THE PRINCESSES AND THE PEOPLE

Letter from Ethiopia

He's finally freed Haile Selassie's family, but President Mengistu's own rule is becoming chillingly imperial

THURSTON CLARKE

'There were times I could quite cheerfully have strangled my mother," Princess Rebecca Asrate Kassa said over tea and thin sandwiches in the lounge of my London hotel several days before I was to leave on a journey to Ethiopia. And who could blame her, or anyone forced to spend nine years in an Ethiopian prison cell with her mother, sister, and six aunts— charged with no crime, permitted no visitors, offered no hope of release, itching with fleas, plagued by rats, sleeping on mattresses on concrete, chronically ill, and blinded by a light that was never once, in all that time, extinguished?

Rebecca Asrate and the ladies who shared her cell carry the title of "princess" because they are all related by birth or marriage to Ethiopia's former emperor, Haile Selassie. They were detained in September 1974 when a conspiracy of military officers known as the Dergue (Amharic for "committee") deposed him. Rebecca was only a distant relation, but the other princesses included Selassie's daughter, five granddaughters, and a daughter-in-law. They ranged in age from fourteen to sixty-three. There was Princess Tenagne, the daughter, who had lost her husband to an Italian firing squad in 1937, her only son to a Dergue firing squad in 1974, and was now forced to watch her four daughters sicken and age in prison. There was Princess Aida, who had last seen her youngest son when he was six months old. (He is now sixteen.) And there was Princess Sara, who for fourteen years was unable to see or comfort her three young sons, all held in a nearby men's section of the Central Prison, known as the "End of the World."

To imprison ladies so young or so elderly under such harsh conditions may strike a non-Ethiopian as cruel, but compared with the Dergue's several thousand other political prisoners, their conditions were luxurious. They did not sleep two to a mattress or share their ten-by-fifteen-foot room with fifty others. Nor were they tortured, or subjected to what humanrights groups choose to call "extrajudicial executions," i.e., being taken out and shot.

Imagine any horror and it can probably be found, flourishing, in Ethiopia. Political terror? During the Red Terror of 1977-78, the Dergue executed thousands of political opponents in secret, then scattered their bodies across Addis Ababa as a warning. Guerrilla wars? The army has fought pitiless battles against the Eritrean, Tigrean, and Oromo liberation fronts—though there have been recent negotiations, presided over by Jimmy Carter, to resolve the first two of these conflicts. Starvation? Employed as a political weapon, its extent is unknown, since the government has evacuated foreign relief workers from sensitive regions. Slavery? Peasants labor without recompense on reforestation and road construction. Natural disaster? Drought and calamitous agricultural policies promote desertification, and the population increases by a million and a half every year, in a country incapable of feeding itself.

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In a single night, the princesses lost almost every man they loved.

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You can also find the usual sad trappings of a Marxist dictatorship: Mao tunics, a mysterious oligarchy consumed by murderous feuds, widespread surveillance, a consumer society divided into two classes—those with hard currency and those without it—an "empire" of oppressed minorities, schemes for gathering peasants into concentration-camp villages, and the absence of such elementary freedoms as speech, assembly, and travel. In fact, political executions, torture, and disappearances are so commonplace in Ethiopia that The Economist has ranked it as the worst humanrights offender in a world with many contenders for that title.

Despite the sheer volume of Ethiopia's human-rights abuses, despite reports in The New York Times of civilians massacred in Eritrea, despite political prisoners numbering in the thousands, despite the many "disappearances" investigated by the U.N., and despite an Amnesty International map of the "Torture Centers" of Addis Ababa showing them to be as numerous and as strategically placed as fast-food franchises in most American cities, there are still remarkably few first-person accounts of life in President Mengistu Haile Mariam's Gulag, and particularly few from the sort of educated victim who causes citizens in democracies to slap their foreheads and say, "My God, that could be me!"

Most of these witnesses are either dead or in jail. During the Red Terror an estimated third of the university was murdered, and among the notables imprisoned were a U.N. representative, a minister of law and justice, and a patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Survivors speak anonymously, and former political prisoners have been threatened with reprisals if they reveal details of their imprisonment. This is why Rebecca Asrate, who is willing to speak publicly, is unique, and why her testimony is so valuable in putting a human face on Ethiopia's terror. She is a feisty woman in her mid-thirties who gives the impression of being able to survive almost any hardship. Her only scars appear to be the pink splotches left by a skin disease that went untreated for nine years, but her youngest brother, after spending his adolescence in jail, has become "a virtual recluse."

