11
‘One must be cunning and wicked in this world.’
Leo Tolstoy
All set to deal with Debre Libanos, General Maletti was elated, for his troops had just successfully conducted scorched-earth ‘punitive action’ in the nearby district of Menz. Apparently annoyed that not a single person had presented themselves ‘in homage’ to his invading forces, he reported that after entering the district on 6 May, his men had managed to kill 2,523 Ethiopians and destroy 115,422 ‘tukuls’. They had also destroyed three churches, and slaughtered the monks of the monastery of Gultené St Michael before burning it to the ground.1
The onslaught of Maletti’s troops in Northern Shewa, which had been maintained at fever pitch since mid-April, was a death march of wanton slaughter and ‘destruction of everything’, just as Graziani had ordered.2 Indeed, the viceroy’s programme of repression was reaching a climax. By 17 May the viceroy’s orders were explicit: ‘What I recommend is to quell without mercy and eliminate rebel leaders and followers.’3 And the following day:
News 18th May.Debre Birhan sector. Menz region has got the hard necessary lesson it deserved … The repression …. displaying merciless rigour against those hostile towards us … rebels pursued and finally surrounded in the valley by our strong and fast columns suffered very serious losses and have found that ditches and precipices thought to offer secure shelter inaccessible to us do not hinder our repression … Rebels killed: 2,491 … 15,302 tukuls burnt.4
Assembling the Troops
Maletti had planned to complete his assignment in Menz before moving on to deal with Debre Libanos on Tekle Haymanot Day, 20 May. However, while embroiled in Menz, he was informed that the saint’s day was 18 May (10 Ginbot). This was two days earlier than he had thought, so he changed his plans. Leaving his troops ‘to complete the ongoing punitive action’ in Menz, he left on 15 May, then went on to Addis Ababa, having ordered his 20th and 4th Colonial Battalions to move towards an area he called Gurenié,5 and to reinforce his battalions at Fiché. At that point, he reported, none of his forces knew the purpose of these manoeuvres, because ‘for the encircling [of Debre Libanos] to succeed, it was necessary to maintain absolute secrecy until the last moment’.6
Thus, on Monday, 17 May, Maletti went up to Fiché for the long-awaited attack on Debre Libanos. Apart from his own military command of the north-eastern Shewa sector, which included the infamous 45th Colonial (Muslim) Battalion as well as the 20th Eritrean Colonial Battalion, the general had assembled a formidable array of Italy’s colonial troops. These included the 12th Colonial Brigade, the 51st, 52nd and 56th Colonial Battalions, and the 23rd Colonial Battery. In addition, he had also brought in carabinieri normally stationed at Debre Birhan and Fiché.7
Altogether, to attack unarmed priests, pilgrims and elderly monks, Maletti had put in place an army of more than 6,000—a massive fighting force such as would normally have been deployed to face a heavily armed and resolute enemy.
If Maletti’s objective was limited to executing only some of the elderly monks (as he eventually reported), a single platoon would have been more than sufficient for the task. But Maletti was launching a massive operation involving a widespread dragnet in which no one was to be allowed to escape.
Each of the military units had its function, and one of the first tasks was allocated to the 51st Colonial Battalion, a highly trained group of soldiers. Specialising in negotiating the type of rugged terrain found around Debre Libanos, they would be deployed to control access to and from the monastery.
Ferocious Castrators
The company at the heart of the army taken to Debre Libanos by General Maletti to implement the next phase in Italy’s holy war was the 45th Colonial (Muslim) Battalion. Created by Graziani following the defection to Kenya of more than 700 Christian Eritrean askaris from the Royal Corps of Colonial Troops, the purpose of creating the 45th was to ensure that he would have at his disposal a force willing to carry out attacks on Ethiopian Christian clergy and civilians that Eritrean Christian askaris, most of whom were members of the same Orthodox faith as their Ethiopian cousins, might refuse to do.
