12

Death in the Afternoon

‘We are going to pay the ultimate price, but fear not them that kill

the body, but are unable to kill the soul.’

Father Tesfa of Debre Libanos, 21 May 1937

The Day of the Saint

Although 20 May 1937 was the holy day of both St Tekle Haymanot and the Archangel Michael, there was nothing holy about the behaviour of the Italian military in Ethiopia’s Christian highlands. Captain Corvo, the residente in Bahir Dar, Gojjam, was that very day writing a chilling order to one of his subordinates—one of several documents later submitted to the United Nations as evidence of Italian war crimes: ‘You are to punish without pity all persons found in possession of arms and ammunition. I instruct you to burn not only their houses, but also the persons themselves.’¹ Under their policy of exemplary repression, when the Italians burned houses it was common practice to burn the occupants to death in the process. However, since this was not normally admitted in writing, Corvo’s written instruction reflects the level of impunity reached by Cardinal Schuster’s ‘missionaries of the Cross’ by May 1937.

Early in the morning Maletti arrived at Debre Libanos with commanders Colonel Marenco and Dr Barca, as well as more troops from Fiché.² The great bell—a gift to the monastery from co-religionist Tsar Nicholas II of Russia in happier times—clanged a welcome from the bell-tower, and the Italians were greeted ceremoniously by the clergy. However, the greetings were not reciprocated. Instead, Maletti feigned anger at finding so few people. Pretending to be unaware of the hundreds of faithful already imprisoned at Mesqel Massaya, he made great play of his apparent annoyance, and went on to use his ‘disappointment’ at finding such a small crowd as a reason for locking up the visitors who had just arrived. ‘As I was informed, you used to be about 700, but now I see only 300 of you. Now, as I want to punish those who did not welcome me [i.e., those who had not yet arrived], you must stay in the church so that you may not be mixed with them.’³

More pilgrims continued to turn up, only to find that the monastery had become a trap; they were never to return. In due course the official welcoming ceremony was completed, and that was when Maletti’s charade came to an end, as it was followed by the arrest of the very monks that he had just put in charge of the monastery.⁴

The first to fall to the bullets of the general’s askaris were the elderly, the sick and the dying, who were traditionally cared for by the nuns. Unable or unwilling to climb onto the trucks, the Italians had them shot on the spot. Others were shot as they tried to run away.⁵ Monks unable to leave their cottages were shot where they lay; others were rounded up and executed. Some disabled victims were shot on the banks of the monastery’s River Qonjit, where their bodies tumbled down onto the stones below.⁶

Later that morning the military started removing people from the church. Since most of the resident clergy had already been moved to Mesqel Massaya, the captives of 20 May included many visitors, including priests and monks from other churches and monasteries. As the monastery grounds swarmed with askaris, the captives were ordered to sit on the ground in groups in the open space between the bell-tower and the House of the Cross, until they were ordered onto the trucks. Once full, the trucks drove off, returning empty for a new load.

In this way the prisoner convoy to Mesqel Massaya was resumed, further swelling the numbers there. While the fate of the monks and priests was sealed, that of the deacons—several of whom were little more than children—was still in the balance. Maletti was being cautious about shooting them, and at 2.15 pm he telegraphed Graziani for his instructions: ‘Please notify me urgently if the deacons are to be set free, or imprisoned, or shot.’⁷ The elimination of the deacons, as we shall see, had already been planned in considerable detail. Graziani did not want them killed at Laga Weldé; the executions would be carried out secretly at Borale.

By 3 pm the convoy to Mesqel Massaya had stopped running, and the prisoners there were being divided into groups. Then the captives at the monastery were taken in four trucks to spend the night at another site, close to the church of the Saviour of the World at Chagel.⁸ It was most likely at this moment, when the captives were waiting to be transported to the new holding ground at Chagel, that a photograph was taken. The 26-year-old Tenente (Lieutenant) Virgilio Cozzani, a commander of the 45th Battalion,⁹ was apparently a keen photographer and, despite Graziani’s assurance to Mussolini that executions would be kept secret, the young officer captured the moment for posterity. Judging from the shadows, his photograph was most likely taken at around 4 pm.

