Memory from the Margins

Ethiopia's Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum

Bridget Conley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030134945
• eBook ISBN: 9783030134952
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book asks the question: what is the role of memory during a political transition? Drawing on Ethiopian history, transitional justice, and scholarly fields concerned with memory, museums and trauma, the author reveals a complex picture of global, transnational, national and local forces as they converge in the story of the creation and continued life of one modest museum in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa—the Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum. It is a study from multiple margins: neither the case of Ethiopia nor memorialization is central to transitional justice discourse, and within Ethiopia, the history of the Red Terror is sidelined in contemporary politics. From these nested margins, traumatic memory emerges as an ambiguous social and political force. The contributions, meaning and limitations of memory emerge at the point of discrete interactions between memory advocates, survivor-docents and visitors. Memory from the margins is revealed as powerful for how it disrupts, not builds, new forms of community.

© The Author(s) 2019

Bridget ConleyMemory from the MarginsMemory Politics and Transitional Justicehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13495-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Memory from the Margins

Bridget Conley¹

(1)

World Peace Foundation at The Fletcher School, Somerville, MA, USA

Bridget Conley

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Each word tells a story: red, terror, martyrs, memorial, and museum.

Red is the color of violence. As Donald Donham writes, “the violent act, the violent event, is a bodily occurrence. It is the sharp flash against flesh, and it is the blood-colored response” (2006, 18). It is the color of a wound and the color of revolution. Its usage in the Ethiopian context (1976–1978) borrows from 1917 Russia. Red was a promise and threat that violence would fulfill revolutionary vision. But red is a spilling, overwhelming hue—a warning flag. Violence creates uncertainty out of which people change their “attitudes, commitments and identities. In this sense it can ‘speed up’ history” (Donham 2006, 28). To study violence, is to enter a territory of extraordinary moments that are explicable only in retrospect through the lens of what violence created. The end results color interpretation of why or how events actually happened.

Terror is violence intent on destroying political ideas, and it is more effective than most would care to acknowledge. In today’s context, conceptual laziness identifies terror as the domain of nonstate actors, but their abilities pale compared to what a state can achieve. Terror in the case of the Ethiopian Red Terror was the military regime’s systematic effort to fracture the urban activist movement into cowered individuals, forced to flee alone or join new causes.

These activists, many of whom had no idea the scale of state wrath they would invoke, nonetheless knew very well why they took to the streets. They stood for a cause; thus, they understand the resultant deaths of their comrades in terms of martyrdom, not victimhood. Victimhood invariably depoliticizes by defining people in relation to suffering from what others did to them. Martyrs are those whose deaths contributed to an effort to realize ideals. However, in the context of a history in which multiple causes clashed and not everyone targeted for violence fell neatly into political categories, martyr is a complicated concept. Martyrdom is exclusionary; it implies dedication to a single cause, the value of which can redeem even the greatest loss of life. It invokes a question, which cause defines the Red Terror martyr: the fight against the military regime, the ideals of Ethiopian democracy, or the agenda of a particular political party?

Memorializing violent history does not settle a question about the meaning of the past. It localizes, materializes and invokes this question for a new set of protagonists in the present. Memory is thus an endeavor to make meaning for a new community through reference to past events.

To make meaning in the particular form of a museum, is to deploy techniques of assemblage for a visiting public in an institution designed to be permanent. Inherent in these museal traits are a constellation of tensions. There is the intended permanency of the structure for making meaning, and the reality that the visiting public changes over time and in relation to evolving concerns about the past and present. An exhibition juxtaposes elements (structure, texts, objects, photos, testimony) that do not seamlessly adhere to a unitary narrative arc. Tension also derives from the traumatic, or red, character of violence: unruly and unpredictable, it travels a different path from that of pedagogical goals that form the stated aims of any museum. In the end, the point of a museum is not to resolve these tensions, but to issue an invitation to pay attention to them.

Each word also tells a story that draws into relief the outline of individual agency—how it is claimed and what exceeds those claims. Memory of any singular time period eddies in the crosscurrents of how individuals experienced and interpret the past, the forms that memory takes, and encounters with others around memorialization. The limits of controlling these currents are acutely visible in memory from the margins—stories that do not align with social and political master narratives at the global, national and social level. This is not to describe memory from the margins as necessarily oppositional; it can also be ambiguous. The key attribute of this form of memory is that it has not settled into place and thus powerfully retains a disruptive capacity, both within any individual memory narrative and when presentation of the past collides with new audiences.

