Fallen Leaders of Ethiopia Jailed in Comfort

As minister of industry in a repressive government overthrown by rebels, Tadeos Harege-Work had little to look forward to last week when he turned himself in, as ordered, to Ethiopia’s new leaders for detention and possible trial.

Now he’s glad that he did.

Clad in a running suit, sneakers and a blue sun hat, he lounged amid a crowd of well-wishers and family members in Africa’s unlikeliest political prison and said: “Considering our experience for the last 17 years, we didn’t expect this treatment. We’re surprised and very grateful.”

Given Africa’s reputation for unspeakable treatment of people caught on the wrong side of a revolution, the scene at Yekatit School--a former indoctrination center for political cadres--is nothing short of extraordinary.

About 250 former officials of the fallen government of Mengistu Haile Mariam have voluntarily turned themselves in since Thursday to the interim government established last week by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, which conquered Addis Ababa on Tuesday.

The prisoners, ranging from Ethiopia’s last vice president and its deputy prime minister to bureaucrats of vice-ministerial rank, are detained here on the edge of town in comfort amid minimal security.

This camp is the closest thing in Ethiopia--and almost certainly anywhere in Africa--to an American-style country-club prison.

On Sunday afternoon, the sunny walkways of the groomed campus were filled with strollers as family members brought presents of clothes and pastries wrapped in pink paper. Husbands and wives communed on carved stone benches under eucalyptus trees, and ministry underlings came to pay their respects to their old bosses.

Tucked away in one corner was the reception office, where incoming former officials reported their names and former positions--and incidentally surrendered their guns, which were added to a pile of Soviet-made AK-47s by a rebel soldier who painstakingly registered the weapons and issued each owner a receipt.

The Yekatit School is also a world apart from the prisons run by the former regime. For evidence of that, ask the man who knows: Getachew Habte-Selassie, a former minister of foreign trade who can compare his current internment with the detention he suffered under the previous revolutionary government in 1975. (After his release he landed a job with the same government.)

“It’s incomparable,” he said, adding with a grin: “This is my second time in detention--I tell people I’m doing postgraduate work.”

In 1975, he was held in a dungeon at the Menelik Palace, the revolutionary headquarters. During seven months in prison, he was allowed visits from his family twice.

“The harassment then was very bad,” he said. “They would come for you at night.” This time, he said, “I was sure I had nothing to fear. Look around you--the family visits go on all day.”

Conditions at the Yekatit School could go far in persuading Ethiopians and the international community that the Democratic Front is serious about honoring its pledges of good behavior, which include a commitment to a broad-based provisional government and a relatively swift transition to democracy. The new leaders have also promised that the prisoners in hand will be given fair trials under international observation and that it has no hankering for vendettas or kangaroo courts.

The prisoners say the accommodations in the five-story apartment block where they live on the edge of the campus are comfortable if cramped, with as many as nine men to a room, sleeping on bunk beds. (Four women are also said to be interned at the school.)

A kitchen is operating to prepare meals for anyone who does not prefer the home-cooked food brought in by their families.

Along the walkways and in the corridors, these men talk more freely among themselves now than they would have dared to under Mengistu--and more openly than some of them ever would have allowed their own citizens while in power.

So far they have had plenty of time to rehash the vices of the old regime--and particularly of their former leader. For the most part, they feel deeply betrayed by a man who claimed he would fight for his country to the death, by suicide if necessary.

“It’s a betrayal, no doubt about it, when someone says he’ll stay and then he goes,” said Shimeles Adigna, 55, who as deputy prime minister of the last Mengistu government is one of the highest-ranking prisoners at Yekatit.

“He left to save his skin!” interjected Kassa Gebre, 57, an alternate member of the Ethiopian Politburo, who said he is bitter that in fleeing into exile on May 21, Mengistu left all his loyal colleagues to face the consequences of his departure.

“We’re the guinea pigs of everybody. We didn’t run and hide in an embassy,” he said, referring to former acting President Tesfaye Gebre-Kidan, currently enjoying asylum in the Italian Embassy here. “We turned in our guns.”

Perhaps influenced by their polite treatment, Kassa and many others have come around to the position that the EPRDF entry into the city last Tuesday was a boon.

Most residents of Addis Ababa had feared the rebel army as savages and hooligans. But the experience so far has been precisely the opposite.

“We didn’t expect them to be so gentle and disciplined,” Kassa said. “I personally am very, very happy they’re here because the alternative was to have deserting government soldiers roaming the town and looting. Now I feel safe, and I feel my home is safe.”

Many of the prisoners professed to have little fear of the outcome of the promised trials.

“I’ve served my country for the last 30 years,” said Shimeles, the deputy prime minister, who had also served as head of the Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, Ethiopia’s famine-relief agency. “I had little reason to hide. What would be my charge? Running the RRC?”

Others expect to be released some time soon without enduring a trial. “I don’t feel they’re looking for me,” said Commodore Asfaw Kitessa, 53, who was one of the top-ranking officers of the Ethiopian navy. “I think they’re looking out for something bigger than normal military life, something like war crimes.”

One who might have reason for concern is the former minister of internal affairs, the infamous Tesfaye Wolde-Selassie, 57, whose position made him the chief security man in the Ethiopian police state for 16 years. Tesfaye is also thought to have been instrumental in putting down a coup attempt against Mengistu in May, 1989.

Stolid and nervous, Tesfaye wandered the compound in a beige raincoat and allowed: “I am ready for trial--I can answer any questions.”

He appears to have been one of the few former officials subjected to a lengthy grilling by the new administration, a three-hour session with a battalion-level Democratic Front leader.

“We talked about our normal activities going on,” he said. “This and that. I gave him the names of the responsible people in our different branches.”

He said he fears being blamed for some of the activities of his own underlings, then added, “I know they (the new government) will not be happy with me, but it’s a profession, it’s not a joke. In America you have the FBI and the CIA. Is that job any different from the Ethiopian internal affairs? People know I did my job openly.”

Often Mengistu would come to him to order someone’s arrest, he recalled. “I would always make my own investigation,” he said. Of course, if he concluded the target was innocent, Mengistu generally had the man arrested anyway. Did this happen often, Tesfaye was asked.

“Over 16 years?” he replied. “An enormous number.”