MEMORY POLITICS AND TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE

Memory from
the Margins
Ethiopia’s Red Terror Martyrs
Memorial Museum
Bridget Conley
Memory Politics and Transitional Justice

Series Editors
Jasna Dragovic-Soso
Goldsmiths University of London
London, UK

Jelena Subotic
Georgia State University
Atlanta, GA, USA

Tsveta Petrova
Columbia University
New York, NY, USA
The interdisciplinary fields of Memory Studies and Transitional Justice have largely devel-
oped in parallel to one another despite both focusing on efforts of societies to confront and
(re-)appropriate their past. While scholars working on memory have come mostly from his-
torical, literary, sociological, or anthropological traditions, transitional justice has attracted
primarily scholarship from political science and the law. This series bridges this divide: it
promotes work that combines a deep understanding of the contexts that have allowed for
injustice to occur with an analysis of how legacies of such injustice in political and histor-
ical memory influence contemporary projects of redress, acknowledgment, or new cycles
of denial. The titles in the series are of interest not only to academics and students but
also practitioners in the related fields. The Memory Politics and Transitional Justice series
promotes critical dialogue among different theoretical and methodological approaches and
among scholarship on different regions. The editors welcome submissions from a variety of
disciplines – including political science, history, sociology, anthropology, and cultural stud-
ies – that confront critical questions at the intersection of memory politics and transitional
justice in national, comparative, and global perspective.
Memory Politics and Transitional Justice Book Series (Palgrave)
Co-editors: Jasna Dragovic-Soso (Goldsmiths, University of London), Jelena Subotic
(Georgia State University), Tsveta Petrova (Columbia University)

Editorial Board
Paige Arthur, New York University Center on International Cooperation
Alejandro Baer, University of Minnesota
Orli Fridman, Singidunum University Belgrade
Carol Gluck, Columbia University
Katherine Hite, Vassar College
Alexander Karn, Colgate University
Jan Kubik, Rutgers University and School of Slavonic and East European Studies,
University College London
Bronwyn Leebaw, University of California, Riverside
Jan-Werner Mueller, Princeton University
Jeffrey Olick, University of Virginia
Kathy Powers, University of New Mexico
Joanna Quinn, Western University
Jeremy Sarkin, University of South Africa
Leslie Vinjamuri, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Sarah Wagner, George Washington University

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14807
 Bridget Conley

Memory from the

Margins
Ethiopia’s Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum
Bridget Conley
World Peace Foundation at The
Fletcher School
Somerville, MA, USA

Memory Politics and Transitional Justice

ISBN 978-3-030-13494-5 ISBN 978-3-030-13495-2  (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13495-2

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Cover image: Painting by Naizgi Tewelde Kidane, displayed at the Red Terror Martyrs
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This book is dedicated to the memory of those who lost their lives
in the Red Terror.
 Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the support of the staff
of the Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum, who shared their histories
and provided access to the Museum, visitor comments and institutional
statistics. Above all else, their willingness to welcome me and my ques-
tions into the Museum reflected a generosity far beyond my expectations
and I remain deeply grateful to every one there, especially to Befekadu
Gebre-Medhin, Menberu Bekele, Eshetu Debelie, Muluneh Haile, and
Freysembet.
Indispensable guidance was also provided by Hirut Abebe-Jirut and
Nunu Tsige, both of whose knowledge and wisdom helped me make
sense of the story told in this study.
Additional insights that helped determine the shape of the study
came from Helawe Yusef, Fasil, Gedion Wolde Emanual, Seifu Eshete
Wube, Mekonnen Wolde, Gebrewold Sembet, Kurabachew Shewarega
Yigletu, Naizgi Tewelde Kidane and Tadesse Gessesse. I also thank
Samuel Kidane and Nehemiah Abie. I am grateful to have connected
with Tamara Dawit, a fellow traveler on the search for Red Terror his-
tory. Makda Taddele and Batul Sadliwala also lent their unique skills and
perspectives to the research project.
Over the course of writing this book, I had the opportunity to par-
ticipate in a collaborative research project on memory that provided
invaluable perspective on the issues explored in this book. I thank these
colleagues for their companionship in questions of memory: Scott Straus,
Catherine Besteman, Baskara Wardaya, Francisco Ferrandiz, Ron Suny,

vii
viii    Acknowledgements

Natan Sznaider, and Molly Minden. My colleagues Stephenie Young and

Kerry Whigham both generously offered insights. I would also like to
thank my former colleagues at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,
where I first became a student of memorial museums, learning from the
extraordinary professionals there.
A wealth of gratitude is owed to my colleagues at the World Peace
Foundation, which supported this project. To Lisa Avery, Dyan
Mazurana, Mulugeta Gebrehiwot and, especially, Alex de Waal, I am
honored to work with you and constantly inspired by your professional-
ism, knowledge and friendship.
To my parents, Tim and Susan, and siblings, Erin and Kevin, thank
you for your steadfast support. And to my children, Aida and Hamza,
who were willing to trade my absences while doing research for a few
gifts upon return, and who, as far as I know, did not take advantage of
my occasional distractedness while writing to test the limits of teenage
permission. You two keep me going.
 Contents

1 Memory from the Margins 1

2 Revolution and Red Terror, 1974–1978 47

3 Transitional Influences, 1991–2005 85

4 The Shape of Memory, 2003–2010 133

5 The Tour as Traumatic Performance, 2010–Present 169

6 Conclusion: On Memory and Future Transitions 217

Index 241

ix
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 The Red Terror memorial stone, as it appeared in 2016,

with the dedication effaced 97
Fig. 3.2 Set of statues depicting the social history of the struggle,
at the Tigray Martyrs Memorial Museum and Monument 101
Fig. 3.3 View of the Amhara Region Peoples Martyrs Memorial
Monument, from the base of the series of pools, near
the Nile River 104
Fig. 3.4 The memorial in Adama 107
Fig. 4.1 Sketch of the RTMMM by Fasil 134
Fig. 4.2 Painting by Naizgi Tewelde Kidane, displayed at the RTMMM 155
Fig. 4.3 Torture model, Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum 162
Fig. 4.4 Photo of a victim and his skeletal remains, displayed
at the Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum 164
Fig. 6.1 Today’s “red terror”: a dust-covered, red construction
truck, on its way into Addis Ababa 221

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Memory from the Margins

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 spill-
ing, 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 vio-
lence, 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, con-
ceptual 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

© The Author(s) 2019 1

B. Conley, Memory from the Margins,
Memory Politics and Transitional Justice,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13495-2_1
2  B. CONLEY

deaths of their comrades in terms of martyrdom, not victimhood.

Victimhood invariably depoliticizes by defining people in relation to suf-
fering 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 con-
cept. 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 mar-
gins—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
 1  MEMORY FROM THE MARGINS  3

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 mean-
ing 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 vio-
lence 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 dis-
cussed 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 con-
verted into the headquarters for a kebele, the neighborhood-level gov-
ernance 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
4  B. CONLEY

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 build-
ing. 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 fam-
ily 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 beat-
ings. 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 contin-
ued 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
 1  MEMORY FROM THE MARGINS  5

something to say, she was told to raise one finger, as if pointing at some-
thing. 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 feudal-
ism. 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 tor-
ture 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 for-
getful—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 ‘revolution-
ary 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 ques-
tion had been used to kill one of the guards’ comrades. They wanted
not only to find the weapon, but also to expose the organizational struc-
ture 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 informa-
tion 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 attach-
ment 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
6  B. CONLEY

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 bro-
ken 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, headquar-
ters 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 informa-
tion first. Hirut and Yosef were then taken to the portion of the build-
ing 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 tor-
ture 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
 1  MEMORY FROM THE MARGINS  7

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; sweat evaporated
off the women’s bodies and dripped back down on their heads. They
could eat only what their families brought. If someone had no fam-
ily to bring food, they had to rely on the generosity of other prisoners.
Surviving such a place required sharing; the women were not necessar-
ily friends, family or even acquaintances beforehand, but in this crucible,
they endured through solidarity.
Hirut was released several months later.
Her family celebrated her release, but she could find nothing good
about it. In this, Hirut’s story reminds us that torture aims to reduce
its subjects to shadows of themselves, to drain them of hope that
they could play any constructive role in their own or their country’s
story, by forcing complicity with the regime through confession. Torture
implicates its victim: who must search, as Hirut did, to produce the
narrative desired by the torturer in order to halt pain. As Elaine Scarry
wrote: the torture victim “is to understand his confession as it will be
understood by others, as an act of self-betrayal. In forcing him to con-
fess…the torturers are producing a mime in which the one annihilated
shifts to being the agent of his own annihilation” (1985, 47). Torture
is an intimate, relentless and visible inscription of power unto another’s
body, and within their self-narration.
Hirut described her state of mind upon leaving the prison:

I survived, but I was tortured and humiliated, what was there to celebrate?
Friends I lost, people died. I was angry and upset and devastated. This is
the country we want to live in? I had always dreamed of going to Addis
Ababa University, I had had opportunities to leave the country. I always
wanted to stay. This time, I said, I have to go at any cost. I must leave this
country. From that day on I started planning.

Once the local authorities stopped scrutinizing her every movement,

Hirut began to train for an exodus by walking across the city. When she
was ready, she and two male friends walked across the barren landscape
to Djibouti. Border guards caught them and threatened to return them
to Ethiopia. She grabbed the barrel of one guard’s gun and pulled it to
her chest: “Shoot me. I am never going back.” Thus started the long
8  B. CONLEY

process of seeking and getting asylum and a move to Canada. Crossing

the border—leaving Ethiopia—constituted an ending, of sorts.

Part II: Memory-Keeping in the Age of Transitional

Justice
Becoming a Memory-Keeper
In 2013, when I first met Hirut, we were both part of a group of civil
society actors gathered in Addis Ababa to discuss the idea of construct-
ing a human rights memorial at the African Union’s (AU) headquarters
in Addis Ababa. The memorial project was prompted by the city munic-
ipality’s decision to demolish the central prison, Kerchele, and its old-
est and most notorious wing, Alem Bekagn, which sat at the edge of
the AU’s campus. Alem Bekagn, which means “Farewell to the world”,
was a site of brutality during successive Ethiopian regimes. Built in the
1920s, it was a massacre site during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia.
Later, Haile Selassie’s Imperial regime held political prisoners, among
common criminals and vagrants, within its walls. Despite harsh condi-
tions, imprisoned political activists engaged in intense debate and dis-
cussion while imprisoned, a seminar behind bars that solidified the very
ideas that would eventually foment revolution. In the first days of the
Revolution, sixty Imperial ministers were killed there. Under the military
regime, the prison filled with a new generation of political prisoners. The
EPRDF that defeated Mengistu likewise filled the prison with its oppo-
nents, especially following controversial elections in 2005 (deWaal and
Ibreck 2013).
A site of Ethiopia’s history of oppression, in 2008, Alem Bekagn was
decommissioned and later torn down to make way for a glistening, anon-
ymously contemporary structure gifted by the Chinese government to
house the AU’s expanded headquarters (de Waal 2011). The memorial
project came too late to salvage the prison structure for a museum, but it
aimed to prompt the AU to consider dedicating a new space to a human
rights memorial, focused on the Red Terror, the Rwandan genocide,
Apartheid, and trans-Atlantic slavery.
By the time of the 2013 meeting, memorials to past periods of large-
scale violence had become a well-established practice around the world,
including in Africa (notably, South Africa, Rwanda, Kenya and the
 1  MEMORY FROM THE MARGINS  9

former slave ports of West Africa). Memorialization had acquired ­stature

in international policy-making as part of transitional justice, linking
examination of the past to the prospects for a democratic future through
a range of policy tools: prosecution, various forms of truth-­ telling,
archiving past periods of violence, and memorialization. Within this
framework, memorialization was seen as signaling a change in authori-
ties’ posture towards their publics, providing a symbolic point of ref-
erence and mourning for survivors and victims’ loved ones, keeping
memory alive for a future generation, and participating in the approved
international performances of legitimacy.
The meeting that initially introduced me to Hirut was held to dis-
cuss how the AU could foreground memory of human rights abuses in
physical form on its campus; a reminder to member nations about the
founding principles of the reconstituted continental union. For Hirut,
participating in a project like this was never part of her life’s plan. Yet,
decades after she left Ethiopia, vowing to forget everything, she had
become a memory-keeper, a survivor of torture who sought to docu-
ment and preserve the history of the Red Terror. Her personal goal was
to create a publicly available archive of the vast record of the Terror left
behind by its perpetrators.
Following the formal meetings, Hirut took our group to several
memorial sites in Addis. We visited the RTMMM; an oddly out of time,
yet still standing, monument built by Mengistu to the Ethiopian and
Cuban troops who fought with him against the Somali invasion of 1977;
a church that houses the final remains of Emperor Haile Selassie and
his wife; and a small memorial to Imperial ministers who were among
the first victims of the military regime’s rise to power in 1974. She also
gave us copies of Tower in the Sky, a memoir by Hiwot Teffera (2012),
another memory-keeper, a woman who had been a political activist dur-
ing the period of the Terror, and whose work is discussed in Chapter
Two. The memoir arrived on the scene in Ethiopia at a time when sev-
eral of the former Derg leaders, including Mengistu, also published their
memoirs—justifying the violence they had authorized and committed.
Teffera’s book, which I will discuss in depth in relation to the history of
the Red Terror, was extremely popular and well received in Ethiopia. I
saw it sold by street corner booksellers who stacked small piles of their
merchandise by the roadside, hoping to entice passers-by.
Hirut, Hiwot Teffera, and the RTMMM’s survivor-docents chose dif-
ferent methods of memory-keeping: writing about, becoming advocates
10  B. CONLEY

for, or guides to the history of these violent years. Most suffered torture
akin to what Hirut experienced, and some of them spent years longer
in prison. Their pathways to becoming memory-keepers entailed events
beyond their control as well as firm decisions made to reclaim agency
over the past. Hirut’s experience is illustrative.
Once she made her way to Canada, Hirut was determined never to
return to Ethiopia. She felt no confusion about where her loyalties lay:
she wanted to be Canadian and to make Canada her home. She built a
wall around her memories. Even with her sister and her best friend,
Elizabeth,1 who had also been imprisoned, they never spoke of what
happened. Her mother never even asked about it. So, once Hirut left,
she didn’t want to ever think about the Red Terror again.
“But life has its own ways…”, Hirut noted. In 1989, she received a
call from Elizabeth that would alter her plans. Kelbessa Negewo, the
leader of the kebele where she had been tortured, Elizabeth told her,
was living in Atlanta, Georgia, working in a hotel. An Ethiopian woman
who also worked at the hotel, Edgegayehu Taye, thought she recognized
Kelbessa when one day their shifts overlapped and she saw him in an ele-
vator (Rice 2006). Edgegayehu, who had also been tortured by Kelbessa,
contacted Elizabeth. Elizabeth then suggested they reach out to Hirut to
help ensure that the now aged and seemingly mellowed hotel worker in
Atlanta, was the same Kelbessa of their nightmares. Hirut’s identification
of the man would be helpful, because she had not only been tortured by
Kelbessa, but also lived next door to the kebele and saw him almost every
day for several years.
Hirut received the call with incredulity: How could a man so pow-
erful that he could kill another person on a whim, now be lugging bags
around for hotel guests in a southern American city?
But it was true. The women positively identified him and then
began to cautiously explore what they could do with this information.
Edgegayehu conveyed her story to a team of lawyers, Miles Alexander and
Laurel Lucey, who took the case pro bono. Adding Elizabeth and Hirut as
plaintiffs, the women who had never spoken of their torture learned to
find words to convey what they had suffered. Following several years of
legal effort, Hirut and the two other women won a case against Kelbessa
in an American civil court, awarded 1.5 million US dollars (of which they
collected less than $800, a sum they donated to charity) (Rice 2006). In
the meantime, Kelbessa was granted American citizenship, so could not
be deported to Ethiopia to face criminal charges for his actions during the
 1  MEMORY FROM THE MARGINS  11

Terror unless his citizenship was revoked. Thus, Hirut’s struggle with the
legal system continued.

Parallels with the Rise of Transitional Justice

The discovery of Kelbessa in Atlanta set off a chain of events for Hirut:
prompting her to return to traumatic memories and influencing her deci-
sion to eventually become a keeper of memory through her work on the
Red Terror archive. This seemingly individual decision and quirk of fate
became possible against the backdrop of transformative changes in the
international political, social and judicial landscape. How individual deci-
sions and local dynamics relate to larger geopolitical trends is one of the
key questions in this study. Four main threads—each of which will be
discussed in more depth in subsequent chapters—emerge. The first two
concern Ethiopian politics.
First, by the time Kelbessa had left Ethiopia, he wore the same kind of
scars on his feet that Hirut did. The military regime that empowered him
to commit unspeakable terrors against people in his neighborhood would
eventually turn against local-level actors like him as it sought to re-concen-
trate violence under its direct control. The regime became as ruthless with
its former allies and agents as it had been with its stated enemies. No matter
the power asymmetries that defined the plight of his victims, Kelbessa would
learn that the whiplash stroke of violence was never within his control.
Second, as the case against Kelbessa wound its way through the US
courts, Ethiopian politics changed. Mengistu’s military regime was
defeated in 1991 by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic
Front (EPRDF), that established a Special Prosecutor’s Office (SPO)
to investigate and bring to trial senior members of the former regime
believed to have committed serious crimes. An enormous legal effort,
the Special Prosecutor would eventually try over 3000 people. As we will
see, the RTMMM’s story begins in the wake of these efforts. Kelbessa
was among those prosecuted by the Ethiopian court in absentia, con-
victed and sentenced to life in prison in 2002 (Rice 2006).
Hirut’s story also intersects with international legal and political
events, which leads to the third and fourth ways in which Hirut’s story
intersects with broader political events.
Third, Hirut’s pursuit of a legal case against Kelbessa was possible
during a period in which lawyers and jurists around the world creatively
drew on existing laws (both national and international), in an effort to
12  B. CONLEY

push the limits of accountablity for contemporary human rights abuses.

Drawing on a US law from 1789, the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA),
lawyers for Hirut and her fellow survivors of torture were able to pursue
a civil case against Kelbessa within the American legal system.
In the US, the ATCA was similarly used to bring charges against per-
petrators who either resided in or were visiting the US, for abuses that
had occurred overseas. US civil courts heard cases concerning rape,
murder, execution and torture in, for example, Bosnia-Herzegovina,
East Timor, Rwanda, the Philippines, Guatemala, Argentina, Haiti, and
Paraguay.2 Although these were not criminal charges and financial settle-
ments were rarely paid out, the availability of this legal recourse stripped
some defendants of their right to reside in the US. One can speculate
that the threat of prosecution may have influenced former perpetrators of
abuses from considering the US as a potential place of residence (Coliver
2006, 1695).
Other countries experimented with different approaches. The pursuit
of cases based on universal jurisdiction in Spain, Belgium, Germany or
The Netherlands, for instance, advanced into the 2000s. In the inter-
national arena, this movement included ad hoc UN-mandated tribunals
for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, hybrid courts in Sierra Leone
and Cambodia, and the creation of a permanent International Criminal
Court. International advisors helped jurists in Bosnia-Herzegovina and
Kosovo, for instance, establish war crimes courts within their national
systems.
Political change both enabled and was furthered by these legal efforts.
Former human rights advocates took up official positions within govern-
ments in Latin America, Europe, Africa, and North America. The thawed
Cold War enabled unprecedented possibility for cohesion in the UN
Security Council. The “New World Order” glistened on the horizon:
democracy, market economies, rule of law and accountability formed the
spearhead that defined the frontlines of a global normative battle. The
period starting in the 1990s and continuing into the first decade of the
2000s, can be described as the ascent of human rights, the rise of the
international community, and the heyday of democratization. In Africa,
the movement was embodied by the triumph of a democratic, non-ra-
cial South Africa, the collapse of authoritarian and one-party systems in
favor of competitive electoral democracies, and the adoption of norms
and principles against tolerating atrocities and military coups by the
Organization of African Unity (OAU), which were then formalized in
 1  MEMORY FROM THE MARGINS  13

the Constitutive Act of the AU, adopted in 2002. Even revolutionary

armed movements that emerged out of Marxist ideology, such as the
EPRDF, were obliged to adopt the trappings of liberal democracy.
Fourth, the attacks of September 11, 2001 occurred and the response
of the “Global War on Terror” set into motion a new logic to r­einforce
and justify use of state violence. In the story of Hirut’s attempts to find
justice against her torturer, the 9/11 attack appears as a mere ­interruption.
In the American response to the attacks, the key bureaucratic office
through which the US government might take action to deport Kelbessa,
the Immigration and Naturalization Services, was dismantled and transi-
tioned to the Department of Homeland Security. The intervening years
caused delay in pursuit of the case against Kelbessa, but eventually in 2003
someone found the case languishing in a folder and began to work on it
again. Kelbessa, facing a long and expensive legal process, eventually relin-
quished his US citizenship, and was arrested by federal agents on January
4, 2005 (Rice 2006). He was deported to Ethiopia to serve his prison
term in 2006 (Blunt 2009).

Geopolitics Shifts from Civilian Protection to Self-Protection

From today’s perspective, the war on terror takes shape as something
much more virulent than an interruption of the story of expanding
democracy and justice. While explosively violent from the moment it
began (in New York City, Washington, DC, a field in rural Pennsylvania,
Afghanistan, and Iraq), it has steadily and unrelentingly eroded (although
not erased) the possibility for justice and human rights to serve as global
normative influences. The U.S., still touting its status as leader of the free
world, used that leadership to advocate for and use torture, illegal ren-
dition, targeted killings (extrajudicial executions), and aggressive armed
conflict. Bringing allies along and deploying every argument available,
including U.S. civilian protection, from 2001 to the time of this writ-
ing in 2018, the US and its allies militarily overthrew three govern-
ments (Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya), advocated the overthrow of several
others (Syria and Iran), criticized some states for doing the same, even
while supporting allies, like Saudi Arabia, for example, as it decimates
Yemen. The US also led the rush to create new digital tools for track-
ing and spying on civilian populations and enabled this technology to be
sold to so-called friendly states around the world—including to Ethiopia
(Turse 2017)—with enormous chilling effect throughout civil society
communities.
14  B. CONLEY

The same period during which international civil society expanded its
influence and articulated tools in support of rule of law and democracy
building, also witnessed systematic destruction of law and embrace of
violent coercion elsewhere. The arenas were set: as if a magic line could
cleanly separate the two trends. The 2011 NATO intervention in Libya
intervention functioned as a bridge between these two logics: a discourse
of civilian protection became excuse for regime change (Conley 2016).
Other international forces began to press on scales that had attempted
to balance international civilian protection and self-interested interven-
tion. Dovetailing with this story of rights and use of force was the rise of
powerful actors who do not subscribe to international rights discourse,
notably Russia and China, but including an increasing number of regimes
in other states. Western austerity policies and stagnation in incomes,
even while economies boomed, fueled upsurges in pseudo-populist
resentments. Mass mobilizations in the name of democratizing state
power in North Africa and the Middle East, the Arab Spring, became
entangled with the war on terror and monetized patronage politics (the
political marketplace) (de Waal 2016). Into the openings created in the
name of democracy and popular protest, rushed actors whose key attrib-
utes were a promise of stability and threat of force. Protest dominoed
into repression, conflict and instability across the Middle East, adding a
new zone of systematic violence to the map of world crises. By 2018, the
Middle East conflict and security dynamics had come to enfold the Horn
of Africa, including Ethiopia. Momentum steadily shifted towards re-
assertion of sovereignty and states’ rights to deploy violence.

Democracy Becomes Problematic

The place of democratization in this swirl of forces is complex. At a con-
ceptual level democracy can mean any number of things: a manner of
legitimatizing political practices in the name of the people, a form of
representational government, a set of political practices foremost char-
acterized by competition among organized parties, a society defined by
equality before the law, and governmental institutions that are trans-
parent and accountable. Pushed to consider democracy, most transi-
tional justice advocates would likely say it includes all of these: a political
philosophy; a way of organizing the state, politics, and public life; and
institutional structures. However, democracy in transitional justice dis-
course as it emerged in a particular framework at the end of the Cold
 1  MEMORY FROM THE MARGINS  15

War, was interested in only a subset of the key questions that define the
concept of democracy.
As Paige Arthur notes, both the various practices of transitional j­ustice
and de facto political transitions long pre-date the 1990s. New to the
transitional justice movement in this period was tying particular practices
to political change, and viewing their convergence as telescoping towards
a single end point: liberal democracy (Arthur 2009, 334, 337). This
was possible, because around the world, diverse populations embraced
democracy as a political goal. However, the particular ­ perspective
that viewed democracy as achievable through a “transition” that could
occur in fairly short order rested upon three central assumptions
about history and politics. First, was the view that democracy could be
achieved through a series of elite pacts in any context, without reference
to socio-economic conditions. Second, was the adaptation of a Marxist
teleological term, “transition”, describing inevitable stages of capitalist
development towards communism. In the rise of democratization in the
1990s, transition was re-conceived in terms of the inevitably of liberal
democracy—everywhere and now. The democratic present had arrived,
and was waiting for undemocratic countries to catch-up, a task that was
treated as self-evident and requiring only technocratic implementation of
discrete institutional and procedure mechanisms.
Third, in much of the world, and here Ethiopia’s transition is an out-
lier, the political left transformed into a left-leaning politics organized
around the discourse of individual, political (or human) rights. As Arthur
summarizes:

…in most of the countries undergoing political change, democracy was a

desirable goal for many people; the delegitimation of modernization the-
ory; the transformation of the transitions concept from a tool of socioec-
onomic transformation to one of legal-institutional reform; and the global
decline of the radical Left. (2009, 340)

Thus the democracy of transitions was largely relegated to formulaic

institutional or procedural (with elections as the major benchmark)
reforms, monitored by the international community. This version of a
democratic transition was premised on “civil and political rights through
emphasis on elections, procedural democracy, constitutionalism, and the
rule of law and various backward-looking truth and justice measures” as
16  B. CONLEY

well as “market driven neoliberal economics” (Gready and Robins 2014,

341). Transitional justice developed as a template unconcerned with
redefining democracy in a given context, questioning what constitutes
“the people” or innovating policies concerned with the welfare of the
people. Within this template, memorials and museums are assigned only
a limited role, and it is one they are not always well-placed to play.
Another view of democracy is required to glimpse the contributions
a memorial museum might make: one focused on the idea of political
community (the people) and how it is produced and reproduced, chal-
lenged and expanded. Jacques Rancière’s work is helpful (2006). He
describes democracy as a movement of asserting claims that disrupts
the idea of the people, however defined, regulated and governed by the
state. Democracy is not an end point, but a performance from the mar-
gins that aims to expand and contest the limits of the public sphere. A
state might be considered more or less democratic to the extent that it
can engage in dialogue with these claims in recognition of the claim-
ants’ equality—if not in fact, then in democratic premise—with those in
government.
Within the Ethiopian context, there remain diverse claims about
defining the “people” as a foundational concept, and hence how gov-
ernment might be justified by and respond to the people’s claims. The
EPRDF government was legitimated by the idea that the people exist
at the intersection of nation with state and party. Nation has a pecu-
liar history in Ethiopia. Never colonized, there was Ethiopian patriot-
ism (against foreign invaders), but also subaltern nationalisms (Oromo,
Tigray, Southern Peoples, etc.). The major debates in 1991 concerned
identity politics, as the basis on which politics in the name of the peo-
ple could be stabilized and manifested in the coalition political parties.
Defining the people in terms other than those of identity, such as was
exemplified in the Red Terror, where people took to the streets and were
killed by the state on the basis of political views, were marginalized. In
memorialization, entitlements based on past, alternate views of the foun-
dational question of the political organization of the people find expres-
sion by expanding the conceptual field of the public sphere.
Analysis of how “democracy” as a ubiquitous concept is delimited in
policy practices, requires understanding how these limits created mar-
gins. Ethiopia has been marginal within study of transitions that occurs
in an undemocratically structured globalized hierarchy. The country
also has internal margins, ones created through modes of governance.
 1  MEMORY FROM THE MARGINS  17

The Ethiopian example suggests that examination of transitional mech-

anisms and their various successes and failures needs to move beyond
the question of how local actors implement internationally determined
democratization agendas. Rather, it suggests another approach: how do
various local actors challenge and innovate (for better or worse) from the
margins?

The Mixed Record of Transitional Justice

The complications of how various margins delimit and define the poten-
tial for democratic outcomes, challenge the idea of templated democracy.
While a seemingly esoteric point, this insight is reflected in very practi-
cal reconsiderations of transitional justice policies based on the uneven
record of democratic outcomes in country examples.
There is little consensus on the impact of transitional justice mech-
anisms. Assessments have produced highly varied conclusions that
depend on the methodology deployed and variables studied (Stewart and
Wiebelhaus-Brahm 2017). Thus, researchers have alternately found: no
evidence of societal contribution of prosecutions (Meernik 2005); no
deterrent effect (Cronin-Furman 2013); neither a positive nor a negative
effect on domestic democratization (Meernik et al. 2010); or a positive
contribution of prosecutions on the norm of accountability (Hunjoon
and Sikkink 2010). Olsen et al. (2010) studied 854 transitional justice
mechanisms implemented in 161 countries between 1970 and 2007,
and tried to determine whether these processes positively affect human
rights and democracy. Their findings suggest that no single mechanism
stands on its own, but must exist within a political environment condu-
cive to multiple methods of seeking justice; introducing a circular logic,
whereby democratizing effects require a pre-existing commitment to
democratize. They found that combining amnesties and trials, or amnes-
ties, trials and truth commissions seemed to support positive human
rights and democratic outcomes. Whereas, for example, truth commis-
sions, they found, may increase social problems.
While political scientists seek to refine the methods of measuring con-
tributions, transitional justice practitioners have sought improvements in
implementing mechanisms. General consensus of the transitional justice
field is that even as it became more professionalized and standardized, its
impacts were revealed as highly context-dependent. In response, many
transitional justice practitioners increasingly argue for the need to adapt
18  B. CONLEY

to local exigencies and operate with a holistic approach to social change

in order to maximize the contributions of various post-conflict tools to
democratization (Gready and Robins 2014; Mutua 2015, 5).
A more radical critique suggests throwing out the entire paradigm of
human rights related approaches to politics. A 2018 scholarly article by
Ingrid Wuerth summarizes key policy arguments that the human rights
expansion contributed to making the world less secure. Wuerth argues
that re-casting international relations and the scope of legal mechanisms
to interfere between a state and its population was a gross overstep,
working against the stabilizing factor of sovereignty in the international
system. Noting that conflicts produce some of the worst human rights
abuses, she argues for an international return to traditional issues of
security and peace away from rights-based interventions. She continues
by asserting that the UN has de facto been weakened by human rights
expansion, which exposed gaps between member states, norms, laws and
power (Wuerth 2017, 312). Wuerth also recites the argument frequently
put forward by formerly colonized states that the liberal international
system was rigged against those who were already globally weak actors:
it was never applied fairly and represented western imperialism. She
draws on the record, noted above, that the net result of the expansion of
international interventions based on a human rights agenda did not pro-
duce countries guided by rule of law, but rather a backlash resurgence of
nationalism and pseudo-populism. To this, she adds another argument:
multiplying legal mechanisms in a global context without viable enforce-
ment mechanisms created a “broken windows” effect—accelerating
a sense of impunity for abuses (Wuerth 2017, 286–289).
One need not accept all of these arguments, even while noting that
global trend lines concur that the human rights and transitional justice
optimism of the turn of the century has not borne out. Whereas the
1990s saw regular declines in military coups, armed conflicts, violence,
famine and mass atrocities, beginning in 2011, all the trend lines shifted
and started to tell a different story. Globally, democracy faltered.

All Boats Sink Together?

The relationship between any memory-keepers’ struggle to realize a pro-
ject, the impact of those projects, national democratizing efforts, and
global trends are not reducible to a single trajectory—neither of advance
nor of retreat. There are however, parallels in the case of Hirut’s story
 1  MEMORY FROM THE MARGINS  19

and the Ethiopian context, which may illuminate the larger patterns that
once tied memory projects to democracy and state-building, and which
now seems to tether their mutual decline. However, Ethiopia’s path was
from the beginning and continues to be that of an outlier in the global
narrative—a story from the margins.
Hirut, having re-opened her memories through the process of pur-
suing a legal case against Kelbessa, decided that there was more she
could do. As the legal case progressed, Hirut became aware of the
enormous amount of documentary evidence left behind by Mengistu’s
military regime. Inspired by the Documentation Center for Cambodia
(DC-Cam),3 she founded the Ethiopian Red Terror Documentation and
Research Center (ERTDRC) in 2007. The ERTDRC set its goal as the
collection, preservation, translation, and indexing of official documents
and survivor testimonies of the Derg’s Red Terror. As Hirut wrote, “By
collecting and preserving the detritus of one of the most traumatic and
formative periods of Ethiopia’s recent history, we hope, at the very least,
in the words of Canadian author and academic, Michael Ignatieff, ‘to
narrow the range of permissible lies’” (Abebe-Jirut 2012, 6). Initially
the center received support from the Ethiopian government and was
granted an office in the SPO, and the work of archiving the enormous
record of the trials, and hence the Terror itself, began. But over time,
bureaucratic hurdles multiplied—seemingly, a policy of obstruction.
Despite emerging out of the nexus of influential international support-
ers of memory-keepers,4 the ERTDRC—like many other such memory
projects and the paradigm of examining the past as a vehicle for altering
future behavior—is in a holding pattern.
From today’s perspective, the threads of justice, truth-telling, and
documentation that compose Hirut’s story and the broader realm of
Red Terror memorialization, do not weave a clear picture of progress.
The story is more complicated. It cannot be described as culminating in
triumph whereby memory allows delayed justice, which then serves as
handmaiden to the implementation of democratic procedures. But if the
line of history is not a one-way path of progress, neither is it straight
in terms of reversal. The question at hand is not did the peacebuilding
and democracy building normative surge and all of the accompany-
ing practices, including memorialization, produce sustainable democra-
cies. A different set of questions needs to be asked. They begin with
less certainty—and hence less disillusionment when challenges mount—
about the one-to-one ratio of programs to outcomes, the capacity of
20  B. CONLEY

internationals to reshape societies, the timeline for transitions, the fire-

walls between domestic injustices and international influence, the nature
of solidarity, and the temptations of power.
This is the context in which I focus on a marginal story of memory
and democracy, through the lens of a small memorial museum, estab-
lished and managed by civil society actors, in the Ethiopian capital of
Addis Ababa: the Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum. The Museum
opened on March 7, 2010—thus, more than three decades after the vio-
lence occurred and almost two decades following the overthrow of the
regime that perpetrated the violence. The RTMMM was created through
the persistence of civil society actors, dedicated to telling the story of
decimation of the political opposition by Mengistu’s military regime.
Red Terror history is not that of the rise of the political party that
emerged dominant following its defeat of Mengistu, the EPRDF. It is a
story of an early chapter in the effort to counter the military regime, one
that included almost complete decimation of the EPRP, whose member-
ship was based in Addis Ababa and suffered most in the Terror, several
other political opposition groups, and people caught in the widening
scope of violence. The RTMMM persists as an institution against the
backdrop of enormous national political changes and evolving geopolit-
ical trends. As a physical space composed of objects and fixed elements,
it is open to the public—a factor that differentiates it from prosecutions
or even the archive, both of which appeals to specialists. Museums must
rise to the challenge of conveying memory to whoever walks through its
doors. A political outsider—not at odds with the EPRDF but also not
documenting their story—permanent, physical and public, the RTMMM
offers a powerful venue through which to probe the evolving relevance
of memory of past violence to democratic practices. The RTMMM also
provides a glimpse from an unlikely perspective: a view of memory from
the margins.

Part III: Memory from the Margins

What can one museum, the Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum, tell
us about the role of memory in supporting democracy? To be sure, there
are limits. Nonetheless, a view of memory from the margins reveals a
glimpse of how a public memory project in the wake of mass violence
makes its impact. This glimpse suggests that memory has an oblique,
yet powerful, affinity with an idea (not a program or set of policies) of
 1  MEMORY FROM THE MARGINS  21

democracy as a politics based on the possibility of unsettling the present

in a manner that opens space for new claims to be posed. When mem-
ory emerges out of the margins, it interrupts the current dispensation
of power, altering who has propriety to speak and what concerns can be
heard. There is no guarantee that such a disruption will occur in a society
that either benefits from it (disruption can be destabilizing and destruc-
tive) or is responsive to it. I use the term “affinity” to capture the sense
that the political meaning of memorial projects is largely undetermined,
even if its structure as interruption aligns with a process of opening polit-
ical discourse.
The formulation of “memory from the margins” introduces several key
terms. In the first instance, “memory” as a concept is itself composed of
multiple elements that arise out of a relationship to the past, and includes
ideas of community and ethics. “From” captures the movement that
endows memory with disruptive capacity. “Margins” identifies a starting
point for narratives that do not fit the dominant story of the present.
Memory in this volume is studied through the example of a memorial
museum, hence is it a physical site of memory that is open to the public.
The term “collective memory” is relevant, but can misdirect. Its phras-
ing suggests a singular memory akin to individual memory that holds
across a group. Few scholars use it in this fashion. Rather, picking up on
Maurice Halbwachs’ initial theorization of the phrase, it describes how
personal memory is socially constructed, and the social and political pro-
cesses whereby parts of the past are deemed to have contemporary rele-
vance (Halbwachs 1992). Memory projects concerned with histories of
large-scale violence, often proceed through a normative view of collective
memory: deploying an affective approach to representing violence, often
by emphasizing victims’ perspectives, in order to argue for how they
instill lessons of tolerance to new generations.
While this study of a particular memorial museum project relies heav-
ily on victim and survivor narratives, it remains agnostic about how
these narratives impact new audiences, and what lessons the past offers.
To this end, a working definition of memory that keeps these questions
open is required. Drawing on three elements of memory that repeat
across most definitions, memory in this study is understood (a) in rela-
tion to a public project (in the sense of being available to the public),
that (b) references a violent past, with (c) the aim of producing a new
community,5 responsive to ethical claims “to do something” in the pres-
ent. The precise configuration of past, community, and call to action
22  B. CONLEY

varies considerably across examples and evolves over time. Throughout

this volume, I argue that memory from the margins reveals disjunctions
between these three elements, and thereby inserts disruption into the
process of making social-political meaning from the past.
No definition of memory means much without placement into a
­specific context. Memory of what? Whose memories matter and in what
ways? Which ones become hegemonic, which are relinquished? How are
memories imbued with new meanings, rendered actionable in the pres-
ent? The act of engaging in memorialization on its own does not nec-
essarily imply a commitment to support democratic processes, more
questions need to be asked: how are projects developed, by whom, with
what intentions and means?
These central questions compose memory and cannot be engaged
except through discrete examples. The very utopian promises that define
memory, as a discourse whereby the past can be reconfigured to alter
the present—especially its relation to democracy—is determined by the
propositions put forward through the example. Selecting the precise
example to prioritize is a practice riven with politics. How one argues
that any given example establishes borders for concepts and informs their
applicability to other cases and to socio-political processes—these are not
innocent matters.
The preposition “from” is a crucial modifier within the formulation of
memory from the margins. It describes a movement that begins in one
conceptual place, the margins, and interjects into a dominant narrative.
It is the movement itself that generates critical interest. Thus, there is
relativity at play in the formulation of memory from the margins, in that
if movement is halted—especially as a memory discourse becomes dom-
inant—its disruptive capacity is diminished. Further, as will be examined
below, any given memorial project might be marginal in some senses, but
not in others. To examine movement—the from—margins must be trian-
gulated not only to a singular dominant narrative, but multiple margins
and dominant narratives.
The example of the RTMMM is particularly helpful for reading this
movement because it does not hold center stage of any of the contexts
within which it will be discussed. The period of the Red Terror is mar-
ginalized within Ethiopian history. The Ethiopian experience of politi-
cal transition in 1991, including its adoption of multiple policies to deal
with the past, are marginalized within international transitional justice
 1  MEMORY FROM THE MARGINS  23

discourse. Memorialization itself is marginal within the various mecha-

nisms of transitional justice. Thinking about memory from across these
nested margins draws upon multiple disciplinary approaches, even as it
disrupts some of the presumptions that anchor these discourses.

