“In this very night, in this city Col. Mengistu Hailemariam lives quietly and in security,” writes Yitagesu Getnet, author of the new book “Tales of the Exiled Leader” (Amharic: የስደተኛው መሪ ትረካዎች) conveying his feeling upon arriving in Harare, Zimbabwe to interview Ethiopia’s Marxist former president.
It’s a remark that betrays a sense of astonishment.
More than three decades after his ouster, Col. Mengistu, who presided over one of the most turbulent eras in Ethiopia’s recent history, leads a life so uneventful and seemingly unburdened by the consequences of his actions as a leader.
His ascent to power in the mid 70s, overthrowing Ethiopia’s last Emperor, was a watershed moment for the country.
And his 17 years in office were marked by fear and blood. Countless people were callously killed. Some in a brutal campaign to wipe out “anti-revolutionaries.” Others in a string of devastating conflicts that crippled the country. Separatist movements and armed struggles mushroomed- to whom he would eventually lose his reign.
He fled to Zimbabwe where he was welcomed and given a new home by his good old friend Robert Mugabe.
Defending his decision to leave the country behind in the early 1990s when a coalition of armed groups closed in the capital Addis Ababa, he bluntly told Yitagesu “had I stayed, the result would have been to languish twenty years in […] prison. And this would have benefited nothing to the Ethiopian people.”
It’s a statement as extraordinary as it is revealing: these tales of the exiled leader are not of reckoning. The sufferings caused during his leadership are barely explored or even acknowledged. The campaign against “anti-revolutionaries”- ominously dubbed “Red Terror” is just glossed over as if it was a footnote in history. Those who lived through it, however, might feel differently.
Mengistu was tried in absentia and was given life sentence in 2007. An appeal from the prosecution would see him given death sentence a few years later. Nonetheless, he has continued to enjoy support among some who see him as a misunderstood hero.
The writer, Yitagesu, doesn’t interject himself much. There’s very little commentary. But there’s also little attempt to press on some of the difficult topics. Most of the book is told in first-person, by Col. Mengistu, from lengthy interviews he gave the author in which he was granted free reign to speak his “side.”
Yitagesu doesn’t hide he was star-struck by meeting the former leader. (At one point he recited him lines from a song praising the colonel that he sang in his boarding school for children from veteran families.)
For a man past his eighties, Mengistu has a surprisingly good memory. Some of his tales are embroidered with details.
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“Tales” is the latest in the growing catalogue of books discussing the Marxist (commonly known us ‘Derg’) era of 1974-1991. Some are about and/or by people who were in power during that era. Col. Mengistu himself has a two volume book titled “Our Struggle.” He has also been a subject of other writers.
And there seems to be sufficient appetite for more.
The large number of books published, especially in the past decade or so, focusing on that particular time can be seen efforts to exorcise a dark recent history.
But a running theme among those ex-powerful figures featured in some of these books is an attempt to retroactively justify deeds with chilling effects on generations.
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