there is torture and extrajudicial killing by government soldiers, and that the OLF fails to protect the Oromo peasants it relies on...
...A small incident, already on the way to dissolving in the confused perceptions and counter-charges of Ethiopia's ethnic politics...
...I asked how he knew they were informers...
...Since 1992 there has been, depending on whom you ask, either sporadic skirmishing or guerrilla war all over Oromia...
...And this guy was explaining my life to me...
...Here, beneath towering, long-gone portraits of Marx, Lenin, and himself, Colonel Mengistu presided over mass celebrations of the 1974 revolution and once smashed bottles of red-dyed water to show what the revolution had in store for its enemies...
...For the purposes of political struggle, it means that when a foreign journalist tries to make contact with OLF leaders inside Ethiopia and to visit OLF units in the countryside, there is no one to talk to—no door opens...
...They assured me that they cross-check all the stories their "reporters"—merchants, hospital workers, government officials—send in from the field...
...but it didn't satisfy the Marxist Kumsa...
...He had heard our questions, he wanted us to know whose funeral this was, and he told us the story we al126 • DISSENT Ethiopia ready knew...
...At his home in Addis Ababa, Andreas Eshete, anAmhara philosopher who has become an adviser to the government, pointed to a map of the new ethnic regions and said, "Collective identities will not go away...
...I was seeing it in my life...
...You draw the faces first"—Tecola began dotting the green shape with his capped pen, each dot a human face—"all over Ethiopia...
...Instead, we crossed the road and plunged into the market...
...Desta's thesis has begun to win a reputation at Addis Ababa University, one of the last strongholds of the Amhara elite, and also among OPDO officials of the Oromo regional government...
...I know identity is a bullshit...
...His grandfather, a traditional Oromo priest in Mendi, had selected him to inherit the ritual and political scepter...
...Anyway, both men were Oromo...
...It is more interesting— shot through with the passionate contradictions of his guilt at having made it in the Abyssinian world, his anger at continuing to find himself thwarted, his candor, his intimacy with Oromo tradition, his disgust with the obsession over identity, his inability to transcend it, his capacity for harshness and for tenderness...
...Ambo told me that there is a good deal of official abuse in the Oromo region (I lost track of the number of people said to be in jail), whether directed from the center or local and more arbitrary...
...Then he excused himself and hurried ahead...
...the return to Addis Ababa lay before us...
...I spent fifteen years there...
...I stood up—there were two hundred people—and I said: No...
...You can say there is no OLF inside the country...
...but for most of the younger children, the teachers said, learning in Oromo was "beautiful...
...It was a gamble, and a paradox of sorts...
...It was self-contained...
...They're in the procession and they don't know who died...
...I'm getting tired, I feel I've run too long and far...
...One couldn't imagine a monument in Abiot Square that the government might raise to Regionalism...
...In the country's ethnic equation, the Oromo have always been overlooked and despised...
...I take Urji as if it were my first child and I want its survival," said Tesfaye Deressa, the young editor in chief...
...I hate the consequences, I fear the consequences, but every time you try to speak some words they outsmart you...
...Solomon, who kept none of his war medals or memorabilia, stayed in the car...
...Desta began asking them about the Oromo word ayyaana—the nature of reality...
...They haven't gone away anywhere in Africa...
...He will be an impressive man...
...Solomon Abera was far from the only Ethiopian I met who has no more heart for politics...
...Solomon was fond of a proverb from his military days: "Better a living soldier than a dead general...
...Farther up the hill stands a modern glass tower called Africa Hall, which houses the continent's major United Nations commissions and whose stainedglass windows depict African suffering and triumph...
...The waiter, an Oromo ex-soldier whose wife was Amhara, said, "Three kinds of teff are sold in the market: white, red, and sergegna—mixed...
...These rebels knew something about the power of the center—with Soviet airplanes it had laid waste to their region...
...On one side of the highlands live three Oromo groups, on the other side two: five, the magic number in Oromo cosmology...
...The poor must have protection...
...and changed the subject...
...A senior judge, who had told me he doubted there was illegal detention in Ethiopia, listened silently, seemed to accept what I was telling him, then said "What to do...
...Galla na gari piazza ay gabam: "Galla and horsedrawn carts are not allowed in the city center," went the saying, Galla being the equivalent of "nigger" for Oromo...
...He wanted his protégé to show, objectively, what he meant by Oromo...
...All my life I've been afraid of fighting, I always hated the idea of a fight...
...The car exploded in laughter...
...I am also an individual, more than any of these...
...That's what civilization means: knowing to trick...
...He has been jailed eight times, the first as a teenager under Haile Selassie, thereafter by the Dergue, the military council that overthrew the emperor...