What surprised Rebecca most about prison was that the routine of making fires, boiling water, fighting fleas, and begging for medicine was more comfort than curse. "Whatever happened, life was never boring," she said. "There was always something to do." The worst moments came when something interrupted this reassuring routine. There was the day Princess Igigayehu died in prison, and there was the ritual of hope and despair every September 12, when the princesses were not included in the yearly amnesty honoring the anniversary of the revolution. There was the night in 1975, a week after the emperor died under unexplained circumstances, when soldiers appeared to transfer the princesses from house arrest to an undisclosed location. When one woman requested time to pack some clothes, a soldier remarked that where she was going clothes would be unnecessary. "We thought that was the end," Rebecca said. "And at first they did take us to the place of executions, keeping us there until midnight. Later I learned that Callaghan [the British prime minister] had appealed to the United Nations, and only that persuaded them to spare us. But the next morning, when I saw that prison, I said to myself, Well, this will kill us off just as effectively—they simply didn't want to waste bullets."

Her darkest moment came in November 1974, two months after her arrest, when a Dergue firing squad shot her father and fifty-nine others who had been related to the emperor or had served in his government. They were executed suddenly, in secret, without trials or formalities, and in batches of ten. In a single night, the princesses lost sons, fathers, cousins, and friends, almost every man they loved. One week later, a delegation of Dergue officials demanded to know if they now supported the revolution, a question which, under the circumstances, speaks volumes about the regime's cruelty. The other princesses remained silent, but Rebecca screamed back a torrent of abuse, prompting a guard to say, "It is not a fair question we are asking her," a comment hinting at the conflict between the Dergue and the basic decency of the Ethiopian people. (When Rebecca was released, her prison guards were the first to call and offer congratulations.)

Perhaps only President Mengistu, who has murdered his rivals and emerged from the Dergue to become Ethiopia's Stalin, really knows why the princesses were arrested, held so long, and then suddenly released. At first, even his own prison governors were so uncertain of the princesses' crimes that they wrote "undetermined" on official forms. Rebecca's release papers described her as "suspected of going to become a stumbling block to the revolution." She thinks she was a hostage, held to discourage royal exiles from intriguing. "It is surprising he still believes his biggest threat comes from the royal family," she said, "because we're not doing anything at all, unfortunately."

The Dergue maintains the princesses were imprisoned "to protect them from the wrath of the people." But even in 1974 this excuse was threadbare. The princesses were never public figures and, unlike European royalty, did not go about opening flower shows and hospitals. In fact, they were so little-known that the officers sent to arrest them had difficulty identifying them. They lived comfortably but not opulently—no European shopping binges or closets stuffed with shoes. Princess Aida managed a branch of the Ethiopian Women's Welfare Association, Princesses Ruth and Sophia were secondary-school headmistresses, and Rebecca's mother founded a school for blind children.

The Dergue has always claimed the royal family had millions hidden in foreign bank accounts. "And it was useless arguing with them," Rebecca said. "They were convinced it existed, and that we knew its location. When I was arrested, one soldier kept asking, 'Where are your shoes?' I said I was wearing them. 'No,' he said. 'I mean your golden ones.' " The most convincing argument against the existence of this royal fortune is the financial condition of the exiles. Rebecca holds a job in London, Princess Aida's son has managed a Chrysler dealership in Ontario, and Princess Igigayehu's daughter has worked on the night shift at a New Jersey typesetter.

Rebecca, her sister, and three brothers were released in September 1983. She still wonders why. Six weeks later, she left for Britain on a tourist visa and has never returned. "If I stayed any longer I would have ended up in prison again," she said. "I just could not adjust to the repression. In Ethiopia, there really is more freedom inside a prison—at least there you can rant against the government and shout at the guards."