Can memory contribute to democratic processes? This question is hasty—the real question begins elsewhere: how does memory compose social and political meaning? Memory from the margins creates meaning through disruption. The disruptive capacity is not an abstraction, but the product of discrete interactions between people. Thus, this study begins with, returns to and is guided by individual memory-keepers.

Part I: Memory of Torture

Hirut Abebe-Jirut was my guide when I visited the Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum (RTMMM) for the first time in April 2013. She was not affiliated with the Museum, but was a survivor of torture and advocate for preserving the record of the brief, intensively violent time period in Ethiopia’s history. She also knew the Museum well. Like the civil society actors and docents who created and maintain the RTMMM, Hirut was a keeper of memory. All of them suffered through direct violence or loss of loved ones during the Red Terror. On the tour, Hirut did not speak about what happened to her during in the Red Terror. She focused on conveying a historical overview of the years following the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974, through the rise of the military regime (the Derg) headed by Mengistu Haile Mariam , and the Red Terror (1976–1978), Mengistu’s relentless suppression of the urban-based political opposition.

Several years later, when we had a chance to speak privately, Hirut discussed her personal experiences (Abebe-Jiri 2017).

“I have this graphic memory,” Hirut explains, “When you bring up that time, you go step by step, you re-enter the time. I go back to the edge, I go in every room, what was said, what they did, I see them far away in a picture.” Hirut was 16 when she was tortured. It happened after she was arrested for the second time. This picture is her worst memory.

Her first arrest was in 1976, before the Red Terror peaked. As she returned home from work one day, a guard stopped her. She was taken into a compound next to her family home that included a house converted into the headquarters for a kebele, the neighborhood-level governance unit. She was forced by kebele guards and officials, as well as members of the revolutionary guard (differentiated by their display of weapons) to answer only one question: was she a member of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP), a political party that opposed the new military regime?

No, she told them.

They did not physically harm her, but kept her under watch in the building. That night, she heard moaning from someone else in the building. Through a locked door, she quietly spoke with the person, and realized he was someone she knew from the neighborhood, Mekuria Zewuda. As he moaned in pain the first night, she tried to calm him down. The next day she overheard him ask the guards to take him to the toilet, an outhouse in the courtyard, where Hirut understood that he tried to kill himself or escape, by jumping into the hole. Guards pulled the man out, covered in feces, and left him on display in the yard. During the second night of her detention, Mekuria was taken outside. Hirut heard a gunshot, and Mekuria never returned.

She was told to sit in a hallway, almost completely ignored. At this point of the revolution the kebele was a relatively quiet place. Hirut did not see others taken in for questioning; most of those who walked past her were the kebele workers going about their business. After two weeks, they unceremoniously released her.

The second arrest did not end so easily. Guards burst into her family home around 10 at night, grabbed her and her sister, marched them next door into the main kebele building. They went directly into a room reserved for the torture, where a young boy around 11 years old was trussed up on a stick suspended between two desks. He was positioned so that the bottoms of his feet were easily vulnerable to the torturer’s beatings. He was bleeding from the wounds on his feet and across his body.

“Which one?” the guards asked the boy. “Hirut,” he answered. Her sister was taken out of the room and the guards turned to Hirut.

“Where is the gun?”

“What gun?”

“He gave you a gun.”

Hirut recognized the boy, Melaku, a neighbor who lived a few houses away, but she had no idea what the guards were talking about. She repeated: “what gun?” The guards then told her to strip down to her underwear. They untied the boy and put her in his place, in the same contorted, painful position. Then they started hitting her: on the insides of her legs, the bottom of her feet, and all over. The beating continued for a long time. When she screamed, they stuffed a rag covered in blood and vomit into her mouth. If she wanted to indicate that she had something to say, she was told to raise one finger, as if pointing at something. When she could not take any more she decided she had to say something. She raised her finger. They took the rag out and lowered her off the stick. She told them, “I don’t have the gun, but if you want one, I can buy one for you.”