Part IV: The Margins

The Red Terror on the Margins of Ethiopian Political History

Red Terror memory is marginal within the Ethiopian political context.
This is not to argue that either RTMMM or memory practices are unim-
portant or irrelevant. However, to appreciate how they are important
and relevant, they must be first positioned within a political economy in
which they are not dominant forces.
The Red Terror (1976–1978) was a period of intensive violence
authorized and largely perpetrated by the newly established military
dictatorship under Mengistu Haile Mariam. When the Imperial regime
was overthrown in the 1974 Revolution, the political opposition was
not in a position to take charge and the military asserted itself into the
gap. Mengistu represented the most radical and violent element within
the military, and he concentrated power in his hands. As he ascended,
state-sponsored violence expanded. The Red Terror was his effort to
destroy the largely urban-based political opposition, especially the EPRP.
The use of torture to elicit confession and force people to betray the
organization of the political opposition and its membership instilled
a sense of fear, and need for silence as self-protection and depoliticiza-
tion, not only among former political activists, but also among the wider
urban and educated population. By 1978, Mengistu’s policies decimated
the EPRP and other urban opposition, and, as occurred in the fate of
Hirut’s torturer, Kelbessa, the regime turned against other political fac-
tions that had previously supported it. Memory of the Red Terror was
buried, and this part of the Ethiopian political story ended.
A different wave of armed opposition, constituted in rural areas (led
by Tigray) and organized around the identities of cultural communities,
slowly gained advantage over the subsequent decades. These rebel fight-
ers established the EPRDF, and eventually overthrew Mengistu’s military
dictatorship in 1991 and remain in power at time of writing—although
currently the government is undergoing enormous change (addressed
in the concluding chapter). The EPRDF also established memorial
24  B. CONLEY

museums, as will be discussed in Chapter 3, institutions that influenced

the creation of the RTMMM, but which are structured as histories of the
triumphal “peoples’ war”.
Thus, the Red Terror and its memorialization is not the narrative of
the current regime. In this, the RTMMM is strikingly different from
many global examples of memorial museums, where memorialization of
civilian dead is tethered to a project of legitimizing a new political order
and aligns with its foundational narrative. In Rwanda, the Rwandan
Patriotic Front ultimately militarily defeated the genocidal regime,
and this battlefield victory plays a central role in how the government
explains itself inside and outside the country. In Bosnia, the g
­ overnment
and territory remain divided with the key political parties from the war
era still wielding power; hence, contestation over the narrative of the
violence against civilians during the 1992–1995 conflict remains cen-
tral to post-conflict political and memorial positioning. For different
reasons, Holocaust remembrance supports national narratives in, for
instance, Germany (as rejection of the Nazi state), Israel (as justification
for the new state) or the US (as an ethical bolster to its post-World War
II internationalism). Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia was
first created as a museum by the Vietnamese who defeated the Khmer
Rouge and established the government that followed. In South Africa,
post-apartheid sites like the Robben Island Museum or Constitution
Hill were intended as permanent markers of the new state’s rejection
of the former regime and installation of a law-based dispensation of
political equality. Likewise, in even older models, like the Hiroshima
Peace Memorial, memory of the nuclear bombing of the city aligns
with the non-militaristic national posture adopted by post-World War
II Japan. Analysis of these memory projects is at the same time analy-
sis of the intersection of memory and power politics. Memorial sites in
Chile and Argentina may more closely align with the circumstances of
the RTMMM, as these countries’ transitions from military dictatorship
occurred slowly and through compromise, thus the memorials have
played more ambiguous political roles in relation to the governments
that emerged after military dictatorships.
In Ethiopia, the overthrow of Mengistu in 1991 enabled survivors
and those who lost loved ones to become memory-keepers and begin the
work of telling the story, but it remains on the margins of the country’s
national political and historical self-narration.
 1  MEMORY FROM THE MARGINS  25

Ethiopia on the Margins of Transitional Justice Cases

There is no lack of scholarly or political debate about the meaning of
the Ethiopian political transition in 1991; the period and issues are dis-
cussed across a lively horizon of debate within communities focused on
Ethiopian history and politics. However, rarely does the complexity of
the Ethiopian case and its debates cross over into a comparative frame-
work (Cohen6 2001, 223). At present, there is no scholarly literature on
the RTMMM, nor, as far as I could find, on Ethiopia’s other memorials
and memorial museums that were created after the defeat of the military
regime, and very little comparative work on Ethiopia’s political transi-
tion. There is much to be learned in the Ethiopian example of political
transition and memorialization, if only for how it is difficult to incor-
porate this early case into the narrative of how transitions to democracy
should have occurred—a narrative that, as noted above, now faces chal-
lenges from all sides.
Ethiopia’s contemporary history is complex, with multiple conflicts
and patterns of violence, diverse sets of perpetrators, victims, and politi-
cal logics. The relevant period is extenuated over time, from the onset of
the Revolution in 1974 through the EPRDF’s victory in 1991, and into
the country’s new political dispensation thereafter. The period includes
the Revolution, Red Terror, war with Somalia, armed conflicts with var-
ious domestic groups, the ultimate triumph of the EPRDF, war with
Eritrea, armed entanglements with neighboring countries, and ongo-
ing contention with multiple political opponents inside and outside the
country. While daunting, the country’s complicated horizon of actors
and debates provide a complex setting into which to read questions of
memory and political transition.
In addition to historical complexity, three primary reasons help
account for the lack of integration of Ethiopian transitional experience
into other areas of study. First, Ethiopia underwent political transition
just as the paradigms for memory and transitional justice were gaining
momentum. The 1991 transition from Mengistu’s regime to the one
established by the EPRDF occurred at a moment when the scholarly and
practitioner field of international transitional justice did not exist. South
Africa had not yet held its paradigm-setting Truth and Reconciliation
Commission; the Argentines had opted for amnesty and were only
beginning to struggle with how to live with and challenge that leg-
acy; Chile’s Pinochet had not yet been indicted; the wars of the former
26  B. CONLEY

Yugoslavia were just beginning and the international criminal tribunal

was not yet mandated, let alone its sister tribunal for the Rwandan geno-
cide, which had also not yet occurred.
But the moment was auspicious. When the legions of ERPDF rebel
fighters entered Addis Ababa in 1991, they faced an enormous challenge
in transforming not only the country but also themselves into civilian
national leaders. Their challenges resonated with early discussions about
transitional justice that were occurring internationally and of which they
were aware. The EPRDF leadership drew from international discussions,
but its policies were primarily shaped by the answers it developed over
the course of the rebellion as they steadily gained control over territory
that they then governed. Throughout the armed struggle, they devel-
oped policies of political education with captured prisoners of war, with
the goal of engaging their erstwhile opponents as potential allies. Thus,
their governance policies and practices of handling representatives of the
regime they fought against were formed across the long duration of the
armed struggle. They, like new governments elsewhere, found in transi-
tional mechanisms a way of signaling to domestic and international audi-
ences that their government intended to be qualitatively different from
its predecessor (Gebrehiwot 2019).
Second, the Ethiopians developed procedures for implementing tran-
sitional mechanisms almost entirely without international aid. They
deployed policies of lustration (removal of representatives of the former
regime from government offices), security sector reform, disarmament,
demobilization and re-integration, large-scale criminal prosecutions
against former regime leaders, and, the story told here, memorialization.
The country’s leadership largely managed the transition itself, instill-
ing these mechanisms with distinct traits borne out of their set of skills,
means, and goals.
One instructive difference between the Ethiopian experience and later
deployments of transitional justice arises in the simple matter of the lan-
guage of the Courts. At the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda,
for instance, several years went by before Tribunal documents were avail-
able in Kinyarwandan, the language spoken by Rwandans. In Ethiopia,
the opposite occurred: most proceedings were conducted in Amharic, a
language understood by the majority of Ethiopians. However, Amharic
is not spoken outside the country, limiting international access to the
record of proceedings.
 1  MEMORY FROM THE MARGINS  27

This basic linguistic difference amplifies a larger point: no interna-

tional lawyers, policy-makers or analysts made their careers based on the
Ethiopian case. The story of much of transitional justice is about interna-
tional experiences in a national context, not primarily national dynamics.
Ethiopia’s experience added little to the international narrative, except a
conclusion that the work was best led by internationals (a viewpoint that
would alter over time with a shift back to valuing local perspectives and
practices).
This leads to the third point. In the few mentions of the Ethiopian
example in comparative transitional justice studies, the main conclu-
sion is that shortcomings immediately became apparent. Criticisms of
the prosecutions stated that the accused were held for extended peri-
ods without knowing the charges against them; trials took too long;
the SPO was extended far beyond its capacity; there were not enough
trained lawyers and jurists, especially for defense teams; the rights
of accused were abused through undue delays in presenting charges
and bringing cases to trial; and the judiciary was politicized in that
crimes perpetrated by the EPRDF were not considered (Vaughan
2009). But perhaps a more salient critique is that the EPRDF govern-
ment displayed “reticence” to “involve itself in the affairs of the SPO
even when, as in mid-1994, the Office was drawing considerable inter-
national pressure to present charges against those detained for three
years without charges” (Vaughan 2009, 64). The work of the Special
Prosecutor faced serious criticisms, but these do not void the Ethiopian
experience of all insight and relevance to larger questions of justice,
memory, and transitions.
Nonetheless, the scale of the endeavor and mounting criticism soon
overwhelmed the EPRDF government, and its interests pulled in differ-
ent directions. While the EPRDF adapted their formative socialist ideol-
ogy to the new post-Cold War realities, political and civil rights took a
clear backseat to the prerogatives of the increasingly one-party state and
economic development. Political opponents, journalists, and non-gov-
ernmental organizations faced mounting hurdles to access and influence
the political system, especially following the war with Eritrea in 1998–
2000 and controversial elections in 2005. Further, given that Ethiopia is
situated in an area of the world that is notable for its conflicts and insta-
bility, international actors were willing to overlook political shortcomings
in favor of focusing on stability and economic growth.
28  B. CONLEY

Thus, the case study of Ethiopia is marginal in transitional justice lit-

erature, because, from the start, its political and memorial trajectory are
difficult to fit into the dominant narratives that define the academic and
policy paradigms for political transition in the late twentieth century.
Assumptions about what transitional justice practices would produce
limited the number of cases that would inform the field’s early develop-
ment. However, over time, more cases have been examined and even the
paradigm-setting cases have been re-examined with a more critical lens.
Thus, in today’s context, the dominant transitional justice examples, like
South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the UN-mandated
tribunals, or memorial sites in Argentina, for instance, have come under
increasing scrutiny. Ethiopia never quite fit the paradigm. The complex-
ities of Ethiopia’s various memorial and transitional practices simultane-
ously innovated, fell short of and differed from these paradigms.

Memorialization on the Margins of Transitional Justice Practices

Memorialization has always been marginal to transitional justice policy
mechanisms. As Buckley-Zistel and Schafer note, despite the increas-
ing reference to commemoration within political transitions, scholars
and practitioners “often share a rather skeptical outlook on the alleg-
edly beneficial impact of such interventions: ranging from fears that
an open display of contested memories reignites dormant animosities
to the defeatist beliefs that symbolic politics of far-away state institu-
tions make little difference in war-torn communities” (Buckley-Zistel
and Schafer 2014, 2). More central were legal proceedings, lustra-
tion, truth and reconciliation, security sector reform and so forth.
Nonetheless, memorialization and commemoration have become
increasingly common in transitional contexts, often classified as sym-
bolic reparations.
Symbolic reparations include a range of mechanisms—financial com-
pensation, apologies, commemorations, memorials, renaming public
spaces, official apologies, etc., that address victims’ rights in the after-
math of violence (UN 2005). Notably, within the transitional justice
framework, these rights include non-repetition, that is, a social and polit-
ical promise to victims that they will not again fall prey to violence previ-
ously suffered. Symbolic reparations can also be understood as making a
broader social contribution, as Ereshnee Naidu (2014) points out, in the
 1  MEMORY FROM THE MARGINS  29

form of restorative justice when they contribute to improved (restored)

communal relations.
My point about the marginal role of memory projects is not the same
as the status memorials occupy within the transitional justice literature.
The transitional justice literature tends to approach symbolic reparations
from the perspective of how they contribute to the singular goal of cre-
ating rights-based, rule of law, market-based democracies. In this way, a
memory project might be deemed relevant in how it speaks to victims’
needs in the aftermath of violence, but invariably also as a less direct
method than legal or economic policy reform measures.
A view from the margins suggests that memory projects are not
merely less direct than other transitional mechanisms in support of a par-
ticular political outcome; they function differently. Let me further clarify
the argument in relation to two different versions of an out-sized politi-
cal role for memory projects: one from critics and the other from advo-
cates of memory projects. Shared by both critics and advocates is a belief
that memory—a call on the past to forge communities in the name of a
political agenda—can be channeled at will towards a particular political
outcome.
Several analysts (Nora 1989; Verdery 1999; Rieff 2017) have been
critical of how memory produces nostalgia, feeds grievance, reifies
social divisions, and reinforces power inequalities. Among the latest
in this line of critique, David Rieff, for instance, argued that memory
can be uncompromising and vengeful, distorting state-building into a
battleground for victimhood. Rather than inoculating new generations
against the abuses of the past, he writes, memorialization de-politi-
cizes and sacralizes discussions about governance that properly belong
to realm of compromise and debate (Rieff 2017). This line of argu-
ment helpfully reinserts analysis of power relations into discussion of
memory.
However, such criticism fails to examine the ways that powerful politi-
cal actors seize upon, warp and bend any discourse that is socially salient,
and which can be deployed to reinforce power, be it religion, ideology,
clan or familial lineage, economic class, or so forth (Hobsbawm 1983).
Critics thereby overlook the primary question of why memory is a pow-
erful organizing principle today. The answer to this question implicates
larger ideological and sociological factors at the national and globalizing
30  B. CONLEY

realm and challenges the idea that memory functions in isolation from its
historical rise as an organizing concept.
Further, critics attribute to memory that which actually belongs to
interests of powerful actors. There are certainly cases, as noted above,
where memorialization of violence against civilians aligns with the
self-justifying narrative of a regime. But even in these examples, a closer
look will find tension between the imperatives of power and those
of memory of mass violence. It is disingenuous to suggest, as some of
these critics do, that in order to protect a certain political balance, “we”
(often unspecified ) should discard memory. This position treats memory
as an entirely voluntary endeavor that can be eschewed when it threat-
ens to become instrumentalized or if it interferes with a political process.
However, if one pays attention to the array of forces that contribute to
the appeal of memory in the world today, it becomes clear that some-
thing more complex than merely self-present decision-making influences
the global rise of memory projects.
There is another risk from the side of memory advocates who have
argued that memorial museums can support democracy, justice and rec-
onciliation through crafting of a common narrative, truth-telling, repa-
ration and coming to grips with the past (Brett et al. 2007; Barsalou and
Baxter 2007; Bickford and Sodaro 2010). Memorialization efforts have
been lauded for how they signal change to the populace, assigning social
value to the losses suffered by survivors and families of victims by herald-
ing that abuses have been exiled to the display case or archives (Wagner
2008; Brett et al. 2007). In so doing, states articulate a moral posture
in a memorial lexicon that is increasingly globalized and advocated for
by international actors (Levy and Snzaider 2001; Bickford and Sodaro
2010). These arguments postulate that memory of large-scale violence
can be harnessed to and contained within a normatively defined political
agenda of democratization.
Over time and in response to criticism of the politicization of mem-
ory, advocates have refined their arguments for and approaches to
memorials in the wake of violence. Recognizing the threat of tying mem-
ory to state-building, advocates for memory have sought to clarify the
conditions under which memorialization can contribute to peacebuilding
and democratization. Memorials have thus been studied in relationship
to multiple transitional mechanisms and the importance of sequencing
(Naidu 2006), and the value of a democratic process of memory work,
the integrity of which should be examined distinct from any particular
 1  MEMORY FROM THE MARGINS  31

outcome (Hamber et al. 2010). Fine-grain analyses have demonstrated

how memorials resist instrumentalization through the inclusion of griev-
ing survivors (Ibreck 2010). Increasingly, advocates adopt positions that
privilege local-level initiatives over national-level memorialization (Brett
et al. 2007, 2; Gready and Robins 2014). Although, as Kris Brown notes
in a study on memorials in Northern Ireland, ‘local’ does not mean apo-
litical. Local memorial efforts often present a different arena for constitu-
ency management within a group, between grass-roots and elites (Brown
2013, 9). The arguments for memory as a contributor to democratizing
politics recognize that the precise form, process, intentions and context
of memorial projects will determine the character of their political contri-
bution (Whigham 2017).
Today, civil society advocates of memorial projects emphasize remem-
brance for the sake of the nation, to remembrance for the sake of the
individual (Bickford and Sodaro 2010, 72–73). In this, “transitional”
memorialization resonates with efforts in advanced democracies. James
E. Young, for example, has argued in favor of negative form memorials
(Young 2016). These structures are premised on the inability of memo-
rials to represent past violence and instead attempt to draw attention to
the void of loss—to what a memorial cannot do. They thus reject the
social role of a memorial as a structure that signifies a shared vision of
loss. Negative form memorials—the signature example of which is Maya
Lin’s Vietnam Memorial—simultaneously mark the longing for and the
inability of contemporary societies to postulate a unified identity, let
alone to build a memorial to one. Negative form memorials resist the
role of “complet[ing] memory itself, put[ting] a cap on memory work,
and draw[ing] a bottom line underneath an era” (Young 1999). Rather
than ‘collective memory’, Young has suggested the idea of “collected
memories” as a way to conceptualize memorials that refuse to symbolize
a common abstracted identity or state narrative, and instead posit a mul-
ti-perspectival, cosmopolitan or ‘post-memory’ presentation of the past
(Rothberg 2009; Hirsch 2012). In this way, negative memory projects
are akin to counter-memory: projects that draw on memory as a mode of
resistance to hegemonic narratives.
These nuanced views of the role of public memory projects demon-
strate the considerable evolution of thinking about how memorial forms
and processes might make a socio-political impact. I have learned much
from these perspectives7 and further emphasize two additional points.
First, the meaning of memory is never fully harnessed by intentions.
32  B. CONLEY

Because of this, secondly, the character of political contribution by

memorial projects does not directly align with formulaic and procedur-
ally defined democracy. The idea of a one-to-one relationship between
memorializing traumatic history and direct democratic processes mis-
characterizes memorialization’s most powerful contribution: to disrupt
the present. As will be shown, this is not a normative role, but a struc-
tural one.

Part V: The Contributions of Memory from the Margins

This study of memory from the margins makes five central contribu-
tions. It presents an understudied case, challenges theories of why and
how memory has become globally influential cultural and political
force, prompts a re-examination of the relationship between agency
and memory, characterizes how memory functions through disrup-
tion, and explores why memory cannot be attributed a normative
political role.

Presents an Understudied Case

Despite multiple pronouncements of a global memory glut or boom
(Huyssen 2003), commentary on and study of memorialization remains
heavily reliant on study of Holocaust memorialization across multi-
ple national contexts. Nonetheless, an additional, although still limited,
number of cases have also grown to stature. Today, the bulk of work
at the intersection of museums, memorials, transitional practices and
memory moves further afield, but is still concentrated on a few country
examples, notably: South Africa, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Spain, Bosnia,
Cambodia, and Rwanda.
This study aims to introduce a marginal case study into the existing
literature and discuss how it compares with other cases. It also pushes
further: rather than approach the example of the RTMMM and evaluate
it from the perspective of diverse theories of memory, my methodologi-
cal assumption is that the example guides us through a re-thinking of the
core conceptual categories that ground memory studies at the intersec-
tion with democratic practices. The primary conceptual contribution of
allowing a marginal example to contest theory is that it breaks concepts
down into their composite parts, revealing internal tensions.
 1  MEMORY FROM THE MARGINS  33

Challenges Comparative Memory Studies

A view from the margins prompts examination of both localized inno-
vations as well as globalizing factors that shape memorial practices, and
the interactions between these forces. The challenge is to examine link-
ages without positing global homogeneity. This is a matter that theo-
rists of memory studies have tackled from multiple angles and the case
of the RTMMM contributes to these discussions. I have already intro-
duced how discrete forms and models of transitional justice as they were
developing in the 1990s impacted Ethiopian processes. Here, I intro-
duce threads from memory studies that further illuminate the relation-
ship between globalizing forces and local practices, and note that the
emergence of the RTMMM cannot be accounted for by any of the major
theories of memory as the product of modernity, postmodern capitalist
reality, or the development of Holocaust memorialization as a transna-
tional paradigm for addressing history of violence.
As Assman and Conrad (2010) argued, historically the focal point for
collective memory studies was at the level of the nation-state. As infor-
mation about, learning from and adoption of memory projects travel
across borders, this has changed. They write, “it has become impossible
to understand the trajectories of memory outside a global frame of refer-
ence” (Assmann and Conrad 2010, 2). The proliferation of and similari-
ties between international memorial forms prompts the question of why
memorialization is an increasingly globally salient paradigm in the first
place.
Several theorists of memory argue that the paradigm’s prominence
can be historically situated at the point of modern disruption of tradi-
tion. For Pierre Nora (1989), the disruption of “natural” or given
memory groups and sites prompted a need to manufacture commu-
nity through the imposition of new memorial ideas and locations.
Disruptions of tradition that are accompanied by or produced through
violence may trigger the desire for new memorial forms. For instance, Jay
Winter (1995) focuses his analysis of memorials in Great Britain on the
impacts of the loss of a generation of young men during World War I.
These explanations are valuable, but do not explain why there was a
rise of museums starting in the 1980s and 1990s. Exploring this phe-
nomenon, Andreas Huyssen places the museum in relation to global
capitalism, in the context of accelerated globalization and the decline in
the ideological discourses of modernity that once oriented societies to
34  B. CONLEY

the future. The global “memory boom” that began in 1980s emerged
as political and economic factors globally moved through cultures, dis-
rupting local contexts (Huyssen 1995, 9). Museums function as an anti-
dote to the logic of capitalism: museums take objects out of circulation
and deposit them in a new public sphere. In the museum, objects are
organized around their inherent value, as unique object, illustration of
a category of object, or as in the case of memorial museum, cipher for
something that no longer exists. The increasing popularity of museums
expressed the desire for social encounters in spaces that are distinct from
that of capitalist logic, Huyssen writes: “After all, the museum is a pri-
mary site of social interaction with objects embedded in other times and
other spaces” (Huyssen 2016, 108).
For some scholars, like Daniel Levy and Natan Snzaider (2001), the
proliferation of Holocaust memory has determined cosmopolitan memo-
rial shapes and forms. Levy and Snzaider argue that the Holocaust
became the global paradigm for calamitous suffering, and hence served
as a model for how to memorialize violent pasts (2001, 191). Likewise,
Michael Rothberg (2009) focuses on the Holocaust, but innovates how
one might think Holocaust memory in a nonhierarchical and non-com-
petitive relation to postcolonial memories of violence. Rothberg offers
the term “multidirectional memory” to capture the idea that memory
need not pit victim narratives against one another. Memorial narratives
can be conceived as mutually redefining the public sphere in a manner
that energizes and validates multiple memorial claims. He describes mem-
ory as dynamic, and subject to “on-going negotiation, cross-referencing
and borrowing; as productive and not privative” (Rothberg 2009, 3).
His work bridges Holocaust and postcolonial memory by drawing on
what he describes as “marginalized texts or marginalized moments of
well-known texts” (Rothberg 2009, 18), and exploring their relation-
ship to postcolonial contexts. While Holocaust memory occupies center
stage of this approach to memory discourse, Rothberg’s goal is to analyze
it against the grain. His approach is instructive, and influences how one
might think about the interactions of diverse memorial projects in post-
Mengistu Ethiopia.
But if one begins exclusively from the margins, the relationship
between memory communities and globalizing forces is not quite cap-
tured by any of the dominant theories of memory studies. From a cos-
mopolitan center, the peripheries might appear to be accepting and
adapting dominant models of museum or transitional justice practices,
 1  MEMORY FROM THE MARGINS  35

applying technologies and discrete practices to local contexts. From

the periphery—the margins—the picture is more complex. The spread
of technologies and distinct practices, an experience of modernity, glo-
balized capitalism, and the model of Holocaust memorialization each
explain elements of the appeal of memory. However, none of these
explanatory narratives entirely accounts for the RTMMM, which
emerged out of a particular historical moment in Ethiopia.
For example, the first mention I found of the idea of creating a Red
Terror museum came in response to survivors’ sense of shortcomings in
the criminal prosecutions. However, the person who made this obser-
vation was not involved in the process of creating the RTMMM. Those
who led the endeavor to create the museum do not directly relate their
efforts to the prosecutions. While the trials may have influenced a certain
general imagination of the past as composed through a narrative of guilt
proven with displays of evidence, it does not account for the RTMMM.
The key figures who created the RTMMM cite a range of other factors:
victims’ families need for a place to mourn, the unidentified bones of vic-
tims that needed a special final resting place, the influence of more trium-
phal memorial museums documenting the anti-Mengistu war effort, and
a desire to teach new generations about a forgotten period of history.
Further, when I asked the staff at the RTMMM, the architect who
designed the museum, the exhibition curators and designers and those
involved at the creation of the institution what influenced them to create
a memorial museum, not one of them noted the Holocaust (although
they did mention that international visitors bring up this history8) or
other global examples of memorial museums. Nonetheless, the timing of
their endeavor and its particular shape resonate with memorial and tran-
sitional practices found elsewhere.
Within its context, the RTMMM is not elucidated through a direct
imposition of a particular globalized or cosmopolitan form, nor is it
the product of a singular transnational influence. This is not to say that
global factors are absent or irrelevant, but the tricky part is to capture
how they are present; for this, one must trace the distinct confluence of
factors that impacted the creation of the RTMMM.

Prompts a Re-Examination of Agency and Memory

The centrality of memory-keepers to the story of the emergence of
the RTMMM compels a discussion of how memory and agency are
36  B. CONLEY

intertwined. Key questions are: who has agency in the memorial context?
Who determines which memories matter? Who can reference and build
upon memory of the past? Who is invited to join a new community that
emerges out of the past? Who makes ethical claims and who responds to
them? The inverse of these questions is equally relevant: when does the
assertion of control over memory fail?
Any one individual gains agency through the social construction of
memory-sites by embarking on a process of constructing meaning about
the past in conversation with others and over time. Memorialization is
grounded in and tethered to the past—which limits some of the ways
that agents can tap into it—and yet subject to constant social reconfig-
uration of meaning. Agency is thus both necessary for memory, in terms
of the process of positing memorialization as a social activity at a particu-
lar point in time, and limited in both the reference to the past (which
cannot support just any claims) and conversation with others. The vacil-
lation between the fixed and constructed components of memorial work
can be elucidated in reference to anthropologist Anna Tsing’s discussion
of objects that are never “self-contained, but always in relation—and
thus site specific” (Tsing 2015, 220).
Imagining agency in relation to memorialization requires assessment
of how meaning about the past is actively defined and redefined in rela-
tion to the work of memory-keepers, but site-specific to the intersec-
tions of memory, multiple memory-keepers’ interactions and an evolving
socio-political context. The past cannot be called upon to do anything
whatsoever; there are limits to what memories have socio-political res-
onance, how far meaning about the past can be stretched and who is
empowered in the work of reconfiguring meaning. However, for any
conveyance of memory, these limits are not a priori givens. Rather they
are produced through the shared project of constructing meaning at any
point in time. In this sense, the meaning of a memorial project (in the
example of the RTMMM) should be viewed as contingent: something
exterior to individual human agency grounds meaning, even if it does
only by describing the momentarily fixed point where multiple projects
of making meaning converge.
In short, understanding the contribution of a memorial museum
requires attention to site-and temporally-specific interactions. My
approach, while learning from other studies of memory, argues that the
potential social role of memory of mass atrocities, emerges from how
a particular example functions. This argument would not be possible
 1  MEMORY FROM THE MARGINS  37

without important scholarly work has helped identify patterns and trends
across memorial museums, learning from these works enables me to
take the opposite approach of centralizing a reading of the example.
However, at heart, the social meaning of memory of mass violence can
be elucidated by adopting what Tsing describes as “nonscalablility the-
ory” that “requires attention to historical contingency, unexpected con-
juncture, and the ways that contact across difference can produce new
agendas” (Tsing 2012, 510). Thus, while noting globalizing trends, ana-
lysts must remain attentive to unexpected entanglements that produce
and are produced by memorial projects within their contexts.

Reveals That Memory Functions Through Disruption of the Present

Memory from the margins pushes one to abandon a view of social polit-
ical developments as teleology or even a less determined, open-ended
chronology of social progress. Discarding this approach, one can catch
a glimpse of how marginalized memories intervene into the present by
re-directing attention to the aspirations and defeated visions of the past.
Whether this detritus of history provided a better direction for the future
is not the point. The insights from marginal memory are not utopian in
the sense that they could cure history of its present ills. Memory from
the margins does not salvage an alternate, unproblematic socio-political
map to the future (although there are certainly memory projects that
present themselves as doing this work).
The primary contribution of memory fragments is how they d ­ isrupt
the idea that the present is the necessary outcome of the past, the
sum of unidirectional progress. One only arrives at today, the memo-
rial museum argues, through loss, injustice, and violence. The present
moment is composed as much by what has been silenced as what can
today triumphantly dominant social and political discourse. This view
of memory draws from Walter Benjamin’s writing. Benjamin’s lifework
was to develop a materialist theory of how the past interjects into and is
capable of producing an awakening within the present. In a short essay
written near the time of his death, Benjamin introduces the idea of a
“weak messianic power” (Benjamin 1968, 254) embedded in scraps from
the past. Past visions of the present and hopes for the future, form con-
stellations with the present, and thereby provide a glimpse of the flick-
ering, unrealized possibilities. These unrealized possibilities interrupt
the present, in a way that demonstrates the contingency of the current
38  B. CONLEY

construction of power and possibilities. In short, unsettling the past

creates openings in the present. This is the “messianic” element of the
past; but Benjamin predicates it on “weakness.” The claims from the past
cannot be “settled cheaply,” Benjamin argued, but must constantly “be
made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to
overpower it” (Benjamin 1968, 254). In other words, memory inter-
rupts, but only momentarily. It does not provide a new stable point of
resistance.
The idea of memory from the margins also draws on Michel
Foucault’s articulation of “subjugated knowledges”, which he describes
as memory that was “confined to the margins” (Foucault 2003, 8).
From the margins, subjugated knowledges function as disrupters within
the “tyranny of overall discourses, with their hierarchies and all the priv-
ileges enjoyed by theoretical vanguards” (Foucault 2003, 8). Foucault,
like Benjamin, draws attention to both the power and limits of mem-
ory. Subjugated knowledge and memory from the margins do not pro-
vide the foundation for a new hierarchy or truth regime; they forge an
“insurrection” against any stabilization of any “true body of knowledge”
(Foucault 2003, 9).
Memories of what was lost, such as we find in memorial museums, are
imbued with political relevance only to the extent that they interrupt the
present construction of political hierarchies. Even then, what is offered is
a momentary glimpse that must be translated or transformed to become
politically salient. Thus, marginal memory contains within it political
relevance of potentially enormous dimensions, but is limited in how its
potential relates to a theory of change. It does not form a new theory or
chart a course for future; that work must be understood as drawing on
different sets of discourses.

Reveals That the Internal Tensions That Compose Memory Are the
Source of Its Political Potential
The internal mechanisms through which subjugated or marginal mem-
ories misbehave is by revealing disjunctions within the way public mem-
ory of mass violence is supposed to work. The definition of memory that
frames this study is composed of three components: a call on history,
deployed in reference to individual or collective identity (community),
which issues ethical claims. The proposed use-value of memorialization
 1  MEMORY FROM THE MARGINS  39

requires unity of these three factors, such that learning about the past
will produce empathetic attachment to history, and will shape political
views on present issues. However, a view from the margins reveals how
these three elements do not function flawlessly together—they do not
harmonize.
Each element (past, community, and ethics) is structured by impera-
tives that push in different directions, and are determined by a range of
evolving factors external to any given memory paradigm. Further, mem-
ory disjunctions expose nested margins and hegemonies. A movement
from the margins must be situated in time, because memory that begins
in the margins can move out of them. When it does so, as for instance, it
is incorporated into hegemonic narratives, there is a threat of ossifying its
impact.
Memory from the margins frames analysis through a side-angle
glance that reveals how the layers do not quite fit neatly together. By
being attentive to the example, in an evolving international and national
political context, and exploring how the precise form, goal and moment
of transference of memory through a memorial museum visit, one can
unearth a deeply ambiguous political role for memory of violence, per se.
Traumatic memory, as presented through the story of systematic destruc-
tion of civilians, especially when presented by survivor-docents, unset-
tles. The past serves as refractory lens for calls to action that are further
re-directed and re-interpreted in light of political debates of the present.
Memorialization cannot be assigned a role that is subordinate to a uni-
fying, liberal democratic outcome, any more than it consistently plays
a role in bolstering authoritarian or partisan politics. Memory has an
oblique relationship to politics. Fundamentally, memory does not func-
tion in a normative role, certainly not one aligned with a predetermined
procedural democratic outcome.

The Structure of the Book

This argument is presented across the chapters. Chapter 2, “Revolution
and Red Terror, 1974–1978,” provides a historical overview of the Red
Terror, and draws on Hiwot Teffera’s (2012) memoir to capture the
emotional content of this history that lays the groundwork for subse-
quent memorialization efforts. Teffera’s memoir provides guidance in
two manners. First, as a high-ranking member of the EPRP, the primary
political group targeted during the Red Terror, Teffera’s account of
40  B. CONLEY

events, and the internal structure and battles of the EPRP offer unique
historical insight. Second, Teffera’s account parallels her experience
as a revolutionary with that of falling in love with one of her cohorts;
revealing an internal logic between personal experience, revolution-
ary zeal, and memory. One lesson that such an approach offers is best
asserted right away. The violence addressed in this study includes relent-
less oppression, imprisonment, torture, murder and betrayal of cherished
loved ones. Their sense of loss is not an abstraction. It always concerns
the loss of very particular loved ones, and an experience of torture,
which, no matter the similarities in methods of infliction, are engraved in
unique patterns on each victim. Let us tread softly; violence and grief are
unpredictable companions.
Chapter 3, “Transitional Influences, 1991–2005,” details how and
why Red Terror memorialization became possible. This chapter provides
a response through example to memory studies about the sources of
memorialization projects in the contemporary world. It examines mul-
tiple far-flung and local factors that influenced the family members and
survivors to create the RTMMM, including political developments, the
influence of globalizing trends, and the advent of transitional practices.
While this story resonates with some of the theoretical models for mem-
ory introduced above, it also reveals innovations within the Ethiopian
context.
Chapter 4, “The Shape of Memory: Creating the Museum, 2003–
2010,” focuses on the debates and challenges faced by the group of
Red Terror memory-keepers as they sought to construct the RTMMM.
It analyzes how the various debates left their imprint on the particular
forms that compose the Museum. This chapter moves from internal con-
testation of the museum-making process, to the final shape of its public
exhibition. I also present the case for privileging a museum as a physical
space in which to read the problematics of memory, and discuss how the
RTMMM compares with other memorial museums.
At the RTMMM—and common across memorial museums—sur-
vivors play an enormously important role, bringing their personal per-
spective to the key museum experience: the tour. Chapter 5, “The
Performance of the Tour, 2010–Present,” focuses on the tour as a site
of transference of meaning from survivor-docents to visitors. It starts
with a focus on the survivor-docents and their experiences of working in
the institution over time, and then analyzes visitor comments to explore
 1  MEMORY FROM THE MARGINS  41

the impact of the encounter on members of the public. Drawing on the

framework of trauma, I argue that it helps illuminate both the survivor-
docents’ range of responses to their professional engagement as well as
visitor responses. The Museum visit clearly resonates, but visitors cite
a wide range of interpretations (none of which forms a majority view)
of their visit. In short, the most powerful contribution of a memo-
rial museum is how it fails to provide a singular map towards a political
agenda.
In this “failure”, I argue, memorial museums refuse to foreclose
meaning. This is where one can locate an affinity between memory and
an ethos of democracy, as a system predicated upon open-ended posing
and re-posing of claims on authorities. In this way, memory has a foun-
dational relationship to democracy that it does not share with author-
itarian forms of governance. This line of argument is developed in the
concluding chapter, where I note that over the same time period that
is covered in the development of the RTMMM (roughly 1991–pres-
ent) saw the rise of and subsequent lapse in discourse of transitional
justice in part because it viewed democracy in technocratic terms, as a
set of programs and principles to be implemented (Gready and Robins
2014). Likewise, this extended period is characterized by openings for
and extending control over the Ethiopian political space—a process that
today is in renewed flux.
The RTMMM is a relatively small museum, founded and main-
tained by a collective of civil society actors. An institution with modest
resources, it reflects the creativity and insights of its founders, the power
of testimony through its survivor-docents, and an ongoing argument
for why memory from the margins is significant. The Red Terror is a
harsh corner of Ethiopia’s modern historical landscape, memorializing
this past reveals that the present moment is composed of stories that did
not survive, as much as those that did. The answers to Ethiopia’s politi-
cal challenges today cannot be found in the past as a map to the future,
but perhaps responses to contemporary challenges can be modeled in a
movement of memory from the margins.
As Hirut described the Red Terror: “It is ours. It is really the worst
time of our history…But we don’t know how to put it into history. We
don’t know how.” If memory makes any contribution it is through the
proposition that acknowledging and honoring that which does not fit
into the present is part of any democratic dispensation.
42  B. CONLEY

Notes
1. Throughout media coverage of Hirut’s story, Elizabeth’s surname is not
included, something she requested to maintain her privacy.
2. For more information about litigation using the ACTA, see the work of
the Center for Justice and Accountability, https://cja.org/.
3. As an Ethiopian-Canadian, Hirut benefitted by learning from the increas-
ingly globally networked organizations working on documentation and
memorialization projects. This is less the case for those who would create
the RTMMM.
4. In her Acknowledgements, Abebe-Jirut (2012) thanks the United States
institute for Peace, National Endowment for Democracy, International
Center for Transitional Justice, and Document Affinity Group for their
support.
5. In many analyses of memory the idea of creating a new community is artic-
ulated in terms of identity, whereby the past solidifies an ethnic or reli-
gious identity. This approach does not apply to the RTMMM, where the
violence did not align with ethnic of religious groups. Even in other cir-
cumstances, there are benefits to using “community” versus group identity
when describing the production of a collective, in that it eschews the natu-
ralizing tendencies of identity discourses.
6. There is mention of the Red Terror in an exhibition at the Canadian
Museum for Human Rights that includes the story of Ali Saeed, a survivor
of the Terror. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing my attention to
this fact.
7. See Louis Bickford, Liz Ševčenko, Ereshnee Naidu, Buckley-Zistal, Amy
Sodaro, Arnold-de Simine, Paul Williams—all of whom have added impor-
tant insights to the relationship between form, content, and political
impact of a memorial museum.
8. Consider the response of those involved with the RTMMM in relation
to scholarly work that has complicated the centrality of the Holocaust
in memory studies, like that of Rothberg (2009), or Craps (2013). I
find both scholars’ work interesting in terms of their contributions to a
post-colonial focus, but do not want to spend my time arguing with the
centrality of Holocaust—which is not actually present in my study—but
rather say what is apparent.