...He rose to the rank of major in the Dergue's army, commanding armored infantry on the front lines of two losing wars—in Eritrea, where a bullet shattered his thigh, and then in Tigray...
...Maybe someone killed them...
...By the end of the war he was fighting simply because he was a professional soldier...
...He had become an Oromo nationalist...
...There is the ruling coalition, backed by the United States, led by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, and dominated by Tigrayans—barely 10 percent of the population—which has all the political power and most of the energy as well, governing through its satellite parties with the rhetoric of democracy, self-determination, and agricultural development...
...You need to explain Marxism, you need to explain feudalism...
...Some people are concentrating on making money in the newly privatizing economy...
...I see through the bullshit, and I hate it...
...The day before I left the country, Desta Abdissa's brothers were released from prison in Mendi...
...Now he was back in Ambo trying to eke out a living by offering to write petitions for illiterate people outside the courthouse...
...Haile Selassie's residential palace is just across Menelik II Avenue, named after the founder of modern Ethiopia, who in turn drew his name from the son of Solomon and Sheba, supposed progenitor of the imperial lineage...
...It was disturbing and disorienting...
...He knew how these things happened under the Dergue: both men had been corrupt party members—the fight was over a bribe for a fuel license...
...In school he heard about socialism and the idea made immediate sense to him, he said, echoing Desta Abdissa, "because my parents were peasants...
...Did I mean the Oromo have no right to self-determination...
...I went into the army because my father was a peasant and he couldn't afford to educate me...
...Suddenly, he suggested at the end of my trip, he has something to lose in Ethiopia...
...Desta said to me...
...One of them had fled town...
...The language was only recently transliterated, and the choice of the Roman alphabet by Oromo nationalists infuriated some Amhara...
...Who am I? I am an Oromo, an Ethiopian, a social anthropologist...
...On Sunday the two men from Ambo were buried...
...The hearse was a black minibus...
...It possesses people, it changes them...
...He returned with the map...
...How had the men died...
...q 128 • DISSENT...
...Two Oromo-Eritrean couples they knew personally had split up...
...I asked how they had died...
...Try to sell a paper in Oromia—it's a hard thing to do...
...My companSUMMER • 1996 • 123 Ethiopia ion on the trip was a thirty-eight-year-old former Ethiopian Army officer named Solomon Abera...
...I just want to do humanitarian work...
...They simply give you their version of the story...
...They must tend," an Oromo research assistant said...
...Desta is an Oromo, the largest of Ethiopia's eighty ethnic groups, comprising as much as half the population...
...Is Ethiopia more free than ever in its history or is it a cleverly disguised police state...
...Start with that...
...In the wake of this news, Desta's mood came closer to the meaning of his name than I had seen it before...
...Stars The fact that Urji reprints OLF "military communiqués" as if they were reliable news reports makes it easier for government supporters to dismiss it...
...When the analogy with black Americans inevitably came up, I pointed out the advantage of Ethiopians' physical similarity to one another: at least for a few seconds strangers had a chance to know the individual before group assumptions could get in the way...
...But with these guys everything is manipulable...
...I wanted to speak to the families and to see the bodies myself, but the waiter told me it "wasn't necessary," which meant impossible...
...Finally a court in Addis freed them on bail...
...At his funeral women wailed inconsolably, men in ceremonial robes on decorated horses waved sticks and shouted praises...
...Were they old or young...
...The dream of equality that still haunts Solomon and that nearly destroyed his generation is mocked by the thousands of mutilated beggars in Addis Ababa and the endless hardships of the vast peasantry...
...But as a movement— yes, something is happening...
...Getachew disappeared from the room...
...He knew both Ambo men and their families...
...embassy, where, I learned, cables written at lower levels that criticize Ethiopian government repression are sometimes softened higher up before being sent on to Washington, it was taken as a lucky journalistic find—truth, but an exceptional truth...
...Yet OLF representatives in Europe and the United States complain that their struggle is unknown or misrepresented in the West...
...I can't go beyond...
...I knew Getachew disapproved of it—he looked down from the higher moral ground of class analysis...
...Gently, enigmatically smiling, ne wondered whether a nationalist ghost mattered to anyone other than a few "petty bourgeois intellectuals...
...Desta dismissed him curtly...
...Who is OLF...
...Every group would say, "Why haven't you put this in the Constitution...
...The room quickly filled with staring children...
...At the U.S...
...Maybe something with politics...
...As for the map's lines, Eshete said, they were based on a survey done by the Institute of Nationalities under Mengistu and generally considered to be accurate...
...People have nowhere to hide, they're being forced to choose between OPDO and OLF...
...It is hard enough to convince people of class analysis...
...But I don't give a fuck any more...
...There are many reasons to be a nationalist...
...From his Kenyan exile he began slipping back across the border on foot to do his field work in Oromo villages, staying for six months at a time...
