‘For Ethiopia’s heritage’: Family fights to reclaim war hero’s stolen medal

When the Italians invaded and briefly colonized Ethiopia in 1935, Amaha Kassa’s grandfather was the last commander who bravely rallied troops and fought back. The Italians had initially attempted to annex the nation four decades earlier, but they were met with a strong defeat. This time though, the story would be different.

The Ethiopians couldn’t compete with the new machineguns the Italians carried and the jet’s deadly chemicals sprayed from the sky with rifles and spears.

Although Kassa’s grandfather, Ras (Prince) Desta Damtew, fought long and hard, he was eventually caught and executed in 1937. In addition to the seven-year occupation, civilians and Red Cross personnel would be killed, according to tens of thousands of Ethiopians, leaving many people there still grieving.

So Kassa and his siblings learned in November that a Swiss art gallery was going to auction off a gold medal that Damtew owned, with shock and anger. The piece was going for between 60, 000 and 90, 000 euros ($61, 800 and $92, 700).

Its description or provenance clearly stated that the medal was from an Italian soldier’s estate and that Damtew had been killed there.

“They were not in any way attempting to hide the provenance of this item, and were even using the personal circumstances of his death and execution as a selling point”, Kassa, who runs African Communities Together, a New York-based activist organisation, told Al Jazeera.

“I just can’t imagine that something like this would happen and be made in the Nazi era.” There’s a way that people have not come to think of African issues as being worthy of respect”, he said.

A global search for the medal has been sparked by the case. Additionally, it highlights a pressing, ongoing conversation in Africa as governments and individuals from Kenya to Cameroon lobby for the return of thousands of antiquities stolen by colonizing Western powers.

In Ethiopia, hoards of artefacts were looted, first by the British, and later, by the Italians. Although the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947 mandated that Italy pay all of the art and religious loot stolen during its brief occupation and pay $25 million in reparations in the course of 18 months, the agreement has not fully been upheld.

“The Vatican Library has more than 300 Ethiopian manuscripts, most of which were looted during the occupation”, Alula Pankhurst, the country director of Oxford University’s Young Lives Ethiopia project, told Al Jazeera. While some items have been returned, Italy has continued to hold on to hundreds of other items like crowns, royal regalia, and paintings, said the veteran professor of Ethiopian studies.

Symbol of African resistance

At the age of 44, Ras Desta Damtew was put to death by the Italian army in February 1937. His distinguished service to the then-Ethiopian Empire lasted for a long period of time. In 1896, Ethiopian forces humiliated Italian invaders in their first offensive attempt, and his father passed away in command of the iconic Battle of Adwa. For the first time, an African force overran an invaded European nation.

Damtew too fought for various monarchs. He helped Emperor Haile Selassie attain the throne and later married Leult (Princess) Tenagnework, the emperor’s eldest child.

“I didn’t grow up with personal memories of him, but I certainly heard a lot about him”, Kassa said, sharing that his mother, Princess Seble – one of the couple’s eight children – was only a child when Damtew&nbsp, died. “He was this kind of legend. There is a great deal of pride in the sacrifices he made, but there is also a lot of sadness in it.

In old newspaper articles, Damtew is described as stoic, handsome and intelligent, with a mastery of French. He is seen in royal regalia, wearing heavily decorated mid-length robes and shiny leather shoes, in grainy black and white photos. A star-shaped brooch, which is thought to be from the Imperial Order of the Star of Ethiopia, was pinned to his right chest in one, along with a medal of pure gold that denoted a rare military award given for service to the crown and the object at the heart of the current uprising.

The prince, who was Ethiopia’s special ambassador, traveled to the United States in July 1933, donned in flowing robes, and carrying gifts like lion manes and pictures of the emperor. President Franklin Roosevelt drew him to Washington. Two years later in October 1935, the Italians, under fascist leader Benito Mussolini, invaded and seized Addis Ababa.

With their “deadly rain” of sulfur and machineguns, the 100, 000-plus Italian army decimated Ethiopia’s defences, even though the local forces outnumbered the invaders eight to one. To clamp down on a budding civilian resistance, the Italians massacred people in their thousands, while also pillaging Ethiopia’s cultural objects. By the end of the occupation in 1941, Ethiopians had already lost at least 100 000 lives.

As Selassie fled into exile, Damtew’s battalion continued to hold the fort for two years. By the time the prince was caught, he had been wounded in the fighting. According to some, he confessed, making him a prisoner of war, and killing him, a war crime under the Geneva Convention, which was passed in 1931.

The prince became a symbol of African resistance for many people on a continent where the calls for independence were becoming louder. In Ethiopia, Damtew became a hero. His name is displayed at one Addis Ababa medical school.