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Author Interview
Abebe-Jiri, Hirut. Interview by author. June 18, 2017. Ottawa, Canada.
 CHAPTER 2

Revolution and Red Terror, 1974–1978

Circling toward the Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum, examining

uneven margins and the jagged edges of memory’s internal logic, the story
begins when the Red Terror was not marginal in its national context, but
the central story of Ethiopia’s political–historical moment. The Ethiopian
Revolution in 1974, which saw the overthrow of the Imperial regime, set
into motion the events of the Red Terror. I use commonly cited dates of
1976–1978 for the Red Terror, but as in many historical events, determin-
ing beginnings and endings can be complicated. Large-scale socio-political
events rarely adhere to strict calendars, leaving ample room for debate.
The study of memory particularly draws our attention to the difficul-
ties of endings (Conley 2016). The ending of the Terror varies for dif-
ferent locations: in some towns, violence continued longer, and in other
areas it ceased earlier. In many parts of Ethiopia the dynamics of the
Terror merged with other logics of violence, notably counterinsurgency,
rendering talk of endings a discordant idea altogether.
By listening to those who suffered the impact of the Red Terror, this
matter of beginnings and endings takes on different nuance. Under the
flow of events is another narrative arc guided by personal experiences
and subjective processes. For victims of torture like Hirut, who were
not political activists but got caught in the Terror’s violence, the story
begins with interruption. There appears to be very little logic other than
circumstance to explain why she was singled out. Hirut had to piece
together the accusations that sparked her arrest and torture while she

© The Author(s) 2019 47

B. Conley, Memory from the Margins,
Memory Politics and Transitional Justice,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13495-2_2
48  B. CONLEY

was experiencing it; even release from prison occurred seemingly with-
out explanation. Hence, taking back control of her life by fleeing and
deciding—for a while anyway—to forget, helped her forge an ending
by reclaiming agency in her narrative. Her later decision to become a
memory-keeper was initially triggered by another interruption, the dis-
covery of her torturer, Kelbessa in Atlanta, Georgia. Nonetheless, she
overcame this interruption as well, propelled forward into a memory
project as a continuation of retaking control of her life’s story.
During the Red Terror, there were many people like Hirut who
were caught in the web of violence without any provocation. There
were also many young people, notably among the educated class,
who embraced political activism. While they did not anticipate the full
force of violence that would be used against them, they knew their
actions were provocative. The term political activist in this context
applies to an enormous range of political engagement—high school age
students who responded to calls to street protests, people who handed
out fliers or helped spread information at a local level, and stalwarts of
opposition political groups. The period of the Revolution and political
upheaval endowed these actors with newfound individual and collective
agency to claim a place on the historical stage. The violence of the Terror
aimed to strip them of agency, fragmenting the power of group pro-
test, into individuals’ fates: the dead, the defeated, or those who would
re-envision their activism by joining new efforts. From the perspective
of activists, beginnings are defined in relation to individual and collective
political awakening, and endings in terms of subsequent atomization and
disillusionment. This chapter is about their story.
To tell their story in a manner that helps clarify later memory projects,
I examine beginnings and endings from the perspective of both histor-
ical events and transformations of agency—the latter a tale of ideolog-
ical structure and emotional fuel that produced activist identities. The
key Revolutionary actors were all nontraditional leaders in the Ethiopian
context, and they raised their voices as part of a rupture with the coun-
try’s established social and political hierarchy. The student activists saw
themselves as bringing the future into existence by breaking from his-
torical binds in order to forge a new social identity and reality. For many,
the historical rupture justified violence. The sense of emotional empow-
erment and idiosyncrasies of individual leaders’ personalities contributed
to the adoption of intransigent ideological positions and harsh tactics
between and within political groups; but the Terror and expansion of
 2  REVOLUTION AND RED TERROR, 1974–1978  49

violence occurred as the military regime sought to decimate assertive col-

lective agency. This was the true target of violence.
Following this path of empowerment points us to insights about
historical events and memory. I have defined memory as a concept
composed of a reference to the past that informs group identity and
issues a call to action. By tracing differences in the emotional content
between the historical activist group identity and memorial group iden-
tity, I draw attention to a schism in memorialization’s logic. The Red
Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum describes a historical group identity
that it cannot recreate for its visitors. A presentation of history about
the decimation of agency does not simulate the old group, but presents
tensions between that which previously animated history and that which
remains in its ruins.
This chapter begins by bringing into focus the emotional background
that helped form activists’ group identity and enabled the Revolution to
occur. I then switch focus to the historical foreground: introducing the
major actors from the period of the Revolution and setting them into
motion by following the path of events. I conclude by posing a ques-
tion of how individuals experienced endings. Through this lens, we can
begin to see how the emotional arc of the Revolutionary period was
transformed through violence, the remnants of which would eventually
(decades later) form a new call to memorial group identity.

‘At the Risk of Seeming Ridiculous’: On Love,

Revolution, and Memory
While in Algiers, Che Guevara—whose writings influenced Ethiopia’s
politicized generation of the 1970s—drafted a letter dated March 12,
1965, to an Uruguayan friend in which he stated: “At the risk of seem-
ing ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great
feelings of love” (Guevara 1965). Love, in Guevara’s letter, is distinct
from interpersonal expression, and is “of the people, of the most sacred
causes.” He encapsulates this idea in the phrase of “love of living human-
ity”—the people as they are, not merely as one imagines them to be—as
the force that tempers dogmatism, scholasticism, and separation from the
masses. Love, in this sense, simultaneously inspires, forms the source of
solidarity, and tempers revolutionary zeal.
What Guevara failed to note was how difficult it is to harmonize these
roles—love is a complicated revolutionary concept and is never a simple
50  B. CONLEY

sentiment when applied to a political context. An emotion of fervor, it

pinpoints what is difficult to explain to those who do not share firsthand
experience; offers a way to think about the enjoyment of group activ-
ism; identifies why agency was the true target of the military regime’s
violence; and captures the idiosyncrasies of personal and collective
involvement. These factors shed light on the impossibility of re-creat-
ing revolutionary community in another context. Love is a concept that
captures components of rupture between historical group identity for-
mation and subsequent memorial calls to community. There is no way
to manufacture love that has been destroyed. The past, as called upon in
a memorial museum, cannot recreate previous identities, but draws on
a historical presentation to produce something new. This new collective
memorial community charts a different course, often revealing disjunc-
ture with the past. I conclude this section by noting that love explains
one more thing: the spark of revolution itself.

Revolutionary Passion
It is inherent difficulty to explain enrapture to those who have not
shared it. This point resonated in my interviews with former activ-
ists who now work at the Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum. In
November 2016, I spoke with the Museum’s director, Befekadu Gebre
Medhin, who was a youth activist during the Revolution, and later was
imprisoned and tortured. He struggled to find the right words to help
me understand his young activist days. Sitting in a utilitarian office, on a
calm, normal day, forty years after the events had taken place, how does
one convey youthful passions that drove thousands to view their cause as
so much bigger than their individual fates that there was no hesitation to
sacrifice their lives if called upon to do so? He recalled a sense of over-
whelming commitment that he and his fellow activists shared. “Love of
your country,” he explained, “is improving the situation of its people.
We had a sense of giving everything for our country.” His memories of
this passion, he continued, astound him to this day.
Museum docent Eshetu Debelie, who was also part of the 1970s
student movement, likewise noted how the revolutionary ideas of
the period captured his imagination. The slogans of the day were pro-
foundly meaningful and empowering to him, and remain so: how could
Ethiopians create a distinctly Ethiopian democracy? Despite suffering in
the Terror, he said he has no regrets.
 2  REVOLUTION AND RED TERROR, 1974–1978  51

Kurabachew Shewarega Yigletu, also imprisoned and tortured, does

not work at the Museum, but visits regularly to spend time with fellow
survivors, recalled how he became involved in the tumultuous politics of
the 1970s that preceded, sparked, and caught fire during the Revolution.
At the time, he was a technician with Ethiopian telecom. During an
evening shift, after most everyone else had gone home, he secretively
went through the building putting flyers from the Ethiopian People’s
Revolutionary Party (EPRP) on every floor. A report of his work went
to the Central Committee, who commented, he gleefully related to me,
“now we have penetrated the telecom!” The memory delights him to
this day, despite the fact that the period of his activism was followed by
his arrest, brutal torture, and eight years spent in prison.
The stories I heard from former student activists are not anomalies.
In 2005, Ethiopian historian Bahru Zewde led an exercise in oral his-
tory that brought together leaders from the student activist movements
of the 1970s in an effort to record “as dispassionately as is humanly pos-
sible”—indicating the enormous effort it would take to discuss events
decades past that still aroused fervently contested positions—“what they
remember of those heady days of student activism and leftist politics”
(Zewde 2010, 3). Throughout the volume, the participants describe
these early days of the Revolution with a vocabulary that tremors with
the excitement of the time. Ethiopia’s leading intellectual-activists stud-
ied history closely. They recognized the monumental nature of the
changes they sought and envisioned themselves as unprecedented actors
on the Ethiopian stage, finding a place within a historical trajectory of
the world’s great democratic and Marxist revolutions. Decades later, they
described themselves as mesmerized, true believers, amazed, enthralled,
militants, and radicals.
The substance of their debates centered around questions of how
to define and understand the country’s social injustices, what actions
were required at which moment, the rights of its ethno-cultural groups
(known as “nationalities”), and leadership of the various political move-
ments. Nonetheless, across the board, the tenor of the debates comes
through in terms of passionate commitment. The emotional content of
the historical moment catalyzed people and events—one cannot under-
stand the Revolution or efforts to memorialize it absent this element.
History churned through passionate commitment. An accurate account
of the period, must take into consideration the emotional fuel that pow-
ered an engine of collective intellectual and political awakening.
52  B. CONLEY

The dynamic is not distinct to Ethiopia. Theorists of social move-

ments have debated the key force that transforms individuals into polit-
ical movements, arguing variably that the determinant factors are:
ideology, political opportunities for action, accumulation of grievance,
material conditions, self-interest of individuals combining to large-scale
action (rational choice), social networks and contexts, or micro-level
social interactions (Della Porta 2015). Although largely absent from
political science discourse, anthropologists and sociologists have also
found that emotions can be powerful social forces that help forge collec-
tive identity. As James Jasper points out:

…a collective identity is not simply the drawing of a cognitive boundary;

most of all, it is an emotion, a positive affect toward other group mem-
bers on the grounds of that common membership….Partly because of this
affection, participation in social movements can be pleasurable in itself,
independently of the ultimate goals and outcomes. Protest becomes a way
of saying something about one-self and one’s morals, and of finding joy
and pride in them. (Jaspers 1998, 415)

In Ethiopia, the combination of enormous pride and joy in politi-

cal expression combined with strong personalities and intricate debates
about how to interpret Marxism proved to be a toxic combination.
Fighting between and within political groups contributed to the ability
of radical military leaders to grab power, concentrate the means of vio-
lence, and deploy it against one set of political activists and then another.
Seizing on political differences, the military regime fomented betrayal in
the civilian political groups as it extended its surveillance mechanisms,
targeting individuals for torture and murder.
The Ethiopian Revolution resulted from its protagonists’ well-de-
veloped social-economic analysis and ideology, plus highly special-
ized organizational structures, that set into motion conflict within and
between political groups, and the military regime. This is the dominant
story of the historical period. Nonetheless, by following a minor (or mar-
ginal) story of “love” for a country or a cause, it is also apparent there
was a role for idiosyncrasies in attachment to new collective agency.
These became more important as endings approached in waves of
betrayal and disillusionment. An understanding of love as an emotional
attachment that ties individuals to each other and to a group, increases
 2  REVOLUTION AND RED TERROR, 1974–1978  53

in importance as it fell apart when the group was decimated and individ-
uals were left to wander through the ruins of their collective social vision.
How they define an ending to the Terror, where they went afterward,
and what place memory would hold for them became increasingly sub-
ject to individual narrative.
In the place of these historical ruins, neither love, nor ideas, nor indi-
viduals nor collectivities maintain their previous shape; the ruins trans-
form. Memory does not overcome this. Thus, a fundamental gap is
exposed between the history called upon by memorial discourses and the
character of collective identity that is possible as a consequence. Falling
into and out of love is not a scaleable experience; its form alters as con-
text changes (Tsing 2012).

The Non-scaleable Part of Revolution

Thus, refracting a Revolutionary period through a simple love story is
helpful. Perhaps this is why one of the most popular accounts of the
period of the Red Terror and its many betrayals, is a memoir that traces a
young woman’s involvement with the popular political opposition group,
the EPRP, alongside the experience of romantic love. Hiwot Teffera’s
memoir, Tower in the Sky (2012), published to widespread acclaim from
across diverse Ethiopian audiences, presents the story of her transfor-
mation from a university student into a political activist by twinning the
historical experience of awakening to new ideas and possibilities, with
falling in love. Her boyfriend was Getachew Maru, an influential student
leader, whom she met when he was designated the head of her clandes-
tine “study circle”—a small group that analyzed Marxist–Leninist texts
and discussed their relevance to the Ethiopian situation. As she learned
to give a name and analytical structure to the injustices she perceived
within her country’s social and political system, she joined with fellow
activists at enormous risk to attempt to bring about the promise that her
generation would inevitably “taste the joy of freedom.” The ideas intox-
icated her. She asked: “Where have I been all this time?”—a thought
immediately tied to her burgeoning relationship—“Good thing I met
Getachew” (Teffera 2012, 39).
Teffera’s memoir captures how the idealism of the Ethiopian rev-
olution carried with it all the passion—and some of the irrationality—
of falling in love. The slogans of the day, “Land to the Tiller,” “Bread!
For the Hungry,” “Democratic rights now,” or “Down with feudalism”
54  B. CONLEY

(Teffera 2012, 71), echoed across voices in large-scale protests, and in

small cells of committed actors, transforming simple words into powerful
political incantation. Like the banal phrase, “I love you,” that builds the
monuments of our private worlds, there is nothing new or profound in
a political slogan. Rather, a slogan’s power, like a term of endearment,
emanates from precisely how it is said, by whom, and in what situation.
When these factors align in just the right constellation, empires can—and
do—fall.
Thus, love offers one more contribution to analysis: it puts a name on
the confluence of factors that triggers large-scale social change. To intro-
duce something as clichéd as love to analysis of revolution offers a dif-
ferent logic than deploying terms like utopian (Zewde 2010), dogmatic
(Tareke 2009, 30), or idealistic, each of which has been applied to the
Ethiopian revolution, with some reason, but often as reductive dismissal.
These classifications remain in the head, describing ideas and systems of
social organization and passing judgment upon them. They fail to distin-
guish the utopian, dogmatic, or idealistic dimensions of all political ide-
ologies as thought systems, from the passion that can cause adherents
to undertake enormous personal and collective risks, and to adapt inflex-
ible, jealously guarded positions. To parallel revolutionary action with
love—of country and ideas, for comrades, and possibly in romantic rela-
tions—is to gesture to the sense of being captured by possibilities that
may have strong (or weak) intellectual backbone, but which foster a per-
sonal investment in action, at times even against practical evaluations of
risks and benefits. In this sense and context, love describes an excess of
emotion that fuels unlikely events, like revolutions.
Social science analyses of past revolutions often focus on defining the
characteristics of the paradigmatic cases (French and Russian, in particu-
lar) and measuring subsequent episodes against them. Thus research-
ers analyze a range of social, political, and economic factors, debating
whether the particular swing of subsequent political events can be clas-
sified as a true revolution (Tilly 1993; Skopoal 1979). This question
also resonated within circles of Ethiopian activists at the time of the
Emperor’s overthrow, in the Marxist terms of the necessary subjective
and objective conditions. Donald Donham remarks that Ethiopian revo-
lutionaries sometimes seemed to be “fighting over revolutions other than
their own” (Donham 1999, 131). Historical perspective suggests that, by
all measurements, and despite important unique characteristics, the scale
and character of social, political, and economic change that followed
 2  REVOLUTION AND RED TERROR, 1974–1978  55

overthrow of the Imperial government in Ethiopia in 1974, must be

understood as revolution (Kebede 2011; Tareke 2008, 183–206).
Contemporary political science analyses aim more for predictive
capacity than revolutionary theory. Efforts to quantify a country’s
risk of revolution have identified social (ethnic and religious diversity,
displacement, and health concerns) economic (inequality, especially
between groups), and political (governance, rights abuses, provision, of
services) factors that seem to persist across historical and geographic
cases (Venger and Miethe 2018). However, many of these indica-
tors also apply to a wide range of social phenomenon that emerge
out of state fragility. The timing and precise location of a revolution
is, as yet, unquantifiable. The 2011 Arab Spring prompted new efforts
to improve the record, by treating the most recent historical anoma-
lies as grist for refining universal theories of political change. It is an
intellectually productive, but ultimately elusive goal, as Olesya Venger
and Terance D. Miethe (2018) note. In a sentence that is representa-
tive of political science analyses, and singularly absent of anything like
the whirl of emotions that form an intrinsic part social, economic, and
political upheaval, they write:

Given that revolutions and revolutionary situations often emanate from

complex interplay of social, economic and political factors that enable and
constrain their development, general composite measures of these condi-
tions do not appear to be sensitive enough to represent the contextual var-
iability. (Venger and Miethe 2018, 388)

In short, something triggers and fuels revolution that escapes social sci-
ence analysis. Objective conditions (at least those that are commonly cap-
tured in economic, state fragility, or democracy measures datasets) do not
produce sufficiently concise insights to identify which countries, among
those that demonstrate vulnerability to large-scale social change, will
experience revolution, nor when the moment is ripe—in Marxist terms
the subjective and objective conditions necessary for revolution. Reading
the emotional content of revolution suggests that it becomes possible
only at the convergence of objective factors, when combined with com-
plex networks of individual relationships, the passion of powerful ideas,
and the willingness to take action at a precise moment in time.
Teffera says it better. Describing the hotbed of politicized activism on
the university campus in Addis, she writes:
56  B. CONLEY

Onward we marched fervently shouting slogans and condemning our

enemies with one voice. We demanded change and a better future with
the same zeal and determination. The camaraderie and sense of solidarity
among demonstrators was unsurpassed. Our communion with one another
brought out the best in us all.
We felt suspended in time and space. (Teffera 2012, 71)

In hindsight, the overthrow of the Ethiopian Imperial system in 1974

seemed predestined, so many actors and segments of the population
were clamoring for change. Shared across most of various groups of
actors who rose against the Emperor was commitment to socialist rev-
olution. The Ethiopian revolution was distinct among democratic or
Marxist revolutions in that there was no counter-revolution of any real
strength or enduring impact. This not to say that threats were lacking.
They were indeed multiple: within and across political factions, from
neighboring Somalia, rural-based insurgencies in Eritrea, Tigray and
eventually elsewhere. But all politics was revolutionary. For a generation
of educated Ethiopians, as Teffera writes, Marxism “promised to bring
heaven down to earth and the students, seduced by its utopian vision,
yearned to transplant it in their country. And so the idea of igniting a
revolution was born” (Teffera 2012, 84).

Dramatis Personae
I turn now to introduce the key sets of actors involved in the Revolution:
the Emperor, the peasants, student activists, and the military.

Emperor Haile Selassie

Ethiopia’s Imperial rule rested on a lineage that claimed to harken back
to the biblical King Solomon and Queen of Sheba. As Fasil Nahum
explains, the country’s constitution affirmed the “inviolability of the
emperor’s dignity, the sacredness of his personality, and the indisputabil-
ity of his powers” (1997, 26). Haile Selassie, who had ruled Ethiopia as
regent from 1916 to 1930, and as Emperor from 1930 to 1936, inter-
rupted by the Italian occupation until 1941, and then up to the 1974
revolution, was reputed for “his shrewdness, ruthlessness an absolute
love of power” (Kebede 2011, 171). He is associated at the beginning of
 2  REVOLUTION AND RED TERROR, 1974–1978  57

his reign with an effort to modernize and centralize the state. Celebrated
internationally as an elder statesman of Africa and a central figure in the
founding of the Organization of African Unity, Selassie holds a place in
world history for his defense of Ethiopia in June 1936 at the League of
Nations against fascist Italy’s incursion. Over the course of his more than
forty years at the helm of the Ethiopian state, he became, as Ethiopian
historian Bahru Zewde has written, “to be regarded as a permanent fac-
tor, as immutable as the mountains and rivers of the country” (1991,
201).
Many analysts of the Revolution attribute its eventuality to the fact
that Haile Selassie clung to absolute power, paying little attention to cul-
tivating a capable heir or broader governance system able to respond to
popular demands (Tola 1989; Halliday and Molyneux 1981). As Selassie
prioritized international issues and aged beyond his capacity to manage
the state, domestic disgruntlement grew. He further consolidated his
power with a new constitution in 1955, that confirmed him as an abso-
lute monarch and reinvigorated his security apparatus. But Selassie failed
to appreciate the pace with which the world was changing around him,
and to recognize that his government’s half-steps to democratic reform
would no longer suffice. Decolonization across Africa was re-interpreted
in the Ethiopian context as fuel for challenging the emperor’s authority
and the second- and third-class status of subjugated cultural communi-
ties. Peasant revolts had long rumbled in Ethiopia’s poor, rural commu-
nities, but now echoed in claims of the modernizing educated elites.
The first serious sign of cracks in the Imperial system was a coup
attempt on December 13, 1960. Two brothers, Mengistu Neway and
Garmame Neway, the former a Brigadier-General with the Imperial
Guard, the elite Guards entrusted with the protection of Emperor, and
the latter a US-educated intellectual, attempted to mount a coup against
Selassie, while he traveled to Brazil (Zewde 1991, 211–215). The effort
was thwarted when the Army decisively sided with the Emperor and
defeated the putschists, who were hanged in public. Although he won
the day, the Emperor failed to realize that the effort hinted at deep-
seated desires for rapid and thorough-going modernization within the
military. He also underestimated the rising generation of young, edu-
cated Ethiopians, concentrated in cities, for whom the failures and injus-
tices of the imperial system provided harsh background against which
58  B. CONLEY

new ideas about social justice, decolonization, and socialism increasingly

beckoned.
Neither the Emperor nor his coterie had the foresight or wherewithal
to respond to the rising social, economic, and political demands of var-
ious sectors of the country with reasonable reforms. Instead, they met
demands for change with repression, and, in response, their supplicants
became radicals. Almost as if Selassie wanted to challenge the potency
of Marie Antoinette’s infamous “let them eat cake”—he celebrated his
eightieth birthday in 1972 with pomp and luxury, including an indulgent
confection. Meanwhile, famine ravaged the countryside.

The Peasants
Land was rural Ethiopia’s pivotal issue for its vast peasant population and
became a central slogan taken up by student activists: “land to the tiller.”
Officially Ethiopian land ownership was divided into three: one third
to the emperor, one third to the church, and the remaining one third
for the peasants. The population in the pre-revolutionary period is esti-
mated at 32 million (World Bank 2018), of which, more than 80% were
rural peasants. Agriculture composed 60% of the Ethiopian GDP in
the 1960s (Zewde 1991, 191). Many of the peasants, especially in the
south, worked as tenant farmers, barely able to maintain subsistence
and some living as slaves. The peasant plight is captured in key statistics:
one doctor for every 200,000 people; despite a tenfold increase in edu-
cation between 1950 and 1970, illiteracy remained around 90%; the per
capita GNP was only slightly over US $100 (Tareke 2009, 20). What is
more, the economic situation of the countryside was stagnating, sacri-
ficed, as Kebede argues, “on the altar of outdated privileges and unlim-
ited personal power” (Kebede 2011, 152).
Emperor Haile Selassie oversaw a period during which the feudal land
system expanded to include grants to the elites for commercial farm-
ing. Doled out as rewards for his supporters, the impact of this change
was greater concentration of ownership, especially in the south. Local
elites were co-opted into the Imperial system, curtailing the emergence
of oppositional rural leadership. As Zewde notes, the cumulative effect
of Selassie’s land policies was “to polarize rural society” (1991, 195).
In both the north and south, and despite differences in land ownership
patterns, peasants struggled to support themselves and meet onerous tax
 2  REVOLUTION AND RED TERROR, 1974–1978  59

demands. Peasants regularly rose up in protest against specific taxes or

other measures of state extraction, but they were not sufficiently organ-
ized to issue political demands beyond these immediate needs. Their
cause was later adopted by the political activists, but the peasants did not
join the Revolutionary rush (Tareke 2009, 19).
Ethiopia’s peasants were poor, unorganized, and over-taxed. Any
efforts they made to alter these conditions were invariably met by vio-
lent state repression. These conditions left them fatally exposed whenever
their general food insecurity was amplified by poor harvest. Historically
beset by famine, Ethiopia’s patterns of governance and violent internal
repression aggravated natural calamities into conditions of large-scale
death for poor peasants (de Waal 1991, 26–33). These famines often
killed tens of thousands, and prompted mere lack of concern by the state.
In 1972–1973, a famine struck in Wollo and Tigray; it costs the lives
of an estimated 40,000–80,000 people, the hardest hit in Wollo, includ-
ing Amhara and Oromo people (de Waal 1991, 58). In Ethiopia, it was
the last famine without a large-scale humanitarian relief effort. Lack of
food was not the primary cause of death by starvation; rather, it was the
peasants’ inability to access food during a time of scarcity when the mar-
gins tightened. The wealthy used the period of deprivation to continue
to demand taxes and confiscated land as payment. While people starved
in the countryside, the famine-affected areas exported food to the capital
(de Waal 1991, 60). As Abebe Zegeye and Siegfried Pausewang note, in
Ethiopia, famine hits the countryside and the cities still eat: “Peasants
cannot afford to eat the crops of their own fields and cannot keep back
the necessary reserves before selling what they can do without” (Zegeye
and Pausewang 1994, 8).
The Imperial government expressed annoyance that peasant deaths
would mar its reputation and the planned celebration of the Emperor’s
birthday in July 1972. The government attempted to sweep the enor-
mous human consequences of the famine out of view. But a British
television documentary by journalist Jonathon Dimbleby broadcast
­
visual evidence of the starving populations to a global audience. It was
later re-broadcast within Ethiopia: images of peasants dying for lack of
food spliced with images of the Emperor’s birthday and the wedding
of the daughter of a senior government official, for which the cake had
been flown from Italy. A young generation of Ethiopian political activists
received the images as a call to action (de Waal 1991, 58).
60  B. CONLEY

The Activists
On the university campus in Addis Ababa, news and images of the fam-
ine riveted student activists. Before gathering crowds, student leaders
cited the Imperial government’s response to the famine as clear evidence
of the Emperor’s lack of interest in the country’s populace. Imperial
trappings of authority, gilded and ancient, could not cower young stu-
dents with huge Afros, bell bottoms and a focused sense of purpose.
Hiwot Teffera describes a campus protest in 1972, with speaker after
speaker decrying the lack of famine response:

I saw a student with a huge Afro, khaki pants and safari coat speaking […]
“Hundreds of people travel hundreds of miles on foot every day from the
famine-hit areas in search of food, children among them! Hundreds have
perished on their way over and their bodies are strewn along the road,
and yet the government was beautifying the city for the 80th birthday of
the Emperor!” […] We were outraged by such an affront to human dig-
nity. “Bread!” a shout went up from the crowd. “For the hungry!” we
rumbled, raising our fists in the air […] we rocked the campus with a
thunderous roar. (Teffera 2012, 44)

Thus, the plight of the peasants featured centrally in activists’ rhetoric

demanding political, economic, and social change, even as “the fam-
ine-vulnerable people did not” (de Waal 1997, 108). The student activ-
ists believed they were acting on behalf of the country’s overwhelming
peasant population, but the Revolution and turmoil in the years immedi-
ately following was, as one Ethiopian researcher noted, “mainly an urban
phenomenon; and of the 3 million city dwellers in a country of about
32 million, scarcely 300,000 or 10% were directly and actively involved”
(Tareke 2008, 186).
These urban activists were part of an African and global trend in the
1960s and 1970s whereby social and political change was led by stu-
dent movements. Nurtured by revolutionary ideologies, youth move-
ments attempted to reshape social conditions (Balsvik 1994, 303).
Within Ethiopia’s educated class, ideas took on new life, as the possibil-
ity for real change appeared tantalizingly within grasp. Inspiration came
from many sources. Students consumed texts by leftist writers including
Frantz Fanon, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Tse
Tung, Agostino Neto, Amilcar Cabral, among others (Teffera 2012, 49;
Zewde 2010, 11).
 2  REVOLUTION AND RED TERROR, 1974–1978  61

In Ethiopia, the “student movement” refers to social activism whose

center of gravity was the university experience, while including a broader
set of actors beyond formally enrolled young people. Educational oppor-
tunities inside of Ethiopia, while still limited by resources, gender and
location, expanded considerably in the decades between 1940 and
1970, with the opening of secondary and higher education facilities. In
this way, the Imperial government’s limited reforms laid the ground for
what became revolutionary demands. Not only were more people able
to study inside the university’s walls, but opportunities opened for them
to travel to continue graduate studies, allowing them also to see their
country, Africa, and the world from different perspectives. A program
initiated in 1964, the Ethiopian University Service, brought Ethiopians
students to work for one year in the rural areas, helping to forge con-
nections across social classes, and between secondary and university-level
students (Zewde 1991, 222).
Ethiopian students were also directly influenced by African liberation
movements that sought to end European colonialism. Selassie’s govern-
ment offered scholarships for some young anti-colonial African students
to study in Addis Ababa, where they interacted with Ethiopian students.
The Imperial regime further supported decolonization by directly train-
ing guerilla fighters—including a young Nelson Mandela—from across
the continent (Dale 2013). Anti-colonial ideas were re-interpreted in the
Ethiopian context to include critique of Selassie’s imperial government.
Ethiopians also could look inside their country for an example of armed
resistance: Eritrean student activists seeking to end or limit Ethiopia’s con-
trol over their territory had already paired revolutionary ideas with military
training in China and Cuba. They took up armed struggle in the Eritrean
mountains, influencing their peers in Addis and elsewhere in Ethiopia who
saw the Imperial government as a system built on injustice.
Global events further radicalized the student movement. World news
was full of stories about the Vietnam War and protests against it. In
Europe and the United States, students and leftists were making head-
lines as they sought to influence policy changes. Ethiopian students fol-
lowed the news, and among them were also young people who had gone
abroad to continue their studies in the United States and Europe. There,
they encountered burgeoning social activism on global and domestic
issues. Those who studied in the United States noted that the American
civil rights movement was a particularly important influence (Zewde
2010, 37).
62  B. CONLEY

Within Ethiopia, students became more vocal and specific about their
demands starting in the mid-1960s, with a major protest in February
1965 under the banner of “land to the tiller” in support of peasants’
rights (Zewde 2010, 14). That year also witnessed the creation of a stu-
dent union uniting all of the Addis University colleges, which helped
unify activism and maintain a steady pace of protests (Zewde 2010,
14–15). Many of the student leaders during this period were arrested,
and used their time in prison as a seminar behind bars: learning from
each other and debating how to interpret Marxist ideas within the
national context. Initially, they demanded participation in government,
but by the late 1960s had shifted to confrontation and the goal of over-
throwing the government (Balsvik 1994, 83). A small core of informal
and highly secretive leaders, known as the “Crocodiles,” were instrumen-
tal in the radicalization process, by articulating a vision for revolutionary
social change (Balsvik 1994, 82). As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s,
the university and high schools had fallen into a pattern of student prov-
ocations and government repression.
Divisions within the student movement began almost immediately,
as an outgrowth of intense ideological and political debates. As Teffera
writes:

…the student movement at the university was beset by internal strife and
became fraught with division, character assassination, labeling and ostraciz-
ing…The Marxist-Leninist pen became the means for thrashing dissenting
voices just as the gun would later become the weapon of choice for settling
scores. (Teffera, 88–89)

Differing interpretations of the “truth” of scientific socialism pro-

duced different organizational and ideological positions that cemented
over time. Three main views of the state dominated: the colonial the-
sis, which understood the Imperial state as a colonizer of various peo-
ples; the nation-state which did not take issue with the centralized
state, but with its policies; and the nation of nations, which held that
Ethiopia contained multiple nations each of which had the right to
self-determination. Debates over these positions occurred both inside the
country and in several congresses of Ethiopian students studying abroad,
including in Berlin, Los Angeles, and Algeria, among other sites.
Out of these congresses and in response to heated debates between
representatives, the key political parties of the Revolutionary period
 2  REVOLUTION AND RED TERROR, 1974–1978  63

were born. Radical intellectuals gathered in a secret congress in April

1972, to form the EPRP, at the same time taking steps to train and arm
a guerilla movement, looking to the Eritreans as a model of how this
might work (Tola 1989, 18). Rival students formed another group, the
All Ethiopian Socialist Movement (Meison, from its Amharic acronym).
In theory, the differences between the groups were not insurmount-
able: Meison and EPRP agreed on the need to transition from feudal-
ism to socialism led by a political party that represented the interests of
the peasants, workers, and progressive elements of bourgeois. However,
among Marxist–Leninists even small doctrinal differences could form
irreparable divisions, especially when leadership personalities are added to
the mix.
Eventually the EPRP began to be identified with Berhane Meskel
Redda, while Meison developed under the leadership of Haile Fida
(Zewde 2010, 16). The leaders differed on several issues, including
two key concerns. First, was whether conditions were “ripe” for spe-
cific tactics, especially armed insurgency or support for centralized pol-
icy changes. Second, was the “national question,” regarding the rights
of national groups, with EPRP arguing in support of a right to secession
and Meison against (Tareke 2009, 24–25, 27; Toggia 2012, 268; Teffera
2012, 148). Additional tensions arose between those operating inside
Ethiopia and movements based abroad. Marina Ottaway puts forward a
harsh argument: that the activists were collectively mesmerized by split-
ting ideological hairs, failed to reach out to the “masses” in whose name
they protested, and were all characterized by “secrecy and duplicity”
(Ottaway 1995, 80). However, during the period before 1974 and into
the early years of the Revolution, individuals and even groups aligned
and re-aligned as leaders sought to build coalitions (Toggia 2012).
Organized labor, although not large in number, played a symbol-
ically powerful role in the Revolution by reinforcing the students’
sense that there was broader social support for their political demands.
By 1970, some industry had developed in Addis Ababa, Asmara, and
Dire Dawa, and there was one major union, the Confederation of
Ethiopian Labor Unions (CELU). By 1974, CELU was estimated to
have 100,000 members (Tola 1989, 17). Other sectors of labor, like
taxi drivers, teachers, and bank workers, also went on strike at various
periods during the pre-1974 period and afterward. Many of these pro-
test movements were organized around specific reforms, like increased
wages and better working conditions, not revolution (Tola 1989,
64  B. CONLEY

21–23). Ethiopia’s first general strike occurred on March 7, 1974

(Tola 1989, 22).
Even as protest and turmoil increased in the early 1970s, neither the
student movements nor unions were sufficiently organized or influential
to topple the Imperial state. That impetus would emerge from within the
newly politicized military.

The Military
The coup attempt of 1960, despite failing, provided two revelations that
would prove critical to the 1974 overthrow of the Imperial regime. First,
as Tola notes, “the façade of absolute authority was stained, the idea of
complete obedience put into question” (Tola 1989, 16). This led to a
shift whereby opposition, previously conspiratorial, became more open
and mass-based (Zewde 1991, 214). Second, the military also came to
realize its central role in maintaining the Imperial government (Kebede
2011, 141).
The Imperial military was composed of some 40,000 men, and it rep-
resented the single largest component of the national budget, consuming
19–24% of the overall budget (Kebede 2011, 196–197). Between the
1960 and 1970s, its ranks were gradually becoming politicized, especially
among younger, more educated, mid-level officers who would play sig-
nificant roles in the revolution. As these younger officers rose through
the ranks based on merit, they found themselves blocked from gaining
higher-level promotions by an Imperial system that rewarded loyalty
to the Emperor above all else. Increasingly, the top ranks were seen by
many of their subordinates as corrupt and co-opted by the emperor, a
critique sharpened as these officers came into contact with the armed
anti-colonial movements, like the African National Congress (ANC),
who they were training.
Further aggravating tensions in the military was the government’s
poor handling of the Eritrean armed opposition (Kebede 2011, 196–
198). Starting in the early 1960s, the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF)
conducted ambushes, sabotage and engaged small garrisons of army
units and police stations. The Imperial government responded with sys-
tematic human rights abuses, collective punishment, and harsh repres-
sion. In 1967, for instance, the Ethiopian military launched an offensive
that burnt 62 villages to the ground, killing over 400 villagers, slaugh-
tering cattle and camels, and instituting a policy of forceful relocation
 2  REVOLUTION AND RED TERROR, 1974–1978  65

(de Waal 1991, 44). The pattern continued across Eritrea, sending refu-
gees pouring over borders. However, the violence, while brutal, was not
effective in diminishing the capacity of the Eritrean insurgents. Within
the Ethiopian military, tensions simmered regarding the extensive vio-
lence against civilians and inability of the state to take control of the situ-
ation (de Waal 1991, 43–49).
On January 12, 1974, the twenty-fourth brigade of the fourth divi-
sion mutinied. The government responded by promising to improve
conditions, increase salaries and pensions (Kebede 2011, 169). Other
mutinies followed: the 2nd division mutinied in Asmara on February
26, 1974, and took over the local radio station (Kebede 2011, 169). On
February 27, air force helicopters flew over Addis Ababa dropping leaf-
lets with political demands, firmly signaling a shift in the armed forces’
demands from a focus solely on their own conditions, to a broader polit-
ical agenda. Now they were demanding land reform, creation of political
parties, free elections, release of political prisoners, free press, and trials
for ministers and other leaders on charges of corruption and dereliction
of duty (Kebede 2011, 205, 232).
The politically vocal members of the military, mostly well-educated
junior officers, went a step further. They formed a military commit-
tee to oversee implementation of their demands. The officers called for
each unit of the military to send to Addis three representatives: a junior
officer (no one above the rank of Major), noncommissioned officer, and
enlisted man. This committee was formed on June 27, 1974, and named
the Coordinating Committee of the Armed forces, Police and Territorial
Army—in its Amharic acronym, the Derg (Tareke 2009, 39).
The Derg was thus initially composed of an ethnically and geograph-
ically diverse set of 120 men, and saw itself as representing the nation
and national unity, but without a distinct ideology. They drew their
unconventional authority from the ranks of younger officers, equipped
with modernizing demands and a goal of claiming the country’s future.
Within its numbers were rival factions with very different views of the
path forward.

The Dynamics of the Red Terror

Ethiopia entered 1974 with an aggrieved population. Herein we focus
on events in Addis Ababa, but note that the Terror spread much fur-
ther.1 Provocations were met by inept governmental response—an
66  B. CONLEY

Imperial system whose aging leader could no longer command control

of the situation and no one else prepared to take his place. Unplanned
and “anchorless” (Tareke 2009, 38), the Revolution began with raucous
fervor as various newly empowered activists joined one side or another.
Following months of mass protests and governmental paralysis, in
September 1974 the Derg took control of the state in the name of the
Revolution. They immediately disbanded Parliament, scrapped the con-
stitution and ended the monarchy (Tareke 2009, 39). It was, initially, a
wholly peaceful coup. The army used just six tanks, as a symbolic pres-
ence, to assert their takeover of the capital.

The Military Takes Over

For activists like Teffera, the military seizure of control was viewed as
hijacking the Revolution. Students promptly organized a protest, as a
“litmus test for the Derg’s patience” (Teffera 2012, 115). Shots rang
out, scattering students and indicating that the military would little tol-
erate political opposition.
The Derg’s nationalist slogan, “Ethiopia First, but without blood-
shed,” suggested a vague unity in what was a factionalized group. There
were three main camps: one advocated for return to civilian rule; another
faction, led by a senior officer, Lieutenant General Aman Mikael Andom
(who hailed from Eritrea), pushed for more streamlined decision-mak-
ing within the Derg and sought peaceful resolution of political issues and
the burgeoning conflict with ELF. The third group, led by Mengistu
Haile Meriam, sought to radicalize the Revolution in order to press their
advantage; this group eventually emerged triumphant. At several crucial
turning points, Mengistu and his coterie were able to out-maneuver or
murder moderates and determine the path of military rule.
The slogan also hid the first indication that the Revolution would
include bloodshed: on the night of November 23, 1974, the Derg exe-
cuted 59 former Imperial Ministers and high officials of the Emperor.
The following day, Lt. Gen. Aman was also murdered (Tareke 2009, 40).
The civilian political activists were unprepared for the pace of changes.
Debates among them splintered groups. As Getachew Maru, Teffera’s
boyfriend, noted, the debates were expressed in terms of theoretical
certainty that were not matched by close analysis of the evolving situa-
tion in Ethiopia: “Right now, we are merely throwing around terms and
labels we don’t even know much about,” he stated (Teffera 2012, 118).
 2  REVOLUTION AND RED TERROR, 1974–1978  67

At this point and through early 1975, the two main organized groups,
the EPRP and Meison, were united in calling for a transition to a
Provisional Peoples’ Government (Wiebel 2015). The new military lead-
ers refused to follow this direction, but acted quickly on some of the
more radical political ideas circulating at the time. Sending students from
the capital across the country to teach in various rural communities, in
what it called a zemecha campaign (Wiebel 2015, 17), the Derg momen-
tarily defused some of their urban competitors for power, and then
sought to enlist support of the vast rural population.
Among political activists, debate raged about how to engage with the
military regime. In 1975, strongly influenced by Haile Fida and Meison,
the Derg adopted the mantle of “Ethiopian Socialism” and introduced
major social reforms, including nationalization of all rural land, major
industries, financial institutions, and insurance companies (Kebede 2011,
238; Tareke 2009, 41). For the country’s overwhelming peasant popu-
lation, land reform was an enormous early victory of the Revolution. It
temporarily brought the peasants unto the side of the new military gov-
ernment (Tareke 2008, 186). Thus, while peasants did not necessarily
identify with the political activists, nor did the Derg conceive the new
policy in relation to developing a political contract with poor farmers,
the peasants welcomed the land redistribution when it arrived (Kebede
2011, 255). Later measures undertaken by the military dictatorship,
such as collective agriculture and model villages, would alienate this same
population, but in 1975, the Derg won itself rural supporters.
There are debates about how sincerely the Derg transitioned from
nationalist to socialist slogans and policies. Kebede argues convincingly
that the Derg was not merely opportunist, but rather implemented
socialist policies ad hoc after they had taken over power for several rea-
sons (2011, 220–221). The junior leaders of the Derg needed a rev-
olutionary ideology because it was the only way they could compete
for power. The radical land reform and nationalizing industry func-
tioned as a scorched earth politics, allowing the rise of an unorthodox
set of new elites—unorthodox not only in that they were upending
the Imperial system but also were not from the highest ranks of mili-
tary leadership. The ideology of Marxism–Leninism also granted this
upheaval a messianic character that endorsed use of violence. Further,
implementing land reform functioned as a blocking measure that took
the wind out of the sails of the civilian movement, who were calling
for a civilian peoples’ government. The Derg could not compete on
68  B. CONLEY

democratic terms, but it could compete in the arena of radical socialist

reforms.
As 1975 wore on, civilian political groups faced the question of
whether they would support the military regime or continue to pro-
test against it. By December, Meison argued that the military had
shown itself sufficiently revolutionary, and declared it would pro-
vide “critical support” to the Derg. Tareke (2008, 191) argues that
Meison’s leaders sought to align themselves with the Derg as a way
to outflank the EPRP, which had a more substantial popular base.
Believing that they could position themselves to eventually take over
as a civilian–led regime, Meison leaders took up the work of politi-
cal organization within the Provisional Office for Mass Organization
Affairs (POMOA) (along with several other smaller left-leaning
organizations). From this position, Meison sought to infiltrate local-
level administrative units, kebeles, and the government bureaucracy
(Tareke 2008, 192). They also pushed for policies that limited the
ability of other civilian political groups to organize and expand their
membership.

