Corbett's The Hard Choices

8. The weirdness of it all

2007-05-02T08:46:00.000-07:00

THE PRINCESSES were exhausted.
The tension of the day began to overwhelm them, but they knew they could be murdered in their sleep and so they decided, during a family council, that one of them must be on guard at all times.
Princess Sara found a tin can and if anything happened during the night, the princess on guard duty was to beat on this can.
"How we were to defend ourselves against these criminals, God only knows, but we were absolutely determined that we were not going to be murdered in our sleep," said Princess Rebecca.
She vividly remembers the surreal setting of the women's quarters of the End of the World.

Princess Rebecca: Then they took us to the women's quarters. In the dark, it looked like a mausoleum, the way the moonlight struck its roof. The first thing that hit us was the stench. Then the weirdness -- all the women in dirty blue uniforms, with shaved heads. At first, there was an awful silence -- no one said a word. Then one of the prisoners took off her blanket and, tentatively, offered it to my mother. Then others offered us their extra mattresses, or shared their meagre food. Some of them got down on their kneess and tried to clean the hole in the ground -- the Turkish toilet it was called. It was the first kindness we had seen all day, and we were overwhelmed. This was also our first contact with hard-core criminals.

Their sanity was maintained by dancing in the prison cell and performing the traditional ceremony of roasting coffee beans, which had been practised for hundreds of years in Ethiopia, whenever they could.
They had no furniture except for mattresses, which relatives had brought them from home. The mattresses were their dining table and exercise area, as well as the place where they slept. Their world had shrunk to an extremely tiny space. The cell had no running water, and they bathed, when they could, from large barrels, in the open air, behind the prison block. They had one toilet -- a hole in the ground -- and only one light, a bare ceiling bulb, which was never extinguished. If the Derg had a purpose in mind, it was apparently to humiliate Haile Selassie's family.
From the other side of the wall, the princesses began to hear familiar voices.
With each passing day, more and more women of the Emperor's Court arrived. But the princesses weren't permitted to speak to them. They were totally isolated, for months, for years.
The daily routine of making morning coffee, battling fleas or killing rats, disinfecting the cell, lining its floors and walls with newspapers and wringing the moisture out, marching across the compound once a day, under the watchful eyes of the guards became the most reassuring part of the princesses' prison lives.

Princess Rebecca: Once a year, every year, they would take us to the administrative office. One at a time. They asked us only one question for all those years: 'Where is the Emperor's money?' They were obsessed with it.

Early each summer, the royal women began to hope they would be included in the annual amnesty, marking the anniversary of the Derg.

Princess Rebecca: That was the worst time. You pinned all your hopes on that particular day, and there was no way to know. The releases were totally arbitrary ...

The years went by, and the princesses' names were never on the list.
Then in 1983, Princess Rebecca and her sister, Mimi, were released.
"The anniversary had passed and I had made up my mind that we would never be released as long as Mengistu was still alive," remembers Princess Rebecca. "I was always the strongest of ou group, bu that Sunday, I fell apart. I couldn't stop crying. I knew I would rot in prison. Nine years is a hell of a long time. I was ill, and was in the clinic in my pajamas, as a matter of fact, and I went to my mother (Princess Zuriash) to say good night before they locked us up. I heard the commotion. Everyone was shouting -- the murderers, the thieves, the guards. 'You've got your papers, Rebecca! You can go home!'"

7. At the gates of hell

2007-05-02T08:30:00.000-07:00

THE 11 PRINCESSES were driven in an army bus from the Duke of Harar's palace to Akaki Prison and were marched to an open field just beyond the building with the electric chair -- the field where Aida Desta's brother, Iskander Desta, had been executed nine months before.
For four hours, the princesses remained in the open field.
They had no suitcases, only the clothes they wore; they spread their cardigans on the ground so they could sit.
Meanwhile, British PM James Callaghan and the United Nations negotiated for their lives.
They were at the gates of hell.

