First Lieutenant Abraha’s ‘Decisive’ Measures

By Abdullahi Dahir Moge

First Lieutenant Abraha, the commander of the army in Ogaden, was in no mood for mercy or compromise. If they had to celebrate their ‘silly Eid’ of the end of Ramadan, it is not my business, he thought. Indeed, if he has to teach them a lesson on how hard losing a comrade is, it couldn’t have come at a better time. Last night, as he oversaw the burial ceremony of the fallen Tigrayan compatriots, his heart bled. Someone will have to pay dearly!

He is not a judge or a priest to take the time to ascertain who is innocent or guilty! He is a soldier. And, a ‘fine’ one for that! He always believed they are all the same — ‘yaw nachaw’; his catch word. All the Somali’s! Leboch (thieves)!

Until now, Abdi, who is a lame man, has escaped the suspicion of the Tigrayan military. However, the killing of six senior army intelligence officers by unidentified gunmen last night in front of the plot of land where he sells imported second-hand clothes muddied the waters.

A week ago, when two soldiers were ambushed and killed near the main motorized water well in the center of the town, the army commander responded by heading straight to the house of the district chairman, Omar-Dahir, and putting ten bullets in his skull in front of his children. He later justified his soldier’s actions in the joint security meeting with the ‘civilian’ administrators; stating that he had ‘evidence’ of the chairman’s involvement in the ambush. No one dared to question his ‘evidences.’

In the mud house of Amran, apart from the Eid (holiday), the jubilation was for one more reason. It was at the dawn of the same day that she finally delivered a health baby girl after long hours of labouring. Nim’o was born on that Thursday, a day of feast and happiness.

Hours later, Abraha was addressing the over two hundred men who were praying in garoonka, a vast area enclosed for Eid prayers. These men were the last ones leaving the scene, having done their Salat (prayers), when they were surrounded by three land cruiser pick-up trucks full of soldiers. Stay put where you are; one soldier ordered-before Abraha majestically jumped out of the cabin of one of the cars. He made a speech.

“Listen! Ye Somale shimagilewooch (Somali elders!). Last night, six of our bravest fighters — flag-bearers — of the “generation that rocked mountains,” who played pivotal role in defeating the ‘cannibal’ Derg army, were killed by your sons. I don’t care if they are called URLF, or GST, or Al-Itahaad or Al-Mubaarakat! I am in no mood to indulge in etymology of weird acronyms and Arabic nouns. They are all Somali’s. You know them and you supply information, money and moral support to them. Now, I give you an ultimatum: produce the killers right here, or no one is walking from this sun alive.”

He was not finished. “When one of your own is killed by another, you find out and take revenge or settle the issue through reparations. When one of our men is killed, all of a sudden you play deaf and dumb. That is not going to work anymore.”

After ‘soaking up’ the sun for nearly three hours, with Abraha taking shade under one of the vehicles, one frail old man stood and spoke, trembling. “I think we have seen many governments before. We have also witnessed similar incidents. But this is the first time that, on a day of mammoth significance to us, we are forced to sit under the sun and confess ‘crimes’ which a) we don’t know who did, b) we haven’t done, and c) even if we knew, we could have done nothing to stop it.”

The old man was agitated. “Is this fair? What kind of justice is this? What kind of humans are you when you don’t respect men in their seventies and eighties who just concluded a tough holly month; and for your information, haven’t eaten since this morning? It is already 3 in the afternoon and our children are waiting to share the Eid with us. Order your ‘intelligence folks’ to investigate and let us go to our homes.”

First, Lt. Abraha stepped forward and caught the left ear of the old man with a vicious slap. “Quch bel (sit down)” he ordered him. The old man fell to the ground well before the order. As he walked back to his car, he told the ‘hostages,’: “Fine. I see you have decided to protect your darlings. You can go now. I know what to do. Tayalaachu (you will see it).” The dust of his speeding vehicles dirtied some white dresses close by as he dashed to the military camp.

