One day as a TPLF rebel By Kidane Y. Aug 2, 2004

One day, I was assigned to take documents to the EPLF leader. Our flight route was sneaking between the towering mountains of northern Ethiopia. Occasionally, the route was too narrow that we could see what was going on the edges of the mountains from the window. We entered an EPLF territory, and we saw a long column of people which we assumed were working on the sides of the mountain. Initially, we thought they were EPLF rebels digging tunnels. At closer look, however, they were Ethiopian POWs.

EPLF ATROCITY

No sooner had we flown past the long column of men that we heard an outburst of machine-gun fires. We saw the entire column of men collapsing into the ditches. The men we saw for seconds were cut down in seconds. The pilot and I were down with instant shock; we were gasping for air. It would be some time in our helicopter cabin before the pilot and I talked about the mass murder EPLF rebels carried out against our fellow compatriots, who had given up their arms so that they would be spared of their war-shattered lives.

When I ran away from Sidist Kilo Campus and joined TPLF in 1975, almost from the beginning, my innocent and raw mind had convinced me that my contribution would be for the honor of the Ethiopian people to live from fear, want, persecution and other savage traits of a military rule. How naive!

Nevertheless, we arrived in Eritrea’s Sahel, and met with a senior EPLF official called Haile Dru’e (Haile Woldensae), who would later become the Foreign Minister of Eritrea until 2001¹.

Expecting a sympathetic response, I told Haile Dru’e about the mass murder his rebels committed against Ethiopian POWs, and promptly asked him, “How come you guys murder captives? Just POWs? Whom you have jailed perhaps for years? And whom you have used as slaves who dug up your endless tunnels and baracks?

Neither amused nor bemused, Haile’s response was dry.
“Do you think they came to develop Eritrea? They came to destroy Eritrea.”

TPLF Bestiality

Well, We returned to the TPLF base. Restless over the gruesome mass murder, I confided in one TPLF official what the pilot and I saw as we were flying to Sahel. He said some of the top guys would not tolerate any one captured in the act of incriminating Shaebia. As someone whom I know closely, he was, by way of warning, advising me to shut my mouth up.

However, many questions began to flood my mind. When I joined TPLF, there were other friends of mine who also joined TPLF from the same Sidist Kilo campus. They were brilliant minds, and daring souls who would never hesitate speaking their minds, particularly about the servile patience TPLF was showing over the issue of Eritrea. Years later after the Sahel incident, I began to question the whereabouts of my friends, whom I haven’t seen for years (I was confined to an office work around the base). I would be told that Tegadalai X was in Gondar (by then TPLF had exploded into EPRDF), Tegadalai Y in Wello, Tagadalai Z in Sudan – on different TPLF assignments. When EPRDF entered Addis Ababa, however, I met some survivors who told me those friends of mine whom I have been looking for were one by one eliminated by no one but TPLF bosses.

Of course, I left TPLF in 1991. From outside, connections were easy to make. In their morbid desire to bring the country down to their knees, Meles and his loyalists had to eliminate key figures by orchestrating Shakespearean-like plots. From destroying the life of General Hayelom to the recent assassination of TPLF Security Chief Kinfe Gebre-Medhin, from how the country they turned into landlocked was brought down from a Shaebia-crushing victory down to humiliating defeat of Ethiopia in a Meles-established Border Court, from the systematic destruction of Ethiopian Workers Trade Union, Ethiopian Teachers Association, Ethiopian Free Press Journalists Association…and in place of them, the proliferation of killer “laws” that has practically stripped Ethiopians of their basic rights, I regret that an organization that tens of thousands of young men and women joined, and gave their lives for, with the firm hope that they would contribute to Ethiopia’s escape from military dictatorship for a free, democratic and self-reliant Ethiopia has fallen from the frying pan into the fire, has fallen in the hands of Eritrean mercenaries who today have sharpened their killer instincts so much so that they are talking about the 2005 “elections.”

No amount of Meles Zenawi theatrics would stop the simmering public resentment from shaping up as a people’s uprising for a government of Ethiopians by Ethiopians for Ethiopians, which is quite a break from the current mercenary rule.