This statement did not help her. Her father was a lawyer and had been critical first of the Imperial regime, and later of the new military regime. For this, he had been arrested in early 1976, accused of feudalism. His arrest had forced her to stop her schooling and work to help her mother with household expenses. But by offering to pay for the gun at the center of the accusations against her, she appeared to confirm the charges of having a feudal mindset. They tied her back up and the torture continued.

“The second torture is worse,” she told me. “They put cold water on you and the sensation immediately cools the pain, but when they start hitting you again, it’s worse. When they hit you now, it cuts the skin….it is very, very painful. I tried to think, did he give me a gun? Am I so forgetful—did I know this guy? I couldn’t figure it out, I was going crazy trying to think.”

But then, Hirut said, her body shut down. “You hear voices, but at a distance. I know they are talking about taking me out to do ‘revolutionary action,’ but a woman in the room argued: ‘no, we want to find the gun.’” Later Hirut was able to piece the story together. The gun in question had been used to kill one of the guards’ comrades. They wanted not only to find the weapon, but also to expose the organizational structure of the EPRP in their area. Hirut, mistaken for an important party activist, was a crucial link for them that day. The female chairperson of the kebele, a woman named Semrate, argued with the head of the kebele, Kelbessa Negewo , who wanted to kill Hirut, that more information could be extracted through torture. Semrate won the argument. They took Hirut downstairs to a basement room used as a holding cell for women.

Hirut was handcuffed, an unusual practice signaling to the other detained women that she was a prisoner of special interest and her days were limited. The cell, a room about 12 feet by 14 feet, held 56 women, who helped Hirut to a place in the corner where she could sleep. The women, Hirut recalled, were kind, but avoided developing any attachment to her, as she had clearly been marked for death. Two women were needed to help carry her to the toilet; her feet were too damaged to allow her to walk. The next morning a guard came to shave her head, a regular practice in the kebele, but with particular cruelty, he used a broken glass bottle to cut her hair, causing new wounds to open across her scalp. Her mother brought food and a blanket, but was not allowed to see her. Time took on a different meaning in that cell, measured by pain. Possibly three or four days later—she was not sure, but knew she had improved to the point that she could move by balancing on the edges of her feet—guards came and called out her name.

She was taken by car to Prison #2, where a young male prisoner who she recognized as Yosef, a friend of her older brother, was brought out. They tried to speak, but guards silenced them for the next part of their journey. Hirut and Yosef were taken to the Imperial Palace, headquarters of the military regime. They were told to sit down together and Hirut hurriedly explained what had happened to her. Semrate, the female guard, ushered them into the office of a prison official, Shaleka Berhanu, where she made the case for why Hirut should be further tortured to extract additional information. The man told Semrate that she could kill Hirut if she wanted, but Semrate insisted that she wanted more information first. Hirut and Yosef were then taken to the portion of the building used for torture. There, the hallways and rooms provided visible and pungent evidence of bodies being torn open and left to fester. The man in charge took one look at Hirut, examined the bodily evidence of torture she had already suffered, and said: “she won’t last five minutes here, take her back and use what resources you already have.”

Back at the kebele, Yosef was called in for torture before Hirut. “I don’t know what they did to him. He said that he had the gun.” With that “confession,” Hirut’s life was spared. Yosef disappeared; never seen again, his remains never found.

Hirut was taken back to the basement holding cell. The room was directly underneath the torture room and the women could hear everything going on above them.

“One thing I learned there,” Hirut stated, “being tortured, it is easy. You deal with it. But listening to other people being tortured, especially older people, begging, saying, ‘I could be your mother,’ it stays with you forever. Their voices stay with you forever. Listening to torture is the most painful experience. Some women would have the chance to come downstairs and be arrested with us. Some we would never see.”

Life in the cell was on tenterhooks. The women could only go to the bathroom once every twelve hours—to this day, she noted, fear ingrained that habit deep in her body. Water was available once a day. The floor was composed of hard, uneven rocks. Prisoners had only thin cardboard and possibly one blanket with which to comfort themselves. There was no medical attention. Some days were unbearably hot; swe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Memory from the Margins
• 2. Revolution and Red Terror, 1974–1978
• 3. Transitional Influences, 1991–2005
• 4. The Shape of Memory, 2003–2010
• 5. The Tour as Traumatic Performance, 2010–Present
• 6. Conclusion: On Memory and Future Transitions
• Back Matter