That afternoon, Abraha took out a piece of paper and asked all the members of the district executive committee to name the most influential personalities in their sub-clans. When the list reached forty-eight, he was satisfied. For each of the Tigrayan ‘hero’ murdered, he will kill eight Somalis. Of course, some might spoil his plan if they ‘buy themselves out’ of the death sentences. That is, if they pay ten thousand Birr each. If that happens, the monetary gain will offset some of his disappointment, as long as a minimum of twenty are killed.

In retrospect, it is still unbelievable how Amran’s husband, Abdi, hadn’t heard of what virtually everyone in town knew about. That the army commander, Lt. Abraha, mentioned his name in a recent meeting as the ‘number one’ conduit and supplier of information to the rebels. Almost everyone in town who heard of this news rushed to warn him.

The first was his elder brother, who whispered to him, “Wait for me till I finish my prayers, I have a piece of information for you.” But Abdi completely forgot this message as he limped off hurriedly to the main market to get supplies to the new mother and her baby. When his brother was done with prayers, and saw that he is not around, he dashed to the only market where he knew he would find him. He wasn’t there. Instead, he opted to spend time with few Eid revelers.

Abdi’s friend, who knew that his friend is in danger, thought he can wait until next day. He was of the opinion that he shouldn’t dampen his sprits on this important day.

Even Halima, Abdi’s younger sister, who was sent by a member of the district administration, a sympathetic fellow clans-man, to warn her brother, couldn’t deliver the message. She had a bad week with her fiancée, and when he insisted that she must see him, she never thought it would take her that long. By the time she was done and came out of her lover’s tiny house, Abdi had already been picked up.

They got him near his house just after sun set, as he walked to his house to deliver clothes and food stuffs he bought for his wife and the new baby. He must have been coming, most likely, from Habiib’s house — his neighbour — where he was watching latest news from the lonely satellite dish in the town. Half-a-dozen soldiers suddenly stopped him. They didn’t produce any warrant, nor did they say a word. They pushed and shoved him, and took him away. He begged them to let him see his new baby; but quickly gave up as one of the soldiers hit his groin with the butt of the gun he was carrying.

Amran is not mystic and doesn’t believe in presentiments and ominous auguries. If she did, the falling of Abdi’s shirt three times from the nail on the wall of her room could have given her a critical hint. She was surprised, but she took it as one of many ‘inexplicable experiences’ she encountered all her life.

The Commander, Abraha, knows he had ordered the execution of twenty-six of the men arrested that night. And had it not been for the wicked ‘ingenuity’ of his deputy, the diminutive Takle, he would have displayed all of the dead bodies. Takle suggested that fourteen of them be strangled to death and their bodies buried inside the camp. Unlike his bullish boss, Takle is more calculative and cunning. But his meanness and barbarism is unmatched by any in his regiment. His undisguised hypertrophic sense of ‘gallantry’ is annoying to most of his subordinates, as well.

Displaying the dead will satisfy his burning desire for revenge, in addition to the ‘terror’ that it will send down the spine of the ‘coward’ Somali’s. Hiding the rest of the dead will quell the feeling of desperation that could result in an outburst of violence, and will serve the purpose of extorting extra ‘income’ from anxious family members.

Three months after the Eid, the fortunate ones who cheated death by the grace of God, came out one after another to the hug and cries of their beloved families. Amran and Abdi’s family stood there for hours waiting patiently. All in all, the numbers of men who walked out of the military camp were fourteen. If all twenty-six ordered executions were carried out that Ciid night, there will still be eight more men an accounted for. To date, no one can tell where they are. The army that took them didn’t offer any explanation, not only about them, but also about those buried en mass in undisclosed location.

Dr. Roble is not a psychiatrist, but a general practitioner. Yet, the enormity and diversity of health problems in this small town turned him into ‘a doctor for all.’ He just can’t sit back and protest it is not his area of specialization whenever desperate villagers bring all kinds of patients into his two-room pharmacy/clinic. He does his best, and the community is grateful. When they brought Amran to him, nearly a year after that eventful Thursday, she had already lost her sanity. They told him that she looked for her husband in all the jails of the country, in vain.