The photograph shows several groups of captive Ethiopians sitting on the ground guarded by askaris, and waiting to be loaded onto four large trucks with their tailgates open, drawn up below the escarpment in the background. The bed of each truck is covered with a canvas awning. A fifth truck stands nearby, and a sixth is parked in a different position, closer to the church of St Tekle Haymanot, which is out of the picture, to the left. On the back of the photograph Cozzani wrote the date (20 May), noting that the captives wearing a headdress were believed (by the Italians) to be priests.¹⁰

Some of the Ethiopians on the ground in the photograph are wearing turbans, and are clearly priests, and a few seem to be wearing monks’ caps. However, while several are almost certainly male pilgrims, those in white with their heads covered could be women. This would be consistent with the fact that most of the monks and priests belonging to Debre Libanos had been relocated to Mesqel Massaya the day before.¹¹

It was 10.03 pm when Graziani responded to Maletti’s telegram. During the afternoon he seems to have been trying to frame a case against the deacons but had not yet managed to do so, so he was not yet ready to have them shot. For now, they would have to be held captive. Concerned that Maletti should not overstep the mark, the viceroy was explicit: ‘They must be imprisoned,’ he pencilled in at the bottom of Maletti’s message, presumably for his secretary’s attention. Just to be sure, he repeated, ‘I say imprisoned.’ Then, yet again, ‘Assure with the word “imprisoned”.’¹²

In his report of 22 May, Maletti described the capture of about a thousand people found ‘hiding’ in the Siga Wedem gorge. He wrote that the operation of identifying and listing them took the entire night of the 20th, and the morning of the 21st. Among the thousand people arrested, he identified 297 monks, 155 deacons and ‘hundreds’ of servants, gardeners, workers, pilgrims, craftsmen and labourers, 23 of whom he suspected were ‘messengers of the monastery to and from the periphery’ while ‘pretending to be pilgrims’.¹³ This section of Maletti’s report is tantamount to fiction, for it would have taken not one day but several weeks for a detachment of soldiers to comb the entire Siga Wedem gorge. No doubt some of the askaris went down into the gorge, but in one day they would not have reached much further than Kora, at the bottom of the gorge below Debre Libanos. Nonetheless, they would have come across many people. Anyone in Rome reading Maletti’s report about people ‘hiding in the gorge’ would probably visualise people crouching down in some sort of crevice to avoid capture. However, the gorge is a vast cultural landscape of more than two hundred square kilometres, and since the 13th century—if not earlier—there have been thousands of people not ‘hiding’ but living within the gorge. In fact, there were, and still are, more than 56 villages established on the terraces in the gorge, each with its own church, as well as a number of monasteries. There are also anchorites, hermits and monks living in caves, and a number of ancient rock-hewn churches.

Maletti wrote that some people had gone into hiding when his troops made an appearance, ‘clear evidence of the propaganda of the monastery hostile to us’. However, the atrocities, bombing and use of poison gas in Northern Shewa were so well known that anyone with their wits about them would have gone into hiding on spotting the Italian military. Moreover, there is nothing unusual or suspicious about finding people in isolated locations in the Siga Wedem gorge. For centuries the residents of the gorge have included some of the world’s most ascetic communities, many still following the strict monastic rule of St Anthony.

However, none of this was explained to Rome. The impression was given that anyone found in the gorge must be ‘suspicious’ or ‘hiding’ and thus ‘hostile’ and subject to arrest. But the viceroy must have been gratified, for his scheme was unfolding as planned. The number of captives had reached four figures, and was still climbing.