After the war, in 1948, Ethiopia wrote to the United Nations War Crime Commission (UNWCC), accusing 10 Italians of being involved in the prince’s killing, and alleging a war crime.

Before November last year, the whereabouts of Damtew’s star-shaped brooch were unknown. When they killed him, or later, is it unknown whether the Italian soldier allegedly stole the gold medal from his body. What’s clear, the prince’s family said, is that the medal is in the wrong hands and should be sent back to Ethiopia.

“We’re not seeking personal ownership of this piece”, Kassa said. This is an Ethiopian museum, according to our opinion. Because it is not just our family’s heritage, we want to see it restored and put on display for Ethiopians.

Medal auction ignites a panicked campaign

Only days before the auction, Kassa, his siblings, and their cousins approached lawyer Christopher Marinello, an art recovery expert and founder of Art Recovery International, for help. Marinello has decades of experience dealing with stolen artefacts, from Nazi-looted artworks to stolen Indian artefacts.

“The family came to me saying: ‘ We are in a panic'”, Marinello, who is working pro bono, told Al Jazeera. “They wanted to stop the auction, so I took up the case”.

The medal was put up for auction by La Galerie Numismatique, an institution based in Switzerland, on behalf of its current possessor, Philip Bosworth Eagleton, a British art collector based in Spain. However, when Marinello approached the gallery, he was rebuffed. The gallery instead requested the family buy the medal, the lawyer said in emails that were shared openly.

“It’s typical”, Marinello said. How can I get my money out of this when you tell someone they have something that belongs to someone else? Greed really runs these things”.

La Galerie Numismatique did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

The auction went live on December 1, 2024. By that time, Kassa and other family members had begun using social media to promote the medal, initiating a global campaign to stop the sale. The bid was halted by the Ethiopian embassy in Switzerland in a letter to the gallery. Although the auction proceeded, the medal eventually failed to receive the minimum bid of 60, 000 euros, meaning it remains unsold.

Marinello stated that Eagleton and Marinello are currently negotiating to retrieve the medal.

Eagleton claimed in a statement to Al Jazeera that the medal’s history was more complex than what is thought to be the case, but that he was willing to cooperate. He’d bought the piece five years ago and had not paid much attention to its originality, he said. Eagleton claimed that he consulted an expert after the family launched a campaign in December and discovered that the piece had only been produced ten years ago.

Due to the drama surrounding this, the collector said, “I don’t want to hold onto it because it starts to smell like a dead horse in the tropics.” “]But] it would be tragic to convey a known debunked ‘ fake ‘ to the esteemed family who have suffered enough from their grandfather’s death”.

Before the medal went on sale for auction, Eagleton would have had to approve its original description. The collector confirmed that he did sign off on the published provenance, but added that he “didn’t pay too much attention” to the description until now.

So much lost, one thing found?

Amaha Kassa and his two sisters were forced to flee Ethiopia for the United States in 1977.

In an effort to create a socialist state, the military’s bloody revolution saw the fall of Emperor Selassie’s monarchy. The communist military, or Derg, would place Kassa’s mother in prison for more than ten years after her capture. Their father, a government minister, was one of several empire officers executed after the coup.

“Our family lost everything in the revolution”, Laly Kassa, Amaha’s sister, said in an interview with Ethiopia Broadcasting Corporation in January. Our mother and aunts were probably not thinking about this medal because we were counting lives, not belongings, because everything our parents or grandparents owned was lost.

The family says they are unaffected by claims that the medal may be fake and are unwilling to let it go now that something from their grandfather has surfaced.

We don’t want to think that the auctioneers were attempting to defraud by listing it as the real thing, Kassa said. “We really don’t want to think they are lying”.

Indeed, some observers observe that Ras Damtew’s opulent Order of the Star brooch is slightly different from the one that is typically worn on auction. There are gold discs where the crosses would have been in the original, which is believed to have contained five mini crosses.

The medal “was deliberately defaced to hide the five crosses on it presumably to hide its origins”, said Pankhurst, the professor of Ethiopian history. He continued, Kassa and his family are coordinating with Ethiopia’s archives to verify the authenticity of the medal.

According to Gregory Copley, the Strategic Advisor to the former empire’s affairs organization, the organization in charge of former empire affairs, several items that were once owned by Ethiopian officials were being illegally traded for large sums of money, according to Copley.

He claimed that the Emperor’s decision to give this medal to Damtew was likely due to the fact that other breast stars given to officers were merely gold-plated. However, he added that a single image cannot establish ownership.

“On the basis of this limited information, however, we would definitely say that the probability of the breast star being illegally obtained is extremely high”, Copley added.

Ultimately, Kassa said, the family does not plan to back down on the fight and is moving forward believing the listed medal is their grandfather’s property.

Source: Aljazeera