Where did our Decent Murders Go?

WHERE DID OUR DECENT MURDERS GO?

Ethiopians, who have had to endure brutal deaths over decades, have a common wish which asks God “to make my death decent” (amamuaten asamirew). I am one of those who wonder why Ethiopians pray since He hardly ever listens to them but then again Ethiopians are a hopeful lot who will die hoping and praying for better days that never seem to come.
We have to admit we have had decent murders over the years. I was a boy of six when I first saw a man being hanged by the State. It was outside a nearby church and there was a big crowd and the hanged man was accused of being a mugger. It left an indelible impression on me, the image of the hanged man with his tongue sticking out somewhat stayed in my mind for long. There was nothing decent in this hanging at all. The next hanging I saw when I was in my preteens involved a woman and a man who were hanged near the Weizero Kelemework School in Addis Ababa. The man was the woman’s lawyer (and as rumours had it maybe her lover too) and he was arguing her case against her husband involving a land and property dispute. The husband and the lawyer got in a tej bet (shebeen or local bar room) brawl and the lawyer stabbed the husband to death. The wife came to the scene and threw a rock at the corpse, it was alleged. A court sentenced the lawyer to death and the woman to ten years imprisonment. The case was appealed and reached the Emperor’s Chilot, an illegal feudal proceeding in which cases were brought before the Emperor and he dispensed pardon or not. Though Ethiopian law, which I tried to study in the University, stipulates that the sentence cannot be aggravated in the appellate court, the Emperor (who, perhaps, woke up angry that morning—if one had good connections and a case pending in the Chilot those who present the cases to the Emperor would not present one’s case if they see that the autocrat was in a bad mood) ordered the hanging of the woman too. And the woman was hanged next to her lawyer.
The decent thing about her hanging was that she was dressed in traditional white shamma netela and skirt but with cotton trousers underneath lest the wind blows her skirt high and makes her appear indecent. This concern about her being decent was touching. The system was murderous but still concerned about indecent exposure. Those were indeed the good old days. And then came the military regime of murderous thugs who massacred more than 250,000 people in a terror campaign they dubbed Red Terror courtesy of the Soviet experience. Even these thugs were at times concerned to do decent murders. Though they buried thousands in mass graves in the dead of the night they still gave respect to corpses by selling them back to their kin after the payment of the bullet price. Corpses were not just useless but valuable—if the person took four bullets to die then the kin paid the price of four bullets to the government that killed him or her. And when the dead were not buried in mass graves the corpses were either thrown outside their houses and the kin forbidden to weep but ordered to sing (an original therapy some argued) or thrown at garbage dumps with slogans nailed or pinned to their body ( thus passing educational messages to the living). Corpses had their uses. They just did not die but by dying also became useful and as deaths go in Ethiopia it was decent of the regime to think of making them useful.

Nowadays, we have no decent murders. The sadists just enjoy it and that is it. The killer regime in Addis Ababa kills and buries people in total darkness. Or it massacres people from the Ogaden to Gambella, to Sidamo and Gondar and denies it. It even travels abroad to Somalia to cut the throats of people or rain cannon shells on houses and then denies any crime. So indecent, the denial kills the victims again as it were. Compare with the previous military regime whose Chairman broke bottles filled with red ink or blood in public and vowed to kill thousands of his opponents. That was respect, it was decent. The murder was acknowledged and defended and, in reverse, it gave respect to the victims as enemies worthy of slaughter. The murderers now in power have no sense of respect or decency. They shoot to death an unarmed human rights activist and teacher coming out of his house to go to work and then claim he was resisting arrest and running away from the police. They stab to death another human rights activist and deny they had anything to do with it. They station sharp shooters on top of buildings and randomly shoot to death peaceful demonstrators and deny that they did such a thing. They have secret prisons and do disappearances routinely. No one even knows you are dead-- how indecent can a murder get!
I was in the Sudan when the over drunk president Jaffar Nimeri have had enough (the Sudanese joked that whiskey was pouring out of his ears) and decreed Sharia over our heads and just made all liquor expensive. According to this law, thieves were amputated (right arm and left leg or left arm and right leg) after the doctor gave them anaesthetic. How decent of the Sudanese authorities you would say, no? However, it was not a decent act in that the anaesthetic in the Sudan took days to take effect and the victims suffered their pain anyways. The rebels of Sierra Leone gave victims the choice on amputation but were not decent enough to ask their victims whether they preferred to die by the bullet or the machete. Times have indeed changed and have become brutal. No one asks Ethiopians if they want to die of famine but the regimes just bring the famine year in and year out. The concept of decent murder is sometimes known as Forrester's paradox. “It proves that if you murder someone, then you only did what you ought to do. For if you murder someone then you ought to murder them gently. If you ought to murder them gently, then you ought to murder them. So, if you murder someone, then you ought to murder them”. But it should be done decently. Is this too much to ask? The Emperor ordered the hanging of the unfortunate woman but she was dressed decently for the occasion. It was not costly at all. I have seen in 1960 my politically unconscious compatriots sticking sticks into the bullet shredded legs of a hanged coup leader to turn the corpse towards this or that direction as they joked and snickered and hurled insults. So indecent!
It could very well be that the tyrants have become exhausted by the murders and have forgotten to be decent about it. If you have to murder people just massacre them, period. Yet, it does not hurt to be nostalgic for some respect and decency in murder so long as we are doomed to do the dying.