‘Fear Not Them That Kill the Body’

General Maletti took personal charge of the operations on Friday, 21 May; Graziani was to report later in the day, in a chilling turn of phrase, that the general had been at Debre Libanos ‘to settle the question of this monastery’.¹⁴ The viceroy was anxious to know exactly what was happening as it unfolded, for he urged Maletti, ‘Please notify me of the progress of the mission. I wish to be kept informed frequently.’¹⁵

As the sun was rising, under the command of Italian officers, askaris of the dreaded 45th Colonial Battalion made their way from Fiché to the plain of Laga Weldé. They disembarked and took up positions in semicircular formation around the plain, adopting vantage points on the slopes of the five hills: Wagede, Kotichu, Gobola, Tsebaté and Shinkurt.

Curious and frightened villagers from the settlements at Shinkurt, and Alete Maryam on the hill of Genda Gora, watched from afar. They knew about the prison camp at Mesqel Massaya, and sensed that something terrible was happening.

Behind the line of armed men, a fifteen-year-old boy named Zelleqe and his father, from Tama village near Shinkurt, managed to find a viewpoint near Tsebaté hill from which they could see much of what was going on, albeit from a considerable distance. They were to stay there, transfixed by what was unfolding before their eyes, for the entire day.¹⁶

At around 9 am, the captives at Mesqel Massaya were assembled, inspected, questioned and once again divided into two groups: clergy and pilgrims with connections with Debre Libanos; and laity with no direct link with the monastery.¹⁷ Anyone wearing a hat was deemed by the Italians a monk or priest, and was put in the first group.¹⁸ At 10 am, Maletti, clearly delighted with the way things were developing, telegraphed Graziani reassuringly, ‘Everything is proceeding normally just as if Your Excellency was on the spot.’¹⁹

Eventually Tibebe concluded that pretending to be a deacon might not be such a good idea after all. So he refrained from his earlier claim and, fortunately, being a ‘bare-head’, was told to join the ‘non-clergy’ group, where there were several other boys.

In the early afternoon, empty military trucks started arriving at the transit camp at Mesqel Massaya. Tibebe watched as the first group of captives standing in the ‘clergy’ section were put onto the first truck. As the vehicle pulled away, Tibebe noted that it contained 30 to 40 prisoners.²⁰ An armed guard sat in the passenger seat beside the driver, and another in the back, watching over the captives. The vehicle turned north towards Fiché and gradually disappeared from view.²¹

Zelleqe caught sight of the truck on the Fiché road as it came into view near Tsebaté hill. He watched as it turned off the road, to the north-east, and lumbered along the grassy lower slopes of Gobola, swaying with its heavy load across the undulations. Passing through the cordon of askaris, it turned north-west as it approached the edge of the precipice and came to a halt at the Fincha Wenz, a small, meandering stream that had cut a shallow gulley into the plateau of Laga Weldé for about two hundred metres before plunging into the gorge. During the long rains from June to September the Fincha Wenz would overflow its banks, creating a marshy floodplain, and for this reason the execution site is also known locally as Chafé, meaning ‘wetland’.

Trained soldiers of the 45th Colonial Battalion who had taken up position along the Fincha Wenz now swung rapidly into action. Without further ado, the victims were pulled off the truck. On one side was the edge of the gorge; the other three sides of the plain were ringed with armed askaris. There were Italian officers milling around and several askaris, two of whom were manning Breda machine guns set up on tripods, facing the Fincha Wenz.

The Italians lined up a group of prisoners with their backs to the guns. Many elderly, and some tottering without their prayer sticks for support, the captives were made to squat in a line near the edge of the southern bank of the stream, which, being seasonal, was quite dry at this time of year. Then the soldiers produced a long narrow black cloth, which they draped across the victims, like a narrow tent, forming a hood over the head of each captive.