Princess Rebecca: From time to time, male prisoners approached us. Some were quite sympathetic. The 11 of us were sitting on our cardigan sweaters in the dark, in an open field, waiting to be shot, and the prisoners were asking us if there was anything they could do. There were others who jeered at us from afar, but most of them came out of curiosity. We were like a bloody zoo. It seemed endless. Then,finally, at 10 o'clock, a car drove up, and a Derg member got out. 'Put them in with the women,'he told our guards. We thus had the distinction of being the first female prisoners under the Derg. What a mess it was. In those days, it was impossible to walk -- there were just stones and boulders and wet, slippery mud. I grabbed hold of Princess Yashasha Worq -- she must have been over 80, but she was feisty and would never tell her age -- and we stumbled along until we reached the gate. Then they searched us. You can't imagine what they wouldn't allow: cigarettes, my glasses, mirrors, chewing gum. They made us hand over our jeweltry. Princess Yashasha Worq flatly refused. I was terrified that they were going to shoot her. But she was determined, and she finally won.

Princess Yashasha Worq, who was the first to be released in 1979, died two months after leaving Akaki, due to lack of medical attention for skin cancer.

6. The princesses' world

2007-04-11T11:15:00.000-07:00

BESIDES THE Emperor's eldest daughter, Tenagne Worq, and her four children -- Aida, Sebla, Ruth and Sofia -- there were other female Family members in Akaki.
Among them were Haile Selassie's octogenarian cousin, Princess Yashasha Worq, Princess Sara Gizaw, the widow of the Duke of Harar, Princess Rahel Mesfin, daughter of Ras Mesfin Sileshi, her mother, Lady Yeshimmabet Guma, and sister, Tirauyer, and Princess Rebecca Asrate Kass, her mother, Princess Zuriash and sister Mimi. There was also Princess Igegayehu, Asfa Wossen's daughter, who would die behind Akaki's walls.
Both Princess Tenagne Worq and Princess Yashasha Worq had led highly-protected lives inside the Imperial Court, moving with calm assurance through its unchanging world of gold braid and curtsies, concubines and tiger shoots, ascetics, priests and ancestral oaths.
Meanwhile, twenty something Rahel and Rebecca were cousins and had been friends since childhood; they had played together in the Palace's gilded halls. They had attended the best universities and schools. Rebecca had been arrested when she returned from University College, London, where she had been studying international relations. The Revolution was in its infancy and she feared her father, Asrate Kassa, would be jailed. Her father begged her not to return to Ethiopia, but on her arrival she was arrested. Within five months, on Bloody Saturday, November 23, 1974, he was executed.
Within a year about 20 princesses and other Family members were taken from house detention at Princess Sara's (the Duke of Harar's) house to the End of the World.

Princess Rebecca: (as told to the New Yorker's Mary Anne Weaver): They had come for us about six o'clock in the morning, three hours before the Emperor was placed under arrest. They said it was for our own protection ... That was our crime. In other words, it was preventive detention -- we were hostages of the Derg.

Of course, the princesses knew something was wrong, for three days earlier, the Derg went to Princess Sara's residence and took away radios and television sets.

Princess Rebecca: The morning after the executions, some of our guards, thinking we were still alseep, turned on theur radios in the kitchen, and my little brother, who was upstairs, opened his window and listened in. He heard the official announcement on Ethiopian Radio. I'll never forget his screams -- 'They've killed them all! They've killed them all!' For a long time, he wasn't able to say anything else. The soldiers rushed into the library, where we had gathered and told us it wasn't true -- that the men were going to be put on trial. We were bewildered. We didn't know what to believe. For the next 24 hours, although the rest of the country knew, we were left in uncertainty. Then, the following morning, six Derg officers arrived. We have ways in Ethiopia of relaying bad news -- we try to crush the blow. But they made the announcement as though they were on the radio. They gave us the names of only seven, who they thought were relatives; there were, in fact, 16. We tried to appeal to them -- to their sense of compassion, if you like. We said we should at least go bury them -- thinking they would return the bodies to the families. We said we would go go under armed guard. We were told, quite rudely, that there would be no funeral, nor would they allow us to go to out families and mourn. Then they raised their AK-47s and pointed them at our heads. We were ordered to stop crying. 'It's anti-revolutionary to cry,' they said. It was at that moment that the bad part began. I think they wanted to kill us, too. It's as simple as that.