President Mengistu freed the remaining seven princesses in May 1988, just before African leaders gathered in Addis Ababa to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Organization of African Unity. While I was in Ethiopia, I heard several explanations for this surprising act of charity. A foreign diplomat said Mengistu worried that the princesses' imprisonment might mar the O.A.U. festivities, an understandable fear since the Central Prison faces O.A.U. headquarters and is visible from its windows. Another theory credits the former president of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, with making a successful private appeal for the princesses' freedom. Everyone praises the campaign waged by the princesses' British school friends.

Princess Tenagne's four daughters attended Clarendon School in northern Wales, with two continuing on to Cambridge and Oxford. Since 1974, their school friends had been sending money to Ethiopia to purchase food and firewood, necessities not supplied by the prison administration. Finally, in September 1987, after years of quiet groveling before Ethiopian diplomats in London, their friends went public. They stood vigil before the Ethiopian Embassy, wrote press releases, and badgered any Ethiopian official foolhardy enough to see them. One told me that "we rather shamelessly played up the nice-English-ladies-in-green-Wellies-and-tweed bit, the nice ladies who had never forgotten their Ethiopian friends and only wanted to stop bothering everyone so we could all get on with famine relief. We said the princesses were our friends, and that we knew that Ethiopians had a reputation for being chivalrous to elderly women, etc. We really just kept telling these officials how wonderful they were, which usually works with almost everyone. After a few sessions of this, the little man we usually saw became quite matey. He'd spout his jargon but then say, 'Now, let's sit down and talk about how very sorry we are your friends are still in prison.' After the princesses were released we brought him flowers and chocolates, and he wept."

Everyone thought the princesses would leave Ethiopia immediately. "I expected them on the next plane," Rebecca said. One of their British friends told me, "We had organized visas and were baking cakes for their welcoming teas." A year and a half later, they remain in Addis Ababa, and since their mail is opened and their phones are tapped, none of their foreign friends knows for sure why. According to Rebecca Asrate, President Mengistu's spokesmen say they are "as free as any other Ethiopian," a phrase as sinister as any you might care to imagine.

I had lunch in London with an Ethiopian princess who begged me not to use her name. She had just spoken with the princesses by telephone and described them as "shell-shocked, nervous, and uncertain what to do." Perhaps they were reluctant to abandon the three young princes, who were released only last month, or perhaps they thought themselves too old to begin again as exiles. "But since they were arrested for no reason whatsoever," she said, "they are terrified it could happen again."

I wondered if Ethiopian functionaries, to avoid giving the appearance of holding the princesses against their will, had warned them not to even apply for passports. Why else would women postpone visiting children unseen since 1974? I consulted some Ethiopia experts, who speculated that because of recent defeats inflicted by Eritrean separatists a coup had never been more likely, meaning that Mengistu's need for hostages had never been more pressing. (And indeed, after I left Ethiopia, he was almost overthrown in an attempted military coup.)

"Personally, I do not know their wishes," Asrate admitted. "When I speak with my mother I say, 'I would love to see you.' Then she says, 'I would love to see you too.' Then I tell her she must decide. So I'm waiting for her to make a move. If she's refused, I could do something. But for now I can't attack the government since they would just say, 'We aren't keeping her against her will—she hasn't asked.' "

I told her that during my forthcoming visit to Addis Ababa I would, among other things, attempt to meet the princesses. She and the other London princesses supplied me with the names of several expatriates who regularly saw the princesses and might know their wishes. "Keep a low profile and be very careful," she said when I admitted having only a tourist visa. "It is not as bad as before. Then for an Ethiopian to talk to a foreigner, particularly a journalist, was to commit suicide. But remember that phones are tapped, servants are in the pay of the government, and you will most certainly be followed."

She was right. An hour after arriving in Addis I was followed by a sad-faced little secret-policeman—at least policeman is a more likely explanation than that he was a timid tout or someone squeezing amusement from tagging along behind a foreigner. I had chosen to walk because it seemed the safest way of meeting the Ethiopians recommended to me as people willing to discuss conditions in their country. I couldn't hail one of the battered blueand-white Fiat taxis used by Ethiopians, because I'd been told the police were suspicious of foreigners who patronize these taxis. I would have had to use one of the ancient Mercedes sedans operated by the National Tour Operation, and driven, presumably, by police informers.