Amran’s account of that ‘epoch of lunacy’ is different, as she told her brother-in-law when she brought Nim’o for medical treatment thirteen years later. She says she saw her husband walking in the street and run after him to tell him how much pain she has gone through while he was away. She says, she is sure that it was him. Those that witnessed the incident in which she threw away her toddler and run bare-footed into the traffic in Harar say they saw no one in the direction she ran to.

She still claims that every night, analogues to the character in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s wake, her sub-conscious “breaks open” as she sleeps, Abdi walks in silently, and then they would have a fabulous time together. That is why she dislikes the crow of cocks in the early morning, which “puts back together” her skull in the morning.

In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s acclaimed novel, Love in the time of Cholera, the lovesick Florentino Ariza, at one point conflated his physical agony with his amorous agony; when he vomits after eating flowers in order to imbibe Farmina’s scent — his love who is happily married to the respectable medical doctor, Dr. Urbino. The novel is a tale of unrequited love that explores the idea that suffering for love is a kind of nobility.

In a bizarre analogy, Amran, in this desolate town in Hawd, finds similar solace from knowing all her misery is for her lost husband. Florentino Ariza lived long enough in that fifty-year love triangle, to share moments of happiness with the widow Farmina after the tragic death of her beloved husband. The societal view that love is a young person’s prerogative, when indeed they were now ebbing to their last days, was the only drawback to their enthralling tale.

Amran finds happiness in the fantasy realm of her own imagination. Only in that mystical world does her passionate heart overwhelm her passionless mind. For her, “in the beginning was the love-not the thought.” All the real word offers to her is the glaring tragedy of her “loss”, of the promising days that never materialized, of the deprived joy of lifetime with the irreplaceable Abdi; and that awakes her to the odour of putrefaction inside her.

She views accepting the endless “you can’t kill yourself like this,” and “keep up your spirits, life goes on” advices of well-wishers as being tantamount to profanation of the purity of her love to her late husband. Cruelly, that augurs an uncertain future to her. So, she neither listens nor adheres to it. Long ago, she has forfeited the temptations of carnality, and opted to live in the ‘spiritually rewarding’ world of madness.

It doesn’t matter what she argues, and in the definition of this society, she is a ‘mentally unfit’ women. Sadly for her, that is also the judgment of the last psychiatrist who saw her. He said, if she follows medication properly and lowers her stress, the frequency of the lapses she encounters would reduce.

It is only Amran who still buys into that story of the unaccounted ‘eight’. She believes her man is alive somewhere. “I know he is,” she murmurs indignantly whenever they tell her to “move on.” Poor pitiful woman! Her daughter also doesn’t refer to her father as “the late.” When she has to talk about him, it is “my missing” father. Since the day she started identifying the good from the evil, she vowed not to celebrate any Eid. When her peers ask her when she shall dance with them, she replies, when my father comes back!

Amran’s misery is not something that was done purposely to spoil her life. She is too insignificant to have been targeted. Her crime is more like the young princes who had to be butchered trying to get through the thorn-hedge that surrounded the proverbial sleeping beauty, just because they had the bad luck to be born before her hundred-year curse expired.

Amran had the bad luck to have been born to the arid land of acacia and camels of Hawd (Ogaden) where a militia of an ‘angry’ tribe descended on and decided to ‘rule’ — or rather misrule — by the barrel of the gun. She is even more wretched, as ‘her curse’ — unlike that of the sleeping beauty — is indefinite. Neither the ‘good fairy’, which made the princess sleep, nor the prince’s son who would kiss and awaken her, are guaranteed to come for her emancipation.

That grisly Eid-day, when women’s wailing and ear-piercing cries replaced the customary cheers and rhymes of hope and ecstasy, left a panoptic memory of pain in the minds of all those who had the misfortune to witness it. It left a picture of the savagery of the ‘devil’ in the skin of a human, and of an endless suffering of the ‘cursed people’.

That day’s ordeal was too horrific even by the standards of the land of widows, and orphans!! The land of Ogaden.
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The writer can be reached at [email protected]