Ato Mulugeta Asrate-Kassa, a prophet in the wilderness calls for forgiveness to reign. Does the Dergue reciprocate?

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Paulos Yrgaw
Apr 24, 2006

There is no prosthetic for an amputated spirit. Ann Applebaum in her remarkable book, "Gulag, A History" opens the first chapter with the following poem by Osep Mandelstam which goes, "...But your spine has been smashed, my beautiful, pitiful era, and with an inane smile, you look back, cruel and weak, like an animal past its prime, at the prints of your own paws."

When the smoke-screen or facade was Ethiopian Socialism, for those of us who recited Psalm 23 in a compulsive feat in a bid to soothe our restless souls, the era was a quintessence of evil where Ethiopia stood in a test of time up on the hill. The time seemed to had been warped in a skewed whirl-wind, and in the mean time as Bob Marley had it, good people we knew and good people we lost along the way. The gruesome loss of our loved-one is however, brutally serious than the melody reverberates.

When we are left behind to tell the world our bleak stories, some of us still haunted by the banality of evil opted to transform the grim reality in to a mirage for fear of retribution. However, a brave and unfettered heart amongst us is telling us to stay put and an epitome to that effect is the courageous Ato Mulugeta Asrate-Kassa to say the least.

As one of the anecdotal stories of politics goes, Nikita Khrushchev who was a close confidant of Stalin’s wife is believed to have said to her, "If Stalin tells you to dance, you have to dance." Doing otherwise is of course facing the cold music. The Colonel and his tags in an incredibly brazen effort tried to intimidate Ato Mulugeta but the true son of Ethiopia refused to dance to the tune of the Colonel’s hench-men and chose to give integrity a priority where the rest of us found a giant shoulder to lean on.

The Ethiopian tragedy did not start neither did it end in Ato Mulugeta’s horrifying death of his father or his own ordeal during the Dergue era. As I invariably made a passing remark in my other writings, the brutal death of my father and hundreds and thousands of Ethiopians as well defined the panorama of Ethiopia’s darkest time span.

The gruesome death of my dearest father which has taken a centre stage in my life tells its own macabre story where the unimaginable atrocities of the Dergue is to remain vivid against the drift of time when time attempts to put it into a fading memory where the perpetrators and criminal tags find a comfort zone.

However, one is expected to make no mistake about it, until the day of justice dawns, we are here to remain to tell our stories so that those who are in power are obliged by morality and by sense of historical obligation bereft of political expediency to bring the killers from their hideouts with a stroke of a pen.

As I listened for the third time with my brothers and sisters in this Easter holiday with an ample intent to the interview of the true son of Ethiopia Ato Mulugeta Asrate-Kassa, I found a sense of hope and an impetus to share my story with my fellow Ethiopians so that the multitude of Ethiopians who had been victims of the Colonel and his hench-men can find a lifting spirit and share their agonies with the rest of us so that the snail’s pace wheel of justice can be expedited before the Sun melts the wax on our wings.

The year was 1976. The year however, as I see it printed on the screen, it happens to me that it is not just a number or a sequence of numbers in the chronology of years in a Calendar. It was a year that changed the fate of my family forever. My father with a modest income set out to build a family and he produced seven children in a shining hope that he will see the ever more coming days where his kids grow up to be productive and God fearing men and women and he would die in an old age the way he exactly understood life, a life surrounded with a remarkable optimism augmented with unflinching faith in God.

The eldest 14 years of age and the youngest barely six months old, my father went to bed on Sunday night imbued with serenity after giving a good-night kiss to his eldest daughter. The night however, did not come to pass when a perturbed knock at the door brought all of us with a trepidation to hide behind our father until blood thirsty Dergue soldiers with heavy boots and Kalashnikovs barged in to our apartment building in search of the enemies of the "revolution" and to avenge the death of a certain Colonel who had been assassinated by insurgents in the previous day.