At this moment a voice rang out. It was one of the captives—a monk named Abba Tesfa, a teacher in one of the schools at Debre Libanos—the namesake of his forebear whose portrait graced Italy’s state church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. Quoting Matthew 10:28—a reassuring biblical message that would long be remembered in the annals of the monastery—he cried, ‘My Brothers, Martyrs, we are going to pay the ultimate price, but fear not them that kill the body, but are unable to kill the soul. So do not be afraid of those who would destroy your body, for you will all go to heaven!’ The theme was then taken up by two other senior clergymen, Aleqa Mekbib-Haylé (a monk engaged in charitable work at the monastery) and Aleqa Wedajéneh, a senior scholar, who added, ‘Even if we lose our worldly life, we will now live in heaven.’²²

However, the Italians had hundreds more captives to execute before dark, and so, eager to get on with the business in hand, the Italian commander²³ gave the order to shoot. At around 1 pm, as the staccato of machine-gun fire echoed from the hills across the plain, some of the most renowned clergy and theologians of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church fell forwards into the gulley, their backs riddled with bullets. Askaris stepped forward to remove the cloth, and a junior officer delivered a final pistol shot to the temple of each victim.²⁴ Meanwhile, the empty truck, which had been driven back to Mesqel Massaya to collect more victims, was soon replaced by another vehicle with a similar load. The same black cloth, now wet with blood, was used again, the guns spoke, and another line of clergymen met their end.

All the available eyewitnesses state that the victims at Laga Weldé were made to sit in a line with their heads covered by a long narrow black cloth. Furthermore, both the eyewitnesses and the monastery authorities state that the shooting was carried out by machine guns. However, it appears that during the course of the afternoon, after several loads of captives had been shot, there was a change in the procedures at the execution site. A photograph of the massacre taken by Tenente Cozzani in the possession of Luigi Panella shows a firing squad of Muslim askaris shooting the clergy with hand-held weapons, and possibly without the black cloth. And another of Cozzani’s photographs, perhaps taken later in the day, shows a shocking scene of considerable disorder—almost pandemonium—at the execution site. Dead or dying Ethiopians are sprawled over the ground—some inside the shallow gulley, some having partly fallen into it, and others on the banks of the stream. Excited askaris are running around wildly like bandits, dressed in a motley assortment of ragged ‘uniforms’, few of which look like regulation attire.

Although Maletti’s report makes no mention of irregulars under his command at the time, the chaotic scene in this photograph suggests the possibility that some might have been deployed at Laga Weldé. However, Luigi Panella is of the opinion that the soldiers concerned were all members of the 45th Colonial Battalion.²⁵ In this same photograph the senior officer, Major Castellano, can be seen facing directly into the camera, amidst the carnage, as well as Captain Ragazzoni and Captain Aliotta, all seemingly quite happy to be photographed, despite Graziani’s solemn assurance to Mussolini that such executions were held in secret.²⁶ The same spirit of jingoism that pervaded the Italians during the massacre is also reflected in a trite but revealing comment written—apparently by Cozzani himself—on the back of one of the photographs: ‘Monks, cheerio!’²⁷

From his view at Mesqel Massaya, Tibebe, who made a point of counting the captives, reckoned that approximately 600 monks, priests, deacons and visitors were taken to Laga Weldé, although it was only later that he learned where they had gone. He noted that it took about 30 minutes for each truck to cover a complete cycle, and that each turnaround was marked by radio or telegraph messages sent from Laga Weldé to Mesqel Massaya, instructing the askaris there to prepare the next load of prisoners. According to Tibebe, the process came to a halt at around 3 pm.

Based on Tibebe’s information, each of the four or five trucks made an average of four deliveries, totalling around eighteen truck-loads.²⁸ Thus, with an average of 35 prisoners per vehicle, this would have been equivalent to about 630 prisoners executed at Laga Weldé by 3 pm, which is consistent with Tibebe’s figure of about 600.

By about 3.30 pm, the movement of prisoners from Mesqel Massaya to Laga Weldé had ceased, but many captives still remained in the camp. Tibebe now found himself being loaded onto one of the trucks together with the other boys and several other prisoners, and driven off. But when they reached the main road, instead of turning north to Laga Weldé, the vehicle swung south, towards Addis Ababa. The captives did not know what to think. Fearful of what was to befall them, he and his companions, who were deacons, students, visitors to the monastery and young boys like himself, sat terrified in the lorry as it made its way towards the capital. Stowed in the back were clothes, prayer books and prayer sticks belonging to the monks and priests who had just met their death.