Formed in February 1936 from Muslim colonial Eritrean, Libyan and Somali troops already on active service in Ethiopia in other battalions taking part in the invasion, the 45th had distinguished itself at the southern war front, and now constituted one of Maletti’s crack colonial battalions. Graziani had certainly groomed the men of the 45th Battalion as a merciless fighting force. The Libyan battalions fighting under Italian command already had a notorious reputation for taking no prisoners, but General Maletti regarded the 45th as a unit like no other, proudly referring to them as ‘ferocious castrators’ when ‘unleashed’. He described them as ‘1,500 men armed with daggers, spears and rifles … agile as monkeys’, guided by what he called ‘their infallible instinct’.8
Delaying Tactics
At 8 am on the morning of Tuesday, 18 May, Maletti ordered his men to proceed from Fiché to Debre Libanos under the command of Colonel Garelli, who set about encircling the monastery. Some soldiers were ordered to occupy the sacred ground around the church of St Tekle Haymanot; others were deployed in and around the cemetery, and at the monastery village of Wusha Gedel. Some were even sent to the nunnery, beyond the church of St Tekle Haymanot and across the holy waters of the Agat River (see Map 8).9 One battalion surrounded the lands beyond Debre Libanos, some of the men taking up positions along the edge of the plateau on the escarpment above the monastery, while others patrolled the edge of the terrace where it overlooks the Siga Wedem gorge. Maletti would report that by 2 pm ‘the entire gorge was blockaded’,10 a ‘complete surprise [to the monastery], and perfectly successful’.11
Dressed in their traditional attire, the faithful started appearing on the track leading eastwards from Chagel to the monastery—priests with their white turbans, monks in their coloured cloaks, groups of women head-to-foot in white, the sick and the lame hobbling along the rough track hoping for relief at the holy waters of the saint, the occasional lone bare-footed hermit with his gaunt, long-staffed iron cross, and traders carrying bamboo umbrellas, food, wax tapers and other artefacts for sale at the market that always sprang up below the escarpment on holy days.
However, when they reached the church, the pilgrims got their first shock. Muslim soldiers had not been seen at Debre Libanos since the massacre of 1531. But now here they were, swarming over the monastery grounds. The soldiers checked on each person as they entered. While at first the operation had the appearance of a regular security exercise, it took on a more ominous character when the visitors spotted troops up on the escarpment above. New arrivals were screened and ushered into the church, which was gradually filling up under the watchful eyes of the askaris.
By the afternoon, several of those locked in the church had realised that they were captives, and in danger. Many could be heard thanking God that if they were to die at Debre Libanos, they would go to heaven.12
While the captives at Debre Libanos were facing the prospect of an early death, General Maletti discovered that he had been misinformed. This was not Tekle Haymanot Day at all; he had sent in the military two days too soon. He could not cancel the operation; things had gone too far for that. Yet if he had the captive clergy and pilgrims shot, those expected to arrive over the following two days would hear about it and would stay away. He decided to play for time. He pretended that he was there to reorganise the monastery. He would distract and calm the senior clergy with a discussion on the future of Debre Libanos, then would move the captives out of the monastery early in the morning to a location where they would not be seen by the new arrivals. But for the time being they would remain in the church.13
At 4 pm the great doors of the church were closed, and Maletti had some seventy clergy seized and checked by the carabinieri. From these he selected ‘Vice Prior’ Abba Gebre-Maryam Welde-Giyorgis and Meggabi Welde-Mikaél Chaffa, who duly presented themselves to be interviewed by the general and his aide-de-camp in his command tent.14
Maletti shared his apparent concerns with the two senior clergymen, diligently acquainted himself with the day-to-day details of the running of the monastery, and appointed senior monks and priests to various positions of responsibility. A strange meeting, it was actually a charade. The clergy were asked about the nuns of Debre Libanos, well known for caring for the sick and the dying. Their refuge, known as Bét Selihom (‘The House of Selihom’), had been named after the pool of Siloam at Jerusalem, where Jesus is said to have healed a blind man. They told Maletti that there were about one hundred nuns, of which 71 were fit enough to look after the invalids, who were about 50 in number.
The general even recorded the rations given to the infirm of the monastery: ‘a flat loaf of barley’ or ‘a soup made of either broad beans or chickpeas’.15 Thus the charade proceeded, with Maletti discussing minutiae of Bét Selihom such as the serving of chickpea soup, while the congregation of the monastery, locked in the church without food or water, awaited the death sentence. The general then reached the topic of specialised monastery services, for which, after a seemingly diligent study of the matter, he decided ‘to nominate a certain number of treasurers, conservationists, librarians, etc., to keep, maintain and ensure the functioning of certain essential services: in total four monks’.16
Why was General Maletti’s report so detailed and apparently sympathetic to Debre Libanos? Why did he go into such depth into the future operations of the monastery that he was about to annihilate? And what was the point of writing such a report two days after the massacre? Although a delaying tactic, the meeting may not have been staged for the monks alone. His account was an official report, not a telegram to his friend Graziani. Written as if he had actually intended to implement those plans at the time, the report gives the impression that Maletti was unaware that his orders were to destroy the monastery. Indeed, in his preliminary report, in which he had estimated that two to three thousand people would be at the monastery, he had not suggested that they were to come to any harm. Even two days after the massacre, the opening sentence of his report stated merely that he was ordered to proceed with the ‘setting straight [risanamento]’ of the monastery, with no hint of its impending destruction. Perhaps Maletti was aware of Mussolini’s decision to replace Graziani, and may have been, so to speak, playing safe, signalling to Rome that he had no intention of executing anyone unless ordered to do so; he was not executing defenceless civilians of his own accord.
