13

Massacre at Borale River

‘The whole history of Christianity proves that she has indeed little

to fear from persecution as a foe, but much to fear from

persecution as an ally.’

Lord Macaulay

The Gravediggers

As the convoy carrying Tibebe and his compatriots made its way through the night of Friday, 21 May, few, if any, of the captives managed to sleep. The ride was rough and noisy, and the passengers were terrified. Apart from boys such as Tibebe, the group consisted of deacons, visitors to Debre Libanos, and students. Unbeknown to them, their fate had already been decided for a clandestine operation was under way. Early that morning, even before the selection of victims at Chagel had begun, soldiers carrying shovels had arrived at Ingécha. Watched by a few local children, they had started digging along the bottom of the shallow valley where the narrow Borale River meanders westwards.

Meanwhile, by 3 pm the convoy had arrived at Debre Birhan, where the vehicles came to a halt, and the captives alighted. Although Graziani reported that the prisoners were held in churches,¹ this is incorrect. They were actually imprisoned in a former carabinieri camp in the town of Debre Birhan near the cathedral of Debre Birhan Sillassé.²

As the prisoners walked to the detention camp, Tibebe started counting, and reckoned that they totalled around 280, including himself and the other boys. Arriving at the camp, they found that it was already occupied by around 120 other prisoners who had been visiting Debre Libanos when the Italian military arrived, and thought they had been spared execution. That brought the total number of detainees at the camp to about 400.

It was on this day that Maletti sent his report to Graziani in which he described having captured 155 deacons and ‘hundreds’ of other people whom he described as servants, peasants and pilgrims—a description confirmed by Tibebe.³ At the time, Maletti was not certain whether he was expected to kill them, for he telegraphed Graziani asking the viceroy to confirm that everyone ‘without distinction’ was to be ‘definitively resolved’, i.e., executed.⁴Maletti’s report stated that following Graziani’s instructions, the deacons were ‘incarcerated for now at Debre Birhan’. In fact, not all of the 155 ‘deacons’ were actually deacons. Thirty of them had already been identified as schoolboys with no formal connection with the Church, and one member of this group was Tibebe.

On Monday, 24 May, Graziani finally made up his mind, ordering Maletti to immediately execute ‘all the deacons of Debre Libanos, excepting boys. Confirm with words “Complete Liquidation”’ (see Appendix V).⁵

This left the question of the hundreds of students, teachers, pilgrims and visitors from other churches. It is clear that even given Graziani’s appetite for executions, the only captives whom he could possibly incriminate in the attempted assassination were those connected directly with the monastery of Debre Libanos. Ever since the attack of Yekatit 12 and the massacre of Addis Ababa, Minister Lessona had been trying to get Graziani ousted from the position of viceroy. He had complained to Mussolini that Graziani was of unsound mind, and was dragging the Italian administration into disrepute. So, with Lessona looking over his shoulder, watching for any excuse to claim that the viceroy had taken leave of his senses, Graziani could not risk ordering in writing the cold-blooded execution of such large numbers of civilians with no conceivable connection with the attempt on his life.

Thus, in the absence of any other written orders from Graziani, how did Maletti know on 21 May that further executions were to be carried out at Borale, leading him to authorise the gravediggers to begin their work on the same day? And how did he know the numbers to be executed? For many years, as we shall see, this would remain a mystery.

From the time the group of captives arrived at Debre Birhan, the non-Debre Libanos prisoners, teachers and pilgrims—‘people without distinction’—disappear from the Italian records. Only the deacons (who were connected with Debre Libanos monastery) and the boys are mentioned in Graziani’s communications.

On 25 May officers and askaris ordered the 400 prisoners to assemble, and started singling out the 30 boys who were not deacons. They were ordered to stand to one side and were escorted out of the camp, with no time to say farewell to their older companions. They were then moved to a bande militari camp in the town centre.⁶

Meanwhile, in the Borale valley the soldiers had returned with their spades and resumed digging. In all, they dug for five days. By Tuesday evening three large trenches had been completed along the shallow riverbed, each around ten metres long, three metres wide and one and a half metres deep. One of the children who watched the men at work was fifteen-year-old Feqyibelu Yirgu, who lived in the cottage overlooking the site from the south. After the soldiers had left, he jumped inside the trenches. Asked in his old age how deep they were, his response was, ‘Up to my chin!’ None of the children knew what the trenches were for, although his older sister Mulatwa, who was 25 years old and married with four children, had her suspicions.⁷

