Arrest, interrogations, rape, torture and anguish: In 1986 the Mossad embarked on a secret mission to bring Ethiopian Jews to Israel, but things went terribly wrong. Decades later, Israel still refuses to accept responsibility
Summer 1986. The Gondar district, Ethiopia. An older man visits villages in the district, looking for young Jews, male and female, even before bar-mitzvah age (13), to take part in a secret operation. The goal is clear, he tells the parents: to get to Israel. The route: on foot to neighboring Djibouti where, once their papers are arranged, they will be flown to Paris and from there to Israel. The Ethiopians and the Mossad knew there was no other way. A route through Sudan that had been used to smuggle out Ethiopian Jews in Operation Moses, had been discovered some time before. During that secret operation, about a year earlier, some 8,000 Jews were brought to Israel (and an additional 15,000 or so were airlifted during Operation Solomon, in 1991). But now, in mid-1986, the Mossad needed to find a new clandestine route. The first group of young people would be the vanguard force that would launch it.
The Mossad man, who will be called Z. here, had a wealth of experience in getting Ethiopian Jews to Israel, particularly via Sudan. The plan he presented to the families helped him collect a group of 27 people who would embark on a course that would change their lives – and not only, or necessarily, for the better. In the end, only 23 of them reached Israel. But the ordeals they underwent along the way – brutal violence, sexual abuse, in some cases abandonment in prison – left them scarred to this day.
The operation, which was kept a secret and in which only a few people in Israel’s defense establishment and the political hierarchy were involved (not even the Foreign Ministry knew about it), quickly slid from promise to failure. Its details, which are being revealed here for the first time, show how it became increasingly snarled, until finally it was decided not to make any further attempts to bring Ethiopian Jews to Israel via Djibouti.
The “Djibouti group” was actually three small groups, which set out from Gondar at intervals of a few weeks. The first consisted of seven people, two of them women. One of them was Yeshiwork Dawit, who was 13 at the time, one of eight siblings. Her mother urged her to embark on the odyssey, despite her age.
“It was explained to me that the route was supposed to be easy and last four days,” Dawit tells Haaretz. “First to the city of Wollo, then the city of Kombolcha, from there by bus, cross into Djibouti and afterward by plane to Paris, and from Paris to Israel.”
They reached Wollo, a province in northeastern Ethiopia, relatively quickly on foot and were housed there under the guise of a group of tourists. Then they waited. A guide who had been recruited by the Mossad and was supposed to meet them, didn’t show up. They waited for three months, during which they began to arouse the suspicion of local residents. Four of them subsequently left and returned to their villages. Three remained, Dawit among them.
The guide eventually arrived; he was from a large, well-known tribe of nomads living in the Ethiopia-Djibouti border region and was very knowledgeable about the area. “We were told that he would accompany us until we met with another man, who would accompany us in Djibouti,” Dawit recalls. They were on the road – crossing large desert expanses in broiling-hot August weather – for about a week, forced to cope with thirst, illness and encounters with dangerous animals and robbers.
At the end of the route lay the sea, the port of Djibouti. “Next to the ships someone was waiting especially for our group,” Dawit says. “He took us to a hut with mattresses, and that was the first night we could rest.” But it was also the first night she was raped.
“The guide accompanying us had held back until then,” she says. “But in the night when we slept together in the hut he did it. I screamed and cried, and in the morning I told the man who had met us in the port that if he didn’t separate me from the guide, I would commit suicide.”
Dawit and the two other young men from the original group were moved to a spacious house on the outskirts of Djibouti City, the capital. In the villa she met an older man from Ethiopia who said he had come from Israel to organize passports for them. “But if you get caught, heaven forbid,” he said, “I don’t know you and you don’t know me.” He added, partly as an order, partly as a warning, “Under no circumstances are you to mention the word ‘Israel,’ and whoever gets caught dies alone.” It was a warning Dawit was to hear many times. Another period of waiting began, this time for the other groups from Ethiopia.
Family nightmare
Mamo Biro was in his teens when he joined one of the two remaining groups. Until today he doesn’t know his exact age; no one does. He estimates that he’s about 50. He was born in a small village in the Gondar district, one of 12 siblings. Until sometime in his mid-teens, he says, he helped his parents herd sheep, and was then forcibly recruited, not to say kidnapped, into the army during the regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam (who ruled the country in one way or another between 1977 and 1991). He kept the fact that he was Jewish a secret, even from his army friends.
