THE MONUMENT TO SELECTIVE MEMORY

Cowardice, Coercion, and the Myth of a “Heroic” Death

By David Yeh

There is something almost surreal in the way the remnants of the Derg attempt to rehabilitate their past, polishing the wreckage of a brutal regime as if it were a cherished inheritance rather than a historical calamity. Their latest effort centers on Brigadier General Teshome Tesema, recast not as a defeated commander of a collapsing military machine, but as a martyr for Ethiopian sovereignty. The demand is simple: build him a monument. The implication is more troubling: forget everything else.

But history does not cooperate with selective memory.

The Derg’s presence in Eritrea was never a consensual project of “unity.” It was a prolonged campaign of coercion, marked by scorched-earth tactics, mass killings, and the systematic dehumanization of civilians. Villages were erased, urban populations terrorized, and famine weaponized. To isolate one officer from this machinery and elevate him as a symbol of national virtue is not merely incomplete, it is a distortion that borders on moral inversion.

Even the specific case of Teshome collapses under scrutiny. The mythology insists on a “heroic last stand,” a noble refusal to surrender. But this framing ignores the reality of the system he served. The Derg was not an institution that rewarded honorable defeat; it punished it. Commanders who failed were not retired with dignity, they were imprisoned, purged, or executed. The fate of figures like General Tariku Yaynie, executed in front of his soldiers, after military collapse in the Nakfa Front, was not an exception but a warning. Others met similar fates in successive waves of purges triggered by battlefield defeats and political instability. A decade earlier, Colonel Atnafu Abate, the Derg’s second vice-chair and a central architect of the coup that overthrew Haile Selassie, was executed after the setback of the military campaign he oversaw at Adi Hawosha in 1977, having openly warned that the war in Eritrea was not militarily winnable.

Teshome knew this. His choices were shaped not by abstract patriotism, but by a brutal calculus: defeat meant death in the Derg’s reign. In such a system, the so-called “last stand” takes on a different meaning. It is not the act of a free man choosing sacrifice; it is the cornered decision of a commander trapped between an advancing enemy and a regime that would execute him if he survived. To call this heroism is to confuse desperation with valor.

Worse still, the final phase of his command exposes not courage, but moral collapse. As defeat loomed, he did not simply fight a conventional battle, he resorted to holding a civilian population hostage, using the residents of Massawa as human shields while blocking avenues of retreat. This was not strategy; it was coercion. It was an admission that the war could no longer be fought on military terms, only prolonged through the suffering of civilians.

And when that failed, the response of the Derg system he represented was even more damning. The aerial bombardment of Massawa, indiscriminate, sustained, and directed at residential areas, was not the action of an army defending sovereignty. It was the act of a regime punishing a population it could no longer control. Cluster munitions and napalm were not dropped on fortified positions alone; they fell on homes, families, and the fabric of civilian life. This was not collateral damage. It was policy.

Against this backdrop, the attempt to construct a monument to Teshome becomes not just questionable, but absurd. What exactly is being honored? A commander who, facing inevitable defeat, operated within a system that criminalized retreat, took civilians hostage to delay collapse, and ultimately chose death in a context where survival would likely have meant execution by his own government? This is not the story of heroism. It is the story of a regime so brutal that even its own officers had no honorable exit.

The real story of that moment lies elsewhere. It lies in the disciplined, coordinated operations of the EPLF, whose leadership systematically outmaneuvered Derg forces and exposed the fragility of their command structure. The outcome was not accidental. It was the result of strategic clarity, organizational discipline, and an acute understanding of both terrain and opponent. The Derg did not collapse because of betrayal or neglect; it collapsed because it was outthought, outmaneuvered, and ultimately outmatched.

To elevate Teshome is therefore to obscure the very dynamics that determined the outcome. It shifts attention away from the structural failures of the Derg and the effectiveness of its opponent, replacing analysis with sentiment. It transforms defeat into virtue and desperation into dignity.

This pattern is not isolated. There is a recurring tendency to memorialize figures whose defining historical feature is failure, commanders who lost, were captured, or presided over collapse, yet are later recast as symbols of national pride. It is a form of historical alchemy that turns defeat into legend, provided the narrative is emotionally compelling enough. But sentiment cannot substitute for truth.

The defenders of this narrative often retreat into abstraction, arguing that personal bravery should be honored regardless of context. But bravery divorced from moral and political reality is an empty category. Courage in the service of a system that normalizes atrocity is not heroism, it is tragedy. And when that courage manifests in acts such as using civilians as shields or enforcing a regime’s violence, it becomes something else entirely.

The deeper issue is not Teshome as an individual, but the attempt to detach him from the system that produced him. A general is not an isolated figure; he is an extension of the political order he serves. The Derg was a regime defined by repression, paranoia, and systemic violence. Its officers operated within that framework, were shaped by it, and enforced it. To honor one without confronting the other is to participate in deliberate historical amnesia.

The demand for a monument, then, is not about remembrance. It is about revision. It seeks to replace a complex and painful history with a simplified narrative of sacrifice and neglect. It asks the public to look at a symbol and ignore the structure behind it, the policies, the atrocities, the countless victims who remain unacknowledged.

But history resists such simplifications. It insists on context. It insists on consequence.

If there are monuments to be built, they should not be to the functionaries of a system that devoured both its enemies and its own. They should be to the victims, the civilians of Massawa who endured bombardment, the villagers who disappeared, the families who were erased by policies that treated human life as expendable. A nation’s moral clarity is not measured by how it glorifies its generals, but by how honestly it confronts the suffering those generals were part of creating.

In the end, the story of Teshome Tesema is not one of heroic sacrifice. It is the story of a commander trapped in a collapsing system, resorting to coercion, facing inevitable defeat, and choosing death in a context where survival offered no refuge. To elevate that story into a symbol of national virtue is not only historically inaccurate, it is an evasion of responsibility.

Monuments built on such foundations do not honor the past. They conceal it.