Meanwhile, one of those inside the church was young Tibebe Kassa, who had watched the operation with fascination from the beginning, and had gone to the church to see what was happening. His friends had told him that if he said he was a deacon, the soldiers would leave him alone. But that had proved to be the worst possible advice, because Tibebe, who in fact held no position in the Church, had been seized by askaris and pushed inside, and now, as darkness fell, he too realised that he was now a captive. In the gloom, he could see that those around him were bewildered but calm. They were being led in prayer by elderly members of the clergy. A bearded priest reached for the ancient tome of The Contendings of St Tekle Haymanot, the holy man whose mortal remains lay beneath their feet, and the congregation prayed for the miracle that would save them.17
Detention
Wednesday, 19 May, hardly features in Maletti’s report—a lacuna possibly explained by the fact that on that day one of his troops’ principal tasks seems to have been pillage.18 The only event mentioned was the refusal of the monks and deacons still in their huts and cottages to follow his orders to turn themselves in. ‘I ordered their immediate arrest’, he wrote, ‘and, at 6.00 am, the number of them arrested reached 325.’19
Nonetheless, from eyewitness accounts it is clear that Wednesday was a busy day. As dawn broke, the clergy were dragged from their beds, and the great doors of the church of St Tekle Haymanot were swung open. Ordered to leave in single file, the captives emerged into the daylight to find that they were required to give their details: name, place of birth, age and occupation.20
The first 30 or 40 captives to have completed the identity check were assembled near the bell-tower, and were made to climb unceremoniously at gunpoint onto a military truck, which took them up the rough track through Wusha Gedel, onto the Fiché road. It continued its journey a short distance to a heavily guarded field known as Mesqel Massaya,21 on the western side of the road, where the prisoners were offloaded. Then a second group climbed aboard another truck, which was also dispatched to Mesqel Massaya, in a cycle that would continue for the rest of the day.
At around 5 pm, Tibebe had to join the line. He gave his details, again thinking that if he pretended to be a deacon, he would be safe. But he found himself being ordered onto one of the trucks, to join the adults, many of whom were monks and priests. Tibebe was confused. Why were they arresting the clergy? As the truck passed his home in Wusha Gedel, he wondered when he would see his parents again.22
Arriving at Mesqel Massaya, Tibebe recognised several of his friends who had been there since the previous day, as well as pilgrims who had been captured at Chagel en route to the monastery. By 6 pm, several hundred captives had been transferred from the church of St Tekle Haymanot to Mesqel Massaya.23
That evening at Fiché, General Maletti received the telegram he had been expecting, stating that Royal Military Advocate Franceschino had ‘gathered absolute proof of the complicity of monks of Debra Libanos monastery together with the authors of the attempt’.24 In fact, the report contained no absolute proof; it actually consisted principally of hearsay. It indicated that Abriha Deboch was close to the tsebaté and a few of the senior monks, which was not surprising, given his mother-in-law’s connections with the gebez of the monastery, and the fact that she lived in the vicinity. At most, the investigations suggested that some of the monks might have been tipped off that there could be trouble in Addis Ababa in the near future, which again was not surprising, given that ten days before the attack on the High Command, Abriha had taken his wife, Taddesech, to the safety of the monastery, to stay with her mother. There was no evidence that the clergy as a body had any involvement in, or even knowledge of, the forthcoming attack on the High Command. Nonetheless, the viceroy apparently felt that the outcome of the investigations was sufficient to enable him to present the liquidation of the monastery as punishment for a crime, rather than an act of exemplary repression designed to terrorise the Ethiopian Church into submission and presumably to satisfy his own paranoia.
The attack of 19 February having given Graziani the excuse he needed to eliminate his enemies, real or imagined, his telegram went on: ‘Therefore execute summarily all monks without distinction, including vice-prior. Please assure me this has been done by informing me of the number of them.’25