“I will do it again if I have to because fighting against a military government and dictatorship is still something I believe in” This was what Prof. Mulugeta Bekele answered to my question of whether he felt it was worth spending 7 years in jail. A well known physicists in Ethiopia, Prof. Mulugeta Bekele unlike our current Indian ‘scientific intellectuals’ had very clear idea political ideology. Being part of an underground political student organization against the military regime while in his 30s, he feels lucky to have survived after being imprisoned for 7 years. He recalls the fate of many of his colleagues and friends who were simply executed by the regime without any trial or reason given. While trying to imagine what 7 years in prison would be, when they had just been brought to prison and saw a senior colleague being released after 7 years in prison, a friend had remarked to him, it is 1 year of Mondays, 1 year of Tuesdays, and so on. Little did he know at that time that he would have to spend something similar in his lifetime also. Cramped in a room 4 by 4 meters with 50 others, he tells us one of the main pastime of prisoners was to read books smuggled in by previous and other senior prisoners. For close to one year after his arrest, he was tortured by the regime to extract information and then he was dumped into the central prison along with other political prisoners. During this time, he was taken care by senior prisoners who helped him get cured from all the injuries during the torture. After sometime, he himself learnt this and became a therapist himself to other prisoners. Now a well known physicists, he recalls how he was called the therapist inside the prison. As a physics teacher, he continued teaching students even in the prison, some of whom he proudly says, have become very well known figures in the country and abroad.
He told us about a popular true story of Ethiopian Political prisoner. Being in prison for a long time, the prisoner again a student was able to lay his hands on the book ‘Gone with the wind’ by Margaret Mitchell. After having read for more than 3-4 times the same book, he started working on translating the book in Amharic, one of the native tongue in Ethiopia. Since each prisoner got the book to read only for one hour per day after which it had to be passed on to others, after finishing up his time, he announced to other prisoners about his work and started reading out his translation to them. The other prisoners who were deprived of reading such books as they did not know the language were quite thrilled by this idea and started looking forward for more of his translation. Very soon, other prisoners started contributing their cigarette packs to him so that he could use the salvaged paper in it to write down his translations. A very long book in itself, the translations soon turned out to be lot of papers and became difficult to keep it unknown to the guards of the prison. Hence it was smuggled to other prisons through prisoners who were transferred to other prisons. This in turned helped to be spread the story to other prisons. The prisoner, being released after 10 years tried to collect all the translated scripts and papers and published the book. A full story on this can also be read here.
One of the last question that I asked him was whether he became religious and tried to seek God while spending such a long time in prison and being hopeless. He told me that he was never hopeless in prison. He knew very well the intentions behind his actions and he knew he had to do it and it was the right thing. He was very hopeful even while in prison.
With the current status of his country, he is disappointed. Though the military junta has gone and now the country is a democracy, he feels there is little choice still for people and the people in power have their own agendas to fulfil rather than serve the people. Yet he is very hopeful of the future to come.