...One minute I think, yes, I will go out and try to help my family leave...
...Even before noticing that one of them was wearing green fatigues, I knew instinctively that they were Tigrayan government soldiers...
...But it is very simple to use ethnic or religious...
...That very effort will force you to identify as Oromo...
...So, lacking any first-hand evidence, Solomon and I spent a second night in a town where political killings had apparently just taken place...
...They tell you, oh, he is a narrow nationalist— they use these catchphrases...
...Merera should know...
...They had books of Marx and Engels in English, and I read them...
...The man who had overseen Desta's torture almost twenty years ago was now in prison himself...
...There might be more to come for four of Urji's staff—including Tesfaye—who had a court appointment in two days and were facing years in prison on charges of false information...
...He was tortured until half his body became temporarily paralyzed, and once he was forced to endure his own mock execution...
...There are no faces that can fit this way...
...By my right ear I heard someone mutter in English, "Young...
...But now the Oromo question has violently emerged as the key to the country's survival...
...Within a few hours we had picked up several stories of illegal arrest and torture of OLF suspects by TPLF soldiers based in town...
...Yet Amhara aristocrats also married their daughters to the sons of Oromo chiefs...
...And the Oromo nationalists I met, who have become the government's number one enemy, seem to have little quarrel with the government's map—after all, it gives the Oromo a huge chunk of southern Ethiopia...
...After five years his wife, the mother of his two sons, sent him a letter from Addis asking for a divorce...
...the second, Asefa Demese, had worked at the hospital in Ambo and had a wife and three kids...
...What Are You...
...On the road to Ambo we began passing the rusted, weedy hulks of Ethiopian Army tanks destroyed or abandoned in the field during fighting in 1991...
...Finally I decided: I will not save myself and leave my children behind to starve or have some other problem...
...Even some government critics believe that the OLF's decision to go into armed opposition was a precipitous and tragic mistake...
...It oppressed everyone...
...It's a clique and it's also a ghost...
...You have to stick to Oromo identity to disagree with the portrait of the Oromo as presented by Abyssinians...
...reprisals had been harsh...
...No," the Amhara woman said...
...You know, George, I really believe in socialism...
...The Amhara claim the Oromo pushed them into the highlands...
...As a result of the killings the Tigrayan soldiers in town, who stand for central power, will become more isolated, more hated, and probably more aggressive...
...The Somalis claim land up to Nazret...
...The spray of gunfire may have been designed to simulate a firefight, and around the finger of one corpse someone had placed a grenade pin...
...His youthful dream died hard...
...The friend's sister had arranged passage for them both across the Kenyan border...
...When he was a shepherd boy of nine or ten, his maternal grandparents teasingly asked the question that now lies at the heart of Ethiopian politics: "What are you...
...He found that Amhara chauvinism had survived utopia and was dividing the fratricidal student movement...
...Maybe I can use this...
...They divide it east and west by the Great Rift Valley...
...Amhara, Tigrayan, and Oromo youth gangs had formed in the aftermath of the apparent murder by government soldiers of an Oromo hotel owner named Derara in September 1994...
...Discussions with Oromo nationalists seemed to end as soon as they began...
...I got out to photograph one...
...I've also heard the OLF compared by a detractor to the Black Panthers...
...I wasted so much time on this bullshit...
...Desta stood and brought me to the map...
...In 1991, after the fall of the Dergue, the OLF entered into a governing coalition with the victorious TPLF...
...Sixty others, he said, had been arrested with him (Amnesty International published a similar figure...
...This was the answer to Getachew's question, and with it the lunch ended...
...I wanted to see one face of the Dergue, and to see Desta's response...
...On the other side of the square, from a wooded hill, a loudspeaker intones prayers as the Christian faithful, shrouded in white, gather at the gate of Stefanos Orthodox Church...
...Everyone agrees that the vast majority of educated Oromos support the OLF and are deeply alienated from the government...
...The owner of the hotel where we had stayed in Ambo was in jail for shooting another man...
...It has always been the belief in Ethiopian politics that security lies in monopolizing power and eliminating one's enemies: it was the belief under the emperor and under the Dergue, and it is still the belief today...
...Desta was in his element, he was completely happy...
...An Oromo elder close to the OLF warned me that I might be kidnapped if I tried, because of American support for the Ethiopian government...
...Today's quiet was spooky...
...And yet in the next phase of Desta's life identity ceased to matter...
...But in school when I asked where my people came from, I was told to shut up...
...Tecola Hagos, a former member of the government who quit and exiled himself to Massachusetts over the TPLF's authoritarian practices, sat with me in his Cambridge apartment and took out his new book on the failure of Ethiopian democracy...