Meanwhile, at the monastery the air was full of the shouts of officers and troops; no one was spared, and no mercy shown. Askaris rounded up anyone who had stayed away from the church or was too old or feeble to have reached it. Some of the victims would by now have realised their fate, but many of these unfortunate monks would have had no idea what was going on, as they were hauled out of their homes by gangs of armed soldiers. According to the monastery, the Italians sent two more trucks to Debre Libanos on 21 May to collect these remaining prisoners for execution.²⁹

The execution of those who baulked at climbing onto the trucks was one of several episodes that went unreported to Rome, thus contributing to the disparities between the actual number killed in the massacre and the figures in the Italian telegrams hitherto quoted by historians. In this case, thanks to the research of diplomat-writer Birhanu Denqé, we have some details. The shooting of those who either refused to board or tried to run away, we are told, was carried out by the carabinieri under the command of a certain Shum-bashi Abriha, apparently Eritrean. Highly thought of by the Italians because he ‘shared their ideas’, he was ‘assigned to kill as many people as he could’.³⁰ The actual number killed was recorded: ‘Monks who refused to leave were machine-gunned in the church compound near the Weyra tree. Those killed were thirty, except Abba Habtu, who survived.’³¹

Zelleqe, who was still stationed at his vantage point, saw truck-loads of prisoners continuing to arrive at the execution site of Laga Weldé until the convoy finally ceased at around six. By the time the exercise came to an end, no less than 39 truck-loads had discharged their human cargo.³² With between 30 and 40 victims in each vehicle, a total of some 1,200 to 1,600 clergy and pilgrims were that day executed on the plain of Laga Weldé.³³

The viceroy’s telegram to Rome in the evening after the massacre made no mention of nuns, but in a sworn affidavit Ras Abebe Aregay testified that nuns were executed: ‘The Italians returned [to Debre Libanos monastery] in the month of Ginbot and exterminated all the monks and nuns of the monastery.’³⁴ The monastery authorities are in no doubt that nuns of Debre Libanos were among those killed, for the plaque at the monastery erected in 1973 refers to the slaughter as having been of ‘monks and nuns’.³⁵

Apparently delighted with the outcome of the day’s work, Maletti telegraphed the news to Graziani in Addis Ababa, but mentioned only the execution of 297 monks and 23 ‘suspects’—a total of 320 dead. Of these, 260 may be accounted for by a handwritten note on the back of one of Cozzani’s photographs, indicating the shooting of ‘260 monks’. Maletti’s report of the executions was very curt, stating only that troops had shot the victims ‘in a valley near Fiché’, the executions being carried out ‘in successive groups’.³⁶

Having received Maletti’s confirmation that all had gone according to plan, Graziani now proceeded to write a long telegram to Lessona in Rome, spelling out Franceschino’s reasons for linking the monastery with the attempted assassination. He went on to report, ‘In consequence of my orders, General Maletti today at 13 o’clock has ordered to the firing party two hundred and ninety-seven monks, including vice prior and twenty-three others also deemed guilty of complicity.’³⁷

As noted earlier, by the end of the previous day, Maletti had reportedly captured ‘around one thousand’ people earmarked as ‘hostile’, which meant that they were liable to be executed, and many more were captured on 21 May. However, the general’s telegram of that day reported a total of just 320 monks and ‘suspects’ executed, with 155 deacons held pending a decision on their fate.³⁸ That telegram made no mention of the ‘hundreds of other people’ people’—a reference to numerous non-clergy who had been arrested. Yet they were certainly not released, because there is no evidence of anyone reappearing after being held at Chagel, apart from the 30 young boys, who were imprisoned.³⁹ However, a separate telegram sent the following day (see Appendix IV) indicates that those people had, without exception, been ‘definitely resolved’—meaning they were executed. No one will ever know the precise number, but notwithstanding the margins of estimating error, there is no doubt that General Maletti executed far more people at Laga Weldé than was reported in Graziani’s telegram to Rome.