"My teacher was piano-garrotted."

[jhameia]

"My teacher was piano-garotted. My economics teacher. You know what piano-garrotted is? I never heard of that before it happened. But it did. He was piano-garrotted. Killed by wire. I saw him on Tuesday and on Thursday he was dead. My economics teacher."

"People think it's like kicking and hitting like that. But it's not. It's a science. Interrogation is a science."

"And they do it slowly. And you can feel your feet swelling. Then they told me to go outside. I said my feet hurt, but they said, you go outside now. So I went outside. There was a flowerbed - a bed of gravel and you have to walk on it, to make the swelling go down. They make the gravel just for that. And you walk on it so your feet are not swelling anymore. It's painful, but they make the gravel, just for that."

"Three months later, I saw the man who tortured me. My friend and I were at a club, and right across the room over there I saw him, and I said, 'that is the man who tortured me!' And the man said sorry to me. 'I know you were a banker. I know. But that was my job.' And he was still torturing people. It's his job! Torturing people!"

"When they came for me, I stood my ground. I read Montesqieu, Jacques Rousseau. I said to them, 'you have no evidence.' They didn't care. I said, 'you have no right to touch me, you have no evidence. You cannot prove anything.' I read Montesqieu and Rosseau. They laughed at me."

"In the play he writes about the rifle. But that was later. That was while I was in Ethiopia, not Eritrea."

"I told him, I don't know what you're talking about. I might have spoken to this guy [who accused him of having information] but I don't know anything. He [the interrogation officer] looked at me, and he said, 'three months ago, I would have killed you by now.' Three months ago - was during the Red Terror. Three months ago I could have been killed."

"When I met the man who tortured me? He said sorry. He said, 'it's my job.' I just looked at him. I didn't get angry. I just didn't get angry. You know why I didn't get angry? Because he's not evil. He's uneducated. This is his job. He thinks it's an honourable profession! But he himself is not evil. It's the system that is. He is just one man, doing his job."