Soon after my arrival I found myself at a diplomat's dinner party, seated next to a European woman and across from a foreign priest, the same people the London princesses had recommended I contact. They said the princesses still had many friends in Addis and feared that if they left they might never be allowed to return. The European woman had lived in Ethiopia for over thirty years and known the princesses almost as long. Her voice was pleasant but firm. "They don't want to see you. In fact, they can't see you, for one simple reason: the government has told them there is only one thing that will land them back in jail for sure—if they give interviews or are even perceived to have cooperated with foreign journalists.''

The next day I lunched with a diplomat who said the princesses were watched by "thugs" who followed them and questioned visitors. He doubted the government would imprison them again, but could not rule it out. He said, "The Ethiopians are not a sentimental people, and keep in mind they did not release the princesses because they are elderly women, or because of some new attitude towards human rights. They saw them as a problem that had to be resolved before the O.A.U. celebrations."

After hearing all this I removed the princesses from my agenda. The risk was too great. Who could be sure that a government which, according to Amnesty International, had tortured schoolchildren and displayed the bodies of its enemies on public thoroughfares would not return seven elderly women to jail to await, for all I knew, the fiftieth anniversary of the O.A.U.?

From a visit to Ethiopia in 1970 I could remember being followed by a swirling tornado of child beggars, being stoned in Aksum because America supported the detested Haile Selassie (although now we are fabulously popular because we oppose the detested Mengistu), seeing monks in the courtyard of St. George's Cathedral use thick poles to discipline unruly cripples who had gathered for a handout of grain, and visiting a hospital where a nearly blind Egyptian doctor wearing pajamas comforted patients with aspirin and dirty tongue depressors. After weeks of seeing Emperor Selassie's photograph everywhere, of following his doings in every day's newspaper, of hearing his name on every lip, and of listening to radio announcers precede his name with a litany of honorary titles, I began to think of myself as being not so much in Ethiopia as in "The Nation of Haile Selassie." I can also remember thinking it impossible for a country to be more wretched, but of course I had not imagined Ethiopia today.

Like Selassie, Mengistu has tried to insulate his capital from the misery of his countryside and the failure of his policies, but still there are clues. I soon noticed an epidemic of one-legged men, draftees with the misfortune to have stepped on Eritrean anti-personnel mines and then been treated by Cuban military surgeons. I discovered that buying a bottle of shampoo involved visiting a hardcurrency store and completing a form. I watched a television variety show starring three singing soldiers who wore battle fatigues, had the drugged eyes of Haitian Tontons, and thrust submachine guns at the camera while chanting tuneless songs, presumably describing the liquidation of "anti-people elements." I accepted a ride from a Swedish couple, here to do good, and in their backseat saw a thick pole, identical to the ones wielded by those monks in 1970. They needed it to repel the aggressive beggars who haunted the post office and other institutions which attracted foreigners.

Clues to what Ethiopia had become were visible even at the Hilton, where the grill sponsored Russian-caviar-andvodka nights, government chauffeurs impatiently jiggled keys while waiting to collect thirty-dollar birthday cakes from the patisserie, and Swedish Good Samaritans swam laps in the pool while their blond children bobbed nearby like buoys. Guards protected rooftops and perimeters, room prices reflected how much you saw of the shantytowns pressing against the chain-link fence, and flocks of skinny prostitutes haunted the bar, desperate to screw a white humanitarian. The hotel is just a stroll from jails stuffed with President Mengistu's political prisoners, and busy with his torturers and executioners.

It must have been easier to overlook all this in 1985, when millions of rural Ethiopians faced starvation, and certainly the celebrities who visited Ethiopia then appear to have done so. It was believed that given the choice between letting millions starve and donating food that might have the undesirable consequence of defusing the righteous anger of the peasants, you had to donate food. Still, the mishandling of a famine has toppled several African governments, and this might have happened in Ethiopia, where the 1973 famine had already led to Selassie's downfall. A good argument can be made that famine relief, by blunting an anti-Mengistu revolution, may kill more Ethiopians in the long run than it initially saved. Dawit Wolde Giorgis, Ethiopia's commissioner for relief and rehabilitation who defected to the West in 1985, now says that "without foreign aid there would have been bloody chaos, ultimately leading to the removal of Colonel Mengistu and the ruling elite." But foreign governments and charities could not announce a policy of permitting Ethiopians to starve to death for their own good, and they could always hope their generosity might somehow civilize Mengistu.