The EPRP Announces Its Presence

There were multiple opposition groups operating in the country and
in the capital, all of whom were eventually targeted by the Derg, but I
focus on the EPRP, because it had the largest popular following the city,
was named as a public enemy by Mengistu and its supporters suffered
in greatest number. The EPRP refused to recognize the military-led
regime as legitimate. The organization existed underground through-
out this period, and on August 31, 1975, it publicly declared itself by
distributing a publication, Democracia in three languages across the
country (Tola 1989, 36). The public announcement was met, as Teffera
explains, with “jubilation among members and supporters” (Teffera
2012, 136). From 1975 to 1976, the height of membership, the legions
of EPRP activists mushroomed (Teffera 2012, 170). Their core demands
included: recognition of basic democratic rights including freedom of
speech, press, and assembly, organization, notably for political opposition
groups; release of political prisoners; peaceful and democratic resolution
of the Eritrean question; arming of the masses (peasants, workers, stu-
dents); increases in wages and a minimum wage; and end to imperialism
(revoke unequal treaties and agreements and close foreign military bases)
 2  REVOLUTION AND RED TERROR, 1974–1978  69

(Tola 1989, 116). Wary of military rule, their central demand was replac-
ing the military government with a provisional peoples’ government.
Babile Tola’s 1989 text, To Kill a Generation: The Red Terror in
Ethiopia, presents the EPRP’s perspective on events, and cites an array
of Derg actions that fed the parties’ early concerns that the military never
intended to return to the barracks (Tola 1989, 29). Tola argues that the
Derg was violent from its first days in power, noting the mass execution
of Imperial Ministers and actions taken against protesters (Tola 1989,
28–38). He also describes the alarms raised by a state of emergency
imposed on September 30, 1975 (Tola 1989, 39), that curbed freedom
of association and made unlawful a range of acts: protests, strikes, dis-
tribution of materials, violation of curfew, carrying of weapons, and dis-
turbing the peace. Officially, the measure lasted until December 1975,
but effectively, it remained in place throughout military rule.
Organizationally, the EPRP had a complex, hierarchical, and entirely
clandestine system. At the highest level was the Congress—which could
not meet under the conditions of the state of emergency—under which
was the Party and the semi-autonomous Youth League. The organization
was divided into various zones, sub-zones, regional committees, and at
the lowest level, cells (Teffera 2012, 141–142). Cells were the organiza-
tion’s foundation; it was at this level that recruitment occurred. Several
“mass organizations” were also formed: Student Association, Women’s
Association, and the Youth Vanguard, which drew from secondary
schools (Teffera 2012, 143–144). At each level of the hierarchy, secret
codes were used to hide identities, and the flow of knowledge between
and across levels was tightly managed. Thus, any one activist would
know the names of only a handful of other activists.
The Party and its organizational culture, Teffera writes, required strict
discipline of its members and commitment to the principle of demo-
cratic centralism: “We were taught that individuals were subordinate to
the League, and the minority to the majority. Members could discuss
and debate policies and issues, but once a majority decision was reached,
we were obliged to uphold it” (2012, 143). The Party could demand
such discipline because it inspired loyalty among its members. Teffera
describes how the sense of historical importance of their work trans-
formed party members. She felt like she had “peeled off layers” of her
old self to reveal a new person: “Life became imbued with meaning…I
took myself seriously and aligned my behavior to the new person that I
had become” (2012, 155). As she explains, the attachment was born of a
70  B. CONLEY

new way of thinking: “Marxism opened my eyes to the injustice around

me and inspired me to fight and destroy the oppressive and exploitative
system and build a better one on its ashes….It gave me hope. It prom-
ised me victory would be ours in the end…” (2012, 157). Individual
commitment emerged through solidarity. She continues, “The Party
came first and comrades embodied the Party and what it stood for. They
were the new family and friends, with the Party as the Father….The
sense of camaraderie, selflessness, devotion, and trust we had toward one
another was unparalleled. Our relationship touched the sublime” (2012,
160). She describes love and veneration for the Party blossoming in par-
allel as her relationship with Getachew Maru developed: “the love I had
for him was meshed with the love I had for the Party” (2012, 161–162).
Teffera, as well as many other student activists, continued to come out
unto the streets for protests and large-scale mobilizations, even as the
Derg responded with increasing violence.

The EPRP Opts for Violent Resistance

By 1976, protests and political actions were regularly met with arrests,
often accompanied by excessive use of force that led to a now steadily
mounting death toll. In July 1976, EPRP leaders in Central Committee
made the decision to strike back with violence. They activated the par-
ty’s “urban defense squads,” who implemented a policy of assassinations
against Derg officials, Meison, and others who worked with the govern-
ment (Toggia 2012, 271). The Derg named this violence the “White
Terror,” referencing the Russian Revolution of 1917, and identifying the
EPRP with anti-Revolutionary Czarist forces.
The decision exposed a rift within the Party. Getachew, for instance,
argued that the Party had no means to protect the young protesters it
called unto the street against the Derg’s violent retribution. His insights
were prescient. While the EPRP’s urban defense policy resulted in the
deaths of hundreds from summer 1976 to 1977, including high-level
Meison and Derg leaders, it had no means to mitigate the government’s
vicious response (Toggia 2012, 271; Zewde 2009, 26.) The Derg made
good on its promise to reply to any violence it suffered with overwhelm-
ing force, claiming for any one of their dead, they would extract a toll of
1000 on the other side (de Waal 1991, 102).
On September 11, 1976, Ethiopian New Year, the Derg announced it
was going on the offensive, broadcasting a statement declaring that the
 2  REVOLUTION AND RED TERROR, 1974–1978  71

EPRP was public enemy number one (Tola 1989, 67).2 Arguably, this
date can serve as the beginning of the Red Terror.3 Decrying the EPRP
as anarchists, the Derg extended the use of detention, denunciation, and
sporadic execution. They did so by granting a widening circle of regime
supporters license to perpetrate violence against political opponents.
Local-level elections in October 1976 enabled the Derg and Meison
to assert control over Addis Ababa’s 294 neighborhood level adminis-
trative units, kebeles (Zewde 2009, 27; Tola 1989, 77).4 The EPRP
was not cowed, however, and continued to recruit, call its supporters
out to the streets and pursue its urban defense strategy. On September
23, the urban defense units failed in an effort to assassinate Mengistu.
Unsuccessful, their move further goaded the most radical elements of the
Derg; Mengistu ratcheted up the regime’s reliance on violence against its
enemies.
While debates remain among serious historians as to how much vio-
lence was inherent in the military regime’s intentions and how much was
a response to EPRP’s tactics, it is clear that violence escalated in paral-
lel as Mengistu concentrated his authority. A momentous turning point
came on February 3, 1977, when Mengistu killed seven of his less ruth-
less rivals within the Derg (Wiebel 2015, 19; Kebede 2011, 261–262).
The following day, kebele leaders ordered people to Revolution Square
(Meskel Square), where Mengistu harangued the crowd in what became
known as his “bottles of blood” speech (Wiebel 2015, 19; Tola 1989,
86). Hurling down bottles of red liquid,5 meant to signify blood, he
shouted: “The Revolution has moved from the defensive to the offen-
sive. We shall carry terror into the camp of the anarchists.” In Mengistu’s
own terms, this commenced the “Red Terror” (Tola 1989, 86).

The Red Terror

The escalation in February 1977 marked what Jacob Wiebel describes as
a period of decentralization of violence (Wiebel 2015, 14): the arming
of citizens, the institution of comprehensive search campaigns, and the
convocation of so-called mass-confession sessions. As a result of this
process, Wiebel argues:

The Ethiopian Terror was never merely a conflict between competing

political groups or top-down imposed by the regime in an orderly fashion
against a particular group. Its violence was as much bottom-up as it was
72  B. CONLEY

top-down, produced by supra-local and local actors in synergistic but often

distinguishable ways. (Wiebel 2015, 14)

Violence reflected local agendas as well as the regime’s interests in defus-

ing the capacity of the EPRP. During this period, the army and police
played less of a role, increasingly, the regime relied on “special” forces:
“security,” military secret police, underground squads affiliated with
Meison, other groups affiliated directly with Mengistu, and kebele armed
units (Tola 1989, 77–79). Beginning in March 1977, the Revolutionary
Defense Squads, associated with the kebeles, and empowered to monitor
and supervise at the neighborhood level, competed among each other
for body counts, vying to outdo each other (Zewde 2009, 27). With
free license to kill, “the door was opened for private vendettas and kebele
guards moonlighted as assassins for hire and they also killed their per-
sonal enemies and rivals” (Tola 1989, 79).
The toll mounted as people were arrested, imprisoned, tortured,
killed on the street or during searches, and executed in prisons. The
Derg rationalized violence during this period as a means to extract infor-
mation about anti-revolutionary actors (largely the EPRP), by elim-
inating members of the political opposition or forcing confessions that
revealed names and other information that could disrupt the opposition’s
networks. It was also designed to terrorize the population. The bodies
of those killed by government-aligned forces were left rotting on the
street—both retrieval of dead bodies and mourning personal losses were
outlawed.
The regime instituted house-to-house search campaigns, called asesa,
conducted by various forces associated with the regime, to reveal the
EPRP’s clandestine network. The first asesa occurred in over four days
beginning on March 23, 1977, subsequent ones occurred in May and
October (Tola 1989, 147). People detained during these searches could
be killed immediately, imprisoned in local kebele holding rooms, or sent
to larger prisons. Kebele leaders were also empowered to take “revolu-
tionary measures”—executions (Wiebel 2015, 20). Another measure
implemented by the Derg during this period was mass confessions. These
were gatherings during which employees or groups of citizens were
forced through threat or cajoling to denounce themselves or others as
engaging in “counter-revolutionary” actions (Wiebel 2015, 29).
 2  REVOLUTION AND RED TERROR, 1974–1978  73

The single most deadly event of that Spring occurred in the wake of
planned May Day protests. Despite the regime’s now accelerating record
of widespread violence, the EPRP youth wing organized protests across
Addis. Having infiltrated the EPRP, the government was aware of and
well-prepared for the protests (Zewde 2009, 27; Tola 1989, 141–142).
As young people took to the streets, they were met with the aggre-
gate force of kebele and military officials. Over 1000 people were killed.
Parents were forced to pay for their children’s bodies, to reimburse the
Derg for the bullets that killed their children (Zewde 2009, 28). Teffera
describes the event with shock, the violence as “unfathomable”; the wail-
ing of women who could not find their dead children echoed through
neighborhoods (Teffera 2012, 242–243).
The decentralized violence ravaged urban Ethiopia from spring
through early summer 1977. Described as netsa ermeja—“free meas-
ure”—violence during this period was no longer accompanied by jus-
tifications. License to take action was distributed widely among regime
supporters (Wiebel 2015, 23).
Those who were captured rather than killed entered a prison sys-
tem composed not only of formal prison structures, but also a network
of local kebeles and ad hoc detention centers. Prisons in Addis included
the Old Imperial Palace (also Derg administrative center), the Central
Investigative Headquarters (Ma’ekelawi), Fourth Army Headquarters,
the central prison (Kerchele)—known as “Alem Bekagn” (farewell to
the world)—the Military Police headquarters, and hundreds of holding
cells in neighborhood kebeles. Each prison functioned as a node in a vast
security apparatus; many detainees were moved between holding various
prison locations over the course of their imprisonment. Many who were
released—or even those never arrested—felt the weight of continuous
surveillance.
Holding cells were unsanitary and overcrowded: detainees were often
wounded and sick, placed in cells with so many others that they had to
take turns laying down. They had limited access to toilets or any way
of cleaning themselves. Food was always inadequate, most survived only
through what their families could bring to them or others were will-
ing to share. The first phase of internment invariably included violent
­“interrogation”: torture.
Among the methods used against prisoners to extract names and
information were psychological torture, beatings, physical mutilation,
and sexual torture—rape of women and genital mutilation of both men
74  B. CONLEY

and women. A common practice was called “wofe illala”: flogging a pris-
oner with a whip or other implement, while they were tied to a pole and
hung upside down, so the soles of their feet were especially vulnerable to
abuse. A torturer might also cut the feet beforehand to increase the pain.
With little or no access to care, a victim’s wounds would often fester in
the prison cells.
One victim described his imprisonment and torture:

Many of us were unable to walk because our feet were wounded. I and a
few others could not use our hands to eat because our palms were burnt.
We tried to help one another, amidst the prisoners there was solidarity.
Each night our number decreased as they took some for execution and
each morning it increased again with new arrivals. The smell of rotting
flesh was terrible. The worst time was at night when you waited for the
executioners to come. (Tola 1989, 168)

An eyewitness from Wollo described the torture and death of a young

woman activist, Almaz Tadesse:

In jail, Almaz was subjected to brutal tortures, knives and bottles were
used on her sexual organ and her breasts were chopped off. She would
have died of her wounds but they took her out one night along with
Kassetch Berhe (a female teacher), Teshager Ayalew, Yimer Kebede and ten
other prisoners and shot them all. Of course, their bodies were thrown on
the street for exhibition. (Tola 1989, 170)

And death was not always the cruelest fate:

Death was a relief for the ones who survived suffered more: The parents
who saw themselves become childless in a day or a week, the mother who
witnessed the torture of her only son, the sister who had to praise the
government who had killed her brother so brutally, the ones in jail who
exhibited amputated stumps where legs and hands should have been, the
ones rendered blind, the relatives who had to take care of the youngsters
reduced to insanity by torture, etc. For the living the “red terror” meant
worse than death. (Tola 1989, 159)

News of arrests were smuggled in and out of prisons as the EPRP strug-
gle to maintain ranks while its members faced threats of arrest or expo-
sure on a daily basis. Torture worked to extract not just names, but also
 2  REVOLUTION AND RED TERROR, 1974–1978  75

to excise the relationships that had forged collective opposition. Hiwot

Teffera describes the pain of learning that a beloved friend and comrade,
Azeb, had been taken into custody. Teffera writes:

Azeb and I had come a long way. We had become inseparable the past cou-
ple years. She was clad with iron discipline and had unbounded commit-
ment and dedication to the cause. She was one of the most pure hearted
people I had ever met…They said every bone in her body had been bro-
ken. She never gave in. (Teffera 2012, 266–267)

Torture, as Michel Foucault pointed out, is a method of producing

knowledge about power, not just a means of extracting information
(Foucault 1979). The details that victims are forced to reveal have lim-
ited truth-value as often people suffering torture will say anything to end
the pain. More fundamentally, torture requires a victims’ complicity in
the system that imposes violence. In the case of the Red Terror, torture
forced victims to participate by naming names, a process that fractured
group identity, by eroding trust. Torture destroyed collective unity,
reduced people to their individual capacity to withstand pain, and forced
them to recognize the regime’s ability to unravel its opponents from the
inside. Thus, survivors of torture and even those who managed to flee,
faced a psychological reckoning with the reality that their own friends
and neighbors had often denounced or handed them over to the regime.
The violent Spring of 1977 turned to Summer. The prisons filled, and
mourners, forced to smother their grief, multiplied.

Dissolution
Even as its leaders and rank and file members were targeted by the
Derg, the EPRP lashed out against its internal critics who opposed
the urban defense policy. Naming dissenters anjas (faction), the Party
scapegoated them as the cause of all that had gone wrong. Teffera
describes the atmosphere: “At a time when morale had gone down and
members gave in easily to interrogation, Anjas became responsible for
every arrest and execution. They became enemies to be severely dealt
with” (2012, 249). Among the leading anja was Teffera’s boyfriend
Getachew, who was detained by former comrades and murdered. Teffera
describes learning the news of his death: “I saw the world I had built
76  B. CONLEY

for the past four and a half years crumbling in front of me. The young
man I had loved, respected, admired, and looked up has died” (2012,
269). For her, the death of Getachew transformed the esoteric disputes
about political differences into irreparable reality. It also opened cracks
in her view of why and how Party members were pursuing their views:
“Revolution, change, and progress became tainted with cynicism,” but,
she continues, “my love for the Party endured” (2012, 285). Wanting
to remain true to the ethos of putting the Party above personal goals,
she also realized that at this point in time, she had nowhere else to go.
If she returned to her family, she would put them at risk. The only other
option would be to turn herself into the Derg, which she refused to do.
She remained a committed Party activist until eventually captured by
regime forces.
The pattern of violence in the Red Terror shifted as 1977 turned to
1978. In July 1977, one of the most spectacular dramas of the Cold War
era unfolded. The socialist regime in Somalia, massively armed by the
USSR, decided to take advantage of the turmoil in Ethiopia to realize its
long-standing vision of uniting all the territories of the Somali-speaking
peoples of north-east Africa, and launched an invasion of Ethiopia.
Within weeks they had driven back the outnumbered Ethiopians and
overrun the south-eastern part of the country known as the Ogaden. At
this point, the Soviet Union—recognizing a truly revolutionary moment
in Ethiopia, resonant from their own experience sixty years earlier—
switched sides and mounted a massive airlift of tanks, artillery, fighter jets,
and other supplies to Addis Ababa. Moscow sent high-ranking generals
to direct the counter-offensive. Cuba dispatched a combat division. The
East Germans sent intelligence specialists. U.S. national security advisor
Zbigniew Brezenski remarked that, “détente lies buried in the sands of
the Ogaden” (Woodroofe 2013, 26). Mengistu turned the tide of bat-
tle. He also did not lose the opportunity to exploit nationalist rhetoric
against internal enemies, while the Soviets and East Germans also put
their technical proficiency to work upgrading his internal security appara-
tus (Toggia 2012, 275; Kebede 2011, 311).
As the Mengistu regime set about to recentralize control over vio-
lence, they set into motion a process of institutionalizing and bureaucra-
tizing violence, that, as Jacob Wiebel argued, “would define and indeed
outlast the Derg’s rule” (Wiebel 2015, 14). The regime launched a final
phase of assault against the civilian political opposition: this time tack-
ling not only the now-deeply wounded EPRP, but also former allies.
 2  REVOLUTION AND RED TERROR, 1974–1978  77

Mengistu created his own loyal militia, Abyot Seded (Revolutionary

Flame), and in August deployed them against Meison and other former
allies (Tareke 2008, 193).
Zewde describes the EPRP as ascendant during the first period of
the Terror (September 1976–February 1977), and still hitting back
through the second period (February–November 1977), but in “total
disarray” in the third phase (November 1977–May 1978) (Zewde 2009,
28). Thus, by Spring 1978, the EPRP leadership was decimated and its
members caught in the web of killing, capture, and torture; the regime
had defeated the Somali invasion and held Addis firmly within its con-
trol (Wiebel 2015, 28; Tareke 2008, 201). The practices of the Terror
continued longer in some other urban centers (e.g., in Gondar as late as
1979) and many prisoners continued to languish in detention centers,
but for the most part, by Spring 1978, the Terror’s visible presence on
the streets subsided (Wiebel 2015, 28).

Assessing the Toll

The best minimal estimate of Red Terror fatalities in Addis Ababa
alone is 10,000, with reasonable estimates rising to double this num-
ber (de Waal 1991), and added to this is likely an equal number in the
provinces. Tola, who is associated with the EPRP, claims that 150,000
died in the Terror; EPRDF government figures for Addis Ababa
are 55,000 dead (Zewde 2009, 30). Amnesty International estimated
30,000 people were held in prison from December 1977 to February
1978 in Addis alone, but there are no other reliable figures documenting
the total number of people imprisoned and tortured across the country
during the Terror (AI 1978, 8).
To this day, members of the Derg, including Mengistu, who have
published memoirs, argue that the regime had no other choice given
the array of threats that it faced from urban “terrorists” (as it labeled
the EPRP for its assassination program), external actors (Somalia), and
insurgencies in Eritrea and Tigray (Tareke 2008, 199–200; Toggia 2012,
269, 274).
The logic of the Terror expanded beyond the immediate targets of its
violence; its aim was to decimate agency by tearing apart both the pub-
lic stage for activism and the sense of solidarity—love—that had forged
collective activist identities. Mengistu wanted to end the possibility
for any opposition to emerge, as a practical and conceptual threat. The
78  B. CONLEY

system to implement the Terror thus had longer-term impacts beyond the
direct infliction of violence. The state’s ability to surveil the population
expanded, such that people saw themselves and their actions as existing
under the gaze of a security state. To achieve this, the regime fed inter-
personal betrayals and infiltrated social organizations (Tareke 2008, 197),
creating a culture of militarized security that crawled into personal rela-
tions. Many people fled into exile and the urban citizens sought to privat-
ize their lives as trust eroded (Wiebel 2015, 28). Even as violence quieted
in the streets, many survivors had to live side by side to their tormentors
and the killers of their friends, colleagues, and family members. The end
result of the Terror was, in Bahru Zewde’s words: “a cowed population,
stripped of its arms, reduced to seeing its loved ones lying dead on the
streets, forbidden to mourn and in extreme cases even forced to celebrate,
was ready to accept anything…. Once it had shown the ruthless levels to
which it could go, the regime could impose anything” (Zewde 2009, 30).
Teffera describes the scattering of former political activists around the
world: “Wherever they lived, many of them became eternal strangers
to the world and to themselves. Devoid of dreams and ideals, they lost
meaning in the present or the future. They kept chasing the elusive past”
(2012, 296). In short, the love, as I have called it, that sparked the revo-
lution was extinguished.

Endings and Memory
Teffera’s memoir and the analytical lens of “love,” help identify two
insights that illuminate later memorialization efforts. First, a conundrum:
the most crucial animating part of the Revolution was an emotional
content that can be conveyed to others only as a shadow of its former
strength. Second, the history of violence during this period involved, at
least for her, abandonment of both a political and personal dream.
Hiwot Teffera was imprisoned for eight years. For her, the story of
the Revolution and Terror ended with a more subdued sensibility
about the vision that had previously animated her activism: “tossed in
prison, I realized our project had failed, our comrades were wiped out,
and our lives were hanging on a thin thread….My dreams were shat-
tered, my heart throbbed with grief, and my mind became numb with
disillusionment” (2012, 351). For her, the Terror ended while she was
still in prison, as part of a personal transformation whereby she came to
view the passions that sparked the Revolution as ultimately producing a
 2  REVOLUTION AND RED TERROR, 1974–1978  79

“crowd mentality” that allowed the Party to become an end itself (2012,
351). Bringing the Party and comrades back to earth, off the pedestal,
meant a new phase of seeing herself in relation to a broader community.
This time, the community was defined in mortal terms: “the sense of
my own fallibility and human frailty, and the longing to remain human
helped me heal, let go, and set me free” (Teffera 2012, 426). She was
released from prison on June 6, 1986 (Teffera 2012, 434).
The end point for Teffera is not necessarily the same for others. As we
will see, memorialization brought together activists and family members
with diverse views of the history, but what united them was a founda-
tion in the spark of love no longer organized around collective political
action, but now concentrated on lost relatives, friends, and, for many, the
lost political hope. Endings reflect dissolution of the shared experienced,
as those who had survived the violence fled or faced a new challenge of
living within a country where the military regime remained in power.
Atomized and wounded, the survivors forged their own paths. Some
joined other political endeavors, but for many of the previously commit-
ted activists, it was not until the memorialization effort that they would
heed another collective call to action.
In interviews, survivors of the prisons and torture centers who work
at the Museum added a caveat to all talk of even an ending to violence:
whenever opposition to Mengistu would flare up, the regime had no
compunction about returning to violence even after the Terror ended,
although it was no longer needed at the same levels given the lack of
organized opposition in the capital. Many activists were kept in prison
long after the Terror ended. Some were only released because prisons
were getting too crowded. Whatever the reason for releases, the logic of
who was released and who remained in prison seem whimsical to survi-
vors. Luck, they argued, determined their fates: release, imprisonment,
or death.
For some, the ongoing impact of physical torture made any discus-
sion of an ending impossible. Instead, they spoke in terms of permanent
scars, both physical and mental. Befekadu Gebremedhin noted that it is
very difficult to make sense of the degree of cruelty involved in tortur-
ing someone. The Red Terror, he explained, was a time when the few
worst people took over and inflicted permanent scars. He suffers from
pain in his feet every day as a result of torture. Then he discussed what
should have been an ending, but wasn’t. About three weeks after he was
released from prison in 1986, the Derg killed a group of people who
80  B. CONLEY

had been imprisoned with him. Among them was his teacher, a man he
greatly respected. The news shocked him, and he could not eat for days.
He—and those in this group—thought they had survived the worst.
They had expected that they would all eventually be released, as he had
been, and no longer feared for their lives. The news of these murders
pierced his sense that an ending might be possible at all.
Even in 1991, when Mengistu was overthrown, he worried. At the
time, Befekadu was teaching adult literacy and the presence of a large
number of soldiers entering the city made him anxious. Having suffered
so much under the military regime, he feared the unknown, especially
when it arrived in military uniform. Among the permanent scars he
lives with is disenchantment with politics and promises of how a soci-
ety might be made better. The experience of undergoing the violence
of the Red Terror left him wary of promises and change, preferring to
wait until policies were proven in time. His generation who suffered the
Red Terror lost the desire to be politically active, he explained. They felt
instead a profound sense of isolation and fear of being political, of expos-
ing oneself and being left with no one to help except family.
Museum docent Eshetu Debelie identified a shift in his sense of being
under surveillance as the ending. He was released from prison before
the military government collapsed and he did not imagine that it would
ever fall. For him the ending came in 1986, when he realized he was no
longer being followed. He left Addis for a job in a place where no one
could identify him and he felt free.
As he reflected on the possibility of an ending, however, he turned to
those whose well-being was permanently diminished by the losses: the
poor elderly parents of those who were killed, who normally would have
relied on their children to help them through their old age. When he
goes to visit his mother, he sometimes sees people he knew whose chil-
dren were killed. While he did not use the language of survivor’s guilt,
it haunted his description of interactions with these indigent, aging par-
ents. As he passes them on the street, he tries to hide from them, avert
his eyes. When we spoke in the Museum, he took me to see the image
of the house-by-house search displayed in the exhibition. He knew of
two youngsters in his neighborhood who were killed by similar searches.
Today, when he sees their surviving parents, he tries to avoid them.
Muluneh Haile, another Museum survivor-docent, identified a differ-
ent ending dynamic. After he was released, he did not go back to univer-
sity, but tried to keep a low profile by continuing to study on his own, at
 2  REVOLUTION AND RED TERROR, 1974–1978  81

libraries and other places where he could remain under the radar. This
was a period of his life when he was very angry. He was alive while others
had been killed, and he felt very bad. He looked for a chance to leave
Ethiopia and study abroad, but he needed a scholarship and could not
find one. Ultimately, he held out hope that the military regime would
end. In 1989, there was a coup attempt against Mengistu and it made
him very happy. Now all could understand us, he thought, even within
the military, opposition was starting to rise. He knew that when the end
came, that Mengistu would flee, as he was a coward.
Over this same time period, in the country’s periphery, a rural-based
armed movement was slowly building capacity and gaining ground.
Organized by nationality and emerging from the peasant regions
in Tigray, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front
(EPRDF) had a different origin story and very different ending than that
of the urban-based EPRP. The Cold War ended and Mengistu’s foreign
supporters abandoned him, and his domestic policies alienated most
of his former supporters, particularly among the peasant population.
EPRDF battlefield victories multiplied. They encircled Addis Ababa and
Mengistu fled into exile in Zimbabwe.
On May 28, 1991, the EPRDF marched into Addis Ababa.

Notes
1. The dynamics of the Red Terror are better documented in Addis Ababa,
which is the focus of much of the research I will present here, as well as
the narrative told in the RTMMM. The Terror was not restricted to the
capital, but there is little research available in English language that doc-
uments beyond this geography. Available in Amharic sources, especially
through the records established by the Special Prosecutors’ Office, is a
much more expansive story of how the policies impacted outside Addis.
The regime perpetrated massacres in Gondar, Wollo, Gojjam, Tigray, and
elsewhere throughout 1977.
2. The Derg was facing pressure from other political groups and armed oppo-
sition at the time, including escalating armed hostilities by proxy with
neighboring Somalia.
3. Others researchers of the period argue, proposing alternate dates for the
beginning of the Red Terror: some argue as early as the rise of the military
rule (1974), the end of 1976, or February 4, 1977—following a speech at
Meskel Square, renamed Revolution Square, during which Mengistu threw
bottles of ‘blood’ on the ground, shattering them as he demanded the
elimination of the EPRP.
82  B. CONLEY

4. The city was further divided into 25 larger districts, Keftegnas, which were
governed by the central committee which elected the mayor (Tola 1989, 77).
5. One bottle of “blood” remained unbroken; today it is on display at the
RTMMM.

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Halliday, Fred, and Maxine Molyneux. 1981. The Ethiopian Revolution. London:
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Ababa, Ethiopia.
 CHAPTER 3

Transitional Influences, 1991–2005

By the time the Derg, the regime that perpetrated the Red Terror, was
overthrown in 1991, survivors and those who lost loved ones in the
violence of the 1970s were scattered. The fervor—what I described
as “love”—that held them together as a collective was transformed.
Henceforward, mournful assemblage of fragments, careful work that
did not aim to recreate politics, would drive a different collective effort:
memorialization. But before the pieces could be arranged, they had to be
blown together by far-flung social, political, and personal forces that also
helped shaped the transitional period as the new government established
itself. The story of how the Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum
(RTMMM) came into existence is not as simple as a linear progression
from mourning to museum, nor is it merely an example of local applica-
tion of the increasingly globally popular institutional form of the memo-
rial museum, nor is it reducible to instrumental political aims.
To understand how a memorial museum took shape as a particu-
lar way of honoring those who suffered or were killed during the Red
Terror, we must search through the period of the political transi-
tion from Mengistu to the establishment of the Ethiopian People’s
Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) government to discover the
conceptual building blocks that contributed to the distinct memorial
form that would be the RTMMM.1
The story begins with material objects—human remains and a memo-
rial stone—around which survivors, families, and friends of those killed

© The Author(s) 2019 85

B. Conley, Memory from the Margins,
Memory Politics and Transitional Justice,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13495-2_3
86  B. CONLEY

began to organize their memorial efforts. The bones were the remains of
those killed during the Terror and hidden in mass graves. Most were uni-
dentifiable by the means at hand for Ethiopians seeking to finally prop-
erly bury their loved ones. These remains of people from diverse national
and religious backgrounds, whose fate was the result of political violence,
exhumed yet unidentified, resisted final resolution within traditional bur-
ial rites. The memorial stone was a simple marker mounted in Meskel
Square by EPRDF leaders soon after they took power, a modest effort to
pay tribute to those who died in the first years of resistance to the mili-
tary regime. These material objects are significant in their physical pres-
ence, and in how they anchored networks of relationships with the dead.
Second, is Ethiopia’s emergent memorial landscape: several memorial
museum projects were mounted in the early years of the new EPRDF
government. This museal moment of Ethiopian history influenced the
founders of the RTMMM, and reflects a trend that resonates with global
developments. Third, is a juridical logic, a distinct way of viewing the
political relevance of violent history, that produced several distinct tran-
sitional forms, including criminal prosecutions and memorial museums.
Swirling beneath all of these factors that contributed to the possibil-
ity for a Red Terror memorial museum, is the steady flow of evolving
politics as the country emerged from decades under military rule and
charted a different, yet still contentious, course forward. During this
time period, the Red Terror was not a major factor. It existed in the
shadows, as a marginal moment of Ethiopia’s past, a dead end. The main
political story charted the rise of the EPRDF that defeated Mengistu and
then embarked on its own program of transforming Ethiopia’s politics,
economy, and society. To understand this narrative, I return briefly to the
past in order to switch tracks and arrive back at the transitional moment
in the 1990s.

A New Vision of the State

The Imperial state inherited by Revolutionary actors in the 1970s
imposed Amhara as the official language and Orthodox Christianity as
the official faith, regardless of the fact that within Ethiopian borders,
there are over 80 ethnic groups, among which the Amharic-speaking
Orthodox Christians are the second largest proportion of the population.
 3  TRANSITIONAL INFLUENCES, 1991–2005  87

The largest ethno-cultural group is the Oromo. The Tigrayans are a

substantial minority in the northern highlands, the historic center of
Ethiopia’s imperial governance. Minority groups in the southern high-
lands and the peripheries of the lowlands make up the remainder. Each
of these groups has its own language and cultural practices. The country
is also religiously diverse with Ethiopian Orthodox, Muslim, Protestant,
and other faiths that often cross ethnic lines. From the nineteenth cen-
tury onwards, the Imperial system centralized and concentrated power
in the hands of the Emperor and his faithful. Ethiopia’s peripheries expe-
rienced the state through forcible and symbolic projection of power
and extraction of resources (de Waal 2015, 156). Following the 1974
Revolution, various leftist groups vied to take over and transform this
centralized state apparatus, including the political groups who were even-
tually crushed in the Terror, and the military regime under Mengistu.
A major point of contention across political debates was whether the
country should be built around the vision of a singular Ethiopian iden-
tity, or through a federation of its cultural communities (“national”
identities in the Marxist–Leninist terminology favored by the left) with
or without the right to secede. Divisions arose concerning how to bal-
ance the interests of democracy with that of socialism and development
(Zewde 2010). From the rural peripheries, the answer to the national
question was clear: politics should be organized around communities
defined by national identity. In Eritrea, rejection of the central state was
most acute, and armed groups fought for independence.
The leading actor in this story of nations is the Tigrayan Peoples
Liberation Front (TPLF), which arose from the Tigrayan members of
the Ethiopian student movement, who launched an armed rebellion
in their northern homeland as a national Tigrayan struggle. The TPLF
eventually dominated the military resistance to the Derg, and created a
coalition of ethno-national groups, the Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary
Democratic Front (EPRDF). Their war effort can be summarized in one
of its slogans: “the people, politicized, mobilized, and armed, can never
be ruled against their will” (de Waal 2015, 159). The EPRDF combined
national and class-based analyses of the Ethiopian predicament and on
taking power in 1991, organized its new federal constitution around
the idea of transforming the country into a “nation of nations” (Nahim
1997).
88  B. CONLEY

The Violence of Counterinsurgency

While this study focuses on the Red Terror, it is important to recog-
nize the degree of suffering and violence experienced across the country
throughout the period of the military regime. The Derg’s counterinsur-
gency strategy systematically and repeatedly targeted the civilian popula-
tion with massacre, aerial bombardment, use of napalm, cluster bombs,
rape, and extrajudicial execution. An iconic example was the bombing of
Hawzein, a small northern Tigrayan town, on market day on Wednesday,
June 22, 1988. A minimum of 1800 people, with estimates rising to 2500,
were killed. One eyewitness described how the valley town was accessible
via only two roads, both of which were cut off by military helicopters.

At about 10 o’clock in the morning two helicopters came low overhead

and circled for about an hour. An hour later they came back with two
MiGs. They circled for a while and then bombed the market area, which
was packed with people, and animals waiting to be sold. Apart from the
market square itself, there was also a big animal market in the old school
compound. The MiGs concentrated on the markets: no-one could have
stayed alive in those areas. Meanwhile the two helicopters circled round
trapping people as they tried to escape, cutting them down like leaves.
(Human Rights Watch 1990, 19–20)

Today, the Tigrayan countryside is dotted with small locally built memo-
rials to the violence suffered by people as a result of the government’s
ruthless counterinsurgency. For example, in Abi Adi, not far from
Hawzein, a memorial to people massacred in the town was repeatedly
destroyed by the Derg army whenever it occupied the town, and rebuilt
by the people when the TPLF came back.2 In this case, the memorial lit-
erally marked a front line.
The most deadly weapon the Derg deployed during the war was fam-
ine. The devastating impact of the 1983–1985 famine for which Ethiopia
would later become a global cause célèbre was due in no small part to
the failure of governmental policies. The famine in the north coincided
with the war zone and government offensives, and, Alex de Waal (1997)
argues, should be understood as a war crime. The Mengistu regime’s
actions amplified threats to civilians: its agricultural policies contributed
to low yields, it distributed aid based on political allegiance, continued
counterinsurgency offensives throughout the famine, and implemented
a policy of forced resettlement that magnified the harm to civilians. The
 3  TRANSITIONAL INFLUENCES, 1991–2005  89

government’s actions transformed poor harvest into massive death: esti-

mates suggest that 600,000 people died in the famine and counterinsur-
gency (de Waal 1997). Herein, I focus on the path of counterinsurgency
as fought against those who eventually won the war, but the Derg fought
on multiple fronts, forcibly conscripting young men into the army, and
battling groups in the east, west, and south, in addition to the north.
However, the armed groups in these areas were defeated or could not
hold ground, and so did not gain political power.
Despite these enormous human losses and a conflict that pitted an
emergent rural insurgency against what was at the time Africa’s larg-
est army, the TPLF steadily gained ground. Although the leadership of
the TPLF at times was brutal in how it selected to resolve internal dis-
putes (Gebrehiwot 2019), it was attentive to the conditions of life for
the people in whose name it fought. Thus, its policies placed the wel-
fare of its people as the ultimate strategic priority; for example, during
the famine, relief took precedence over military matters (de Waal 1997,
127–131).
As it became clear that it could defeat the government, the
TPLF sought partners from other ethnic groups to build a coalition
(Gebrehiwot 2019). The first to establish a united democratic front with
the TPLF in 1989, was the Ethiopian People’s Democratic Movement
(EPDM), which emerged as a splinter from an EPRP armed group, and
was later re-christened the Amhara National Democratic Movement
(ANDM) in 1994. These two partners formed the EPRDF, and then
reached out to other ethnic groups. Leaders eventually encouraged
Oromo members of the EPDM and former Oromo prisoners of war they
had captured from Derg forces to form the Oromo People’s Democratic
Organization (OPDO) in May 1990. After the coalition won the war,
the EPRDF worked with the political organization of various southern
peoples to develop what eventually became the South Ethiopian People’s
Democratic Movement (SEPDM).

The Triumphant EPRDF

When, on May 28, 1991, the EPRDF defeated the military regime and
entered Addis Ababa, it sealed its position as the country’s primary polit-
ical protagonist for decades to follow. The period of the Red Terror
was locked away in a dusty corner of the country’s history, reserved for
violence whose political meaning was no longer deemed relevant. The
90  B. CONLEY

post-1991 state marked a new beginning for the organization of p ­ olitical

power in the country. Ethiopia’s government is built around the c­ oncept
of transforming a “prison of nations”—an imperial system that sub-
jugated diverse national collectives to a single ruling identity—into a
“nation of nations,” with a political system, multinational federalism that
reflects the country’s multiple nations, cultures, languages, and religions.
It is based on a Leninist understanding of rights of nations and national-
ities to self-determination, with, by the time of the EPRDFs triumph, an
economic program open to global markets yet characterized by govern-
ment control over key areas of development.
As they established their government, the EPRDF faced immediate
challenges. The full range of issues is well beyond this study of muse-
ums. Here, I note only the outlines of several key contentious areas.
While Mengistu was very unpopular by the end of his rule, this did not,
as Marina Ottaway argues, “translate into widespread support for the
TPLF” (1995, 68). In the regional context of the Horn of Africa, sur-
rounded by countries struggling with instability and violence, Ethiopia’s
new leaders, with international support, prioritized stability over democ-
racy. Stability was needed in order for their development plans to take
root, so they could grapple with what they identified as the country’s
most pressing challenge: poverty. This is not a specious argument, nor is
it without complication.
Major points of contention emerged. By 1998, Ethiopia was at war
with Eritrea, whose independence from Ethiopia was formally resolved in
a 1993 referendum. A border conflict arose in 1998 and ended two years
later, causing an estimated 70,000 battlefield deaths, massive civilian dis-
placement, and bitter tensions.3 Political criticism of the EPRDF arose
from a range of sources, from members of ethnic groups who felt that
their interests were not served in the Tigrayan-led EPRDF, from former
adherents of Mengistu’s regime who lost standing during the transition,
and from others within the political elite who argued that the ERPDF
imposed a closed political system where all decisions were made inside
the party rather than through open, multiparty electoral processes. While
fair arguments exist within each of these positions, at times the politi-
cal complaints converged into an argument that romanticized conditions
under Mengistu as a way to undermine the legitimacy of the EPRDF.
In this context, memorialization of any segment of the past, along
a marginal or major track of history, was bound to get ensnared in
 3  TRANSITIONAL INFLUENCES, 1991–2005  91

ongoing political debates. However, these debates are not the sum of a
memorialization effort. There is more at play here. To understand the
various complications and contributions of Red Terror memorialization,
one must trace the contours of three primary factors that helped set the
stage for the Museum: material objects and the relationships they reveal,
model memorial museums constructed in the regional capitals during
the transitional period, and a juridical narrative of history exemplified in
prosecutions.