Martyrs for the Church

Early in the morning of Wednesday, 26 May, the solitude of the Borale valley was disturbed by the arrival of several hundred soldiers.⁸ Running out of their cottages to watch the goings-on, the local children saw some of the soldiers checking the excavations, while the others started walking up the surrounding slopes, clearing away the few people and livestock in the vicinity. The fifteen-year-old Feleqe Asress ran up the hillside and heard the rest of the day’s events from a safe distance, but saw little.⁹ Another was seven-year-old Derbi Tsegé, who also fled in the face of the advancing soldiers.¹⁰ Young Letarge, who lived in his father’s house on the northern slope of the valley, was watching, together with two little boys named Gebre Gonete and Negash Yirgu, the nephew of Feqyibelu.¹¹

In Ato Yirgu’s house on the southern slope, his daughter Mulatwa was watching the proceedings. For some reason no soldiers came to the house, or if they did, they failed to realise that Mulatwa was there. Outside the house Feqyibelu was crouching in the undergrowth, about 200 yards from the trenches.

The soldiers now took up positions around the site, preventing anyone from entering the valley. Then at about 11 am, local residents some distance to the west of the valley saw a convoy of trucks approaching,¹² which stopped a few hundred metres from the Borale River.¹³ In each truck were many prisoners, tied together. In addition, there were three passenger vehicles carrying several Italian officers.

The commander, his officers and several soldiers drove to the Borale River in the valley near the excavations, and had machine guns set up on steel tripods. Then one of the trucks left the convoy and proceeded along the valley, coming to a halt at the western end of the southern slope, not far from Ato Yirgu’s house. Feqyibelu saw that the truck was packed full with about 70 people, and that several of them were young.¹⁴

Negash described the offloading as a noisy affair, ‘with a lot of pushing and shouting’.¹⁵ After some of the prisoners had been ordered down from the truck, Feqyibelu could see that the ropes were being adjusted so that the prisoners were now tied together in batches of five or six. The prisoners were all male—a mixture of old and young, clergy, deacons, and many laity with no direct connection with the Church. Feqyibelu estimated that around a third of the total were deacons. Approximately half of the victims wore clerical vestments, and several wore a cross on a leather necklace and carried a holy book in a traditional leather case. The victims’ outer garments were removed and piled up near Ato Yirgu’s house, following which askaris tied each prisoner’s wrists together with wire.¹⁶ Escape was impossible. Officers then made the captives walk to the execution site, where they were lined up along two of the trenches. Unlike what happened in the executions at Laga Weldé, no cloth or cover was placed over the victims’ heads.

Without further ado, the machine guns opened fire, and the captives crumpled and fell. Victims who still showed any sign of life were finished off by an officer with a pistol, and any bodies that had not fallen into the trenches were pushed in.¹⁷

Negash Yirgu, who in 2015 was still living in the same family house overlooking the execution site, confirmed Mulatwa’s and Feqyibelu’s accounts in detail, re-enacting the executions on site for the benefit of a visiting group of researchers from the University of Debre Birhan and the University of Addis Ababa, together with the present author.¹⁸

Negash, like his neighbours, had no difficulty pointing out the precise shape and location of the mass graves, which extended over a total distance of around fifty metres, and recounting the details of the massacre: how the victims were made to stand and how they were shot, with their wrists tied together with wire, for his family had never forgotten the day in May 1937 when the normally tranquil valley just below his front door became a place of horror and death.¹⁹

Feleqe Asress, who watched the soldiers bring the prisoners to the execution site but was chased away out of sight before the killing began, recalled: ‘I did not see the actual shooting, but I could hear the sound of the machine guns. The soldiers who did the shooting were ferenjes [Europeans] and Hamasiens [Eritreans].’²⁰

Mulatwa, who watched the executions from her house in frozen horror, later recalled the sound of the captives in their last moments. She would never forget the way they burst forth in a joyful chorus: ‘They were ululating with joy as they became martyrs for the Church.’

Feqyibelu watched transfixed as the next group of captives was brought to the trenches and shot, and so on until all of them had been executed. By that time Mulatwa had fled in terror from the house and disappeared over the hilltop, running from the scene as fast as she could.

In 1948, Baron Eric Leijonhufvud (1907–72), who had recently retired as Ethiopian advocate general and had been teaching at the Haile Selassie Military Academy in Addis Ababa,²¹ published in his memoir a sketch captioned ‘Massacre of monks from Debra Libanos’ (Fig. 44).²² Accredited to ‘an Ethiopian artist’, it depicts the execution of men in clerical clothes in a shallow valley encircled by a ring of soldiers.

The illustration shows two homesteads, planted with eucalyptus trees, standing on opposite slopes of the valley, a scene similar to the setting at Borale. Running along the bottom of the valley is a trench into which the bodies of priests or monks are falling, as they are shot by soldiers facing them across the trench and firing two tripod-mounted machine guns. Along the top of the slope behind the victims is a line of soldiers. In the foreground is a track on which can be seen, at the edge of the sketch, the front part of a vehicle. Supervising the proceedings is a uniformed Italian officer.