The princesses learned some time later their lives were saved only by the intervention of British Prime Minister James Callaghan, the United Nations and the British Royal Family.

Princess Rebecca: It was early in September 1975 that they came to Princess Sara's house and told the women to pack. The young princes had already been taken -- we didn't know where. So we packed outr small suitcases, and then waited all day. Finally, at five that evening, a bus arrived. Even the driver didn't know where we were going; he had been told to follow a car. As we boarded the bus, a cadre told us we couldn't take our suitcases after all. 'Where we are taking you, you don't need anything,' he said. I was certain that was the end.

5. Life in a hell hole

2007-03-31T10:03:00.000-07:00

AT THE beginning of the Revolution, the princesses and others from the Imperial Court were treated with a hands-off approach; many fearing the government.
However, as the years started to mesh with the next year, the Royal Family members were, if not forgotten, ignored by most Ethiopians. The only ones who seemed to maintain a vigil concerning them was their constant guards.

Stephen Mengesha: There were female guards and they would take shifts and there were frequent changes so they didn become too familiar with the prisoners. I must say there was quite a bit of sympathy from the jail guards so they weren't mistreated.

The Derg's focus had basically shifted off the Emperor and his family and centered on their hunt for opponents to their rule; with many swallowed to death by the Revolution.
"Eventually, the royals became heroes," emphasized Aida Desta's son.
As the years went by, the princesses were able to go to the prison chapel and after about a dozen years' confinemen, they were able to interact with the other inmates; one of them used her skills in the kindergarten. The others passed the time by doing handiwork.
It was, indeed, a dramatic fall from grace.
Most were highly educated, with Stephen Mengesha's mother a graduate from the prestigious Cambridge University in history and two were Oxford graduates.

Mengesha: All my aunts were educated and Princess Sara Gizaw was educated as a nurse in Scotland. Princess Zuriash was a philanthropist and she had a school for the blind. That's another thing, they were not the type of people sitting at home, but they were always active. They were not the glamor type of princesses, but had a sense of duty.
Editor Corbett: They were loved within the prison and outside, weren't they?
Mengesha: Yes. They would look after the children in the prison and people would sometimes send them presents, like chocolates. So there is a human side and they had to learn to adjust. Nobody would have been able to survive for 14 years without adapting to the conditions.
Corbett: What happened to the young male members of the Royal Family?
Mengesha: The boys stayed in prison at the beginning were part of the old guard, but then the prison began to fill up with younger revolutionaries, who were thrown in by the government, so radical Marxists were being thrown in prison with the young princes, who had never been exposed to the Marxist government. So the boys are to be commended for surviving even in the prison compound. The prisoners that were inside were totally opposed to the type of government in the past and the royalty, in general.

4. The unsung heroines

2007-03-31T09:23:00.000-07:00

HUNGER is often a way of life in Africa and starvation in Ethiopian prisons is a cruel fact.
Unlike North America, where prisoners are fed three times a day, unless relatives or friends bring food to hell holes such as the End of the World, inmates starve to death.
For the Royal Family, dying was a distinct possibility in prison; in fact, two of the 10 did die and one princess was given early release because of her age.
At the beginning, Ethiopians were afraid to assist them, not because of any dislike for them, but because they feared the revolutionaries and subsequent repercussions. After all, the Derg hadn't shown any mercy towards royalty or commoners.

Stephen Mengesha:The responsibility of feeding them was left for their servants. My grandmother's lady-in-waiting travelled 14 years without ever stopping one day. She cooked food and took it to them on a daily basis. Her name is Fluothe Selassie (no relation to the Emperor because Selassie means Trinity). Hers is a fascinating story. She and her sister are from Kaffa province where my mother's father -- Ras Desta Damtew -- used to be governor-general. The two sisters came into his household at a very young age, probably at the ages of 12 or 13. When the Italians invaded Ethiopia in 1936, my grandmother decided to take those two girls with her in exile and they got on a British frigate to Palestine. They got to Jerusalem with my grandmother and then they had a change of heart. They really missed their homeland and they decided to go back.
Editor Corbett: How did they get back to Ethiopia?
Mengesha: They approached the British authorities and asked them and by this time they were young ladies. A family hired them in Addis. When the Emperor regained power (in 1941), my grandmother (Tenagne Worq) returned to Addis and she welcomed the two sisters back into her household. On sister used to be a lady-in-waiting, but then she became a nanny. Fluothe Selassie remained a lady-in-waiting and when the Revolution came in 1974, she decided she was going to help them. She figured she had the loyalty to look after them. Loyalty can only stretch so far, but to really sacrifice yourself for 14 years and ceaselessly cook and take food to them is another matter.