Material Objects and Personal Relationships

For family members who lost loved ones in the violence of the 1970s,
Mengistu’s departure enabled them to finally begin the search for the
bodies of those killed during the Red Terror. Theirs was a mourning pro-
cess interrupted by a decade and a half (Tsige 2016). In Addis Ababa
and other towns, families flooded to the sites of mass graves, hidden
away in corners of the urban landscape and embarked on impromptu
exhumations.

“You Should Talk to Nunu”

Among these family members was a woman who is central to the story of
the RTMMM: Ayene Tsige, known as “Nunu.” She is an elegant, artic-
ulate woman, whose fluent English is conveyed with quiet focus. When
I asked in 2016 about how the RTMMM was created, everyone familiar
with the Museum’s creation advised that I talk to Nunu. She was cer-
tainly not the only person whose efforts contributed to the creation of
the Museum, and she is modest about her role, but she was clearly a criti-
cal force for making it possible. Her personal story is complicated: a fam-
ily with politics on all sides. Her diplomatic tone mirrors the careful path
she navigated through Ethiopia’s often polarizing politics in pursuit of
the Museum project. Nunu was in a unique position as an early advocate
for Red Terror memorialization: married to an influential EPRDF offi-
cial who served as mayor of Addis Ababa, and one of her brothers was
a leader in the political opposition working against the EPRDF govern-
ment. He was arrested in Yemen in 2014 on charges of terrorism for his
role in the armed opposition group, Ginbot 7. Extradited to Ethiopia,
he was only released from prison in 2018 (al Jazeera 2018). Another
92  B. CONLEY

brother, Amha, was killed during the Red Terror—a death that haunted
Nunu’s family (Interview with Tsige 2017).
Nunu was in Addis in the beginning of the 1974 revolution, but
left for London the following year. Amha, 17 years old at the time,
was among the high school students who formed the EPRP’s youth
membership. When the EPRP called for these young people to take to
the streets across Addis as part of the massive May Day protests sched-
uled for April 29, 1977, Amha joined the thousands who answered. In
Addis, Gondar, Nazareth, Dessie, Debre Marcos, among other towns,
they took to the streets demanding that the military regime cease its vio-
lent pursuit of EPRP activists and transition to a civilian government.
At least 1500 youth (Tola 1989, 143) in Addis alone, including Amha,
never came back. Given a city-wide curfew that was enforced with lethal
means, Nunu’s mother could not search for him until the next day. She
found him alive in a prison at a local police station, but officers refused
to release him, and she had to return home. The following morning
came with rumors that the imprisoned young protesters had been massa-
cred and their bodies were at Menelik Hospital. Nunu’s mother, grand-
father and brother ran to the Hospital to try to find more information
and to search for any sign of Amha.
Eventually, they discovered his body among the dead. Deep in sor-
row, they left to search for a coffin. When they returned to the hospital,
they put his remains into the coffin and were instructed to pay 100 birr
to reimburse the state for the bullets used to kill him. They paid, but
were still prevented from taking his body away. Rather than return the
children’s bodies to their families, the Derg authorities decided to hide
the human evidence of the massacre in mass graves. There was no possi-
bility to search further while the Derg remained in power. With mourn-
ing itself outlawed, the Derg, like brutal regimes elsewhere, attempted
to place the dead “beyond the reach of care” (Rosenblatt 2015, 165).
Nunu’s brother, along with many others killed in May Day 1977 pro-
tests, and across the larger sweep of violence during the years of the Red
Terror, was buried in an anonymous grave.
In 1991, Nunu returned to Ethiopia and joined mourners who for
the first time felt free enough to search sites suspected of holding mass
graves for the remains of their loved ones. Some people were able to
find and identify bodies, but many others—including Nunu’s family—
were unsuccessful.
 3  TRANSITIONAL INFLUENCES, 1991–2005  93

The pain of loss did not dissipate with time. As Nunu explained: “In
our family, my mother lost one son. But she only lived until 67 when
many others have lived much longer, and she died early because of the
loss of that son.” Nunu continued, although her brother died over
40 years ago by the time I spoke with her, “it still feels like yesterday”
(Tsige 2016). The state-imposed prohibition on mourning victims of
the Terror amplified loss for those who felt closest to it. The subsequent
years of silence also created enormous social gaps between those who
knew and those who were not told about the past. The missing body, the
lost person, and social forgetting were thereby entangled.

Finding What Is Left

Commenting on a similar condition that held in Spain following the
civil war where honoring or representing Republican deaths was not
allowed, Leyla Renshaw (2010) argues that absence of social recog-
nition compounds the predicament of uncertainty for families who do
not have a body to bury. This predicament compounds the significance
of the missing body. The absent body becomes a locus of a longing for
a material object, love for the missing person and lack of social recog-
nition for the political violence suffered. For those who remained riv-
eted by such a loss: “absence of certainty surrounding the victims’ status
can in fact make them more potently present…” (Renshaw 2010, 48).
Perhaps this is why memorialization is held in such esteem by families
and victims across geographic and social contexts of violence: they des-
perately seek a way to localize mourning (Kiza et al. 2006). This was the
case for Nunu and others in her family’s predicament who would never
find their loved one’s body, and thus would never be able to culminate
their mourning through a burial process.
For many people in a situation similar to that of Nunu’s family,
exhuming mass graves from the period of the Red Terror introduced
multiple complications. Families tried to search for bodies with the lim-
ited means at their disposal. In the end, many mourned without a body.
There were also human remains exhumed that no one could identify, and
once unearthed, they posed an acute challenge. The victims could have
hailed from a number of religious communities, Ethiopian Orthodox,
other Christian faiths or Islam. By the time violence wound down in
the capital, they also could have held remains of political activists from
a number of different groups. With only a small number of remains
94  B. CONLEY

identified, an impossible quandary arose: what should be their final rest-

ing place?
Some of these remains ended up under the control of an association
of families and survivors: they had to decide what to do with them. As
Nunu explained, secular memorialization—creating a permanent site for
the families’ vagrant mourning—was an attempt to answer this ques-
tion. It was intended to create sacred ground, consecrated by history.
Both the absence of a loved one’s body and the presence of unidentified
bones could be made to re-enter into relationship with families through
the space of the memorial museum. In this way, Ethiopian memoriali-
zation activists selected a path that other mourners have also chosen.
Victoria Sanford describes how Guatemalan Mayan communities vic-
timized by the government in a 1981–1983 genocidal assault, opted to
accept unidentified bodies: “‘Si no tiene dueño, entonces es mio’ [If it
has no owner, then its mine]” (cited in Rosenblatt 2015, 23). The deci-
sion these Guatemalan survivors echoed with that made in the Ethiopian
context. It was, as Adam Rosenblatt notes, a commitment that no one
would go unmourned: “an affirmation of communal ties and an act of
care for the dead” (2015, 23).

Anchoring Relationships
While the memory of violent pasts is vulnerable, as I have noted, to the
changing winds of politics and social trends, it is anchored to material
objects and physical sites—or the profoundly felt lack thereof. I argue
that memory is composed through reference to the past, re-articulated
in the present to call upon a collective identity, and to issue a call to
action. In this way, memory appears as malleable, and hence, highly vul-
nerable to politicization. But it is not infinitely malleable and the focus
here on material objects helps clarify this point. Material anchors for
memory tug most powerfully in conditions of their absence. The key
point here is not entirely the presence of an actual “authentic” material
object, but an investment in materializing loss: discovering or creating
objects that mark absence. Like an anchor, the actual object is meaning-
ful (and hence the commonly used idea of memoral objects as a screen
for memories falls short), but equally so is how it tethers something
else. In the case of memorialization, objects aim to anchor networks of
relationships.
 3  TRANSITIONAL INFLUENCES, 1991–2005  95

These relationships are not limited to family nor are the material
objects limited to human remains. In 1994, several leaders of the new
EPRDF government consecrated a simple memorial stone in honor
of those who died during the Terror. It was a memorial gesture from
the highest level of the new government, yet disconnected from the
ERPDF’s foundational political narrative. While not unrelated to
the politics of the time, the stone was primarily endowed with meaning
through the political, intellectual, and personal connections of various
EPRDF leaders to the victims of the Terror.
The Marxist–Leninist ideological underpinnings of the Revolution
informed not only the initial activism in Addis Ababa, but inspired and
politicized the entire generation of educated Ethiopians. Among them
were the TPLF founders as well, many of whom engaged with or were
key members of the 1970s circles of newly awakened political activists.
Additionally, among those targeted during the Terror in Addis Ababa
were members of the TPLF’s urban infrastructure. The Terror expanded
outward to Tigray, which was hard-hit by the violence of this early
period of the Revolution; state forces targeted students, merchants and
rural people suspected of supporting the TPLF in the regional capital,
Mekelle (de Waal 1991, 108). Violence further branched out to the rural
towns, merging with patterns of violence of the counterinsurgency.
A number of people who fled the Terror in the cities and eventually
fought against and were defeated by the TPLF (Gebrehiwot 2019),
but others selected to join forces with it. For instance, Helewi Yusef,
whose story will be introduced later, narrowly escaped a massacre dur-
ing the Red Terror, then became a leader of the Ethiopian Peoples
Revolutionary Democratic Movement (EPDM), later renamed
the ANDM, and a member of the ERPDF coalition. Yusef was also a
key actor in the development of the RTMMM. Another example can be
found in Meles Zenawi, who rose to prominence in the TPLF during the
war, and subsequently was head of the Ethiopian state for 17 years. His
given name was Legesse; he took the nom de guerre “Meles” in honor of
a comrade, Meles Tekle, who was killed in prison in the early stage of the
Red Terror. The personal relationships that crisscross political affiliations
extend into familial relations as well (Wiebel 2015, 24): it is not unusual
within families to find siblings who fought with, or even died, on multi-
ple sides during the longer revolutionary period. It is not uncommon for
friendships to have been forged or broken against different political and
armed opponents.
96  B. CONLEY

The above reasons instruct us not to be cynical about the EPRDF’s

efforts to commemorate the Terror, even as one must acknowledge
their strategic interests were at play in memorializing Menigstu’s vio-
lent excesses. As a new state actor, the EPRDF sought to legitimize itself
both domestically and internationally, part of which was attempted in
direct contrast to the violent excesses of the military regime. On May
28, 1994, Meles Zenawi (President of the Transitional Government),
Tamrat Layne (Prime Minister), and Teffera Waluwa (mayor of Addis)
laid a stone at Meskel Square that was intended to mark the location of
a future Red Terror Memorial. Prime Minister Meles Zenawi spoke at
the commemoration of the memorial stone: “we lay this memorial stone
in memory of those who were massacred while fighting for democracy
and justice.”4 Recalling the 1977 May Day massacre, Zenawi’s speech
emphasized that never again will families have to buy their children’s
bodies back. This memorial moment was made possible at the intersec-
tion of multiple concerns: historic and intellectual continuity between
the revolutionary students who led the urban resistance and rural insur-
gencies, personal ties, and the government’s efforts to establish itself
(Fig. 3.1).
Some memorials are intended to alter the landscape on which they
appear, others are modest markers on a social-political horizon, tak-
ing up a little space amidst the jostling world around them. The Red
Terror memorial stone falls into the latter category. For families and
survivors of the Terror, who promptly joined forces to create the
Ethiopian Association for the erection of a Red Terror Martyrs Memorial
Monument, the humble rock served as a foothold in central Addis Ababa
for a more substantial memorializing effort. Their initial goal was to
transform the lonely stone marker into a stately monument. As the pro-
jected later shifted toward building a memorial museum, the stone was
forgotten. Today, it has eroded, the dedication effaced. It is a reminder
not so much of the past, but of the passage of time.

Martyrs Memorial Museums: Ethiopia’s Museal Moment

The broader Ethiopian memorial landscape in the early transitional period
(1991–2005) provided another prompt for creating a Red Terror memorial
museum. In Mekelle (Tigray), Bahir Dar (Amhara) and Adama (Oromia)
the EPRDF’s key coalition members, the TPLF, ANDM, and OPDO com-
memorated their armed struggle by creating martyrs memorial museums.
 3  TRANSITIONAL INFLUENCES, 1991–2005  97

Fig. 3.1  The Red Terror memorial stone, as it appeared in 2016, with the ded-
ication effaced (Bridget Conley/World Peace Foundation 2017)
98  B. CONLEY

Ethiopia’s Memorial Landscape

Memorialization and museums were hardly new phenomena in the
Ethiopian context post-1991. The country hosts a wealth of historical
sites many of which display historical objects in museum-like fashion,
from small collections at ancient churches to Imperial structures, and
including the modern National Museum of Ethiopia. There, the most
famous artifact is the 3 million years old “Lucy,” a hominoid skeleton
discovered in 1974. My interest, however, is in displays and memori-
als that concern political violence. In this category, there are a range of
examples, mostly memorial structures.
One prominent example can be found in the Sidist Kilo area of Addis
Ababa: the Yekatit 12 Monument that commemorates a massacre com-
mitted by Italian forces. Europeans never colonized Ethiopia, but from
1936 to 1941, Italy occupied the country. In 1937, following a failed
attempt to kill Rudolfo Graziani, a dedicated fascist and the Italian
Governor-General of Ethiopia, Italian armed forces and fascist militias
responded with massacre. An estimated 20,000 people were killed in
Addis Ababa over three days, and as the Italians inflicted punitive meas-
ures across the country (Campbell 2017, 327). Following the restora-
tion of the Emperor in 1941, a simple memorial obelisk was mounted
to commemorate the killing. In 1955, as Ethiopia joined the nonaligned
movement, Yugoslavia’s leader, Tito, presented a gift of a new memorial:
an obelisk with two bronze relief scenes depicting the violence, sculpted
by one of Yugoslavia’s leading artists, Antun Augustinčić (Campbell
2017, 363–364). Pride in the experience of resisting colonialism and
denunciation of the violence wrought by the Italians during their brief
occupation is shared across Ethiopia’s internal schisms and informs the
shape of Ethiopian nationalism.
Not all of the country’s contemporary monuments unify. A memo-
rial to the Derg’s 1977 war against Somalia was gifted to Ethiopia from
North Korea in 1984, and still stands in Addis. It includes a 50-meter
high obelisk that pierces the sky with a red star, and is emblazoned with
a sickle and hammer. A scene in relief depicts both the Emperor ignor-
ing famine-stricken people and Mengistu leading the military to victory.
A memorial to Cubans who fought with Mengistu’s regime and died
in Ethiopia stands to one side. A more recent example is the Aanolee
Oromo Martyrs Memorial Monument and Cultural Center, which
was unveiled in 2014 by Oromo leaders. Commemorating brutalities
 3  TRANSITIONAL INFLUENCES, 1991–2005  99

perpetrated by Emperor Menelik in the 1880s, the monument depicts

a severed hand holding a severed breast. Muktar Kedir, president of the
Oromia regional state and chairman of OPDO when the monument was
unveiled,5 described the memorial as honoring “those Oromo heroes
and heroines who were cruelly massacred for strongly resisting the then
oppressive regime” (Kebede 2014).
However, the focus herein is on three memorial museums conceived
during the period of transition after Mengistu’s fall, which illuminate
the major political story we are following and influenced the creators of
the RTMMM. These structures are situated in the regional capitals of
Mekele (Tigray), Bahir Dar (Amhara) and Adama (Oromia). In Adama,
the former capital of the Oromo region, a war memorial was finished,
but the museum project was left incomplete when the regional capi-
tal was moved to Addis Ababa in 2000. The three sites follow a ­similar
logic: documenting the armed struggle as simultaneously a political, mil-
itary, social and national endeavor. The two exhibition narratives por-
tray the contemporary Ethiopian state as woven together by the ruling
coalitions’ political parties (the TPLF, ANDM, and OPDO), with cul-
tural self-awareness and through armed struggle that relied upon popu-
lar participation and support. Further, each of the three sites includes an
expansive campus with meeting halls, libraries, archives, cafeterias, space
for cultural events, and soaring monuments. Important, if subtle, differ-
ences emerge between these regional structures, conveying their distinct
ethno-nationally defined historical arc.

Mekele, Tigray
The Tigray Martyrs Memorial Museum and Monument occupies high
ground, visible from across the expanding city of Mekele, the capital of
Tigray.6 Mekele is a windswept, mountain plateau town that boomed in
the years following the war. The memorial campus was initially opened in
1995, but was closed to the public for two years before being fully ready
for daily operations, re-opening in 1997. Funded through private dona-
tions, including four months’ salary from each TPLF soldier, the com-
plex is enormous and impressive. Except for metal, all of the building
materials used in structures across the complex are from Tigray: a direct
response to Mengistu’s infamous statement that Tigray was not worth a
stone.
100  B. CONLEY

The most imposing feature of the complex is a towering monument.

Read from the ground to the sky, the four legs of the monument repre-
sent the cardinal directions, indicating the peoples’ contributions to the
struggle from across Tigray. They are engraved with images of sorghum
and the TPLF emblem: in a historically famine-stricken region, the abil-
ity to feed the people is projected through the party, soaring skyward
to an orb at the top to symbolize the bright future. On the ground in
the center of the monument is a memorial flame, lit each martyrs day on
June 22, anniversary of the wartime massacre at Hawzein.
The Derg’s bombing of a crowded marketplace in Hawzein also
appears in one of two sets of statues framing the monument. One side
depicts the social history of the struggle through a six clusters of stat-
ues: a bomb jutting into the ground, a baby trying to nurse at a fallen
mother’s breast (modeled on a historic photograph taken on the scene in
Hawzein), scenes of displacement affecting men, women, children, the
old, and the young. Interspersed with figures that are clearly civilian are
a male and female soldier, comforting and helping civilians on the way
(Fig. 3.2).
On the opposite side of the memorial, the military history of the
struggle is depicted. This series begins with a man cradling a dying
woman, then proceeds to a scene of a peasant receiving instruction from
a soldier—both of whom sit close to the ground, represented as equals,
overseen by a standing elderly man, indicating sanction given by the
older generation. The peasant is next portrayed in an embrace—a fare-
well to his wife and child—as he joins the insurgents. The statues then
give way to armed figures, the final of which stands on top of a tank,
overcoming the well-armed Derg forces.
The museum’s exhibitions are housed in a circular structure with
a white domed, windowed ceiling that provides gently filtered natu-
ral light. A large-scale relief map of the entire country occupies much
of the floor space in the first exhibit scene. The story opens with a ges-
ture to the long, peasant history of Tigray, testifying to cultural and
national longevity, interspersed with scenes of historic famines and local
resistance to centralized political authorities. A series of photos capture
the violence during the Red Terror, before the perspective shifts back
to the Tigrayan armed national struggle in the countryside. The exhibi-
tion includes some chronological features—including artifacts cases with
weapons that begin with farmers’ rifles, some dating into the previous
century but used at the onset of the TPLF’s formation, and advancing
 3  TRANSITIONAL INFLUENCES, 1991–2005  101

Fig. 3.2  Set of statues depicting the social history of the struggle, at the Tigray
Martyrs Memorial Museum and Monument (Bridget Conley/World Peace
Foundation, 2017)

into automatic weapons and an open air field of fighter jets, tanks, and
other heavy weapons outside the Museum. However, its core narrative
progresses thematically. The social and political role of the TPLF are
given significant exhibition space alongside the war story: their commu-
nications, humanitarian programs, educational work, political debates,
agricultural developments, cooking, conferences, and health programs
are woven in and out of scenes of military units. The development of
the party, the armed movement, and the nation emerges as a single
story. This was a “people’s war,” the narrative asserts: military strategy
included social and political development.
The photographs of the war form an impressive documentary col-
lection of an insurgent movement. Further, the documentary evidence
was largely (if not entirely) produced by the movement itself. While this
colors the narrative arc, it also presents a unique self-representation of
102  B. CONLEY

an African political movement from its infancy through to its capture of

the state. The 1984 famine, which is plastered in international memory
with relentless images of starving women and children tended by white
aid workers, plays a small role in the Museum. Only a handful of images
depict Tigrayans as victims; the story here is of political and national
self-consciousness and agency. In the center of the exhibition, mounted
on a lower level that is reached through a gracefully curving ramp, is a
display of the rebels’ social life. Here, wedding photos, a volleyball game
(included a young, shorts-clad Meles Zenawi) and other leisure time
activities present a human face of the armed movement. A large pres-
entation here also displays the numbers of the dead: more than 60,000
people killed in battle and more than 100,000 disabled by war injuries.
The Museum displays a peoples’ struggle that, against enormous odds
and losses, ended in victory. The people, in this case, are an undiffer-
entiated nation of Tigrayans, the party and the soldiers. Individuals are
not called out for special treatment, even if one cannot help but notice
that outside the memorial complex, on a hill above Mekele, towering
at higher elevation than even the monument, is a billboard mounted in
2012 with the face of Meles Zenawi, who served as leader of the tran-
sitional government and Prime Minister from 1995 to 2012, when he
died in office.7
As explained by a guide at the museum, Abraham Mercy, the exhi-
bition provides a background of chronological development, but the
foreground is social development. It proceeds iteratively: scenes repeat
and “progress” is a movement of inculcation, perseverance, and expan-
sion. The exhibition displays learning by trial and error, debate, and rep-
etition. The intended message is that as the insurgency slowly grew it
learned not only how to defeat an enemy but also how to develop its
intellectual backbone, build its vision for the country, and expand its
base of supporters. It is a conceptual history forged through conflict,
rather than a war museum. It intends to educate younger audiences
about the collective struggle to realize social, economic, and political
goals. After all, Abraham explains, the revolution was for these younger
people—for the country’s future.

Bahir Dar, Amhara

The Amhara Region Peoples Martyrs Memorial Monument8 was inau-
gurated in 2006 and opened to the public in 2009. It shares many
 3  TRANSITIONAL INFLUENCES, 1991–2005  103

similarities in purpose and narrative style with the Museum in Mekele,

but angled toward its Amhara audience. Financed by the Amhara
Regional Government, the grounds include an amphitheater, museum,
library, art gallery, monument, meeting halls, and cafeteria, spanning a
hilltop on the banks of the Blue Nile, just as it leaves its source, Lake
Tana.
A monument reaching 40 meters into the sky dominates the complex.
Its base is black, representing the contributions of all national groups
across Ethiopia to the struggle to overthrow the military regime. A white
circle above the base symbolizes the ANDM, the central committee of
the party and their agenda for democracy. Soaring above are two pil-
lars, abstract reflections of the contributions of men and women to the
struggle. The male pillar, visible as such by a slight widening at shoulder
height, stands marginally taller than the female one, which widens at the
hips. Both pillars are composed of black and white stone, representing
the war, sacrifice and inequality, and peace, democracy, justice and devel-
opment, respectively. The two are joined by a circle, again symbolizing
unity against Derg.
Centered under the monument is a flame: the spirit of the people.
Surrounding it are archways, and embedded in the front one is a small
pipe at the top, that drips water into wells; symbolizing the individual
contributions of the founders of the party. The water is drawn from
the Nile and as it fills the well, falls to a series of wide, shallow pools; hid-
ing, rushing and flowing over a series of low stone walls—like an insur-
gency—before it returns to the Nile (Fig. 3.3).
The front of the monument, overlooking the Nile, houses a set of
statues, framed on two sides with a relief depicting the civilian and mili-
tary experiences of the insurgency. These statues depict the participation
in the struggle of traditional peasants, women and men, civilians and
rebels. A fallen man, cradled in a woman’s arms, demonstrates the suffer-
ing during the war; the most forward statues are dressed in military garb,
looking into the future and over the Nile. A relief on one side depicts a
raised fist, united against the Derg regime that is shown abusing peas-
ants, who then join the resistance. Battle scenes give way to the ultimate
defeat of the Derg. The second side shows reconstruction of the civil-
ian lives, with scenes of education, rebuilding, job training, development,
and farming.
Inside the museum, the exhibition opens with a large photo of the
Founders of the Ethiopian Peoples Democratic Movement (EPDM,
104  B. CONLEY

Fig. 3.3  View of the Amhara Region Peoples Martyrs Memorial Monument,

from the base of the series of pools, near the Nile River (Bridget Conley/World
Peace Foundation 2017)
 3  TRANSITIONAL INFLUENCES, 1991–2005  105

which later became the ANDM). It then briefly sets the scene for the
Revolution in 1974, by juxtaposing the Emperor’s lavish celebration of
his birthday in 1972 with images of famine that occurred at the same
time, presenting a few photos of student revolts in Addis Ababa from
1974. But the exhibition moves quickly into the story of the armed con-
flict. Historically, the leaders of Ethiopia were Amhara, so the longer
history of oppression gestured to at the beginning of the exhibition in
the Tigrayan museum finds no parallel here. However, like the Tigrayan
memorial museum, in Bahir Dar, the exhibition loosely suggests a chro-
nology, but its core story is the merging of nation, party, and military to
culminate in the new political system created at the war’s end.
Presented through a series of framed images and artifact cases, the
exhibition displays the evolution of the armed movement in tandem with
the cultural, ideological, and social development of the party. Akin to the
museum in Mekele, the core of the collection is composed through pho-
tos taken by EPDM affiliates, with only a few documenting the civilian
horrors of the conflict. It, too, is a museum that focused on agency and
organization, not victimhood.
According to Nehemiah Abie, Director of the Museum and Library,
the core purpose of the museum and monument is to commemorate
those who lost their lives or were wounded in the effort to defeat the
Derg and establish the new government. He noted that younger people
generally do not understand the asymmetric and brutal character of the
war and the difficulties experienced by the generation that led it. The
museum’s goal for this audience is to educate and encourage visitors to
adopt the liberation story as their own. The generation of the struggle
paid for the new political dispensation with bullets, he told me, this new
one should play a role in the struggle through participation in democ-
racy, development, and consolidation of the peace.

Adama, Oromia
The memorial and monument in Adama was begun along similar lines
to both the Amhara and Tigrayan memorials, but the process was
stopped short. This interruption reflects the more contentious charac-
ter of the Oromo relationship to the EPRDF government. Adama was
designated as the capital of the regional Oromo government in 2000
and the infrastructure for regional government was under construction
there for five years until it was abruptly moved back to Addis Ababa in
106  B. CONLEY

2005. The relationship between Addis Ababa’s city administration and

Oromo regional organizations is tense: plans to expand the city’s admin-
istrative borders further into Oromo areas sparked large-scale protests
starting in 2014. The Oromo story of participation in the struggle is also
more fractured than that of the TPLF and EPDM/ANDM. The Oromo
Liberation Front (OLF) was founded in the early 1970s and shared the
Derg as a common enemy alongside the TPLF, but took a divergent
political line, insisting that the Oromo struggle was for the independ-
ence of the Oromo nation. The OLF was also fragmented and poorly
organized. For these reasons, the EPRDF created the OPDO, principally
from Oromo prisoners of war as a coalition member in 1990. In 1991,
the OLF joined the transitional government as a junior partner, but
quickly fell out with the EPRDF. It began an armed uprising that was
rapidly repressed, and the OLF was labeled a terrorist organization and
banned. The OPDO thus had the official political field to itself, though
it struggled to win legitimacy and much popular sympathy in Oromia
remained with the outlawed OLF (Lata 1999).
The memorial site in Adama reflects these tensions. It opened in
2004, and was paid for by the regional party OPDO, but was never
completely finished. Today, the complex includes a large memorial, that
is adjacent to offices that house regional government officials and party
officials, multiple meeting spaces constructed between 2003 and 2005.
However, an intended museum was not completed. Instead, the struc-
tures nearest the memorial were occupied as dormitories for regional
security forces when I visited in 2017. Thus, it is a busy site with a café,
clinic, and living areas, but adapted to a new use (Fig. 3.4).
As explained by an official with the regional government, the monu-
ment was intended to honor all Oromo who participated in the struggle
against the military regime. Perched on a hill that is visible from across
Adama, it is composed of two sweeping white pillars, arched toward
the sky, meeting at a point of two circular structures that touch each
other. Underneath are two pairs of smaller, arching stone structures,
and on the ground, a white dome. It gestures to an abstracted human
skeletal form: legs and ribs, representing the struggle of the people for
freedom and to preserve their culture for the future. The symbolism is
intended to capture past, present, and future. The past, in this case, is
conceived as the long history of efforts to build an Oromo political sys-
tem, drawing on long-standing practices of local democratic governance.
The conceptual present was explained as the exhortation to appreciate
 3  TRANSITIONAL INFLUENCES, 1991–2005  107

Fig. 3.4  The memorial in Adama (Bridget Conley/World Peace Foundation

2017)

today’s freedom and equality, treat each other with love and respect, and
remained unified. The future is expressed through a hope that the people
learn from the past, and enjoy a prosperous future.9

Ethiopia’s Museal Moment

The proliferation of new memorial museums during the transitional
period poses a question: why did the political changes result in privilege
for the museum form and proliferation of memorials?
An enormously complex country, over the period from 1974 to
1991, Ethiopia experienced unprecedented social, political, and eco-
nomic upheaval, and subsequent re-organization. As it entered into a
new era, several factors made museums a privileged form for its newly
triumphant leadership. First, was the work of communicating to ethnic
communities that their long-standing existence was now the foundation
108  B. CONLEY

of the country’s political institutions. In this manner, the EPRDF lead-

ers sought to invent tradition, in the sense proposed by Eric Hobsbawn
whereby traditions that “appear or claim to be old are often quite recent
in origin and invented” (1983, 1). This is not to minimize the ways
that ethnic communities structured Ethiopian social life before 1991.
What was new was the way in which ethnicity bolstered governmental
legitimacy.
But why create museums as a way to invent tradition? In selecting
to privilege the museum form, the Ethiopians were part of a globaliz-
ing trend of creating new museums—what some scholars call a “museum
boom” (Huyssen 1995, 5). The global coincidence of the appeal of the
museum in the late twentieth century has been largely theorized in ref-
erence to postmodern trends in the European and North American con-
texts, yet the “boom” includes museum-making in other areas of the
world, including Ethiopia. Andreas Huyssen (1995) theorizes that muse-
ums multipled in the postmodern context in response to accelerated pro-
cesses of globalization, digitization, and the parallel demise of political
ideologies that projected a better future. These trends, he argues, cre-
ated a desire for authenticity and need to find it in the past that together
prompted a surge in interest in memory, and museums as repositories
thereof. As the pace of the “new” accelerates and flattens differences
across the globe, museums provide space for the corollary opposite:
objects and narratives extracted from the ever-new and presented within
a stabilized, material form. In a world that is increasingly digitized, in a
museum the “authentic,” material objects still hold sway. He writes: “the
museum is a primary site of social interaction with objects embedded in
other times and spaces” (Huyssen 2016, 108).
This postmodern view of the museum does not describe Ethiopia’s
transitional museums. But the choice of museum is not unrelated to
globalized trends for conveying to a public its new role in telescoped
historical change. Perhaps, a different take on the museum “boom” is
helpful. However much museums might respond to macro-level eco-
nomic, social, and political trends, the increased popularity of the form
granted them an instrumental role for leaders who wanted to announce
their country’s presence on the international stage. Museums became
an emblem of statehood even as they provided marketing opportu-
nities that could draw in foreign visitors, whether expatriates or new
travelers (Rogerson and van der Merwe 2016). In this manner, muse-
ums on the global “margins” demonstrate an inversion of the pattern of
European museums. Many collections of modern European museums
 3  TRANSITIONAL INFLUENCES, 1991–2005  109

were produced out of colonial extraction, assembled as an invitation to

the populace to understand their countries’ global stature and to estab-
lish the metropole as a global city. Later twentieth-century museums still
help cities and countries claim a place on the global stage; now, access
is not exclusively through the projection of universalized global culture
(although the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, for example, does follow this
model). Instead, global relevance is projected through performance of
the “local.” Today, the museum persists and even thrives as an indica-
tor of global position, but it plays multiple roles depending on specific
institutional location. In some places, museums represent a postmodern
response to global technological, economic and social trends; in others,
it mimics colonial logic of performing global power; and in yet other
places, it announces national-cultural presence and autonomy. The
multiplicity of roles magnify the extent to which museums overall have
become an accepted, accessible, and highly visible institutional model.
Within a country, as the example of Ethiopia’s regional museums
demonstrates, museums also play a role in modeling an evolving indi-
vidual–state relationship. The martyrs memorial museums provide ped-
agogic, historical, and emotional invitation for former soldiers and a
younger generation to practice a performance of the new relationship
between state and individual. In this manner, Ethiopia’s regional party
memorial museums display national progress and invite the people to see
themselves as participants in the story. This is a well-established role for
museums in the modern era.

Museums of State
Tony Bennett (1995) differentiates the modern museum from its pre-
decessor institutions, which displayed religious artifacts or collections of
objects whose meaning and presentation derived from their unique status
and ability to provoke wonder or curiosity. The modern museum had a
different goal: to demonstrate “science’s progress from error to truth”
(Bennett 1995, 2). Herein, displays are organized so that objects typify
their larger genus. The point of a display was not the quirks of an object
or a particular historical episode, but making sense through all-encom-
passing order. Intended to endure, museums provide instruction in the
larger logic of the world, against which short-term adjustments or new
issues could be measured and brought into line (Bennett 1995, 80).
In the context of a national history museum, exhibition narratives
convey the past as an orderly progression of moral, technological, and
110  B. CONLEY

economic development. Exhibitions invariably present political history

as the glorious and logical march into the present moment, which takes
shapes as the culmination of national advancement through time. The
main character of history in such narratives is the “we,” the body poli-
tic. Members of the public who enter the museum are thus instructed to
understand themselves as both subject (as visitor) and object (that which
is displayed) (Bennett 1995, 63). They perform the role—and are seen
by others as performing the role—of citizen or representative of their
people, by entering the pedagogic space where they learn how that role
was created for them. In this manner, national museums offer a distinct
contribution for displaying and engaging the public around new expecta-
tions for the relationship between the individual and the state. The epit-
ome of exhibiting the idealized relation between state and citizen in the
modern context is the war museum, which invariably sanitizes and sacral-
izes the role violence plays in state formation (Winter 2012).
In the Ethiopian context, the regional museums of the transitional
period align with the logic of the modern state history museum, while
offering distinctions from the general category of modern or postmod-
ern globalized museum forms. Like more traditional war museums that
relate a history of a particular armed conflict, their primary focus is on
a fairly narrow, time-constrained period. But the conflict is presented
alongside national, cultural, ideological, and developmental progress as
well; they form a very particular kind of “peoples” museums. In this way,
they follow a trend in the later twentieth century museums of focusing
on a broadly conceived citizenry during conflict (Winter 2012, 157)—
but in this case, the subject of focus is not “innocent” civilians, per se,
but a previously marginalized national people claiming political rights
through armed resistance.
The use of the term “martyr” in the name of these institutions reveals
three traits of how the museums characterize the human losses they
depict. First, is the appropriation of a religious term. Despite the Marxist
leanings of the political groups whose histories are told in the museums,
the creators sought to appeal to the broader populace (especially in rural
areas), which is devoutly religious. Second, the idea of martyrs draws
attention not only to the individual who was killed, but also the redemp-
tion of their death for a larger cause. The inclusion of the word ­“martyr”
ties human losses to what was built through violence—in this case, a
people, party, and state—rather than that which was simply destroyed or
marginalized through history. In this manner, the death is witness to a
 3  TRANSITIONAL INFLUENCES, 1991–2005  111

higher moral (or sociopolitical) order. Thus, the idea of “martyrs” intro-
duces a third element: the temptation to what Jay Winter has described
as the exclusionary logic of martyrdom. He argues that, “when martyr-
dom enters the equation, there is not enough symbolic space for both
communities of victims to enter into national narratives of loss. The lan-
guage of martyrdom apparently creates a zero-sum game: only one set of
martyrs can be commemorated at a time” (Winter 2015, 222). In order
for a death to gain meaning as martyrdom, the cause for which some-
one has died must arise to almost transcendent religious-political mean-
ing. It must be capable of structuring meaning to the extent that even
death finds a logical place. Rare is the martyr’s logic that can hold two
such structures for meaning without one subsuming the other. In the
context of Ethiopia, the vocabulary of martyr raises a question: do the
deaths commemorated in the multiple martyrs memorial museums find
meaning in relation to a fight against the military regime, for democracy,
for a party, or some combination of the above? In this manner, the idea
of “martyrs” multiplied to fit several different structures identifies the
empowerment behind each museum’s narrative: tethering the historical
and national stories together, the Ethiopian regional martyrs memorial
museums identify human losses as martyrs for the cause of the nation(s)
becoming a political subject, not merely fallen combatants nor civilian
victims to be pitied. But the term also raises a warning flag: a poten-
tial limitation when one regards the country’s larger memorial horizon,
which is composed of multiple martyrs to different causes, each of which
is intended to structure a slightly different moral order.
Despite the overt politics of these regional museums, they should
not be dismissed as mere vehicles for reproducing the party faithful. The
country has changed considerably since the 1990s. Ethiopia’s develop-
ment indicators (World Bank 2017) denote significant improvements in
the GDP, foreign investment, school enrollment figures, life expectancy,
and poverty reduction. However, its democracy indicators place it among
authoritarian regimes (Freedom House 2018). This complex balancing of
economic goals and governance has become more difficult over time, as
the significant portions of the population witnessed the uneven distribu-
tion of the benefits of national development and felt excluded from deci-
sion-making, fueling demands today for increased democratization on
the basis of political, ethnic, and generational claims. The contradictions
between the idealism that sparked the movement and governance deci-
sions over time are drawn into relief by the exhibition displays.
112  B. CONLEY

The exhibitions and memorials display a tethering of armed struggle,

people, party, and ideology that fused governance and society from 1991
to 2018, leaving little room for debate outside this paradigm. However,
by displaying the iterative process of arriving at this fused system, and
doing so within the aspirational vision of the insurgent movements which
foregrounded collective improvement, the exhibitions also leave open the
door to the central political question of democratic practice: how does
one recognize and respond to deep historical inequalities between and
within groups while cultivating a sense of shared future? This is far from a
uniquely Ethiopian problem, it is the quintessential problem for all states
whose legitimacy derives, even if only conceptually, from “the people.”
The martyrs memorial museums further pose a generational chal-
lenge even within their intended audiences of a single ethnic people. The
rebels who overcame enormous odds to defeat the Derg, transformed
themselves from rag-tag insurgents into a force to be reckoned with, and
from young students of political-economic ideologies into a movement
with the capacity to transform the country. From a famine-prone, excep-
tionally poor, and conflict-ridden corner of Africa, Ethiopia became one
of East Africa’s more stable and economically successful examples. The
tasks were enormous, the successes and shortcomings—especially regard-
ing democratization, human rights, and equal enjoyment of develop-
ment—numerous. But, as the exhibitions make clear, the core national
struggle of this generation must now transition to younger people whose
expectations and challenges are not those their parents faced. Lurking
beneath exhibitionary narrative arcs is the ever-present museological
challenge: the visitors change over time.

Juridical Logic
We have now introduced two of the factors that contributed to the pos-
sibility of a Red Terror museum: a memorial impulse that emerged from
material objects and personal relationships, and a museal moment within
Ethiopian history that provided models within the national memorial
horizon, including the phrasing of “martyrs memorial museum.” These
are important elements of the story, but what ties memorializing losses
(versus triumph) to the institution of the museum is a distinct narra-
tive structure. Red Terror memorialization cannot claim its relevance
to the evolving Ethiopian story through what it established, only by
what was destroyed. Despite the echo in name and similar chronology
 3  TRANSITIONAL INFLUENCES, 1991–2005  113

of establishment, the idea to create a Red Terror “martyrs memorial

museum” shares more similarities with the international genre of memo-
rial museum than with the triumphant Ethiopian regional museums.