The degree of detail in the sketch suggests that it was drawn by an eyewitness, in which case the slopes and the homesteads shown may be drawn from the actual scene rather than from the artist’s imagination.

There were no trees or homesteads in the immediate vicinity of Laga Weldé in 1937, no sloping ground around the site, and no track or pathway. On the other hand, all of these features were, and still are, present at Borale. Thus the sketch most likely shows the executions at Borale, and was probably the work of one of the soldiers.

Around midday the shooting stopped, by which time Feqyibelu estimated that around 500 victims had been shot. The soldiers then began to shovel soil on the bodies lying in heaps in the mass graves.

In 1958 the authors of the Amharic History of Haile Selassie I Military Academy from 1927 to 1949 [EC] published an unidentified photograph taken during the occupation (Fig. 45).²³ The illustration, which is not cited in the text, is captioned, ‘This photograph shows the cruelty of the Fascists’. Neither the location nor the date of the photograph is identified. Eight uniformed Italian soldiers—a combination of regulars and militarised labourers—pose nonchalantly with rifles and shovels along the edge of a shallow trench containing numerous corpses. They appear to be either waiting for more bodies to be thrown in or are about to shovel soil on top of the bodies. The shadows at the feet of the two soldiers on the right indicate an overhead midday sun. In the background, a featureless landscape slopes gently upwards to the crest of a low hill, which is planted with eucalyptus silhouetted against the skyline.

If one ignores the apparent slope of the landscape down to the left, which is created mainly by the tilt of the camera, the scene in the photograph is consistent with the landscape at Borale. Most likely it was taken either at Borale or at the site of a mass grave following another, similar massacre conducted in a similar setting. Although the digging of mass graves to bury massacre victims would become common under Italian occupation in the Balkans, it was less common in Ethiopia.²⁴ Furthermore, the deployment of Italians rather than the Eritrean askaris to do the digging of the trenches and the covering up of the bodies afterwards was unusual, and would be consistent with a desire on the part of the commanders to keep the executions and the location secret. For these reasons it is likely that this photograph shows a section of the mass grave at Borale. Another photograph (Fig. 46) could be either of the same trench or possibly the second trench. The victims can be seen to have their wrists tied together, as the eyewitnesses reported.

By 1 pm, according to the witnesses, the soldiers had left. The 30 boys in Debre Birhan were now the sole survivors of the congregation that had gathered at Debre Libanos on that ill-fated St Tekle Haymanot Day. Trembling with fear, the youngsters could scarcely eat their food, hungry though they were. Meanwhile, General Maletti was telegraphing his report to Graziani, putting it on record that he had had the deacons of Debre Libanos executed, as specified in Graziani’s order.²⁵

The Toll at Borale

Tibebe’s evidence of the number of captives he saw suggests that the death toll at Borale was around 370. Yet eyewitnesses at Borale report a figure of 500 or more victims executed there.²⁶ The key to the difference is Feqyibelu’s observation that many of the victims he watched being executed were wearing clerical vestments, and that some of them still had their neck crosses and prayer books when they arrived at the execution site. And Mulatwa made a special point of mentioning that their outer garments were removed and piled up outside her house while the executions were taking place. Yet Tibebe observed that not a single captive brought from Debre Libanos had been allowed to retain such clothes or to carry such artefacts.

Clearly, the 370 captives counted by Tibebe were augmented by around 130 other people belonging to other churches, who arrived at Debre Libanos during or after the executions at Laga Weldé. They must have been brought to Debre Birhan on 25 May, after the boys had been moved to make room for them. This would be consistent with the reports by eyewitnesses at Borale that only a few of the clergy executed there belonged to Debre Libanos. In fact, they recognised some of the victims, identified them by name, and knew to which churches they belonged. Furthermore, the bodies in the photographs generally appear to be adults. It thus becomes clear that Maletti’s report mentioning only the shooting of the deacons did not tell the whole story.

Furthermore, given the dimensions provided by Feqyibelu, the volume of each trench was around 45 cubic metres. This suggests that the trenches dug at Borale could easily accommodate 500 bodies.²⁷ Clearly there was no need for the soldiers to excavate such large trenches if the intention was to bury ‘only’ 125 deacons.

The inevitable conclusion is that around 500 victims died at Borale, of which 125 were deacons belonging to the church of St Tekle Haymanot at Debre Libanos.²⁸ The ‘hundreds of others’, as Maletti referred to them, totalling around 375, consisted of pilgrims and clergy belonging to other churches who had been visiting Debre Libanos to celebrate the day of the saint.