Terror Ended, Ethiopia Starts Over : Africa: Almost everything political has changed since Addis Ababa fell in May, 1991, to rebels. This month was nation’s first fully free election.

The little neighborhood compound known as Kebele 10 housed Ethiopia’s most infamous prison during the military junta’s reign of terror, and it was there that Tadele Edward decided he would most certainly succumb to the torture and die.

“Come, let me show you,” he said. Tadele’s back is still scarred, and he wears dark glasses to cover injuries suffered when his torturers tried to gouge out his eyes. He walked down a flight of rickety wooden steps and, under a porch overhang dense with cobwebs, stopped at a padlocked door that bore the words, “The Revolution Above All Else.”

Inside the dark, airless storage room, 600 political prisoners were once packed night and day like boxed matchsticks. The men who ran this place killed, among hundreds of others, Tadele’s 19-year-old brother and tortured one woman so endlessly that she crawled into a septic tank to drown. The men who ran this place did it, they said, to build a new Ethiopia dedicated to Marxism and the masses.

“This was Kilbesa Negeo’s kebele ,” said Tadele, who is now chairman of the kebele and part of the government’s efforts to sweep away 61 years of imperial and Marxist history and start over. “It is impossible to say how many died here--doctors, lawyers, university professors, all kinds of people, but I can tell you Kilbesa was a man of great evil.

“He would come down here at night and pick out 10, 15, 20 people. It didn’t matter who they were--just, ‘You, you and you.’ He’d take them across the road, by the schoolhouse, and shoot them. Then their bodies would be dumped on the streets around Addis as a warning to others. Kilbesa, you know, is in the United States. We would like to get him back one day.”

Kilbesa, in fact, was sued last year in federal district court in Atlanta by three Ethiopian women who said they recognized him as their torturer. The women won a multimillion-dollar judgment, which the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa said is under appeal.

Ethiopia has asked the United States to return Kilbesa to stand trial with 1,200 members of Mengistu Haile Mariam’s deposed regime imprisoned here. But there is no extradition treaty between Addis Ababa and Washington.

Mengistu’s revolutionary junta, known as the Dergue, was characterized between 1974 and 1991 as much by murder as by ideology. It was centered on thousands of kebeles , each a sort of Marxist mini-municipality. Every kebele had its own defense force and controlled where its inhabitants could live, work and travel. Some were given specific missions. Kebele 10’s mission was the elimination of perceived dissidents, Jehovah’s Witnesses and supporters of the overthrown emperor, the late Haile Selassie.

Given the brutal oppression kebele leaders had exercised for so long, Mesfin Moges, 30, couldn’t quite believe what had brought him to Kebele 10 at 6 a.m. on June 5. He had come to vote in the first fully free national election ever held in Ethiopia. One of the candidates was even an open sympathizer of the old imperial family--a crime just four years earlier punishable by summary execution.

“I felt excitement,” he said, “like I was part of something important. I listened to all the candidates and voted for an independent. What impressed me about him was his honesty and willingness to work hard for Ethiopia.”

The ballots listed 38 opposition parties, each identified by a symbol such as a lion, bee or tree, because 90% of the nation’s 50 million people cannot read. When results are announced around July 1, the sole task of the 547 winners will be to approve a new constitution and then, sometime around February, give way to Ethiopia’s first elected government.

Heading the constitutional drafting committee is the grand old man of Ethiopian politics, Kifle Wodajo, a foreign minister under Haile Selassie.

His presence, combined with the election that was monitored by observers from 24 countries, sent an important signal to the international community that almost everything political in Ethiopia has changed since Addis Ababa fell in May, 1991, to a guerrilla army of Tigrean rebels.

People talk freely again, even criticizing Meles Zenawi, the transitional president, without fear of reprisal. No guns and only an occasional soldier are seen on the streets. Press censorship has ended, and the former rebels--who now constitute the transitional government and the army and once spoke of creating an Albanian-style Communist state--have been embraced by the West as pragmatic advocates of a free-market economy and of unity.

Some Ethiopians, though, remain uneasy. They are nervous about the government’s plan to own all land, renting out acreage on 99-year leases, and its willingness to allow regions to secede and declare independence, as Eritrea did last year.

Also, despite all the good intentions displayed by Meles, there is in this land of the biblical Queen of Sheba concern that those occupying Haile Selassie’s old palace are almost exclusively northern Tigreans.

None of the opposition parties shows much viability, making it likely that the eventual government in Ethiopia--the only country in black Africa besides Liberia that was never colonized --will resemble the transitional one.

That disturbs the Amhara people of central Ethiopia, whose king, Menelik II, forged the Ethiopian empire in the 19th Century and whose language, Amharic, has its own age-old alphabet--a unique development in sub-Saharan Africa.

In Addis Ababa (meaning new flower in Amharic), the end of Marxism has brought the removal of V. I. Lenin statues and slogans that once bedecked every nook and cranny, but it has done little to alleviate stunning poverty or the city’s sense of timeless misfortune. Caravans of donkeys still plod along the streets, their backs piled high with wheat, and beggar children sleep among the weeds in shantytowns that reach to the grounds of the Hilton Hotel.

But Ethiopia’s international isolation is over. Western tourists have returned. Businessmen impressed with the seriousness of Meles’ government arrive daily on flights from Europe, and the sprawling U.S. Embassy compound, where only a handful of Americans weathered the final years of the Mengistu regime, again has a full complement of diplomatic staff.

From 1954 until Haile Selassie’s 44-year reign ended in the 1974 coup, Ethiopia was a client state of the United States. Washington armed and trained Ethiopia’s army (which grew under Mengistu to be the largest in black Africa) and ran top-secret communications and intelligence-gathering facilities here staffed by Americans.

Mengistu ended the alliance in 1977 and turned to the Soviet Union for massive military backing. In what had been a feudal country with landless peasants held in serfdom, many Ethiopians cheered the revolution. But Mengistu turned out to be among Africa’s most coldhearted rulers. He was a man who, when informed that Eritrean secessionists had threatened to kidnap his wife and children, replied: “Go ahead. Boil them in oil for all I care.”