The Rise of the Memorial Museum

The memorial museum as a genre gathered steam in the 1990s (Williams
2007). Earlier examples are dominated by historic sites transformed into
museums: including Auschwitz and Dachau, Holocaust-era death camps
converted into museums by Allied forces after the end of World War
II. Senegal’s Maison des Esclaves on Gorée Island was converted into
a museum in 1962. In 1979, when Vietnamese armed forces overthrew
Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime, they transformed S-21, a prison and
torture center in Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh into the Tuol Sleng
Genocide Museum. These examples document enormous brutality per-
petrated by defeated regimes. In the post-Holocaust and Cambodian
cases, converting the sites into public spaces was a way to force the cit-
izenry to witness the injustices that rationalized foreign occupation.
However, it was decades later that the institutional form multiplied
across global locations, primarily as groups representing victims adopted
it, and subsequently as transnational experts began to standardized dis-
course about these institutions through comparative analysis and advo-
cacy for the form.
By 2001, the memorial museum had become established as a distinct
museum genre, evidenced by its recognition by the premiere interna-
tional museums professionals’ organization, the International Council
of Museums (ICOM). ICOM created a specialized committee for
memorial museums (International Committee of Memorial Museums
in Remembrance of the Victims of Public Crimes (ICMEMO) which,
building on established institutional practices, defined memorial muse-
ums by their aim to commemorate “victims of State, socially determined
and ideologically motivated crimes” (ICMEMO). They noted how these
institutions are often connected to historical sites and with survivor or
victim communities. Further, memorial museums claimed a more overtly
political profile than most museums, as they “seek to convey informa-
tion about historical events in a way which retains a historical perspective
while also making strong links to the present” (ICMEMO).
The combination of “memorial” with “museum,” as Paul Williams
has noted, conveys “an increasing desire to add both a moral framework
114  B. CONLEY

to the narration of terrible historical events and more in-depth contex-

tual explanations to commemorative acts” (2007, 8). Today, examples
of memorial museums include former historical sites transformed into
museums (like former concentration camps, prisons or torture centers)
and newly created structures (like the US Holocaust Memorial Museum
in Washington, DC, opened in 1993, and our example, the RTMMM),
and can be found across Latin America, the United States, Europe, Asia,
and Africa—including South Africa, Rwanda, Senegal, Kenya, and, of
course, Ethiopia.
However, when I spoke with the key players involved in creating the
RTMMM, none of whom were museum professionals before developing
this project, not one cited these international developments as influential
for their decision to create the Museum. This prompts a question: what
factors enable the memorial museum to appear as a logical and desirable
institutional model across the globe at a particular historical moment?
One explanation is that the memorial museum displays a way of
making sense of the world. The international genre of the memorial
museum is predicated on a way of interpreting political histories of vio-
lence in legalistic terms, which presuppose that exposing discrete harms
and those directly responsible for them will contribute to a prohibition
against violence, a crucial step in the creation of stable, rule-bound,
democratic states. In this manner, its foundational logic is shared with
law-based practices like the international human rights profession, whose
coming of age began in the 1970s. Further, there is particular resonance
with transitional justice practices, which spread at the end of the Cold
War under the tutelage of transnational actors. In a straightforward fash-
ion, transitional justice as been defined by the International Center for
Transitional Justice (ICTJ), a major player in the development of policy
recommendations regarding the implementation of transitional mech-
anisms across country contexts, as “the ways countries emerging from
periods of conflict and repression address large-scale or systematic human
rights violations so numerous and so serious that the normal justice sys-
tem will not be able to provide an adequate response” (ICTJ).
The question of whether memorialization of atrocities, human rights
paradigm, or international legal practices came first and determined the
other is not my focus: rather, I examine how a similar underlying logic
unites them, even while each retains a distinct genealogy linked to par-
ticular sets of professional practices. The uniting logic is juridical, charac-
terized by three central traits.
 3  TRANSITIONAL INFLUENCES, 1991–2005  115

First, is a narrative arc with stock characters of perpetrator and victim

(sometimes including enablers, bystanders and rescuers, in the roles of
supporting actor), legally delineated acts of violence, presentation of dis-
crete evidence intended to establish definitive truth about those acts, and
a denouement whereby a third party—visitor, judge or witnessing pub-
lic, whose legitimacy springs from neutrality—denounces violence. This
should not be understood as a simple advance of rationality over political
violence, but a very particular arrangement of power relations that has,
since at least the 1990s, risen to influence and is now hotly contested
by other logics. The juridical logic arranges practices, actors, and objects
on a political-social scene in a manner that, even while ascendant, is not
exhaustive of the available possibilities at any given moment (Foucault
1996; Brown 1995).
Second, in this logic, “victim” is a central, yet complex concept that
provides the ethical basis for multiple discrete activities. The most basic
and seemingly self-evident meaning of “victims” as those directly harmed
by violence, has proven an inadequate definition to capture the corro-
sive path of large-scale, group-targeted violence. The idea of direct vic-
tims has been complicated through: theorization of “communities of
harm,” as a way to capture of how hurting one person directly impacts
others (Ni Aolain 2009); debates over which harms count and in what
ways (McEvoy and McConnachie 2013); and documentation of the
intergenerational impact of violence (Hirsch 2013). In a transnational
or international context, the “victim” is also often refigured as a specter
of humanity, such that harms of the scale that rise to international rec-
ognition are framed as “crimes against humanity.” Hence, a slippage is
introduced: between the individual assaulted in a specific act and the jus-
tification for why certain acts concern a global audience. Further, within
states imagined to be “transitioning” from authoritarianism or conflict
toward democracy, the “victim” stands in for the citizen, per se, when
addressing discrete, past harms is envisioned as a way to produce a new
overall relationship between individuals and state authorities. Transitional
justice mechanisms are thereby conceived as governmental speech
announcing to all citizens that they are “safe from the abuses of their
own authorities” and protected from violations (ICTJ).
Thus, an idea of “victims,” while central to the ethical rationaliza-
tion of the entire juridical logic, plays multiple roles: individuals, com-
munities, a concept of global interest and emblem for the new citizen.
116  B. CONLEY

As the paradigm of transitional justice began to be applied in post-con-

flict and post-authoritarian states, individuals suffering from physical
and psychological ailments and financial loss as a result of violence—
victims—were too often sidelined (McEvoy and McConnachie 2013;
Gready and Robins 2014). The discrete mechanisms justified in their
name require enormous expenditure of political capital, dedicated finan-
cial flows, and specialized knowledge—and thus took on lives of their
own.10 An increasingly recognized problem, the peacebuilding and tran-
sitional justice movements have sought to improve the record, making
adjustments to restore and protect “the dignity of those who suffered
violence and repression, acknowledging victims and, at least on paper,
empowering them to play a role in the societies emerging from these
traumatic periods” (Druliolle and Brett 2018, 2).
A third characteristic of juridical logic is the presumption that violent
state practices can be halted through examination of the past, prohibi-
tion of certain types of violence, and construction of global norms. The
jury is out on whether the larger aims of raising the bar on human rights
issues through local and international pressure has resulted in a “jus-
tice cascade” (Sikkink 2011), whereby states are influenced by prosecu-
tions and increasingly internalize pro-civilian values accurately captures
unidirectional global progress. The rise of xenophobic nationalism in
Europe and the United States, previous leaders of the effort, sows doubt.
Nonetheless, rationalizing the entire paradigm and discrete mechanisms
is a twofold model of democratic progress that is pushed ahead by a
punitive model of repression of harmful acts, and a productive model of
state-building through international norm advancement. Both rationali-
zations, however, view democratic transition as achievable through “elite
bargaining and legal-institutional reforms” (Arthur 2009, 338) and mar-
ket-based economies, rather than economic modernization, for instance.
History, in this logic, is deemed to be of marginal consequence—some-
thing to be overcome during a transitional period. The juridical logic
also presents these policy preferences as apolitical, dissolved into a dis-
course of self-evident ethics, economic necessity or legal neutrality
(Brown 1995).

From Juridical Logic into the Museum

Tracing how the juridical logic played out in the Ethiopian context,
some of its limitations become evident. At the same time, one can also
 3  TRANSITIONAL INFLUENCES, 1991–2005  117

bear witness to how the logic set into motion slower-moving, unantici-
pated endeavors—like the creation of the RTMMM. The framework that
justified certain transitional justice mechanisms cannot entirely explain
the limitations of the model; foremost its difficulty with understanding
how priority on building states and concentrating authority gives way
to political interest and power relations that evade the juridical promise
of neutrality. Nor can it account for ways in which the model generated
variations and local interpretations of its imperatives—the ways that the
logic is disrupted and distorted. Yet, how the mechanisms of juridical
logic are “done wrong” and altered reveals more about the potential for
political and social change than does the degree of perfection of their
adoption. The RTMMM is one such product.
Memorial museums both fit into a juridical logic and depart from it:
they, too, see the relevant portion of history as defined by discrete peri-
ods of intensive harm, with the key antagonists defined as p ­ erpetrators
and victims, and are designed to provoke a rejection of violence.
However, as a museum—in theory, a permanent institution—they simul-
taneously undermine the idea of any quick release from the past, and
operate as sociocultural institutions, an arena that was deemed at best a
secondary site for producing political change within transitional justice
policies. Therefore, memorial museums found a place along with truth
commissions, criminal trials, and reparations programs, within the transi-
tional justice framework, but it was a place at the margins.
Advocates for memorials and museums highlighted their potential to
contribute to democratic transition. For example, Louis Bickford and
Amy Sodaro, argued that memorials “devoted to remembering, explain-
ing and educating about past atrocities, conflicts and trauma in the effort
to learn the lessons of the past and apply them to the strengthening of
democratic culture in the present and – especially – the future” (2010,
69). In this way, memorialization was deemed valuable in relation to
how it might contribute to the distinct outcome of a liberal democratic
state: memory as warning of the perils of repression; as social catharsis,
an exorcism of violence; or as therapy, providing solace and reunifying
the social body (Brown 2013, 276–277). Categorized by transitional
justice professionals as “symbolic reparations,” memorials and muse-
ums earned a place within donors’ agendas and UN policy documents
(Brown 2013, 274).
The idea of symbolic reparations includes a wide variety of measures,
including official apologies, changing names of public spaces, mounting
118  B. CONLEY

memorials, and so forth, and was first articulated in the transitional jus-
tice context by Chilean President Patricio Aylwin in 1991, who refer-
enced the need for “symbols of reparation.” By the time of the South
African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1998), this idea had
become a term of art, “symbolic reparations” (Hamber and Palmary
2009). Over time, memorialization has come to be considered as a cat-
egory in its own right (Naidu 2014, 34). But across the board, within
transitional justice literature, the place of memorialization is understood
in relation to victims’ rights. Memorials are purported to contribute to
restoring a sense of dignity for victims, present public recognition of past
harms as the first step toward a promise of non-repetition, support rec-
onciliation through creation of a common narrative, provide a place of
mourning in cases where bodies are either not discovered or identified,
and assign social value to survivors and families of victims (Brett et al.
2007, 1; Barsalou and Baxter 2007; Bickford and Sodaro 2010, 69).
In so categorizing museums and memorials, the discourse envisions
a limited audience, victims, and not visitors. It also overlooks challenges
distinct to an institutional form that is intended to endure beyond the
transition: like financial security, an evolving political context and chang-
ing generations of visitors. Further, it adds memory to a policy checklist,
on which outputs are measured in terms of direct contributions to politi-
cal benchmarks, which, as this study argues, is difficult to prove and may
mistake a museum’s strongest contribution.
Thus, analysis of memorial museums from the perspective of tran-
sitional justice discourse has tended to ask when and how memorials
can contribute to post-conflict reconciliation, and then try to present
an accounting sheet of when and how a particular memorial contribu-
tion augments peace or aggravates existing intergroup tensions. But the
answers to this question vary from place to place and over time. A memo-
rial museum does not provide a singular answer: built out of diverse
forces, it is marked by them and gestures to multiple paths forward.

Transitional Justice in Ethiopia

As an early adapter of the suite of transitional justice mechanisms as it
took power in 1991, the EPRDF offers a distinct and complicated exam-
ple of what transitional justice practices would produce. The EPRDF
convened a national transitional conference in July 1991, that endorsed
the Provisional Government of Ethiopia, and developed a National
 3  TRANSITIONAL INFLUENCES, 1991–2005  119

Charter as an interim constitution and governmental framework until a

new Parliament was elected in 1995. They undertook an enormous dis-
armament, demobilization, and re-integration program (Gebrehiwot
2017); removed officials from the previous regime’s party from office,
and prevented them from running for public office, among other restric-
tions on their political rights. To aid victims of the Derg regime, they
launched a restitution effort to restore political rights and help recover
personal property stolen by the regime (Tronvoll et al. 2009, 8–9). The
EPRDF-led provisional government also embarked on what was once
described in the Washington Post as “the most comprehensive exami-
nation of human rights abuses since Nazi war criminals were put in the
dock at Nuremberg, German in 1945–1947” (Parmelee 1994). Distinct
from later efforts, the ERPDF undertook these measures largely with-
out international assistance and in the name of establishing a govern-
ment that, while adapting to a market economy, retained an activist state
focused on development not political rights.
Despite having seriously engaged in many transitional justice mech-
anisms, in Ethiopia, development policies took precedence over politi-
cal or human rights issues (de Waal 2012; Lefort 2013; de Waal 2013).
Ethiopia’s transition did not, in the end, result in a liberal democracy.
From today’s vantage point, looking back at the many examples of coun-
tries that subsequently experimented with different constellations of
transitional justice mechanisms, Ethiopia does not appear as an anom-
aly. A wide range of governing models emerged—democratic, institu-
tion-based states, like Argentina or Chile; illiberal, highly centralized
states like Indonesia or Rwanda; fractured central states that reflect the
divisions of the recent past, like Bosnia-Herzegovina or a much more
violent example, Iraq. The Ethiopian example is compelling because
from the beginning of its transition, it clearly demonstrated divisions in
the logic behind transitional justice mechanisms: legal proceedings, lus-
tration, security sector reform, economic development, and memoriali-
zation were each tasked with goals distinct to the tool itself. However,
all were guided by the new leaders’ strong political vision, which did not
prioritize political rights and democracy. Ethiopia demonstrated that the
tools are inherently subordinate to political vision and cannot substitute
for, nor determine that vision. Discrete policy mechanisms do not “wag
the dog,” and override politics.
In Ethiopia, prosecutions began with gusto and slowly faded from
perceived national and international relevance over their duration. Meles
120  B. CONLEY

Zenawi initially rationalized prosecutions in terms that echoed the newly

minted transitional justice discourse, noting, in 1995, that: “The absence
of rule of law was the reason we had these tragic events. We had to come
to terms with the events of those years. The only legitimate way was a
trial” (Tronvoll et al. 2009, 91). Further, as his interviewer summa-
rized, Meles emphasized that a trial was the most “bipartisan and objec-
tive way to demarcate and reach a consensus on this distinct period of
the country’s history, since courts and processes of litigation in Ethiopia
are historically highly valued” (Tronvoll et al. 2009, 91). However, as
the prosecutions dragged on for years, outside criticism increased and
domestic attention waned. By 2002, Meles discounted what the trials
could achieve: “I think we sort of swallowed more than we could chew.
The judicial system in our country was not structurally capable of manag-
ing such an exercise [Red Terror trials] quickly. And as time went by the
exercise became more and more irrelevant” (Tronvoll et al. 2009, 92).
Ethiopia’s extensive experiment with prosecutions has been largely
forgotten in the annals of transitional justice. Perhaps because Ethiopians
ran the trials almost entirely without an international presence,11 and
retained the death penalty (though it was not used), placing them at
odds with the consensus in the humanitarian international.12 Further,
the language of the Court, Amharic, is not spoken outside of the coun-
try and thus inhibited many non-Ethiopian scholars from conduct-
ing in-depth analysis; and the government later hindered access to the
archive of materials produced by the prosecutions. The long duration
of the trials (1993–2010) may have exhausted trial watchers, while also
complicated efforts to summarize the impact. International actors found
much to criticize over time, both in terms of human rights infringements
specific to the trials and the broader government actions (Tronvoll et al.
2009, 10). Interest in what could be learned from the Ethiopian exam-
ple diminished. For those who believed unquestionably that prosecutions
offered a privileged mechanism for transitioning to rule-based, liberal
democracies, the Ethiopian trials appeared as a footnote to why interna-
tional actors should lead such processes. Today, in the literature on tran-
sitional justice, Ethiopia rarely enjoys mention.

Memorialization as an Unexpected Outcome of Juridical Logic

The juridical logic of transitional justice cannot account for the wide
range of political outcomes of the mechanisms it engendered, neither in
 3  TRANSITIONAL INFLUENCES, 1991–2005  121

a particular country example nor across the board. While nondemocratic

outcomes might well be viewed as disappointments, the logic also cannot
account for the varied spin-off measures it produced which are more dif-
ficult to separate into the good and bad political columns. Civil society
efforts to salvage “irrelevant” pathways of history, like the Red Terror,
are one such outcome. Memorialization, while it was not contained
within the purview or practices of prosecutions, found a conceptual cata-
lyst within the juridical approach to history.
Prosecutions related to the period of the Red Terror allowed for the
re-examination and introduction of new facts into social circulation.
Victims’ concerns were institutionalized within the Prosecutor’s office
from the beginning (something the later international tribunals only
developed over time), in the National Anti-Red Terror Committee that
functioned as a nongovernmental organization representing the families
and victims of the terror and human right abuse perpetrated during the
Red Terror.13 The group was led by Astateke Chaka, a man whose elder
brother was stabbed to death by militia at a kebele. Like Nunu, his family
searched every hospital in Addis to find the boy’s body, and paid 300
birr (about 150 USD at the time) for the right to claim it. He counted
his family as lucky for having located the body. His father was also
arrested and tortured, as was his mother, for the unforgivable crime of
mourning her son’s death. In a 1995 interview with John Ryle, Astateke
argued that more important than the trials was the right to mourn. His
comments echoed the logic that inspired Nunu to work on the museum:

Having names is not the same as having bodies, having bodies is not the
same as having a burial. Muslims and Christians died together in the Red
Terror, their bones are all mixed up. It would be better to put them in a
museum. (Ryle 1995)

This is the earliest mention I could find of the idea of a Red Terror
museum.14 The presence of individual bodies whose identity could not
be accounted for—recognizable only by their status as victims—was
highlighted in contrast to the elaborate procedures to hold individ-
ual perpetrators to count for those very same abuses. Within the pros-
ecutorial approach to political violence, a field “dominated by an elite
international professional and donor network rather than locally rooted
movements” (Gready and Robins 2014, 342), individuals with direct
experience of events participate in the process only in highly prescribed
122  B. CONLEY

manners (witness, defendant). Both harms and remedies are framed in

technical language that can alienate the very people who have suffered
(Gready and Robins 2014, 343). But prosecutions can model a way of
viewing history that produces a particular corollary form of memorial-
ization. Deploying similar analytical categories to describe violence,
memorialization searches out a different nonjuridical audience with an
educational and commemorative function.
It was not the Anti-Red Terror Committee that would ultimately take
up the work of creating the museum, but the fact that the idea suddenly
appeared as “natural” to at least several different groups relates to the
transitional model deployed. Astateke’s comment, above, suggests that
a museum made sense for survivor groups—a project that was built on a
way of thinking about harms in terms of evidence, with identifiable per-
petrators and victim groups, and a public purpose of education, and finds
a logical home within a museum. Nonetheless, and again as a product
of the marginal status of the Red Terror memory, the museum project
would take almost another two decades to realize.

Provocation: Politics of Forgetting, 2005

The RTMMM’s origin story now contains material objects, an institu-
tional model born of a major shift in historical narrative and a juridical
way of seeing history that bolster the possibility for a Red Terror memo-
rial museum. Still, the RTMMM would never have been possible without
the steadfast commitment of memory-keepers. After the fall of Mengistu
and the rush of transitional activities, for many Ethiopians—including
former political activists, victims, and families of those targeted in the
Red Terror—life moved on. This does not mean that memories of vio-
lence were forgotten or forgiven, but rather that the demands of earn-
ing a living, and more immediate political debates around the prospects
for democratization and the internal splits in the ruling EPRDF loomed
larger. In such a context, especially in a society where poverty restricts
the focus of many people to just making ends meet, and where a new
war (against Eritrea in 1998–2000) riveted attention, organizing around
memory is difficult.
As the regional large-scale monuments and museums were opening,
people in Addis who were dedicated to memorializing the Red Terror
were beginning to formalize their association and goals. On September
15, 2003, the Association of Red Terror Survivors, Families, and Friends
 3  TRANSITIONAL INFLUENCES, 1991–2005  123

received official registration from the government, granting it license

to operate as an organization. As was explained by the general manager
of the Association in 2017, “martyrs” are those who died; “families”
includes the parents, siblings, and children of those who suffered and
died; and “friends” are those who support Association programs. When
it was founded, the Association did not officially define who would
count as a victim, but the overwhelming majority was from the EPRP
(Mekonnen 2017).
Members would meet on Sundays, in a group of about 20 people,
each of whom paid a nominal membership fee of 20 birr a month (Tsige
et al. 2016). During this early period of its existence, the most visible
memorial activity was an annual commemoration, held around May Day
at the modest memorial stone in Meskel Square (Tsige 2016). Other sur-
vivor groups formed and dissolved over time, but the registration of the
Association enabled it to become the most visible and enduring vehicle
for collective action (Tsige et al. 2016). A second result from the 2003
meetings was that the Association also switched its goal from a monu-
ment at the location of the memorial stone, to a museum, a process dis-
cussed in the next chapter.
As the years passed, the difficulties of transforming the vision for a
museum into reality mounted. The group lacked land to build on and
financial resources. The active participation of Association members
dwindled. Those who remained deeply involved, all of whom were vol-
unteers, committed time to the project after working their regular jobs,
but the project began to dissipate (Tsige et al. 2016).
This changed in the aftermath of the 2005 elections.

Memory Ensnared by Politics

Elections took place in Ethiopia in 2000 (general elections) and 2001
(local), producing very much the same outcome: the EPRDF remained
in control. In 2005, the landscape of campaigning was different, more
open to debating real political dissent among the population and with
opposition parties (the strongest of which organized into two coali-
tions) seizing the opportunity to make their voices heard. In 2005,
the Association was able to host a discussion between the EPRDF and
opposition. They sought assurances from all sides that regardless of who
won the election that they would accept the results. It was an attempt to
124  B. CONLEY

practice what they call “tolerance politics” (Tsige et al. 2016). For many
Ethiopians, this time period marked the first and the last real space for
political dialogue.
Elections were held on May 15, 2005, and to the surprise of the
EPRDF, opposition parties did well, winning most of the major cities
and a large portion of seats in several rural areas. In the wake of the elec-
tions, both sides adopted an all or nothing view of the political stakes.
The opposition, claiming it had been cheated of victory, called for pro-
tests and a Parliamentary boycott. The EPRDF arrested political leaders,
clamped down on the media and civil society, and expanded its reach
among the populace, embracing an identification of the government
with the party, reducing the space for organized dissent outside its struc-
tures (Abbink 2006; Tronvoll et al. 2009).
The history of the Red Terror got caught up in the politics. For the
formal political opposition, memory advocates were seen as still partic-
ipating in the process of legitimizing the EPRDF by providing the nar-
rative of the Derg as a political counterpoint. However, the government
had moved on to other issues; the political aspirations of those targeted
in the Red Terror and endorsement of popular activism implicit in its his-
torical narrative were not deemed relevant to the work at hand.
Association members, worried that events might de facto impose a
statute of limitations on memorialization, redoubled their efforts. Led
by Nunu Tsige, who drew on personal connections, they advanced an
argument for why the city government of Addis Ababa should give them
land adjacent to the memorial stone’s location for a museum. As noted
earlier, the government was not opposed to Red Terror memorializa-
tion, the laying of the memorial stone by the highest-level EPRDF offi-
cials had helped mark Meskel Square as a logical site a decade earlier.
Additionally, in 2004, just one year previous to the contested elections,
Ethiopia played a prominent role in commemorating the ten-year anni-
versary of the Rwandan genocide. The Ethiopian government co-spon-
sored with the African Union and Rwandan Embassy in Ethiopia a
candlelight walk from the Rwandan Embassy to Meskel Square, where
the Mayor of Addis Ababa spoke, and the Ethiopian President delivered
the keynote address at the official AU ceremony.15 This helped advance
the legitimacy of a domestic commemorative effort led by civil society
actors. The city relented and the location for the Museum was secured.
The group then faced the daunting task of a private fundraising cam-
paign; the story of how they succeeded and the debates that emerged
 3  TRANSITIONAL INFLUENCES, 1991–2005  125

within the group of memorialization activists forms Chapter Three. With

the additional passage of time, the RTMMM has not escaped this liminal
position, as neither opposed to nor supported by the government.
Within a few years, Nunu and volunteer members of the Association
managed to raise sufficient funds to begin construction of the RTMMM.
Drawing on one major donor and many smaller contributors, the
Museum slowly transitioned from an idea to a reality.

Conclusion: Origin Stories

Why is there a RTMMM in Addis Ababa, rather than some other memo-
rial form, or nothing at all? The answer includes some of the modern-
izing, postmodern, and transnational factors that have been theorized
within memory studies as central to the contemporary ­memorialization
“boom.” However, contrary to much of memory studies theoriza-
tion, the legacies of grappling with the Holocaust, does not seem to
be directly influential, even if attenuated relationships with this history
of violence are visible, through influence on modern architecture and
legal precedents can be lightly discerned, if one is looking for them.
Transitional justice practices, guided by a juridical logic, also made an
impact on the RTMMM, but indirectly. Discrete practices of law and
state opened questions about how the narratives of violent acts, victims,
and judge are not delimited to the legal realm, but influence how history
is understood and made sense of.
These globalizing and transnational factors find their place against
the backdrop of a uniquely Ethiopian opening for democracy and sub-
sequent retreat. Thus, the Museum’s story moves through a reworking
of the Ethiopian polity, and a national memorialization landscape that
includes structures that redeem losses, through narrative of the merg-
ing of people, armed resistance, political Party, and eventually state—as
well as unfinished and marginalized memorial structures. National poli-
tics also played a role, aiding the development of the RTMMM at some
points, detracting at others.
Into the swirling story of these forces that helped shape the museum
are much less abstract material objects that echo with the relentless phys-
icality of violence itself: human remains and a memorial stone. And at the
heart of this story are memory advocates who relentlessly held true to
a simple desire to create a physical site for mourning. The story of how
the Museum was created does not flow seamlessly forward from a single
126  B. CONLEY

idea for memorialization irrevocably gaining speed and meaning along a

straight path. The unlikely eventuality of the RTMMM emerges out of
disparate forces: a fractured origin story.
The various pieces of this story resonate with insights on mem-
ory within scholarly debates. Convincing arguments have suggested
that explanatory factors include global capitalism; the emergence of
the memorial museum as a transnational form, heavily influenced by
Holocaust memorialization; the dedication of families of victims; or in
relation to transitional justice discourse translated into policies objec-
tives. The Ethiopian example suggests that each of these factors plays an
important role not only in determining that memorialization happened,
but also in shaping the particular forms that are privileged by local,
national, transnational, and globalizing forces. None of these alone,
however, is sufficient to explain the particular outcome of a Red Terror
memorial museum or how it relates to Ethiopia’s transitional political
period.
A story from the margins, the RTMMM provides a lesson in the com-
plexity of the relationship between memory and power, global forms and
local debates, transnational actors and emerging practices, aspirations
for democracy and actual politics. No single judgment about the dem-
ocratic or ethical value of memorial practices emerges: with time, under
the influence of diverse actors, and in a changing situation memory’s role
fluctuates. It can reinforce power inequalities—within a country or in
the international hierarchy of nations—just as it can cradle the spark of
protest or the personal pain of loss. The real story is not a conclusion
of what memory does, but how it arrives on the scene and in so doing
describes larger social and political conundrums.
The path from far-flung social and political factors that bolstered
the creation of a memorial museum to the actual work of establishing
the RTMMM, requires focus on the discrete decisions made within the
Association, the focus on the subsequent chapter. For now, it is worth
noting that the RTMMM is located on a site in the center of Addis
Ababa, at the corner of Meskel Square, just adjacent to where the
now-eroded memorial stone still stands. As ground was broken for the
building, one “artifact” was on site: the skeletal remains that had been
exhumed from mass graves around Addis and stored in twenty-seven
coffins—vessels for an undetermined number of intermingled human
remains.
 3  TRANSITIONAL INFLUENCES, 1991–2005  127

Nunu Tsige managed to have the bones transported four kilometers

from a holding place, near Sidist Kilo, to the Museum’s construction
site at Meskel Square, in what she called a “state funeral” (Tsige 2017).
She hired a horse-drawn carriage to ceremoniously deliver the coffins
to Meksel Square, where they were stored inside a temporary structure
while the museum was built around them.
“They deserved that much,” she said.

Notes
1. What I am calling the longer transitional period includes the governmen-
tally designated period from July 22, 1991 to August 21, 1995, which
ended as the new Constitution came into effect, and extends into the
2005 elections after which, for all practical purposes, the government
functioned as a one-party state.
2. Author communication with Alex de Waal, September 9, 2018.
3. The political resolution occurred only in July 2018.
4. Quoted on a plaque displayed at the RTMMM.
5. I was unable to visit this site, but find its logic and form intriguing. Its
opening in 2014 is somewhat late in the memorial chronology I am lay-
ing out. Arguably, it suggests a logic similar to the RTMMM in that it
foregrounds victimization, but it does so in ethnic terms.
6. I would like to thank Samuel Kidane for his informative and insightful
tour of the site. All mistakes are my own.
7. It is notable that the EPRDF deliberately avoided celebrating individual
heroes. Meles’s face was far more visible in public spaces after his death
than during his lifetime.
8. I would like to thank Nehemiah Abie, Director of the Museum and
Library, for his knowledgeable and insightful tour of the museum,
memorial and grounds. All mistakes are my own.
9. I am grateful to several representatives from the regional government who
spoke with me during a visit to the site. All mistakes are my own.
10. This was particularly true as tools were being developed, for example,
several years after they began trials, neither the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) nor that for Rwanda (ICTR)
made the core documents available in the languages spoken by the vic-
tims. The International Criminal Court has been up and running for
more than a decade now, and has not yet figure out how to administer
the victims’ compensation fund that was included in its mandate. The
ongoing transition in Colombia threatens to completely upend dis-
course and practices predicated on ‘victimization’ given that critique of
128  B. CONLEY

transitional mechanisms has pushed practitioners to widen the definitional

parameters in a case of conflict that spans multiple decades. The special
status of ‘victims’ is proving to burst its seams.
11. International monetary and technical assistance was forthcoming in
response to an initial request for support in 1993, but diminished quickly
thereafter. Inconsistencies in funding and cuts increased thereafter
(Vaughan 2009, 62–63).
12. Likewise, Rwanda kept the death penalty as well, creating the situation
in which leaders of the 1994 genocide tried before an international tri-
bunal could only receive life imprisonment, whereas as their underlings
prosecuted in Rwanda were condemned to death. The United States also
implemented a transitional court in Iraq that applied the death penalty to
former leaders of Saddam Hussein’s government.
13. Consisting of 21 volunteer members it had official status, and was regis-
tered with both the Prime Minster’s Office and the Ministry of Justice
(Vaughan 2009, 65).
14. Alex de Waal, who worked with Human Rights Watch in the early 1990s,
recalls recommending to the Ethiopian government that the central
prison, Kerchele, be turned into a museum at around this same time
period (1991–1995). Communication with author September 15, 2018.
15. Also, one of the most respected elders of the Ethiopian diplomatic
corps, who had chaired the Constitutional Commission of 1993–1994,
Kifle Wodajo, made a speech that evening that called for a memorial to
the Red Terror, as well as action in Darfur. It was Wodajo’s last public
appearance: he was taken ill at the end of the event, and flew to South
Africa for emergency medical treatment, but died at the hospital.

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Author Interviews
Ayene “Nunu” Tsige, November 13, 2016.
Ayene “Nunu” Tsige, Gedion Wolde Emanuel, and Seifu Eshete Wube,
November 18, 2016.
Ayene “Nunu” Tsige, August 19, 2017.
Mekonnen Wolde, August 9, 2017.
 CHAPTER 4

The Shape of Memory, 2003–2010

As I interview him, Fasil,1 the architect who designed the Red Terror
Martyrs Memorial Museum (RTMMM), borrows a piece of paper and
sketches to illustrate a point. His practiced hand makes it look easy: a few
strokes of the pen and a blank page transforms into the familiar structure
of the Museum.
In practice, moving from the blank page, through the crosswinds of
forces that shaped the possibility of the project, to the actual structure
and exhibition was the result of arduous labor and contention within the
community of family, friends, and survivors committed to memorializa-
tion. The process included strongly debated differences of opinion. In
tracing these debates, “memory from the margins” does not take shape
as a singular construct in opposition to unified hegemonic memory. Both
forms of memory are replete with internal differences. These differences
remain legible in the Museum’s final structure and exhibition, contrib-
uting to tensions between the overarching historical narrative, the pre-
cise objects and forms displayed in the exhibition, and whatever lessons
might be learned through a visit (Fig. 4.1).
Fasil’ ink outline also draws our attention to the silhouette of
a museum, per se—example of a cultural form found around the
world, and to the specific subcategory of the memorial museum.
Museums convey meaning through assemblage of objects, texts, images
and ­exhibition—a multilayered storytelling experience that invites the

© The Author(s) 2019 133

B. Conley, Memory from the Margins,
Memory Politics and Transitional Justice,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13495-2_4
134  B. CONLEY

Fig. 4.1  Sketch of the RTMMM by Fasil (Bridget Conley/World Peace

Foundation 2017)

visitor to engage in interpretation. Adding memory to these practices,

in the form of a memorial museum, attempts to channel the experi-
ence into an ethical narrative rejecting violence. But displaying mem-
ory reveals the internal disjunctions between a reference to the past,
a present construction of community, and a call to ethics. This holds
for memorial museums, as such, and for the RTMMM, in particular.
However, tensions between memory’s composite parts are not a dis-
traction from, but rather constitutive of the power of a memorial
museum experience.
The chapter begins by discussing the memorial museum in relation to
the broader category of a history museum, then addresses the debates
within the community that created the RTMMM. The second half of
this chapter shifts perspective to analyze the structure, exhibition narra-
tive and collections of the RTMMM.
 4  THE SHAPE OF MEMORY, 2003–2010  135

The Memorial Museum in Context

Memorial museums are often analyzed for how they differ from the
wider genre of history museums. As discussed in the previous chap-
ter, memorial museums are distinguished by a focus on political (often
state-sponsored) violence, key stakeholders within survivor communities,
and the pedagogical goal of persuading visitors to pass judgment on vio-
lence. Further, their juridical narrative, with set characters of victim, per-
petrator, judge (herein, the visiting public), presentation of evidence and
movement towards moral judgment on historical harms, distinguishes
them among museums. But merely enumerating a memorial museum’s
distinctions is different from analyzing how these institutions construct
meaning. This question must be posed before examining their political
relevance, which, as multiple analyses have demonstrated, can variably
challenge or reinforce existing political hierarchies (Rieff 2016; Brown
2013; Brett et al. 2007).

The Forms of a Museum

There are many similarities between how a memorial museum and most
any history museum constructs meaning. In his landmark study, The
Birth of the Museum, Tony Bennett describes museal meaning-making
techniques and processes as an “exhibitionary complex” (Bennett 1995,
24). Included in this, is the constellation of what is exhibited, the over-
arching exhibition narrative, and the performance of the tour. A museum
conveys meaning through displays of discrete objects (including photos,
artifacts, text panels, etc.), that find their place within a logical order-
ing of the world, on a scene that is animated as visitors circulate through
the exhibition path. Bennett argues that the object, narrative, and visit
do not merge into seamless instruction. Visitors make meaning of the
museum experience at the point of tension between these three elements.
Exhibitions are designed to engage their visitors by inviting them to
stop and ponder the place of a given photo, object or incident in the
larger narrative and the multiplicities of meaning embedded therein.
Objects and photos sometimes fail or exceed their assigned exhibition
role, and resonate with unintended meanings. The visit, while structured
by an overarching exhibition narrative and prescribed visitor behav-
ior, is guided by the visitors’ preferences and pre-existing experiences.
136  B. CONLEY

A visitor can pass quickly or linger over exhibition elements that catch
their attention based on quirks of curiosity or knowledge they bring with
them before entering a museum’s front doors.
In the modern, state-sponsored museum that is the focus of Bennett’s
analysis—and which resonates with my discussion of Ethiopia’s regional
martyrs memorial museums in Chapter 2—exhibition narratives concern
the construction and performance of the national citizen. In this con-
text, master narratives of the citizen are composed through presentation
of foundational national ideals that often exclude contradictory parts
of history: the marginal stories are left out.2 However, displaying ideals
that compose the story of citizenship through specific photos, stories and
objects, exposes gaps between the ideals and the actualities of their pres-
entations which are, by nature, limited and fixed within particularities.
As Bennett writes, “the space of representation associated with museum
rests on a principle of general human universality which renders it inher-
ently volatile, opening it up to a constant discourse of reform as hitherto
excluded constituencies seek inclusion—and inclusion on equal terms—
within that space” (Bennett 1995, 97). The displayed difference between
inclusion and exclusion opens a foothold for contestation.
Memorial museums share these exhibitionary principles for making
meaning. However this institutional form does so through presentation
of previously marginalized histories, opening the tensions between uni-
versal and particular unto a different scene.

The Content of a Memorial Museum

The tension exposed through the memorial museum focuses on the
violence of exclusion as its primary narrative. In this case, tension arises
from juxtaposition of the fact of violence with the question of what
meaning can be extracted from it. Just as the state-sponsored museum
does not ultimately manage to control the tensions it displays, neither
does the memorial museum.
Multiple ethical, political and historical lessons can emerge. These
may alternatively reinforce power hierarchies, grievance-fueled politics,
or tolerance and rights’ based social insights. Memorial museums chas-
tise the state in many contexts, but often it is a previous state-structure,
one that has been deposed. Hence, the narratives frequently retain an
element of progress—of violence overcome in the end—but by empha-
sizing loss, not glory. This difference is important: memorial museums
 4  THE SHAPE OF MEMORY, 2003–2010  137

approach the present day through a narrative of the unnecessary

suffering of average people. Even when the ending marks triumph over
perpetrators, the final moment offers only ambiguous redemption—
leaving a visitor torn between a sense of comfort in final resolution, but
drenched in shock at the degree of violence and loss that paved the way.
Objects likewise play a different role in a memorial museum. They
do not convey social order, but are the detritus of the everyday. As Paul
Williams notes, memorial museums are often “object-poor” in that
they must compose their collections out of that which was marked for
destruction (Williams 2007, 25). Objects in these institutions are of no
importance in and of themselves, only transformed into museum artifact
as the residue of intentional violence.
As example: In the RTMMM’s exhibition is a vitrine displaying a black
and white photo of an unnamed, handsome and serious-looking man (Fig.
4.4). Behind his photo, in a small box-shaped vitrine, are his skeletal remains
exhumed from a mass grave. The box also contains items found alongside
his bones: green rope, used to tether his hands behind his back before exe-
cution, and a toothbrush and pen, tucked into a small plastic carrying case.
Setting aside for the moment the shocking character of a display
human remains from the recently deceased, I want to draw attention
to the unexpected impact of simple objects, like a toothbrush and pen.
A mundane, mass-produced toothbrush and pen have no self-contained
logic for appearing in a museum exhibition. They are not compelling in
and of themselves, nor are they presented for their ability to represent a
form, as in archeological museum displays of ancient everyday objects.
Rather, the power of everyday artifacts in a memorial museum resides in
how they juxtapose mundane features of life and the context of an excep-
tionally violent socio-political moment. In so doing, objects testify to the
potential slippage between what is expected and what is feared. Some
memorial museum artifacts, like implements of torture, convey a sense
of the exceptional, but their impact is magnified in relation to ordinary
objects that testify to common human vulnerability. In presenting these
objects, memorial museum exhibitions prompt visitors to ponder how
exceptional moments haunt the everyday.
Memorial museums can also be examined in relation to other
­practices, like legal prosecutions, that share juridical narrative assump-
tions and which are regularly categorized as transitional justice mecha-
nisms. Both legal proceedings and memorial museums culminate in an
ethical judgment on past incidents, but their manner of abstraction from
138  B. CONLEY

particular reprehensible acts to social meaning differs considerably. Law-

based ethics moves from the specific infraction to universal legal pro-
nouncement, and serve to reinforce the validity and power of law as final
arbiter of actions. It is an ethics defined by rules.
The memorial museum tells a story in order to prompt reflection
on the precariousness of the line that separates everyday living from
an exceptional moment. This is a storytelling ethics, akin to parables.
Storytelling as a vehicle for ethical discussions invites individual interpre-
tation of what lessons can be abstracted. Lesson-learning occurs only at
the point where stories resonate with visitors across the uneven terrain of
lived experiences. As a vehicle for arriving at ethical lessons, storytelling is
inherently unstable because its appeal resides in the invitation to interpret
not the certitude of judgment. Storytelling in a museum is particularly
exposed to the difficulties of finalizing a narrative, because exhibitions do
not present seamless narratives, but assemble scenes. Pedagogy through
assemblage rejects final settlement of morality and invites participation.
While the openness of the invitation to interpret renders storytelling an
unpredictable form, it is capable of engaging a broad audience.
As a result, museums are well positioned to engage the cultural and
social work of advancing marginalized histories by presenting the range
of human emotional existence. Through what Richard Sandell calls a
“focus on lived experiences” (2017, 161) and I refer to as storytelling
ethics, museums can “play a significant part in shaping the social and
political conditions in which human rights are negotiated, continually
recast and disseminated, constrained or advanced” (Sandell 2017, 161).
At least one study has found strong evidence that visitors to memorial
museums find the open invitation to engage is a more appropriate start-
ing point than law-based rights discourse when discussing the meaning
of violent history (FAR 2011).
In the case of the RTMMM, the composition of narrative and evidence
emerged out of debates within the community of memorialization activ-
ists dedicated to creating the institution. These points of contention left
behind traces of unresolved differences. Rather than viewing these traces as
defects—flaws within a potentially seamless narrative—they are the critical
source of dialogic potential within the memorial museum. They provide
the footholds for interpretation that compel storytelling ethics. The possi-
bility of creating meaning through a museum experience is maximized at
the point of difficulty: where politics, representation, objects, narrative and
diverse goals do not neatly coincide, but rather snag the conscience.
 4  THE SHAPE OF MEMORY, 2003–2010  139

Establishing the Parameters: Memorial, History,

and Management

On September 15, 2003, when the Association of Red Terror Survivors,

Families, and Friends officially registered as a civic organization, its lead-
ers inaugurated a series of meetings concerning the memorial project.
The group debated the memorial form, narrative arc, and management
priorities of the institution they would construct together. Their discus-
sions and final choices in these key matters, in addition to the interpre-
tative decisions of the architect, exhibition designers and artists whose
work is displayed in the Museum—and, as explored in-depth in the next
chapter—with survivors of prison and torture who serve as docents, pro-
duced an institution with multiple layers of meaning.