Flouthe Selassie wasn't the only samaritan.
Two of the most prominent were a Dutch woman, named Van der Leew, and a Mrs. Wayne, the head mistress at Clarendon in north Wales, a finishing school for some of the princesses, including Aida Desta. Van der Leew raised money for the women prisoners throughout Europe while Wayne, although not a wealthy woman, stipulated that monies from her will be distributed to the royal members.
Mrs. Van der Leew also pursued improving the hygiene facilities. In fact, she received permission from the Mengistu Haile Mariam government to build showers and other facilities within Akaki Prison, however, they were built for the prisoners in the main building. Haile Selassie's family were never allowed to use them.
Another woman, only identified as Ruth, who was a lady-in-waiting to Aida Desta, also provided a needed service, that of washing the princesses' clothes.

It was a spartan life.
They were forced to sleep on mattresses on the damp, concrete floor for 14 years.
They were also limited in "getting a bit of air," with the prison authorities restricting their exercise periods to 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes at night.
They were allowed books and magazines, provided by the prison, but their shortwave radio was taken away from them when officials feared they would listen to foreign propaganda.

3. The lightbulb from hell

2007-03-30T16:51:00.000-07:00

THE COMFORTS surrounding Palace life were quickly dismissed for the sharp realities of Akaki Prison, located near the supposed monument to tolerance and justice, the Organization of African Unity.
It was ironic that African heads of state would visit Addis Ababa on a regular basis in the late 1970s and 1980s, and completely ignore the plight of Haile Selassie's Court, within eyesight of the OAU.
With systematic brainwashing techniques, the Emperor's accomplishments and even his very existence were being eradicated. Monuments and plaques to his life were ripped away and replaced by socialist slogans.
In the crumbling, tin-roofed stucco buildings, which housed the End of the World, Haile Selassie's family was separated by a wall from more than a hundred women.
Dressed in black because most were in mourning for family members, who had been executed, the princesses existed in the damp, nine-by-12-foot cell, sleeping on mattresses, with its one window with no glass and a single door.
Actually, it was a makeshift storage room, next to the prison's ill-equipped clinic without any proper washroom facilities and no shower.
However, the most annoying intrusion into their previously-insulated lifestyle was a small lightbulb.
It had to be on 24 hours a day.
It was on for 14 years.
It was another form of torture.

2. End of the world

2007-03-30T16:16:00.000-07:00

THERE IS a prison within Akaki Prison in Addis. It's a maze of catacombs and underground cages known as the End of the World.
In November 1974, 56 male members of Haile Selassie's court, including former Prime Minister Endalkatchew Makonnen, Lt. Gen. Abiye Abebe and Ras Asrate Kass, were slaughtered within its confines by the new rulers of Ethiopia -- the Derg.
When three young soldiers refused to join the firing squad, they were also killed.
Built by Mussolini's occupation forces in the 1930s, Akaki Prison was notorious for its sadistic disregard for human life and it was home for Aida Desta -- the Lioness of Ethiopia -- for almost 14 years.
The Derg claimed the princess and other members of the Imperial Court were thrown into prison for their own protection.

Stephen Mengesha (in a taped conversation in 1990): When the Emperor was killed in August 1975, and I say killed, because we don't trust the official explanation that he died of natural causes, he was visited three days before by my grandmother and my mother ... That's all we knew until August 27th when it was officially announced that he had been buried and then the family was put in prison. The government still insists in 1990 that they were ut there for their own protection. If they were there for protective custody for one year at the residence of the Duke of Harar, I see no reason why the government should just throw them in the most notorious prison, slam the doors shut and keep them there for 14 years, but that's what happened. It's called Allamgang. Allam means world, but Gang is the map of the world, it's the End of the World.

