Abel Wabela
On
April 25 2014, the day Abel Wabela was taken to his cell at Ma’ekelawi, he was overcome
by a feeling of confusion and physical exhaustion. Once inside the center,
“they took my belt, my shoe; they opened the door of the cell and [pushed] me
inside,” he remembers. The room was pitch-dark; he couldn’t make head or tail
out of it. Other inmates who had already been inside gave him blankets and “I
fell asleep right away”. It was only the next morning when he woke up that Abel
was able to fully grasp his new reality.
Abel was no stranger to tales
about Ma’ekelawi. Since he started
following Ethiopian politics, he had been aware of the horrible stories coming
out of the shady institution and he had read some of the human rights reports
with strong allegations. But now he had to come face to face and get a taste of
it himself.
The cell
was very cold, Abel says. Inside there were seven other detainees. All he could
see are plastic bags and buckets. The mattresses to sleep on were not thick
enough to resist the cold coming from the cement floors. His cellmates (some of
whom had been there for quite a long time) explained to him that the mats used
to be even thinner. They also told him that twice a day, in the early morning
and late afternoon, they’d have bathroom breaks; and they would go outside for
sunlight for fifteen minutes. Besides that, the rooms were locked all the time.
He
didn’t see his lawyer or family for three weeks. “And after they allowed me to
contact them, once a week that is, on Fridays, it went on very irregularly.
There were days when I didn’t get to see them,” he confides to this magazine.
Sleep
deprivation was commonplace as he was often called in the middle of the night
for interrogation.
The
interrogation predominantly focused on the origin, direction and purpose of
Zone9, a blogging collective of which Abel was a founding member. “I told them
we were just a bunch of young people concerned about our country and people,”
he says, “and our aim was to make a platform for public discourse in which
ideas can run free. They were not happy with that. They kept on asking what
will happen after ideas ran free.”
The interrogation
went sour after Abel dared to confront one of his interrogators. “I asked him
boldly why [the ruling] EPRDF was afraid of ideas. He went totally mad. He
started kicking me like a crazy person,” he says struggling to control his
emotions. “Before I was jailed I already have a problem in my left ear. So when
he started kicking me I asked him not to hit me on my left ear. But he did
exactly that.” After being made to return to his cell, Abel cried all night
long. “My ear was echoing all night.” The next morning he explained his
situation to the person in charge and asked for a physician. “But he said it
was not a big deal.”
It was
not the first time that Abel was tortured. Nor was it the last until he was set
free a year and half later.
“I was
first hit by the interrogators after they asked me about my ethnicity and I
told them I prefer to be identified simply as Ethiopian,” he says. He brought
this incident at the court when his case was being seen. “The judge didn’t do
anything. In fact when I returned back to Ma’ekelawi my interrogators told me that
there was nothing I’d bring by reporting them to the court.”
The
most horrible torture came later though, when “I refused to sign a statement of
confession they brought. I told them that that was not my word and if they
wanted me to sign it they had to make some amendments.” But they resorted
to force instead. “They stroke the soles on my feet with a stick and computer
power cable. When I still refused to sign they took me, still handcuffed, to a
dark room and tortured me more. They even let me lay down and stumped on me,
including my face,” he says. Eventually he signed the paper but only after they
made the amendments he demanded.
It’s
been six months now since Abel left prison. But the 84 days he spent at Ma’ekelawi before he was transferred toQilinto,
a prison in the outskirt south of the city, do still have a profound impact on
him. “I used to be more conservative and used to want to control everything in
my life. Now I am not like that. I tried to live smoothly but all of a sudden
some unexpected details trigger a memory,” he says. He particularly cites an
incident in which he was attending a court case and saw his abusive
interrogator standing by casually. “He was there like nothing happened, like nothing
happens. He was just another man like everybody else. But he was allowed to
abuse me.”
Before
being jailed, Abel worked as a tools engineer at Ethiopian Airlines. “But they
terminated my contract even though I have papers from the court declaring my
innocence,” he says. He is now in two court cases with his former employer; he
has sued Ethiopian “for their unconstitutional and
illegal act” and they on the other hand have sued him for breach of contract.
“When I was hired, I took a training and singed a contract to commit for seven
years. Otherwise I had to pay seventy thousand ETB. Now after terminating my
job they want their money back,” he says with a tinge of ironic smile of a man
whose life is hanging in the balance after his experience at Ma’ekelawi.
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