Instead, his government has become more vicious, its capacity for evil expanded by the lunch-money donations of California schoolchildren. Take, for example, the trucks sent to assist in the distribution of emergency food. The government insisted these become its property within two years, the donors agreed, and it is not difficult to imagine the grisly errands now performed by those trucks in the service of the world's most brutal government. In case you think this is stretching things, consider that the Ethiopian army commandeered all food trucks after its defeat by the Eritreans at Afabet on March 19, 1988, and that the massacres of civilians in northern Ethiopia are said to have occurred during that spring and summer. It is possible that Ethiopian troops were driven to the massacre sites in trucks donated by Western charities. If those who supplied these trucks wish credit for the good works they once accomplished, can they also avoid responsibility for the atrocities they later facilitated? Can any aid channeled through such a regime properly be called "humanitarian"?

By the time I left Addis I was again imagining myself as not so much in Ethiopia as in "The Nation of the Emperor," although this time the emperor was Mengistu. His picture decorated every public venue, his military pageants were staged on the same broad avenues Haile Selassie had built for this purpose, he had reportedly developed a fondness for sitting on the imperial throne, and it was almost impossible to hear or read a news article without finding mention of his name.

The Mengistu government's capacity for evil has been expanded by lunch-money donations from California schoolchildren.

Like Haile Selassie, Mengistu was ready to bankrupt, starve, and brutalize his citizens in order to preserve an empire of dissimilar, dissident peoples. Like Haile Selassie, he had ignored a serious famine in the North, while at the same time sponsoring lavish entertainments in the capital. Here is a passage from a 1975 propaganda pamphlet published by the Dergue: "As the 5,000 guests assembled at the Hilton Hotel for the wedding party washed down their exotic cakes with champagne, the death toll from famine in Wollo was reaching the 2,000 mark." And here is how exrelief commissioner Giorgis described Emperor Mengistu's $100 million celebration of the tenth anniversary of his revolution: "Many [of the starving] walked all the way from the northern part of the country to the gates of Addis Ababa. The Commission of Relief and Rehabilitation. . .was instructed to stop them, and police were sent to make a human fence around the capital to prevent these people from entering the city and spoiling the show."

At first glance it might seem that the two emperors shared an equal disdain for human rights. Yet, under Haile Selassie there were never the five thousand political prisoners, the massacres, or the hundreds of disappearances. Such things happened, but on a smaller scale. And, to his credit, he abolished many forms of traditional punishment that were medieval in their brutality. Before he took the throne in 1930, the penalty for murder had been public disembowelment, performed by the closest member of the accused's family. The preferred method for discovering thieves was lebasha, in which medicine men drugged small boys and sent them wobbling off through a village. Whoever they pointed out was assumed guilty, and lost a hand or a leg on the spot. Criminals in rural areas were identified by a technique known as afarsata, which entailed imprisoning everyone in a village or enclosure and starving them until they surrendered a perpetrator.

Now, under Emperor Mengistu, one finds echoes—some faint, but others strong—of these abandoned barbarities. During the Red Terror, the mere accusation of "counterrevolutionary" activities could lead to immediate execution, a method of criminal justice roughly equal to lebasha in its capriciousness and cruelty. The withdrawal of foreign relief workers from the North can be seen as just another form of afarsata, i.e., starving villages believed sympathetic to the rebels. And as for disembowelments carried out by close relatives, is there not an echo of this in the Dergue's insistence that the princesses swear loyalty to the men who had just ordered the murder of their husbands and sons?

Last month, Mengistu freed the three princes who survived that massacre—the last members of Selassie's family remaining in captivity. Once again, there was a possible proximate cause: the limelight surrounding his negotiations with the Eritrean and Tigrean rebels. But perhaps the best explanation for their release, and the release of the princesses last year, is that President Mengistu has become more charitable toward members of the ancien regime as his own reign comes more and more to resemble that of the previous emperor and as it becomes in his interest to establish a precedent for the humanitarian treatment of deposed imperial families.