1. The Lioness of Ethiopia

2007-03-19T10:36:00.000-07:00

THE LIONESS of Ethiopia, Aida Desta, named after the heroine of Verdi's opera, had seen her world crumble.
Her beloved grandfather, the Emperor Haile Selassie I, had been murdered; her husband and children were scattered throughout the world; and she and her mother, Tenagne Worq, along with her sisters were about to leave the comfort of house detention in the now-nationalized Duke of Harar's palace for the Hell Hole known as the End of the World.
Born on April 8, 1927, Aida Desta was the daughter of Ras Desta Damtew, a Shoan nobleman, who had married then 14-year-old Princess Tenagne Worq in 1924. Besides Aida, they had three daughters -- Sebla, Sofia and Ruth -- and a son, Iskander Desta.
Aida's father was appointed governor of Sidamo in 1932 in succession to Birra Wolde Gabriel and founded its two towns, Yirgalem and Wondo. He was killed by the Italians on February 24, 1937 at age 39. Aida was only 10 at the time.
Her mother would later marry Ras Andargatchew Messai, who was one of the fortunate ones, who had survived the killing spree of the fleeing Imperial Bodyguard in the Palace's Green Salon in 1960. Aida's father-in-law, Ras Seyum, had been executed in the same aborted coup.
The beautiful princess would attend Clarendon in north Wales and Cambridge University in England and then marry the respected and down-to-earth Mengesha Seyum. They would have seven children -- Rebecca, Michael, John, Seyum, Jalyce, Menen and Prince Stephen.
It had been an idyllic lifestyle.
After a number of postings in Arussi and Sidamo, Stephen's father, Mengesha Seyum, would become the minister of public works and communications and be based in Addis, where they all lived in the rambling Palace complex, next to the Emperor's Jubilee Palace, known as Little Ghebbi, and just down the street from Big Ghebbi -- Menelik's Grand Palace.
Jubilee, the grayish stone mansion, was the jewel also known as Princes' Paradise, and was next to the joint homes of Mengesha Seyum and his father, Ras Seyum, who was governor-general of Tigre with a palace in the province's capital of Makale.
While the Mengesha Seyums lived in Addis, they were in close contact with Emperor Haile Selassie and Empress Menen; sharing nightly visits when they would watch newsreels of world events.
Stephen's mother, Aida, besides raising her children, had the privilege of travelling with the Emperor to far-off places such as Brazil in 1960. However, that state visit was a time of turmoil, as the Imperial Bodyguard revolted. She worried about her children's safety. Her husband, as minister of public works and communications was on a road-building project in Jimma, at the time.

Stephen Mengesha: My father was a hands-on type of personality and in construction work on roads, he would be a do-it-yourselfer. He'd just jump on a bulldozer or grader, not to be a showoff or anything, but he'd just do it and stay on the job three or four months until the road was completed.

In early 1963, Aida Desta suffered a brain aneurysm. Her grandfather, the Emperor, flew to Zurich, Switzerland to be with her and then made arrangements to have her flown to the United States for medical treatment with the assistance of President John F. Kennedy.
She recovered.
In 1974 with the military revolutionaries closing in on the Emperor in Addis, Stephen's mother made a monumental decision in the Palace in Makale, where her husband was governor general.
It was a choice of her either staying with her husband, Mengesha Seyum, and trying to escape to The Sudan with their two young children, Menen and Seyum, or head for Addis to be with her mother and three sisters and her grandfather.
Her other children, Michael, Rebecca, John, Jalyce, were in various locations throughout the world. Stephen was completing his university studies in Canada.
Mengesha Seyum and son, Seyum, made a dramatic escape through Eritrea and into The Sudan where the former Tigrean GG would eventually even escape a would-be-assassin's bullet.
Meanwhile, Aida Desta arrived in Addis on a military plane. The Derg had expected it to contain Tigre's governor-general, but when Stephen's mother, who had been roughed up by a military woman during the flight, looked out onto the tarmac to see an array of military hardware, including tanks and jeeps, he exclaimed: "The lion has gone out of his cage. He has escaped you and you're looking at the lioness. I won't bite you."