“RED TERROR” Martyrs Memorial Museum

War, famine, and misery… These were the three topics that generally dominated all conversation that followed within 5 minutes of our announcement that we would be serving in Ethiopia with the Peace Corps.  While some parts of the country still struggle, it doesn’t take a very astute traveler to realize that whether you are in Addis Ababa or a small town off of the main highway, there is certainly no war and there is plenty of injera and beef tibs (tibs: the name given to fried meat) to go around. Generally speaking, war and famine in modern Ethiopia only exists in the memories of the ‘over age 30’ crowd and in the star of this particular blog post, museums.

Located at the corner of Bole Road (the road leading to Addis Ababa’s posh district) and Meskel Square is the “RED TERROR” Martyrs Memorial Museum. I had driven by this museum countless times in a line taxi, probably on my way to a foreign market to buy maple syrup and BBQ sauce before guzzling a liter of delicious beer at the German beer garden as quickly as possible before returning to Fitche.  We finally decided to visit this museum while in Addis waiting to go to the airport for our ‘first year down’ capstone trip back home.  Having visited several crimes against humanity museums and memorials around the world, I felt it would be worth viewing, as much of Ethiopia’s 20^th century reputation, which lingers strongly to this day, is largely based on the contents of this museum.             

The museum is free to get into and very accessible by foot from Meskel square.  The museum is very much a snapshot in an era. There is not much in the way of context provided to the casual visitor who does not know much about the military regime known as the ‘Derg’ that ruled Ethiopia from the time that Emperor Haile Sillasie was deposed until about 1991, as atrocities of this regime and time period for which Ethiopia is unfortunately best known are the primary focus of the museum.  If you are like me, and did not know much beyond a few little facts or less about this time period, I highly recommend doing your homework before visiting. I feel the museum was very much aimed at locals who already know the history, and are simply there to mourn.

           

Upon entering the museum, I expected to do a lot of reading.  In many museums I tend to superficially wander around, glance at the displays, and maybe half read a few signs and captions by pictures that look interesting.  However, as I really do know almost nothing about the Derg regime and I really wanted to remedy that, I came prepared to do some reading.  However, this museum offers more of a history in pictures. There really are no lengthy plaques or literature on the walls. Mostly, there are pictures of victims, historical photographs of the Derg leaders, war atrocities, and translated documents.

           

In light of this photographic approach to memorializing this time period, I realized that in order to get anything meaningful out of this visit, I needed some more information to go with what I was seeing. Luckily, there was a U.S. Embassy family taking a free tour provided by the museum that was led by a former political prisoner.  To me, this part was absolutely essential to fully appreciating this museum. Normally I am a very independent visitor. I don’t tend to take audio tours or hire guides. In this museum, that approach would truly be a mistake.

           

I don’t want to go into too much detail about the contents or the tour guide’s stories, as it is not a big museum and even slowest visitor can expect to make it through the museum in less than an hour. The place reminded me a lot of the S21 Teolsleng prison museum that I visited in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in terms of its approach to recounting the violence.  While S21 in Cambodia was the actual scene of the crime as it were, the museum is similar in its feel as it has hundreds of individual photographs of people who were executed as political dissidents, as well as the general sense of macabre highlighted by the detailed torture methods and displayed bones of anonymous victims of the Derg’s “RED TERROR” which was aimed at brining legitimacy to the regime by crushing any kind of suspected resistance.  

           

By the end of the exhibit, there is a conspicuous lack of resolve.  There is no build up or much background provided in the beginning, and there is no resolution in the end. As I said in the beginning, the museum offers more of a snapshot rather than a holistic and exhaustive approach to the topic. While it is clear that the days of the Derg regime are well behind Ethiopia, the visitor is left with the task of interpreting his or her own ending to the story, as there is very little in the way of a conclusion to this definitive time period in the display itself.  It is as if the museum was created with a sense of conflict as to how exactly the events of the 1980 should be explained, whereas I felt S21 in Cambodia was certainly aimed at foreigners and the lack of international action taken towards the Khmer Rouge during the genocide of the late 1970s. There was also a great emphasis from the point of view of the victims as to the lack of justice that was ever pursued, as evidenced by the hitherto lack of arrests of Khmer Rouge officials.

This sense of conflict that I mentioned and even further parallels between the two museums boiled to the surface at the end of the tour when the tour guide mentioned that most of the former Derg war criminals were actually still walking around Addis Ababa freely to this day. Although they spent some time in jail, they were recently freed for what he ambiguously explained as “political reasons.”  Although these are two very different events on two very different continents, the aura and circumstances of the atrocities are nevertheless strikingly similar, just as they are presented. 

-Donovan