Determining the Memorial Form

As Association members set out to memorialize the Red Terror, there
were a few people, according to Gebrewold Sembet, Chairman of the
Board of the Association in 2017, who wanted to resuscitate the politi-
cal debates and goals of the EPRP. They sought to rehash the feud with
Meison, and worried that memorialization would contribute to bolster-
ing the EPRDF’s credentials as the force that defeated the Derg. These
voices, however, were in a clear minority and sidelined by the larger
group (Sembet 2017). The overwhelming majority wanted no part of
the old political debates. This is not to say that they crossed a border
separating politics from memorialization. Rather, they interpreted the
political relevance of the Red Terror as issuing a different imperative
than that of organized party politics. They were drawn together to com-
memorate the human losses during the Terror by advocating for what
they called “tolerance”: an ethical exhortation that never again should
Ethiopians resort to atrocities to resolve political disputes.
Establishing tolerance and commemoration as goals was the result
of clear consensus, but what precise form it would take was not self-ev-
ident. Initially, the Association effort focused on the idea of mounting
an obelisk on the site of the simple stone marker in the center of Meskel
Square. The group invited Fasil to speak to them in 2003 about the pro-
ject. He offered his opinion that a museum would be more appropriate,
based on two factors. Fasil, a leading Ethiopian architect and advocate
for cultural preservation, felt that the monument they envisioned was not
140  B. CONLEY

logical for the site. He argued that it would obstruct the flow of move-
ment through Meskel Square, an enormous intersection with an open
area (where the memorial stone still stands) flanking one side, creating
a sense of expansiveness distinct within Addis Ababa’s urban landscape
(Fasil 2017).
In additional to a functional, site-specific argument, Fasil was also
convinced that younger people needed to learn about the history. The
Red Terror had faded from popular memory because it was forcefully
buried from 1978 until 1991. In the intervening years, even those
who most suffered its impact learned not to speak of it. In 1991 as the
EPRDF was approaching the capital, Mengistu’s government called for
young people to join the city’s defense. Fasil was stunned when students
from Addis Ababa University, where he was teaching at the time and the
former site of mass opposition to the military regime, responded to the
call. It was as if, he said, the Red Terror had not happened or happened
to another country or another people. It was forgotten.
Fasil speculated that maybe the history was too painful, and people
avoided re-opening the wound. The Terror worked to the extent that
those who knew about it refused to even speak of the violence. Like
many others I spoke with, he also noted that partisan politics contrib-
uted to the silence in the post-1991 period. Given rivalries between the
EPRDF and the EPRP, some EPRP activists did not want to memori-
alize the story of violence committed against their ranks by Mengistu
for fear it would justify the ERPDF’s defeat of Menigstu. Those who
adopted this view organized around an anti-EPRDF agenda. Whatever
the reasons, the sum result was silence about the actual violence of the
Terror. This is why he felt a museum, something that could educate
about, not just symbolize the suffering, was the appropriate commemo-
rative form.
At first, the Association members were unconvinced. Fasil prepared
and presented a sketch for a museum near the place where the memorial
stone stands, at the center of Meskel Square, and the Association mem-
bers debated it for months. Unable to resolve the question, the group
decided to convene a parents’ committee—elders who lost their chil-
dren in the Red Terror. Fasil again presented his concept for a museum
and why he prioritized education about the history. Again, the debate
launched—a discussion that seemingly could have continued without
end. However, this time, Fasil recalled, an elderly woman whose child
was killed during the Red Terror, suddenly stood up and announced:
 4  THE SHAPE OF MEMORY, 2003–2010  141

“what he is saying is correct.” Then, as if the idea of a memorial museum

was the only natural end product of their efforts, the debate ended.
Echoing in the back of people’s minds and adding further logic to
the idea of a museum were several other factors (discussed in depth in
Chapter 3). First, was the need to find a permanent home for human
remains of former activists. Second, were the museums in the capitals of
Amhara, Tigray and Oromo regions, commemorating the contributions
and suffering of these ethnic groups during the effort to defeat Mengistu.
A Red Terror memorial museum would serve as a multi-ethnic site,
focused on the civilian losses suffered during the early resistance to the
military regime within the cities. In this way, there is synergy between
the RTMMM and the regional memorial museums in telling a story of
resistance to the military regime. However, the memorial museum would
follow this story along a side path of history, presenting evidence of the
Derg’s crimes through documentation of human losses. This choice ech-
oed a juridical narrative of violent history, modeled in the large-scale
prosecutions of Mengistu regime officials in the post-1991 period.

Gathering Resources
Even with a guiding ethos and museum goal, the means with which to cre-
ate the institution were lacking. Between 2003 and 2005, the Association
lost momentum and dwindled down to a handful of committed volunteers.
Among them were Nunu Tsige, Gedion Wolde Amanuel, Seifu Eshete
Wube and Tadesse Gesses. Gedion was 19 when he was arrested by the
Derg and spent six years in the central prison, Kerchele. Seifu was the same
age at the time of his arrest and spent four and a half years in prison in
Kerchele. Gessess was unique among those involved in the Museum, he
had been aligned with Meison. Nunu explained that his involvement was
possible because the idea of the group was that anyone who was harmed in
or willing to denounce the violence of the Red Terror was welcome (Tsige
2016). Her view reflects an understanding of the violence in its multiple
paths, targeting all political opposition, even if the EPRP lost more of its
members, given the density of its urban membership.
As discussed in the previous chapter, Nunu redoubled her efforts fol-
lowing the controversial 2005 elections, and in 2006 managed to secure
the rights to land in a corner of Meskel Square from the government of
the city of Addis Ababa. Once she had the deed in hand, she felt that
everything else would become possible. But with no further government
142  B. CONLEY

support, financing the project remained a daunting challenge. Initially,

she hoped that the government would support the project’s develop-
ment, but in time, she came to realize the benefits of being independ-
ent. It gave the survivors broader latitude in their efforts and defused
a potential criticism that the Museum was merely a bolster to rational-
ize the ERPDF government. The Association could create, she noted, “a
peoples’ museum” (Tsige 2016).
Like non-profit fundraisers around the world, Nunu drew on every
social connection she had to kickstart the process of securing funds for
the Museum. An initial gift of 7 million birr—half the total costs esti-
mated to complete the project—came from a single donor, Mohammed
Hussein Al Amoudi, one of Ethiopia’s wealthiest residents. Construction
began immediately even as the Association continued to raise money
over the next few years to allow them to finish the Museum. One of their
fundraising efforts was a telethon. The technique of what is now called
“crowd sourcing” is not unusual in the Ethiopian context, where devel-
opment and social welfare projects frequently make broad appeals to the
public. Many of the specialists whose work contributed to the Museum
also helped defray expenses by volunteering their time: among them,
Fasil, a project consultant Dr. Mesele Haile, and artists who designed the
exhibition.
The Association leadership recognized that they needed funds not
only to build the Museum, but, lacking any other form of financial sup-
port, to sustain it. They also wanted admission to be free of charge.
They were cognizant that the martyrs memorial museums in Tigray
and Amhara regions closed for a couple years after their initial open-
ing to finalize the work and continue fundraising, even though these
other institutions could draw on Party and regional government funds.
The Association aimed for a definitive opening and included space for
income-generating businesses on the site to help secure the Museum’s
long-term financial health. Fasil’s design thus included the Museum
building and several smaller attached, self-enclosed structures that the
Association rents out to businesses.
As the project became viable, the Association was re-invigorated, with
previous members re-engaging and new ones joining its ranks (Tsige
et al. 2016). New disputes arose. Some Association members questioned
if a museum was the best use of funds when among the survivors and
families of survivors—especially mothers whose children had been killed
and had no one to look after them as they aged—were people living in
 4  THE SHAPE OF MEMORY, 2003–2010  143

destitution. They argued that funds should be directed to aid those ren-
dered indigent by losses of the Terror. Nunu agreed that this was a seri-
ous issue—and often gave to those seeking support from her personal
resources—but remained firm that the memorial project, previously
decided upon as the Association’s central activity and the reason for
which they had raised funds, should remain the focus of activities (Tsige
2016). This dispute faded while the project was underway, but did not
go away (Sembet 2017).

Determining the Narrative Arc

As a narrative composed of finite material objects—structures, photos,
artifacts—a museum forces decisions: which historical events will be
included and whose stories will be told? In the case of the RTMMM,
the group needed to clarify their historical scope: would they tell the
story of the Red Terror as a discrete period of violence, named as such by
the Derg to describe its systematic violence against EPRP members and
those who expressed any sympathy with them? Or did the Association
want to document the longer time period of urban violence during
which many actors committed and were targets of violence, while doc-
umenting how the Derg’s means for and uses of brutality far exceeded
that of any other actors? The differences in opinion on how to answer
this question were refracted through personal experiences and reflections
on the significance of the Terror. Like many survivors of mass violence
elsewhere, personal relationships and a sense of debt owed to those who
did not survive fundamentally shaped their views of what meaning could
be extracted from the period of violence.
A key supporter of maintaining focus on the violence against the
EPRP during this early period of developing the exhibition narrative
was Helawe Yusef, who narrowly survived a mass killing during the
Red Terror. His analysis of the historical period and personal experi-
ence led him to believe that the Museum should honor the EPRP mem-
bers who were targeted by the Derg, and whose friendships shaped
his early perspective on politics (Yusef 2017). A member of the EPRP
Youth Committee, Yusef was arrested at 19 years old, and tortured at
the Central Prison. Derg guards forced him to confess to working with
the EPRP and to expose friends and comrades. After one month in
prison, a guard came into the crowded cell as night fell and read out
a list of names. People whose names appeared on these night lists never
144  B. CONLEY

returned; Yusef’s name was called. He was led into a small room, where
he saw the military officer in charge draw a line through his name, cross-
ing him out. He and some 50 other prisoners were then forced into
closed trucks, their mouths gagged and hands tied behind their backs.
Before reaching their destination, one among the prisoners, Belayneh
Gebremariam, managed to untie his hands. Yusef spoke of Belayneh with
deep respect, as someone whose bravery and commitment to his fellow
activists and the cause inspired him to undertake enormous risks. On this
fateful night, Belayneh not only freed himself, but also labored to free
several others before the guards noticed. One prisoner quickly broke a
window and seven or eight of those whose hands were freed, including
Yusef, escaped. Guards fired their weapons at the fleeing prisoners, but
the dark city provided protection as they raced away from the convoy.
The trucks continued with the remainder of the prisoners a short distance
further to the outskirts of Addis, near Kotebe. Belayneh, wanting to know
what they doing, followed their path. As the trucks halted, he hid himself
nearby and watched, later reporting what he saw. The trucks parked so
that their lights illuminated an area of ground before an open pit. Then,
in groups of four to five, the prisoners were brought forward and gunned
down, their bodies pushed into a mass grave. A month after this act of
heroic bravery to witness what was happening to others, Belayneh was
discovered by Derg forces, taken into custody, tortured, and killed.
Yusef managed to find his way out of Addis, and he met up with the
armed units of the EPRP. Eventually, he joined with others to splin-
ter away from the EPRP units, and created the Ethiopian People’s
Democratic Movement (EPDM), which was later transformed into
the Amhara National Democratic Movement (ANDM). He became
a leader—contributing as a musician, poet, political theorist and ulti-
mately political leader. He figures strongly in the museum at Bahir Dar.
After the war ended, Yusef became the founding director of the Amhara
Development Association (ADA), a non-government organization,
which through voluntary contributions from its members and supporters
built hundreds of schools and clinics, rural roads and wide range of inter-
ventions to alleviate poverty in the Amhara region. Later, Yusef became a
prominent diplomat. When I spoke with him, he had just returned from
a posting as Ambassador to Israel. “This is my second life,” he explained,
“these forty years since that day of the massacre are all extra.” For him,
the RTMMM was a way to honor his fallen comrades from the early days
of his political work.
 4  THE SHAPE OF MEMORY, 2003–2010  145

Reiterating the argument that the RTMMM should maintain a nar-

row focus on the military regime’s effort to destroy the EPRP, was
Gebrewold Sembet. His involvement with the RTMMM began after the
Museum opened, but his perspective on the logic of the exhibition narra-
tive is instructive (Sembet 2017). Gebrewold is from Addis and attended
the Teferi Mekonnen School until midway through high school, when
his education was interrupted by a student boycott. As the revolution
heated up, he became a committed EPRP activist, eventually holding
several leadership positions in Addis and then in a nearby region. At one
point, he returned to Addis, intending to stay one or two nights in a safe
house near Merkato, but the house was under surveillance and he found
himself surrounded by police and military.
Captured by Derg forces, he was transported to Higher Prison 25,
where guards beat him with pistols, weapons and other implements
until he lost consciousness. Every part of his body was battered. For
one week, he could not even speak as he recovered from the injuries.
Throughout the torture, he maintained that he was a low-level EPRP
sympathizer. He was moved with about 20 other prisonerss, including
his close friends, Mesfin Yilma and Zewdu Hailemichael, to another
prison. The three of them stayed together as they were again moved, to
Station 5 for three months. Zewdu, he told me, was eventually killed.
During this time period, the EPRP organizational structure was falling
apart, as people were arrested, tortured and forced to give names, and
many were killed. While Gebrewold was in custody, someone else iden-
tified him as an EPRP leader, and he was sent back to Higher 25 to be
tortured again.
Gerbrewold believed that a change in policy at this point of the
Terror, whereby long-term imprisonment became more common than
executions, saved his life. He was transferred to Alem Bekagn, a part of
Kerchele prison known as “farewell to the world.” After some time, he
was sent to another section of the prison, where he lived for years in the
overcrowded and unsanitary conditions alongside thousands of other
political prisoners. Insufficient food and clean water contributed to the
spread of disease. Many prisoners died, especially following a cholera
outbreak. On May 23, 1985, he was among a large group of people who
were released.
It is not surprising that someone who was influential within the EPRP,
and who suffered at the hands of and whose friends were killed by the
Derg, would advocate for the Museum to maintain a narrow focus on
146  B. CONLEY

the period of intensive violence against the EPRP. But degree of suffer-
ing alone cannot explain the positions of the Association members on
the scope of the exhibition. Almost all of the Association lost people they
loved or had themselves been tortured by the military regime.
Nonetheless, some among the group felt that the history was incom-
plete if it solely focused on the EPRP as victims and the Derg as the only
perpetrator. Reflections on the historical period were refracted through
a number of prisms: political, personal, and ethical positions informed
by the long intervening years. Gedion Wolde Emanual and Seifu Eshete
Wube, for instance, both of whom were arrested and tortured during the
Red Terror, argued on the side of expanding the historical scope (Tsige
et al. 2016). They advocated for a more inclusive and critical reflection
on how violence was used for political ends, without relativizing the
abuses of the Derg. Also among this group were Tadesse Gessesse, Fasil
and Nunu. Each offered a story to explain their positions.
Tadesse Gessesse, the one Association member from Meison, unsur-
prisingly, repeated the argument that the EPRP’s program of assassi-
nations (what the Derg called the “White Terror”) caused the Derg to
unleash the Red Terror, inaugurating a cycle of killing and revenge
(Gessesse 2016). When I spoke with him, he emphasized that he was
“lucky” to have survived an EPRP assassination attempt. He told me that
he created the Derg’s political school and was its director in 1976. Most
nights he slept at the school, but once, when he was on a trip to Djibouti,
the EPRP set off a bomb in the school’s sleeping quarters—it had been
placed directly under his bed. He survived not only this attempt on his
life, during a period when he was actively supporting the military regime
in its persecution of the EPRP, but also the later period when the Derg
turned against Meison. While he remained resolute that the EPRP was to
blame for setting into the motion the dynamics of violence that became
the Red Terror, he became involved in the Museum project, “to pay back
for all the mistakes we committed,” which he clarified as, “bringing social-
ism to a country that was still feudal,” the project of “youthful ambition
and the cause of the violence” (Gessesse 2016). His explanation of the
mistakes would certainly be at odds with other Association members’
interpretations of Meison’s support for the military regime. It is worth
noting that he also departed from the project before the Museum opened.
Fasil explained his perspective on the question of the scope of the
Museum by juxtaposing several personal stories from the period (Fasil
2017). He was 13 during the Red Terror, living in Gondar. One day,
 4  THE SHAPE OF MEMORY, 2003–2010  147

following a school break, he, like many other children, did not return
promptly to school. Interpreting widespread student absences as a pro-
test, the so-called “butcher of Gondar,” Captain Melaku Tefera ordered
all children on the streets to be taken into custody. Fasil, along with
some 400 boys and 200 girls, were taken to the grounds of the Imperial
Palace, where they spent the entire day forced to run barefoot back and
forth over harsh ground, and were beaten by guards. Their teachers were
also arrested. Tefera appeared once to examine the crowd of children and
told his guards—in a loud voice, audible to the captive children—to beat
them and if any of them caused trouble, to shoot them. The next morn-
ing parents surrounded the entire palace, begging for their children to
be released. They were, but only after each child promised not to engage
in politics. Later, Fasil’s father moved the family to Addis, hoping they
would be safer there. He advised his children not to become involved in
politics. Fasil recalled him saying: “your friends or people you know may
try to recruit you, but you have to remember that the Derg is a monster,
they will go after you.” At one point the Derg offered an “amnesty” for
anyone who confessed to being involved with the EPRP, and his sister
felt compelled to reveal that she had once read a single copy of the EPRP
newspaper Democracia. For this, she spent three weeks in prison.
Fasil also provided a counterpoint that helps clarify why he sided with
a more inclusive presentation of the different patterns of violence dur-
ing the period. He had a relative on his father’s side who a young Fasil
overheard telling his mother that he had been threatened by the EPRP
because he worked in the Derg’s government. The relative had taken a
low-level government job because he was very poor and had to care for
his family. A week after the cousin spoke with Fasil’s mother, the EPRP
killed him. This relative was not the least bit influential in the regime,
and his murder shocked Fasil.
Nunu presented her argument for wider inclusion of patterns of vio-
lence with a succinct and simple story that ends with a question (Tsige
2016). She knew a woman whose four children were killed during the
wider period of violence in the 1970s. The daughter was with Meison,
and three sons sided with EPRP. Should she have to go to separate places
to mourn her children, one by one?
The debate about the narrative arc of the exhibition was fur-
ther reflected in discussions about how to name the institution. The
Association opted to resolve the issue with an admirably democratic
mechanism. They hosted a debate: two sides were presented, discussed
148  B. CONLEY

and the group decided. Helawe Yusef argued that the “Red Terror,”
was a distinct program of violence against EPRP activists, named as such
by the Derg, and a logical focus for both the narrative and name of the
institution (Yusef 2017). Gedion Wolde Emanual argued that the name
should be “Never, Ever Again,” reflecting the museum’s educational
ethos and a position against political violence (Tsige et al. 2016).
Ultimately the narrative arc and the name were decided in favor of a
focus on the Derg’s violence against the EPRP, but with recognition of
the larger period embedded in smaller ways. The name of the Museum
focuses on the period of the Red Terror, but the phrase “never, ever
again” appears widely in Museum publications and inside the building.
While the core exhibition narrative obscures violence within and between
the political opposition groups, there is an attempt to incorporate wider
scope of victims of the Derg near the end of the exhibition, albeit in a
somewhat haphazard way. The focus of tours and the Museum’s commu-
nications is conveying the idea of “tolerance” in politics, as the primary
institutional lesson.

Assembling the Exhibition

To collect photographs and artifacts that composed the original exhibi-
tion, the Association sent out notices through local media asking people
to donate materials. Thus, the collection of images and artifacts were,
as is often the case with memorial museums, of uneven quality: cobbled
together from a wide range of sources, with photos of varying resolu-
tions, and artifacts retrieved from conditions of destruction.
As the process gained momentum, the Association leaders com-
missioned several pieces of art, including a statue of three women in
mourning, that stands outside the Museum, which was created in China
and transported with the aid of Ethiopian Airlines. They also worked
with artists affiliated with a well-known local art gallery, Makush Gallery,
to design the exhibition. The artists were too young to have participated
in the events of the Red Terror, but one of them, painter Naizgi Tewelde
Kidane, who volunteered his time as a curator and designer, along with
two others, Gedion Dangeus and Yordanes Wube, noted that he became
involved because he wanted the experience of working on museum
design and believed strongly that the history told there is also his his-
tory—it is Ethiopian history. He stated: “When you know something
you are responsible for it” (Tewelde 2016).
 4  THE SHAPE OF MEMORY, 2003–2010  149

On March 7, 2010, the Museum opened to the public. Cutting the

ribbon during an opening ceremony was an elderly woman in tradi-
tional garb, Kebebushe Admasu. She was the mother of four sons, all of
whom were killed by the Derg on a single night during the Red Terror.
Whatever disputes marked the construction of the Museum, the symbol-
ism of inviting Kebebushe to open it was clear: this Museum housed the
history of profound loss.

Managing the Museum into the Future

After the Museum opened another debate ensued about who would
manage the institution henceforward. Embedded within this administra-
tive discussion is a question central to the longevity of a museum: who is
it for?
Nunu and some of the others involved early on envisioned handing
over management of the Museum to the Addis Ababa University, at the
time under Andreas Eshete, who was among the intellectuals engaged in
debates of the 1970s, but was living in the United States as the Terror
unfolded. Advocates for incorporating the Museum within the University
hoped that the Museum would benefit from institutional support of an
educational context, which could support further research and provide
a larger administrative structure. This plan envisioned the Museum as
being for a wider visitorship, a new generation who would learn about
the history of the Terror.
Others disagreed, arguing that the Association was capable of manag-
ing the Museum and doing so would ensure its independence. Those on
this side of the argument also wanted to harness the income-generating
businesses associated with the Museum structure not only to support
the Museum, but also to provide financial aid for the poorest families of
victims of the Red Terror and survivors who became severely mentally
unstable as a result of torture they suffered (Wolde 2017). In the end,
Association members voted to retain control of the new institution. This
marked a subtle shift in the Museum’s life: it took its place as a vehicle to
support survivors, rather than a stand-alone institution.
The differences sparked some bitterness between the two sides.
At this point, Nunu, Gedion and Seifu, having brought the Museum
to ­fruition and not agreeing with, but respecting the decision of the
majority of Association members, stepped aside (Tsige et al. 2016).
Their part in the Museum’s story had finished. The process to create
150  B. CONLEY

it, they told me, was exhausting, and they were ready to hand it over
to a new team who would manage the institution henceforward. They
all said they were proud of what they were able to achieve, especially
regarding the tolerance politics that the Museum espouses, and they still
regularly visit.
In 2017, the Museum’s director, Befekadu Gebre-Medhin, reported
to the Association director, Mekonnen Wolde, who was responsible
to the Association Board, whose Chairman was Gebrewold Sembet.
Mekonnen noted that especially for mothers who lost their children
in the Terror and never found their remains, the Museum functions as
an important physical site in the absence of any other marker of their
child’s grave. Nonetheless, his focus, and hence that of the Association
itself, is tending to the needs of living survivors. Today, in addition to
managing the Museum, the Association has members all over the coun-
try, with 350 fully subscribed members and another 600–700 people
who are active with the organization. The Association places multiple
roles: beginning in 2009, it hosts an annual conference on May Day;
organizes members meetings; distributes small funds to a number of
indigent families and survivors in addition to helping them connect
with other sources of support; and represents Red Terror victims and
families with various constituencies inside and outside the country
(Wolde 2017).
In principle, the priorities of educating the public and caring for the
survivors need not be at odds, but when resources are small, the inter-
ests can pull in different directions. The Association has managed the
Museum throughout its existence, and in 2017 they expressed mul-
tiple programmatic goals to further develop it. The Museum direc-
tor expressed concern to stabilize its collections and add oral history
to the exhibition. Nonetheless, the emphasis for the Association is the
Museum’s role vis-à-vis supporting the larger survivor community.
Despite having strong differences of opinion, the Red Terror memo-
rial activists who banded together created a compelling institution. In a
context where memory is highly politicized, facing significant financial
odds and struggling to forge consensus among the key stakeholders,
these memorialization activists were surprisingly successful. Through
their efforts, a marginal memory was given a modest, permanent home
in the country’s capital. As Nunu reflected on the difficulties of the pro-
cess, she stated quietly and simply: “Yes, but it’s amazing, isn’t it? We all
worked together on the Museum” (Tsige 2016).
 4  THE SHAPE OF MEMORY, 2003–2010  151

The Design and Exhibition of the Red Terror Martyrs

Memorial Museum
A Structure with a Story
Addis Ababa’s Meskel Square is an almost constantly busy intersection
where five main thoroughfares meet. Named for the annual Meskel
celebration, a religious holiday for Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox
faiths, in 1974 it was changed to “Abyot” (Revolution) Square. Under
Mengistu, it was the site of military parades, with the entrances spanned
by North Korean triumphal arches proclaiming “Long live proletarian
internationalism” and “workers of the world unite.” It was also here that
Mengistu made his famous “bottles of blood” speech, from a specially
built stand for viewing military parades, opposite to where the RTMMM
stands today. At the far end of the square are soaring apartment build-
ings built in the late 1960s, among the first high-rises in Addis Ababa,
and the site of a gun battle between EPRP and regime forces during the
Red Terror. One EPRP leaders threw himself from the top rather than be
captured.3
Today, the air smells like dust and car exhaust fumes. Crowds on foot,
car engines and horns provide a bustling soundtrack. Since 2015, an
elegant two track city rail line dissects one corner of the square, credit
to the government’s efforts to create a mass transit system. The domi-
nant feature of the square is an open area, with crumbling terraced walk-
ways, lit with charming clusters of lights that hint at a now well-aged
grand vision for the space. At the bottom of the walkway is the original
Red Terror memorial stone, a single square rock, barely holding ground
against the jostling city that circulates around it.
Standing on any corner of Meskel Square, one would be forgiven
for at first not noticing the humble building Fasil designed for the
RTMMM. But looking twice, one sees the bold modernist lines of its
structure. The building is situated on a slight decline, paralleling a street
that leads downwards into the massive, open space of Meskel Square.
The Museum is housed in the upper portion in an angular, large charcoal
gray structure that appears to be falling unto the lower structures, com-
posed of several small, zig-zagged, sand-gray stone shops. The stone of
the shop buildings mirrors a wall behind the Museum, blending into the
scene. The Museum structure, however, collides into the lower portion
and juts towards the sky as a harsh angular scar. Hence, the structure
152  B. CONLEY

itself is torn in two; it both reflects its surroundings and is distinct from
them, like the history itself. It folds into its site, even as it poses an inter-
ruption. Unlike much of the city’s contemporary architecture, composed
of anonymously modern glass office buildings, the RTMMM presents as
a quiet, solemn structure, positioned between history and the present.
The building begins to tell the story.
The Museum is a strong example of architect Fasil’s design aesthetic.
As noted by one architectural critic, Mark Jarzombek, Fasil’s work pro-
vides “visible evidence of the city’s cosmopolitan and complex relation-
ship to modernity” (Jarzombek 2008, 38) The architectural landscape of
Addis Ababa offers thousands of examples of incomplete and half begun
modernist concrete slabs with glass veneers, gesturing to a hasty contem-
porary dispensation. Fewer in number are older, more imposing impe-
rial structures. Hilltop communities, with residential houses and shops
once defined the cities’ neighborhoods. They are disappearing. The city
is pushing upwards and outwards, developing at an astonishing pace. Its
architectural history is in the process of evisceration. Fasil’s work pro-
vides a strong contrast to the trend. It is notable for how it challenges
the idea of modernism “as national progress” (Jarzombek 2008, 40)
and signals “complex reversals of the tropes of civilization and primitiv-
ism” (Jarzombek 2008, 41). His buildings pose “an interrogation of and
entanglement with the messy, cultural uncertainties of our age…a very
real, political economic battle to find a voice unto itself” (Jarzombek
2008, 42).
Fasil describes his conceptual development for the RTMMM as draw-
ing on multiple sources of inspiration (Fasil 2017): Ethiopian architec-
tural history, the site at Meskel Square, modernist architecture, and the
history of Terror. The lower structures echo with Ethiopia’s various
historical forms, including ancient chapels carved into cliff-sides. The
Museum portion reflects cosmopolitan architectural developments, as
do rooftop terraces that serve as points of continuity between the darker
structure and light-stone, sub-buildings.
The two components of the structure are further connected in how
they together speak to the history of the Terror. Fasil explains that the
lower parts of the Museum buildings form a series of “steps,” like stages
of growing up. The larger, dark gray, solid structure that houses the
Museum cuts into this path, disrupting and dominating its progress. He
wanted it to appear like society itself was sinking into the ground under
 4  THE SHAPE OF MEMORY, 2003–2010  153

the weight of the Terror. For him, the period of the Terror represented a
collective lapse: “We lost forgiveness, tolerance.”
Initially, his design placed the building in the center of Meskel Square,
at the exact location of the memorial stone. However, the city museum
of Addis Ababa, which is located behind the wall that defines the back
edge of the open space, argued against the site, as it would have blocked
their entrance. Fasil adjusted the design, taking the challenge as instruc-
tive for what the Museum was intended to teach: tolerance as giving way
to others. And so the RTMMM sits quietly on the side of the square,
emerging from its context as if it had always been there. It is not osten-
tatious. The violence of Terror humiliated its victims, he explained, there
was nothing glorious about it, and the building rejects self-aggrandize-
ment. It is designed to merge with its location and the city that moves
around it.
In 2017, the lower part of the Museum buildings housed a book-
store, café, cinema and computer store. The businesses have no relation-
ship with the Museum, aside from the income their rent provides, and
some survivors feel their commercial character tarnishes the memorial
function. On a small lawn outside the café, a cluster of red Coca-Cola
umbrellas and tables announce a casual atmosphere. An auditorium
inside the Museum portion of the building serves two roles. It can be
entered from inside the Museum, for Museum events. And at night, it
functions as a commerical cinema, with access from the rooftop terrace,
which is dotted with plastic canopies and umbrellas.

The Aesthetics of the Museum

The businesses do not encroach on the Museum’s main entrance.
Visitors pass through a small gate to approach the doors: red tiles offer
the first sign of color, symbolizing the blood on the streets during the
Terror, and a rock garden represents the thousands of individual lives
lost. There, one also encounters the first piece of the Museum’s art
collection, the statue of women in mourning. Intended to symbolize
the losses of the Terror, it encapsulates tensions between the modern-
izing impulses of the Revolution and Ethiopia’s more traditional cul-
ture. While the political activists were mostly male (hence the victims
were likewise mostly male), there were many female activists during the
Revolution. Some of these young women are represented within the
154  B. CONLEY

exhibitions, looking very much the part of 1970s radical student activ-
ists. The statue, however, is intended to capture women in mourning:
traditionally garbed women clustered close together, grieving for a man,
symbolized by a jacket, who never returned to them.
The entryway is embedded in a glass section of the exterior wall. It
provides the first iteration of a series of grids that repeat throughout the
exhibition. The interior, constructed of unforgiving concrete, reflects the
harsh conditions of the prisons that consumed so many young political
activists. Visitors are greeted by quick security check, and then face a
desk, behind which sit the survivor-docents, who do not announce their
relationship to the history, but simply offer to guide visitors through
the exhibitions. To the left is the entrance to the exhibition. The only
splash of color in the two-story high entrance area is provided by the first
glimpse of the Museum’s collection of paintings: a pair of large oil paint-
ings by Merid Tafesse that set the tone for the emotional content of the
exhibition.
These, and several other compelling paintings were produced for the
Museum and have been on display since the opening in 2010.4 They
depict figures, the “heroes” of the story, standing their ground and mak-
ing a direct appeal to the viewer. Throughout, paintings provide the
most vivid touches of color in an exhibition that is primarily produced
in shades of gray, with concrete floors and walls, and black and white
photos. A set of powerful paintings by Naizgi Tewelde Kidane, appears
later in the exhibition and provides the most dramatic insertion of
the color red. Naizgi, who worked on curating and designing the exhi-
bition, presents the activists from the Revolutionary period as composed
of a diverse Ethiopian people: men, women, children, and several faiths
lined up within the scopes of the Derg’s guns (Fig. 4.2).
The above painting (Fig. 4.2) is displayed centered alongside two
other paintings by Naizgi. To the left is a depiction of an enormous dark
cliff, with a silhouette of a military truck driving to its edge. The painting
draws from historical examples of the military government killing prison-
ers and pushing them into mass graves. To the right, a painting depicts
an almost completely obscured silhouette of a single person, as dark-
ness descends. Together the paintings show the Terror as it focused on
groups of activists, overwhelmed by the military’s violence, and leaving
behind traumatized, individualized survivors.
 4  THE SHAPE OF MEMORY, 2003–2010  155

Fig. 4.2  Painting by Naizgi Tewelde Kidane, displayed at the RTMMM

(Bridget Conley/World Peace Foundation 2016)
156  B. CONLEY

The Exhibition Narrative

The RTMMM shares a juridical narrative of history akin to other memo-
rial museums around the world. It presents a well-defined historical
period through objects, photos, documentation and testimony, that serve
as an indictment of a particular set of persons (perpetrators) for acts
of violence committed against others (victims). Like trials, a memorial
museum exhibition also bends evidence towards an ethical judgment. It
does so, however, through specifically museum practices. As noted by
Amy Sodaro in a comparative study of memorial museums, the form is
characterized by several display tropes (2018, 24–25). Exhibitions are
commonly developed with a controlled circulation path, channeling vis-
itors through a historical presentation with a clear chronology of begin-
ning, middle and end. Memorial museums include affective presentation
of history, often using interactive elements, dramatic lighting and envi-
ronmental techniques to create an experience of the history presented.
These institutions regularly include eternal flames, artwork or other
commemorative forms. Above all, shared across the institutions within
this museum genre, is an emphasis on “individual victims and survivors:
photographs; names; personal effects like clothing, shoes, identity cards,
and other belongings; and video and audio testimony from survivors
help make the individual victims real and present to visitors, making the
entire experience more visceral and immediate” (Sodaro 2018, 25). The
RTMMM shares many of these characteristics (albeit in low-tech form),
and, like all such museums, also innovates the model in response to the
specific history and context out of which it emerged.
One significant innovation emerged from the history of the Terror
itself: the main subject of the exhibition is the activist movement. The
exhibition opens with a visual indictment in the juxtaposition of two
large images: the Emperor’s lavish birthday celebration and a famine-
stricken peasant, recalling the sense of injustice that triggered the
Revolution. An artifact vitrine, holding objects associated with the
Imperial regime, helps carve a path through the space, which opens unto
a large framed grid of twelve images set against a cement wall. For the
first time, the exhibition introduces its heroes: the diversity of groups
who rose up in protest.
The RTMMM exhibition asserts the power of collective political
action from the perspective of EPRP activists. Its exhibition tells inher-
ently an activist story, concerning not only the topic of abuse of state
 4  THE SHAPE OF MEMORY, 2003–2010  157

power, but also the emergence of a revolutionary movement that sought

to redefine the country’s politics. Thus, the key historical actor is a polit-
ically engaged community organizing across social sectors. In keep-
ing with the ideological orientation of the activists of the time, which
emphasized the “people” as the main protagonist of history, the exhibi-
tion only allows two individuals to rise to prominence in the exhibition:
the Emperor and Mengistu. Neither is the key protagonist of the his-
tory presented. The exhibition’s central subject is the activist movement
depicted in large framed grid of images.
The grids repeat throughout exhibition, conveying “the people” first,
as peasants suffering from famine, and then as boisterous crowds pro-
testing the Imperial and later the military regime. The displays attempt
to capture the indignation, agency, and diversity of the people who ulti-
mately became targets for state-sponsored violence. The grids of images
tell the story of a collective effort by displaying images at equal size, side
by side, often of disparate actors joined together physically by the display
and experientially by the historic arc that bound their lives together. The
images include suffering and activism—violence by the state, along with
protest and solidarity.
In foregrounding the activist as historical protagonist, the RTMMM
departs from the genre of the memorial museum. In many memorial
museums, as Paul Williams notes, the protagonist is “…the victimized
individual [who] had neither choice nor agency, and is thus blameless,
allowing him or her to retain moral rectitude” (Williams 2007, 134).
The status of victims’ blamelessness is connected to the character of
moral demands that can emerge. Suffering tied to innocence abstracts
lesson-learning from politics, noting that people were targeted based
on identity, not anything that they did. The argument put forward in
the RTMMM departs from this model: it asserts a right to activism and
indictment of the state for abusing its power against the political oppo-
sition. Hence, its lessons begin with consideration of what and how a
people issues demands to the state, and the character of state response.
The exhibition immediately announces that this is the story of the emer-
gence of a politically engaged community claiming the right to decide
the country’s future.
However, the exhibition glosses over violence between and within
the various political parties. In the decision to craft a historical narrative
from one primary perspective, the RTMMM is similar to other memo-
rial museums. Despite espousing democratic ideals, many memorial
158  B. CONLEY

museums move quickly from historical complications to a story of

overwhelming violence. In so doing, as Susanne Buckley-Zistel argues,
memorial museum exhibitions often present a limited narrative voice.
She argues that this results from opposing demands of justice and
democracy:

…justice requires and thus reproduces a single authoritative metanarra-

tive to vindicate the dignity of victims, while the transition towards a less
repressive and authoritarian regime is at least metaphorically undermined
by dominant meta-narrative of the guided tours and the physical structure.
(Buckley-Zistel 2014, 121)

Tensions between prioritizing the interests and perspectives of vic-

tims, and advocating for inclusive democratic dialogue in societies with
acutely contentious histories are inherently difficult to resolve. At the
RTMMM, the degree to which a visitor will notice the exhibition nar-
rative simplification of history depends on their prior knowledge before
entering the Museum. As will be discussed in depth in the subsequent
chapter, visitors arrive at the Museum with widely varying expectations
and background knowledge, which impact the character of insights they
gain from the visit.
As a point of distinction from other memorial museums, the
RTMMM does not include digital interactives, video of oral history or
complex environmental build-outs. However simple, the design and
presentation not only tell a story, they use space and display techniques
that compose the story without excessive fanfare. Most of the text is
available in both Amharic and English, but even if it were not, the visual
language of the exhibition instructs the visitor in the main narrative arc.
The exhibition designers use repetition, scale, color, artifacts and path-
way to convey the story.
As one turns the first corner of the exhibition, the narrative shifts
to the rise of the military dictatorship. Now the Emperor is portrayed
a last time as a frail, humiliated elderly man, about to enter an unim-
posing Volkswagen Beetle as he is led away from his palace home. It
then elaborates on the rise of the Derg, tanks interposed with suffer-
ing, and artifacts of militarization. Artifact cases display a military hel-
met announcing the slogan of the day, “Ethiopia First,” and weaponry.
Mengistu appears for the first time. Crowded streets scenes mingle with
images and artifacts of the rising military intrusion into everyday life,
 4  THE SHAPE OF MEMORY, 2003–2010  159

overt violence, and continued activism. This hallway is subdivided into

smaller spaces, forcing a visitor to experience to the rise of the military as
a series of constrained movements through the exhibition space. At the
end of this gallery is a large image of Mengistu from his famous speech
at Meskel Square—at the time called Abyot Square–in February 1977.
In the image, his body is contorted as he prepares to throw a bottle of
“blood”—clear glass bottles filled with a red liquid—onto the ground,
launching the Red Terror.
In glossing over violence between and within the various political par-
ties, the exhibition offers no criticism of the EPRP’s decision-making of
the time, notably its adoption of violence in pursuit of political goals. It
strictly adheres to narrative of how the military came to dominate the
Revolution and turned its overwhelming lethal force against the politi-
cally engaged activists and wider segments of the population.