When the blood thirsty with a rabid desire to kill made their forceful way into our rooms, my father who was in his pyjamas holding in his arms my six months old brother kept his composure so that our frantic cry for help would not be exacerbated. However, the errands of evil could not give a heed to our helpless cry and to the supplication of my mother when she told them to take what ever they want including her jewelry. Instead, they started to smash our furniture, tearing apart pillows, mattresses, bed-sheets and snapping a gold necklace from my mother’s neck while one of them pointed his bayonet onto my mother’s chest.

As the twenty or so soldiers chased us from room to room as a vampire thirsty for blood, my father still holding my screaming brother fell on to the floor when a soldier shot him at a close range. My brother fell with my father tainted with blood that spilled out from my father’s desperate heart.

The soldiers with no remorse what so ever, threw my mother onto the floor as she desperately tried to hold the blood which was perfusely coming from my father’s body. In the meantime the others kept going in a looting spree including my father's wallet and his shoes and trousers as well. In later years as my brother put it in an article he wrote while he was in Medical School in the late 80s titled, "Reflections of an Ethiopian Refugee", the Sun refused to rise as we looked to the heavens for help as my mother finished pulling her long and beautiful Ethiopian hair in a desperate agony.

My mother 36 years old at that time was left with seven children and surrendered her life to God as she realized with the drift of time that, Dergue was there to sip the life out of her let alone to recognize her predicament. As the proverbial Jacob wrestled with the angel until the angel broke Jacob’s hip, my mother as well wrestled God as she tried to make sense out of her predicament. And as Job (Eyob) conversed with God when he said, "You told me to listen while you spoke and to try to answer your questions. In the past I knew only what others had told me, but now I have seen you with my own eyes. So I am ashamed of all I have said and repent in dust and ashes." My mother strongly felt that she saw the eyes of God during the fateful night as she held her dearest husband’s body as he departed to his creator untimely and dreadfully.

My mother in later years would tell us that, if it was not for us, she was more than ready to arm herself to the teeth to fight the Colonel to the end and join the rebels in the mountains. Instead, she reminded us time and time again that, we have no one to hold grudges against but the system, a system which set out to destroy the Ethiopian spirit beyond repair.

From the four corners across the vastness of the land, the death of my father was cloned in a different form, students were made to hung around their neck a caption which read "Key Shibir" before they lined up to be executed. Their mothers’ as well were made to pay for the bullets and to treat the day as an ordinary day by withholding their tears which rolls down their burning cheeks. This was the "revolution" that heralded the annihilation of a generation by evil spirits manifested in a human flesh.

As we broaden our horizon in a desperate attempt to seek an answer to our ordeals and agonies, we came to learn that, the tragedy was ubiquitous and we found a quenching water when we found our fellow Ethiopians in the same crucible. The crucible however, seems to be untangled when the Dergue is revisited disguised in a reformed self. Its exponents in a blunt hubris are telling us that, the Dergue was fine. It would be unbecoming of me to wish them go through what we have gone through so that they can walk the valley of darkness in a bid to taste and smell what the Dergue is like. It is a high time and incredibly imperative that, we should not make a mistake about it. Justice has to be done. The Colonel and his tags have to be brought to justice.

However, what seems to be enigmatic including to this writer is the incredibly slow pace in the Ethiopian government’s part to bring the criminals to justice. It has become clear that, the amputated Ethiopia needs giants like Ato Mulugeta Asrate-Kassa so that our echo for justice can be heard.

The Colonel, we are told that, in his tentative niche in Zimbabwe leads a successful life. He has sent his kids to a prestigious universities and he lives a comfortable life looking forward into the future with a complete ease. His accomplices as well lead a good life here in North America and in Europe as well. It is all fine and dandy for them. Their success story does not end there, they are still in an irresistible urge to come back to destroy what is left of us. It is incredible!!!

Alright. Ethiopia has moved on. But justice if I can use a Kantian lingo, it is a priori. It is beyond the realm of time. As Ato Mulugeta Asrate-Kassa aptly put it, forgiveness is the language of Ethiopia. And if the perpetrators come forward and unconditionally ask for forgiveness, Ethiopia is ready to forgive them for it cleanses their guilty-ridden consciousness. However, it is a wisdom to distinguish between justice and a call for forgiveness.

Comments: asimov107@yahoo.ca

Paulos Yrgaw
Ottawa, Canada.

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