...In the early afternoon a crowd suddenly materialized on the main road— a very large crowd, hundreds of people, walking slowly, many of the women in white, the men wearing threadbare jackets that were obviously their best clothes...
...Solomon remembered an Amharic proverb...
...It was inevitable, he said, if you occupied someone else's place, if you no longer had a cause to fight for other than simply staying in power...
...Scars Desta Abdissa's brand of nationalism isn't what you find among most Oromo...
...The extent of peasant sympathy is always hard to gauge...
...If someone says 'Dirty Oromo' I feel it here...
...In a sense he was defending the honor of the government in which he had served for so many years...
...yet people here were trying to separate it...
...Where would the borders of an Oromo republic be drawn...
...Imprisonment seemed very nearly a universal experience among Ethiopians between twenty-five and fifty, and their months or years of detention came up in the casual way that Americans mention where they went to college...
...The arguments themselves are rarely engaged but more likely dismissed with stale slogans and charges of bad faith...
...It was one of the stranger funerals I've ever seen...
...It lasted less than a year and fell apart amid mutual recriminations: the TPLF claimed that the OLF was divided and unprepared to govern, its popularity overstated...
...Is the woman sitting in the corner of the hotel bar a security informer, a prostitute, or both...
...If it was my brother I would have to cry out...
...two coffins lay inside...
...He said that the victims' chests had been riddled with bullets...
...A kind of exhaustion has set in...
...A huge grimy arch still spans Jomo Kenyatta Avenue, with the communist star at its peak...
...They looked compact and serious and wary, and instead of sitting down in the bar, which had gone quiet, they walked straight through to the back, where, presumably, the girls were...
...We had arranged to give a surreptitious lift to an Ambo man who had a court appointment in Addis Ababa tomorrow, and on the way he told us the details of his case...
...The murder was personal, not ethnic...
...Twelve thousand peasants there, who had seized eight hundred guns from local landlords, were at his command...
...What mattered was class...
...The town of Ambo lies on a plateau two and a half hours west of Addis Ababa, dry in March but spotted green with eucalyptus...
...His mother died during one of his stays in jail...
...He wanted to trick us, because he's been civilized...
...He spent a year in Khartoum masquerading as a Muslim...
...In Oromo urji means "stars," as in "the future...
...Some," he said...
...These factors muted the argument they were having at lunch, but something important was clearly at stake for both men...
...It had also ruined his own father, who lost most of his land...
...Oromo nationalists like to draw an analogy between their situation and that of American blacks—an Oromo professor in Tennessee is even writing a book on the subject...
...But it was the other way with Meles...
...What is their program...
...There had been a lot of gunfire, and Solomon's uncle seemed surprised that we hadn't heard it...
...The next day was market day in Ambo, and we spent the morning sipping barley beer with farmers and hearing their complaints about rumored tax increases and the high price of desubSUMMER • 1996 • 125 Ethiopia sidized fertilizer...
...You cannot separate mixed teff...
...or did Emperor Menelik invade and set up his capital at the end of the nineteenth century in what had always been Oromo land...
...Not the socialism of the Dergue—not by force...
...Solomon, stationed northeast ofAddis in Debre Birhan, got a call one night from a friend in the Ministry of Defense...
...He began to tell himself that he was fighting for Ethiopian unity...
...It was the question he had been asking Oromo peasants as an anthropologist for seventeen years, and today it turned into a Socratic lesson...
...Solomon and the waiter and barman—all three Oromo—spoke Amharic together...
...The Southern Group says we were swallowed SUMMER • 1996 • 119 Ethiopia by Oromo—they would be cut off by Oromia...
...The analogy disintegrates along all kinds of fault lines, but it is convenient shorthand when you're trying to explain to an American why people are angry...
...Addis Ababa minded discipline that destroyed a far larger Soviet-supplied army, since 1991 the TPLF has written a Constitution dividing Ethiopia into autonomous ethnic regions and granting them the theoretical right to secede, and held a series of uncontested and widely criticized elections...
...But the exit wounds were in front...
...They are still imprisoned by debate over the division of political power...
...But the more somebody tries to stop you thinking about it the more fanatic you become...
...You knew the landlords by their horsedrawn carts...
...It's a commonplace that solid information outside ofAddis Ababa is extremely difficult to get...
...Opponents say the OLF is simply fighting for power since it has already been offered democracy and self-determination, which it refused to take part in...
...But Meles is trying to draw faces in the regions...
...This statement became a kind of talisman for me in the days to come...
...He said that he had watched our car and now we owed him money...
...The deaths of three men will drive more young Oromo into the OLF, and the next generation of OLF leaders inside Ethiopia will be more ethnically fanatic than the older one in exile...
...We were turned away at the gate...
Vol. 43 • July 1996 • No. 3
