A Dream Defiled

My natural sympathy was not with the protesters. I saw them as Amhara supremacists who did not appreciate that the Tigreans had liberated them from a brutal dictatorship. Because of this, perhaps, I didn't judge the incident harshly enough.

I thought of that shooting again as accounts of police and army excesses started pouring in last month. A French journalist I met on the street had seen army troops firing at the backs of retreating demonstrators. A young woman ran up to us breathlessly and said she had seen soldiers burst into a house a block away and start shooting. Soldiers roared through the now empty streets by the truckload. By afternoon, most of the shooting had subsided. But not all of it.

In the morning, in one of the thousands of dirt alleyways that form grids between Addis Ababa's broad avenues, I was led into a mud-brick home, where mourners wept and danced in a frenzy of sorrow. A 17-year-old named Tsegahun had been standing with friends in the alleyway at dusk the day before when soldiers arrived. One of the friends said, "They called him over, told him to kneel down, and shot him twice in the midsection."

After that, hundreds of young men had taken refuge in a nearby river gorge to escape soldiers who had come knocking on doors at midnight. I heard the same story in neighborhood after neighborhood. Arrests continued every night for a week, until thousands were taken, human rights groups said. Many were hauled 220 miles away, to the malaria-infected lowlands near Sudan.

After a week, Addis Ababa returned to a semblance of normalcy. Shops reopened -- though only after the government had begun to revoke the licenses of businesses that remained closed. Parents wandered from police station to police station, trying to get information about their arrested children. The opposition leaders, Mesfin among them, were shown on TV shuffling, handcuffed and bent, toward a courtroom.

Suspicion simmered, as though the Mengistu era had returned. People in cafes shot furtive glances at neighboring tables.

"We feel betrayed by democracy," said a journalist who said he has been in hiding since the Nov. 1 crackdown. "It's as if the government encouraged us to speak our minds so that it would know who to grab when the time came."

Yet many Ethiopians believe that the Western democracies could still help. The driver who took me to the airport, a friend from previous visits, had carefully avoided talking politics during my trip.

As we approached the terminal, he finally had his say. "The donor countries can twist Meles's arm and make him compromise -- release the prisoners, allow the newspapers to reopen," he said about Zenawi. "That's if they care about democracy as much as they say."

Democracy had been the focus of the people's disappointment -- yet that disappointment had not killed their desire for it. Zenawi, undoubtedly, already knows this.

Author's e-mail:mzo@netvision.net.il

Micha Odenheimer is a writer and rabbi based in Jerusalem.