Representing the Terror

Turning the corner, a visitor enters a long gallery spanning the back of
the building. At one end, outside the glass window is a reconstructed
prison cell; at the far end is a small room with exhumed bones. In
between, the exhibition details the violence of the Red Terror. Several
wall-sized panels filled with headshots of victims of the Terror dominate
the space. The images are mostly black and white, largely depict young
men, many of whom have been identified by name. Artifacts further the
story: a duplicator that produced activist publications; guns, handed out
to the members of the kebele; a thermos flask—inside of which messages
were hidden and conveyed to prisoners; and instruments of torture.
Photographs of various torture centers and of the violated bodies testify
to the impact of Derg policies. Through this hall the story has changed:
activists no more, the heroes are now presented in the devastation of the
violence. The scenes, for a visitor who has experienced other memorial
museums, feels familiar. A state’s abuse of power crushes those it can-
not tolerate. While they began as activists, at this point in the story, the
heroes become victims.
A final hall opens after the section on the Terror, but here, the story
falls apart. Thus, the ending of the narrative is emotionally aligned with
the transition of the crowds of activists into individualized victims,
and the completion of the evidence presented against the Derg. The
final space houses a series of glass vitrine towers of clothing exhumed
160  B. CONLEY

from mass graves. It also contains an assortment of papers haphazardly

attached to the walls, a departure from the exhibition design aesthetic.
The materials chart important components of the history, including
information about individual perpetrators revealed through prosecutions,
and the story of the military regime’s eventual turn against other groups,
like Meison, but seemingly as an afterthought. Artwork of widely varying
quality and character line the walls. A final hall, running across the front
of the Museum, past windows that open unto the street, re-orients visi-
tors to the world outside. This hall includes the visitor comment books,
symbolizing a conclusion to a Museum experience. The hall nonetheless
contains a series of powerful charcoal drawings, an artist’s representation
of torture. It also displays the final grid of images depicting the aftermath
story: the EPRDF’s victory over the Derg and prosecutions.

Evoking the Violence

In addition to presenting history through text, imagery, and artifacts
from the period, the Museum also includes efforts to capture the expe-
rience of violence. Into this category, fall two elements: a life-size model
of torture and the display of human remains. These are included as a way
to upset the balance of the literal, evidence-based photographs and arti-
facts, and the abstraction of the building and artwork. The model and
mortal remains “evoke” violence, rather than document or represent it.
I use the term “evoke” in the way Susan Sontag introduces it, in dif-
ferentiating artistic drawings from photography. Sontag explores the idea
of “evocation” in a discussion of Spanish painter Francisco Goya’s draw-
ings of assaults against civilians during Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in
1808. Goya drew the series several years later, between 1810 and 1820.
Each image captures a single instance of violence and is fashioned, as
Sontag writes, “as an assault on the sensibility of the viewer” (Sontag
2003, 45). The drawings are captioned with exclamations, “One can’t
look”, “This is worse!”, “Barbarians”, “What madness!” and “I saw it!”
The truth-value of a hand-drawn image is not akin to forensic evidence
documenting a scene; it does not claim to document actual acts. Rather,
it asserts, “things like this happened” (Sontag 2003, 47). Goya’s draw-
ings—and, as I argue, the torture model and bones—do not present
the violence, they are intended to evoke it. An evocation is a shock. It
is literal without being an actual document of the violence; it aims to
reveal a truth of experiencing violence that cannot be depicted through
 4  THE SHAPE OF MEMORY, 2003–2010  161

documentation. Memorial museums, which often aim to convey expe-

riences of violence that have not produced representative objects or
images, often rely on evocative, inauthentic objects (Williams 2007, 33).
First among the evocations at the RTMMM is a life-sized model of
a torture. It presents wofe ilala, a torture technique used throughout
the Terror whereby victims were trussed up on a heavy pole suspended
between two desks. The painful position contorted their bodies so that
the bottoms of their feet were easily vulnerable to torturers’ weapons. In
the Museum, the torture model is displayed behind a curtain, opposite
the wall of faces of victims, historical photos of detention centers, and
an artifact case of torture implements. For visitors who tour with one
of the docents, the impact of the presentation is magnified as the guides
pull back the curtain, and often only reveal at this moment that they per-
sonally survived torture. Seeing torture represented in realistic detail, as
a survivor-docent talks about the experience of undergoing it, introduces
cognitive dissonance.
The model is a disconcertingly realistic display of violence, although
now worn by the passage of time, and an aesthetic departure from the
Museums’ primary exhibition presentation. Tempering its realism, how-
ever, is a mannequin, which stands in for the tortured person. Its body is
twisted unto the pole, but it has a bland, anonymous face. Mannequins
perform their work without reference to the scene in which they are
found: plastic expressions, never bothered by what they are asked to do.
Inserted into a scene of torture, the model disconcerts. Further, hang-
ing above the scene is an abstract painting, breaking with the attempted
realism of the model and adding further dissonance to the cumulative
impact of this display.
The torture model was not included as part of the original design of
the exhibition, Association members separately installed it. Naizgi noted
that the artists who curated and designed the exhibition would have pre-
ferred to show the torture scenes through art, to add a layer of abstrac-
tion. Torture, he noted, “its too ugly to show. We don’t have to show it,
we should represent it” (Tewelde 2016) (Fig. 4.3).
A second mode of evoking the violence is the Museum’s inclusion of
skeletal human remains. As noted in the previous chapter, these bones
were integral to the conceptualization of the Museum and were in place
even before the exhibition was designed. Fasil designed the room spe-
cifically for the bones. The windowless space angles slightly downward,
giving the impression of a subterranean room. The bones are displayed
162  B. CONLEY

Fig. 4.3  Torture model, Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum (Bridget

Conley/World Peace Foundation 2016)
 4  THE SHAPE OF MEMORY, 2003–2010  163

in two large artifact cases, divided into smaller boxes, mimicking the grid
design throughout the Museum. One vitrine is organized by the bone
parts: skulls in one area, femurs in another and so forth. In a separate
vitrine, the remains within each box belong to a single, identified per-
son. Tucked against the glass, is a small photo or the name of the person
killed. Included with the skeletal remains are remnants of green cord,
used to tether hands behind backs, or coiled around a neck (Fig. 4.4).
A controversial decision in any context,5 many memorial muse-
ums struggle with how to incorporate human remains into their struc-
tures while being respectful of traditional burial rites (Williams 2007,
38–46). Developers of the exhibition at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum strongly argued against displaying human remains, both for
reasons of religious propriety but also because the institution is situ-
ated far from former killing centers and sites of death. To display human
remains would have required exhuming, transporting and creating
an artificial space for them in Washington, D.C. Tuol Sleng, a former
Khmer Rouge prison and torture site in Cambodia once infamously dis-
played skulls in the shape of a map of the country; the display has since
become regarded as inappropriately disrespectful of the victims and dis-
mantled. Rural killing fields in Cambodia, however, still contain visible
skeletal fragments. Memorial sites in Rwanda vary on how they treat the
dead: at the Gisozi Memorial Center in Kigali, skeletal remains are dis-
played in the exhibition, but half underground in a display case. Outside
the museum, bodies are contained in coffins, lowered into shared
grave sites underground that are visible through a glass opening. At
Rwandan massacres sites turned into memorials, skeletal remains of vic-
tims are central to memorial displays, notably at the Murambi Genocide
Memorial Centre and Ntarama Genocide Memorial Center. In Bosnia-
Herzegovina, the Potocari Genocide Memorial, commemorating gen-
ocide in the area around Srebrenica, is home to a Muslim cemetery. It
is consecrated with individual graves of victims. A cemetery with named
headstones was possible through a large-scale effort to conduct DNA
identification of remains from mass graves. The site combines traditional
burial practices of a Muslim cemetery, with the nontraditional decision to
gather remains in relation the circumstances of death rather than inclu-
sion in a family plot.
In a courtroom, exhumed human remains can function as evidence
of the most compelling sort; in a museum, their testimony is oblique.
Bones and a person are two different matters. Abuses are committed
164  B. CONLEY

Fig. 4.4  Photo of a victim and his skeletal remains, displayed at the Red Terror
Martyrs Memorial Museum (Bridget Conley/World Peace Foundation 2017)

against persons, bones testify to what is not there. Bones are the most
and least human element. They are the residue and former substance of
a singular person, and yet in a display case they are unrecognizable as
anything except a generic human body. For all but the forensic expert,
bones signify the inability to differentiate humans.6 In the RTMMM, the
bones simultaneously speak of the distinct historical terrors suffered by
the person they once supported, as well as the raw vulnerability to vio-
lence that underlines human existence.

Conclusion
The RTMMM provides a strong, if modest example of how memorial
museums display the past by deploying professional museum practices
combined with a juridical narrative to produce a distinct institutional
form. The Museum issues an invitation to the public to engage in the
process of extracting meaning about past violence through exposure to
 4  THE SHAPE OF MEMORY, 2003–2010  165

evidence and narrative designed to provoke judgment. It does so, as do

other examples of the memorial museum, in reference to an ethics born
of storytelling. Storytelling above all solicits engagement in a process;
its strength resides not in seamlessness, but in how the story unfolds.
Tensions and layers of meaning are the substance of an open invita-
tion—a call to engage in the process of making meaning in response to
disjunction and tension.
The internal debates of the Association that set out to create the
RTMMM left traces in the final structure and add to its complexity.
However, the core narrative reflects the influence of advocates for a his-
torical narrative that emphasizes the perspective of one political party,
the EPRP, which bore the brunt of violence during this period. In so
doing, the Museum does not reflect on the intense debates of the time
about when and how political parties could justify violence. Nonetheless,
the exhibition is not about a political party and its objectives, rather it
aims to honors those killed and advocate for tolerance. These two direc-
tives are not perfectly aligned. The name reflects a particular reading of
history, but the institution opens multiple pathways for how it can be
interpreted. Each of the key people I spoke with emphasized a differ-
ent aspect of the arguments and logic for why a certain interpretation of
the history inspired them to become involved in the process. Yet beneath
these differences, all of them emphasized loss of friends or family as the
core animating logic of the project; mourning created solidarity across
differences. The architect and artists who developed the Museum aes-
thetics further contributed visual and structural interpretation, adding
structural framework and abstraction that complicate the experience of
visiting. In moving forward by establishing points of consensus within
the group, the civil society actors who created the Museum layered
meaning and maintained a coalition of support for the institution.
The final form of the RTMMM both displays tropes common across
memorial museums and innovates the form. From the first glimpse of
the Museum building, which was influenced by contemporary architec-
tural trends, Ethiopian historical forms, the specific site and the history,
one can begin to appreciate how the Museum is example of a memorial
museums and distinct in its choices. Like memorial museums elsewhere,
the RTMMM displays everyday objects in juxtaposition with implements
and residue of extraordinary violence; artwork adds emotional tumult to
its presentations; it depicts victims in row upon row of individual pho-
tos to emphasize the scale of the violence; and it combines historical
166  B. CONLEY

narrative with indictment. It also departs from many memorial ­museums

in presenting the historical protagonist as politically active crowds of
people who only become individualized as violence shatters the possibil-
ities for collective action, turning them into victims. In their efforts to
evoke the violence, the Museum creators selected an approach common
to memorial museums, but distinct in the forms of a torture model and
modes of presenting human remains.
The RTMMM also includes an important factor that resonates with
other memorial museums: the inclusion of survivors as docents. The con-
tributions of these survivor-docents to the experience of the tour require
a separate, in-depth discussion that follows in the subsequent chapter.
The RTMMM, like memorial museums around the world, finds it
limits and its strength in the ways in which it fails to harness its story to a
singular outcome. A museum introduces more than it can explain. What
one takes away from the visit depends heavily on the knowledge that one
can bring to it, combined with a willingness to be open to the tumult
of messages presented. In the end, memorialization, historical narra-
tive, and moral meaning do not adhere seamlessly within an assembled
exhibition story, no matter how well curated. The performance of the
tour builds on these disjunctions, creating footholds for questions and
uncertainties.

Notes
1. Ethiopian names are composed of an individual personal name, and
two generations of patrilineal lineage; not first name and family name.
Throughout this study, I have presented the names of people as they pre-
sented them to me. The Museum’s architect asked that I use his given
name, Fasil. Other texts that discuss his work sometimes refer to him as
Fasil Giorghis.
2. The idea of a traditional museum has changed considerably over the past
few decades, as institutions grapple with changing social expectations
about which stories should be included and, in many contexts, as public
funding declined, forcing museums to make direct appeals to and deepen
engagement with their visitors. The result in many institutions was a
change in both the content of exhibitions and tone of address to the visitor
from the authoritative expert to multi-perspectival and interactive locus of
engagement.
3. I thank Alex de Waal for drawing my attention to this history.
 4  THE SHAPE OF MEMORY, 2003–2010  167

4. Subsequent artwork was donated and appears to have been more haphaz-
ardly produced and displayed.
5. The British and German governments have issued guidelines for museums
on how to treat human remains within their collections, a concern that
largely arises out of colonial era collections, but which can relate to more
recent concerns as well. There are a host of legal, ethical and conservation
issues to consider.
6. DNA identification alters this conundrum in some ways. It can trace within
the bones that which is the unique individual human. Two additional
points: this is not everywhere possible nor was it feasible at scale in 1991
in Ethiopia. Secondly, the resolution offered by DNA is to identify distinct
remains but it still does not solve the gap introduced between the person
and what remains after they have died.

Works Cited
Arnold-de Simine, Silke. 2013. Mediating Memory in the Museum: Trauma,
Empathy, Nostalgia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bennett, Tony. 1995. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. New
York: Routledge.
Brett, S., Louis Bickford, Liz Ševčenko, and M. Rios. 2007. “Memorialization
and Democracy: State Policy and Civic Action.” Sites of Conscience and
International Center for Transitional Justice. Available at http://www.site-
sofconscience.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Members_member-Bene-
fits_004.pdf. Accessed on July 27, 2017.
Brown, Kris. 2013. “‘High Resolution’ Indicators in Peacebuilding:
The Utility of Political Memory.” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 7
(4): 492–513.
Buckley-Zistel, Susanne. 2014. “Detained in the Memorial Hohenshönhausen:
Heterotopias, Narratives, and Transitions from the Stasi Past in Germany.”
In Memorials in Times of Transition, edited by Susanne Buckley-Zistel and
Stefanie Shafer, 97–124. Cambridge: Intersentia.
European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA). 2011. “Discover the
Past for the Future: The Role of Historical Sites and Museums in Holocaust
Education and Human Rights Education in the EU.” Vienna, Austria:
European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights.
Jarzombek, Mark. 2008. “Fasil Giorghis, Ethiopia, and the Borderland of the
Architectural Avant-Garde.” Construction Ahead (May–August): 22–29.
Rieff, David. 2016. In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Sandell, Richard. 2017. Museums, Morality and Human Rights. London:
Routledge.
168  B. CONLEY

Sodaro, Amy. 2018. Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of
Past Violence. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux.
Williams, Paul. 2007. Memorial Museum: The Global Rush to Commemorate
Atrocities. New York: Berg.

Interviews
Gessesse, Tadesse. Interview by author. November 18, 2016. Addis Ababa,
Ethiopia.
Fasil. Interview by author. August 12, 2017. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Sembet, Gebrewold. Interview by author. August 11, 2017. Addis Ababa,
Ethiopia.
Tewelde, Naizgi Kidane. Interview by author. November 19, 2016. Addis Ababa,
Ethiopia.
Tsige, Nunu. Interview by author. November 13, 2016. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Tsige, Nunu, Gedion Wolde Emanual, and Seifu Eshete Wube. Interview by
author. November 18, 2016. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Wolde, Mekonnen. Interview by author. August 9, 2017. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Yusef, Helawe. Interview by author. August 10, 2017. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
 CHAPTER 5

The Tour as Traumatic Performance,

2010–Present

Shortly after first visiting the Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum
(RTMMM) with a group led by Hirut Abebe-Jirut in August 2013
(described in Chapter 1), I returned alone. This time, I was guided
through the exhibition by one of the Museum’s survivor-docents,
Freysembet, known as Frey.1 As the tour ended, I stumbled to find
adequate words of farewell. It must be difficult to work here, I said,
but rewarding as well, to teach this history to the next generation of
Ethiopians. My words articulated a predictable sentiment, one that,
based on familiarity with memorial museums, I thought would meet an
equally unsurprising reply.
Frey’s response was jarring. “I hate working here,” he said flatly, “but
I cannot get a job anywhere else.”
His words snagged with my expectations. A desire to better under-
stand his response prompted this research project. Part of the explana-
tion for his predicament can be found in the marginal character of the
Red Terror memory. It was a period of violence in Ethiopian history
that, as noted throughout this study, intentionally isolated individuals
from their social and political networks. In addition to the painful human
losses, violently cutting people off from their communities meant that
even after the regime was defeated many former prisoners’ avenues for
social advancement, including educational and work opportunities, were
stymied. For many young people who were arrested and spent years of
their youth in prison, the Terror cruelly crushed their life plans.

© The Author(s) 2019 169

B. Conley, Memory from the Margins,
Memory Politics and Transitional Justice,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13495-2_5
170  B. CONLEY

Frey’s response illuminates his personal perspective and aspects of the

history of the Red Terror; it also prompts a closer examination of the
interactions between a survivor-docent and visitor during the memorial
museum tour. How does the survivor-docent’s personal struggle with
the legacies of violent history impact what visitors learn over the course
of a tour? How do visitors’ expectations, knowledge, and willingness to
listen shape the possibility of learning from the experience? The tour
is a performance of memory: the exhibition provides a script, but it is
animated by the interactions of survivor-docent and visitor. Intended to
educate about and transmit an emotional attachment to the past; these
interactions during the tour also invite the visitor to join a community
defined by an ethical stance against violent politics.
However, intentions do not capture the complications of an actual
encounter between a survivor-docent and visitors. In paying close to how
traumatic history impacts this encounter, and how neither “survivor-
docent” nor “visitor” constitutes a homogeneous identity category, anal-
ysis of the tour performance reveals points of resistance to the goal of
consolidating a community around ethical lessons learned from the past.
Memory from the margins unsettles a visitor’s ability to entirely incorpo-
rate the history within their given frameworks for making meaning—it
does not coalesce a new community. This failure should not be under-
stood as illustrating a memorial museum’s incapacity; rather, this disrup-
tion constitutes its most profound impact.

Setting the Scene

A museum exhibition, as described in relation to the RTMMM exhi-
bition in the previous chapter, is composed through assemblage.
A museum structure sets the tone for images, objects, artwork and his-
torical narrative that, together and in juxtaposition, lay forth a story and
introduce footholds for interpretation. The scene is animated through
the tour with the introduction of two agents of interpretation: the survi-
vor-docent and the visitor.

The Intended Goal of the Tour

The RTMMM, like most memorial museums, articulates institutional
goals of education, memorialization, and instillation of ethical lessons.
The RTMMM presents its mandate as:
 5  THE TOUR AS TRAUMATIC PERFORMANCE, 2010–PRESENT  171

Upholding the values and principles for which they [martyrs] paid the
highest price, it is our duty and honor to share with generations to come
their story, our story, history. Our objective is to build a bridge of commu-
nication and information that will help heal and bring greater understand-
ing of the occurrences of that time, so that such an egregious atrocity and
crime against humanity will never, ever again be repeated in our beloved
country Ethiopia or on our planet for that matter. We will promote and
foster a philosophy of tolerance and peaceful passage to conflict resolution.
Finally, the R.T.M.M.M. will be a platform for the voice of those voiceless
martyrs who can now by heard by the people of the world. (RTMMM)

Herein, the Museum presents itself as aiming to honor the dead, educate
new generations, heal society, prevent recurrence, encourage tolerance,
and bolster peaceful conflict resolution. The RTMMM’s aims resonate
with those of other memory projects from around the world; the hope
that visitors develop an affective attachment to history is often perceived
as the critical element that enables diverse social, political and ethical
goals.
Theorists have developed conceptual frameworks to try to capture
the intended goals of forging an emotional attachment to and learn-
ing from history: for example, Marianne Hirsch introduced the term
“post-memory” to describe the simultaneous movements of continu-
ation and rupture at play as memory of trauma is transmitted between
generations (2013, 205). Alison Landsberg (2004) introduced the term
“prosthetic memory” as a way to convey how contemporary media nar-
ratives can create a sense of intimate and personal connection to a past
that was not experienced firsthand. However, the idea of “empathy” may
be the simplest and most accurate concept to capture memorial muse-
ums’ intended provocation of an emotional and personal connection to
historical events in a memorial museum.
Defined in terms of the ability to “read someone else’s feelings accu-
rately and being able to genuinely feel for them” (Arnold-de Simine
2013, 45), empathy in the memorial museum is envisioned as the emo-
tional fulcrum around which all of the other memorial museum goals
circulate. In the museum context, Silke Arnold-de Simine argues, empa-
thy is “considered a virtue, needed to respond in an ethically responsible
way to representations of war, genocide and suffering, it is seen to moti-
vate pro-social and altruistic behavior” (Arnold-de Simine 2013, 46).
Empathy functions as a humanizing emotion that bolsters the possibility
for respectful engagement across existing social or political categories.
172  B. CONLEY

It is, however, problematic. Attempting to spark empathy through

searing presentations of violence can numb visitors; even while more
restrained presentations of extremely violent history threaten to sanitize
the past. Further, empathy may be too much to expect from a simple
museum tour (Arnold-de Simine, 46). Even when achieved, it can sub-
stitute emotional connection for critical analysis, thereby individualizing
the political and social roots, patterns, and legacies of political violence.
It suggests a model of learning that veers towards narcissism if visitors
only grasp complex history in relation to their own emotional vocabular-
ies (Arnold-de Simine 2013, 122–124).
These warnings should be heeded in any analysis of a memorial
museum, but they fail to constitute the full picture. “Empathy” does
describe memorial museums’ intended emotional connection that is pos-
ited as the foundation of both appreciation of history and construction
of a new ethical community in the present. In aiming towards this goal,
however, institutions do not necessarily embrace the de-politicization or
de-contextualization of history. Memorial museums provoke emotion
through historically-based narratives. The degree of privileging emo-
tional connection versus historical complexity cannot be stated at the
level of the genre, but only examined institution by institution.
At the RTMMM, survivor-docents foreground the experience of
the exhibition’s primary protagonist: the activist movement. The survi-
vor-docents’ own personal stories play a role in eliciting engagement and
empathy from the visitor, but not solely in terms of a sentimentalized
bridge to the history. RTMMM survivor-docents do not ask a visitor
to see the history through their own experiences. Rather, they present a
social-political history that provokes an emotional response through the
depiction of the suffering of those who died, with the survivor-docents’
eyewitness experience serving to bolster the veracity of the core historical
narrative. They do not linger over their own story, but reference it as a
matter of fact—like a footnote to the larger unfolding story.
Nonetheless, “empathy” is an important component of the tour. It
is elicited as the exhibition is composed through the perspectives of the
political activists, first presented as a group, and then, as violence esca-
lates, depicted as individualized deaths in the form of “martyrs.” The
display of human remains and model of torture, elements of the exhibi-
tion designed to “evoke” the violence (Sontag 2003, 47), likewise play
this role.2 The RTMMM survivor-docents’ ability to speak of torture
in the first person and to identify people they knew among the pictured
 5  THE TOUR AS TRAUMATIC PERFORMANCE, 2010–PRESENT  173

dead and in their stories of the past, make significant contributions to

the emotional impact of the tour. In eliciting “empathy,” the RTMMM
functions similarly to other memorial museums that intend to enlist the
emotional engagement of their visitors, even if it is not devoid of political
analysis.
However, empathy is only one component of a memorial museum’s
emotional address to the visitor. In addition to the layers of meaning
embedded in structure, exhibition, and collections, explored in the previ-
ous chapter, the tour also includes traumatic knowledge that disrupts the
process of making meaning about the past.
The tour aims to produce community through the time-constrained,
pedagogical, physical, and, at least in intention, ethical experience of the
tour. In a small group setting, the abstractions that often characterize
discourse about the possibility for forging a new collective understand-
ing about a traumatic past through the encounter of a survivor and new
audiences becomes concrete and embodied. The “transfer” plays out
over the course of actual interactions between specific individuals within
a time-constrained context—but not precisely in the way it is intended.

The Survivor-Docent
I have introduced the term “survivor-docent” to identify people—in
the case of the RTMMM, it is four men who guide visitors through
the exhibition and the Museum Director who sometimes also plays this
role—who have suffered the violence depicted and now work as museum
professionals. Like most hyphenated terms, there is a link of connection
and separation between the two concepts. Let me begin with “docent.”
“Docent” is a term primarily used by American museum profes-
sionals to describe trained museum educators who work directly with
the visiting public. It captures the professionalization of the tour guide
through the acquisition of specialized knowledge and skills required to
effectively engage with members of the public to achieve a museum’s
pedagogical goals. The term “exhibition guide” is eschewed because it
suggests a museum official whose work is subordinate to the informa-
tion presented in the exhibition. “Guide” reflects an older understanding
of how the museum addresses its public, whereby curators would pro-
duce an authoritative narrative that was received by the public, with
guides as instructional handmaidens. Increasingly, museum profes-
sionals understand their work as part of a multi-perspectival process of
174  B. CONLEY

creating meaning in dialogue with visitors (Duclos-Orsello 2013). The

docent does not merely “guide,” but also adds meaning to the exhibition
through dialogic interactions.
Outside the US context, the terms “facilitator” or “interpreter”
are commonly used. However, these terms that draw on given lan-
guage do not sufficiently capture the degree of specialization of the
museum guide. Further and importantly for the context of studying the
RTMMM, these alternative terms do not work well with the modifier of
“survivor.” A “survivor-interpreter” or “survivor-facilitator” both imply
that the survivor is the one being “interpreted” or “facilitated,” rather
than the survivor as the agent of facilitation or interpretation of history.
Hence, my preference for the term “survivor-docent.”
The challenge of capturing survivor agency extends beyond the riddle
of how to identify their role in a museum. The term “victim” is more
commonly used in juridical contexts, like courts or truth commissions,
describes someone against whom harms have been perpetrated, and gen-
erally implies innocence and lack of agency (McEvoy and McConnachie
2012). A victim is defined in relation to an unwanted event through
which a person is victimized—reduced to a position of passivity. The
idea of “survivor” in the context of mass atrocities often retains the sense
of innocence in relation to the harm perpetrated, but the survivor has
outlived the harm. Thus, it is a concept that includes harm, innocence,
and the passage of time that enables greater agency over the past, while,
nonetheless, retaining reference to how the past continues to define a
person in the present.
The introduction of the term “survivor-docent” thus pairs two rela-
tionships to and types of knowledge about the past: “docent” describes a
professionalized museum educational role, implying the ability to engage
with objectivity and to foster dialogue; and “survivor,” captures personal
experiences from the past that continue to lay claim to a person’s iden-
tity. The knowledge gained by the docent and shared with the public is
intentional and includes a honed performance of the tour that develops
as the docents gain skills in engaging the visiting public. A survivor’s
knowledge is based on an unwelcomed violent intrusion, it is, “red” in
Donald Donhams’s terms: “It overtakes and overwhelms. It disorients
and disrupts” (Donham 2006, 28). It can also be described as traumatic
knowledge.
 5  THE TOUR AS TRAUMATIC PERFORMANCE, 2010–PRESENT  175

Trauma and the Memorial Museum

I draw on trauma studies in relation to three conceptualizations of
how violent history impacts knowledge. These include inquiry about:
(a) the possibility of understanding how a violent past shapes individ-
ual identity formation; (b) understanding of social reality as defined by
what it excludes; and (c) the processes of re-inscribing (making mean-
ing about) violent events. These three components of trauma studies
guide this analysis of the encounter between survivor-docent and the
visitor, pointing attention to multiple ways that exposure to violent his-
tory through memory can be a powerful experience, but one that unrav-
els and unsettles, not coalesces, communities.
I tread lightly here, without making any grand theoretical claims and
cognizant of the challenges of applying the concept of trauma outside of
the clinical context. Four key caveats from critics of deploying “trauma”
as a theoretical lens apply. Broad usage of trauma has been critiqued
as transforming a specific medical term into existential category that
describes a condition of modernity itself (Kansteiner 2004). Further, the
discourse of trauma is sometimes and problematically treated as an eth-
ical category. As Michael Rothberg notes, trauma concerns exposure to
an overwhelming event that may impact perpetrator, victim or bystander
and “should not be a category that confirms moral value” (Rothberg
2009, 90). Trauma studies have, historically, privileged Holocaust his-
tory as the site of analysis, and hence event-based traumatic impacts,
thereby eliding the impact of everyday “traumas” such as sexism, rac-
ism, or colonialism (Craps 2013). And trauma cannot jump the rails
and do the work of politics (Brown 1995; Fassin and Rechtman 2009).
Nonetheless, trauma theory provides an analysis of different structures
of knowledge and time that capture the dislocations and disjunctions of
marginal memory, and clarify why it “fails” to produce coherent, ethical
communities.
My approach to the structure of traumatic knowledge draws from
Cathy Caruth’s influential Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative
and History (1996). Caruth frames trauma as concerned with “the com-
plex relationship between knowing and not knowing” (Caruth 1996,
3). A traumatic event is not assimilated when it occurs, and thus can be
known only subsequently, as traces of the event interrupt the present.
This interruption, an “inadvertent and unwished-for” (Caruth 1996, 2)
176  B. CONLEY

repetition of the traumatic event, is therefore, the only way that trau-
matic events can be understood.
In repetition and for the first time, Caruth argues, the event is wit-
nessed. Within this witnessing is an enigma of knowledge: at the core of
what can be known is something—what she calls the voice of the other
or the truth of the event—that cannot be known. This absence at the
center structures and destabilizes the possibility for knowledge of the
self who experienced the traumatic event and of a narrative transference
of traumatic knowledge. Trauma is knowledge defined by what “defies
even as it claims our understanding” (Caruth 1996, 5). Narratives about
trauma do not simply present facts; they convey the impossibility of fully
knowing what the experience was. Caruth writes:

If traumatic experience, as Freud indicates suggestively, is an experi-

ence that is not fully assimilated as it occurs, then these texts, each in its
turn, ask what it means to transmit and to theorize around a crisis that
is marked, not by a simple knowledge, but by the ways it simultaneously
defies and demands our witness. (Caruth 1996, 5)

In the memorial museum, the call to engage a traumatic story is

issued through visiting—a physical form of participation, a performance.
Museums engage visitors in a face-to-face encounter at a physical site
where the narrative is presented through object, text, and, most impor-
tantly at many memorial museums including the RTMMM, the guidance
of a survivor. The “output” is therefore a corollary of the encounter: a
query about how it is possible for people to come together and create a
new community. In the context of a museum that relates marginal mem-
ory, traumatic interruptions occur in relation to the time-constrained
performance of the tour, that ultimately destabilize the possibility for
community.
Three points of traumatic destabilization occur within the experience
of the tour. First, trauma focuses attention on the survivors’ relation-
ship to their violent past. In tethering the ideas of survivor and docent,
I draw attention to tensions between a traumatic experience of violence,
and a professional educational role. Trauma complicates how one under-
stands the position of the survivor-docent. It prompts questions about
how the traumatic experience impacts individual survivor-docents, and
hence, what can be conveyed to a visitor and how it is conveyed.
 5  THE TOUR AS TRAUMATIC PERFORMANCE, 2010–PRESENT  177

The survivor-docent presents a dilemma that resists any easy resolu-

tion of whether survivor testimony in the museum context is beneficial
or detrimental for the survivor or visitors. Museum educator Cynthia
Robinson succinctly captures the challenge: “Their [survivors] lived
experiences as intertwined with the sites add an irreplaceable point of
view—and richness-to the visitor’s experience. But there are risks that
telling one’s traumatic story to strangers may harm the teller, or could
teeter on the edge of spectacle and exploitation” (Robinson 2018, 2).
What she describes as “exploitation” is addressed within transitional jus-
tice and psychology as re-traumatization. The problem of “spectacle” has
been described by political theorists in terms of the potential distortion
effects of survivor-mediated presentations of historical events: de-polit-
icization of history by reducing it to psychology, individual experience,
an appeal to emotion and prioritizing the victims’ perspective to the
exclusion of other perspectives. As will be demonstrated herein, a care-
ful reading of the survivor-docent in a memorial museum suggests that
there is no single answer to these concerns. In becoming a docent, the
survivor does not transform into a “healed” eyewitness to horror, and
neither—especially in the case of the RTMMM—should the survivor
be dismissed as merely a de-politicized and emotional prop for political
agendas beyond their control.
Second, trauma adds to how we can understand the Red Terror as
marginalized memory. The RTMMM exhibition narrative, one empha-
sized by and added to through survivor insights, centralizes political
analysis and activism. By presenting memory of a different way of see-
ing the state and its political subjects, including detailing political vio-
lence intent on destroying different political views, the Museum re-opens
questions concerning how the country defines political subjectivity and
the role of violent coercion in this process. These are not questions that
can ever be fully settled; they necessarily precede everyday politics and
must be managed in order to undertake policies. These are foundational
questions upon which political decisions occur. In the Ethiopian con-
text, which today continues to undergo significant transitions, the precise
terms of what falls into foundational or everyday politics remains a point
of contention. This context will be addressed in greater depth in the con-
cluding chapter—and not through a framework of trauma, but through
the current political debates in the country. Here, I want to emphasize
the structural point that is related to trauma: the politics of the present
178  B. CONLEY

is composed through exclusion of the founding logic of a political order.

Memory from the margins draws attention to the exclusion.
Third, trauma elucidates the process of a visitor’s unsettling experi-
ence of the tour and subsequent efforts to re-inscribe it into established
paradigms for making meaning. In the setting of the tour, which primar-
ily is a small group experience guided by a survivor-docent, exposure to
traumatic history and the effort to make meaning in response, are not
theoretical issues. They are enacted. Traces of this enactment are visible
in visitor comments left at the RTMMM since its opening. The com-
ments provide a glimpse of how visitors, in those moments as the tour is
concluding, struggle to make meaning from what they have experienced
in the Museum. The comments illustrate multiple frameworks at play
within a single visitor’s comment and across the collection of comments.
The RTMMM tour is clearly valued by visitors and the idea of “never
again” resonates, but beyond these points of consensus, comments do
not indicate the stabilization of a new community forged by ethical
learning from the past that might serve as a filter for present-day polit-
ical issues. Rather, the comments document how visitors try to navigate
across the jagged edges between multiple frameworks for constructing
social meaning as they seek to make sense of the traumatic encounter.
Trauma is relevant in these three manners by providing a framework
for understanding how the tour makes its impact: it unsettles, and reveals
internal tensions as different forms of knowledge and frameworks for
making meaning clash against each other. There is little evidence that a
new communal ethics emerges to bridge the gaps exposed by trauma.
Traumatic interruption—memory from the margins—testifies that the
present could have been different because it was constructed through
violent exclusions that challenge the present construction of social reality.
Arguing that the present could be better (and, of course, it always can),
marks a transition to a political position that requires articulation in a
different discourse.
Throughout my reference to trauma theory, I am interested in how it
describes tensions between different structures of knowledge as exempli-
fied in the concrete details of a tour experience. I do not apply a theory
of trauma to the reading of the RTMMM, but rather allow the structure
of knowledge as theorized in trauma studies to inform my analysis of the
experience of the tour, as told through its key protagonists: the survi-
vor-docent and the visitor.
 5  THE TOUR AS TRAUMATIC PERFORMANCE, 2010–PRESENT  179

Introducing the RTMMM Survivor-Docents

In August 2017, I spoke with Frey in depth about what he said to me
years previously (Freysembet 2017). His fluid, self-taught English res-
onated in the articulate baritone one would expect from a veteran
Shakespearean stage actor. He explained the difficulty of his work as a
survivor-docent in the context of how the Terror impacted his life.
Frey was born in Addis and was a teenaged high school student when
the Revolution began. He did not identify himself as an EPRP member,
stating that he generally disliked the military government and its poli-
cies. This opinion was not a political position that emerged from com-
plex analysis of Ethiopian political predicaments or borne from steadfast
activism, it was a sentiment he expressed to his friends. He was arrested
in 1977, and imprisoned for eight years. Initially, he was held in a kebele,
later he was transferred to Ma’ekelawi prison, and finally to Kerchele, the
central prison. His parents only discovered what happened to him when
he arrived at Kerchele. At that point, they were able to bring him food,
but even then, it was never enough. Many days, he survived on three
small pieces of bread and two cups of tea. He managed only because
other prisoners shared whatever little food they received. He lost his hair
in prison and they did “bad things” to him.
One day without any logic, prison guards came and told him he
would be released. Leaving prison, he entered what he described as “the
wilderness”:

Everywhere you go, people are mourning. They are suffering, because
some of them lost their sons, who can help them. And others, they lost
their daughters, sisters, husbands, and all that. Everything was dark,
gloomy, and morbid. Nothing was bright; everything was heartless. I tried
many times to go out of the country.
[…]
I lost everything. They didn’t leave me alone, they followed me wher-
ever I went. They needed no excuse to kill. They were trigger-happy. I had
to run again. I disguised myself as a laborer, only to get bread. I started
going from place to place, from one region to another, one city to another.
I tried to flee the country, but I didn’t succeed. My mother died because
of the grief, the trauma. My father, too. I had one younger brother; he
died, too, after I came out.
180  B. CONLEY

In addition to losing his family, all of Frey’s family property was confis-
cated. Before joining the Museum, he had no job: “I had nothing to do.
I stayed with friends. I spent most of my time by reading.”
His suffering and losses later became part of his credentials for work
at the Museum. While he is grateful for the job, he nonetheless finds it
difficult:

Working here is very tiresome. I am working here for seven years, seven
days a week, telling the same story. Bringing back all the bad memories.
I really engage when I’m talking to people. I’m reliving that period. I’m
bringing back memories that are still fresh. The trauma is here [points to
himself], you see? I don’t want to remember, I’m trying to forget it. But
always when I talk to visitors, I always bring it back and the wound still is
fresh. It is painful. That is why I hate it. […] I’m just working for a living.

Frey’s sense of exhaustion through work at the Museum was not uni-
formly echoed across the other survivor-docents’ experiences. Each of
the other three docents, Eshetu Debelie, Muluneh Haile, and Menberu
Bekele, and the Museum director, Befekadu Gebre Medhin, were
arrested, tortured, and imprisoned for years. However, their inter-
pretations of this violent past and, therefore, of their positions in the
Museum, offer compelling variations
Befekadu Gebre-Medhin, the Museum Director in 2016–2017 when
I conducted research there, was 17 in 1974 when the Revolution began,
a high school student and EPRP supporter (Gebre-Medhin 2016).
In 1978, he was arrested and held at a neighborhood level prison, a
kebele, where he was tortured for five hours. Later, he was transferred to
Kerchele prison and kept there for seven years and eight months. Before
joining the RTMMM in 2013, he worked as a teacher and then with
various NGOs, although through the Association he had been involved
with the Museum longer.
Befekadu made a decision to join the Museum staff, not for salary or
stature, he explained, but to contribute to the preservation of and edu-
cation about the history of the Red Terror so that future generations
would understand what happened. “Its my history”, he said, “preserving
the history of a country is not just my job, it is a job for all of us. It is a
duty.” When he reflects on his student activist days, he is still surprised
at the students’ overwhelming commitment to improving their country.
This moment is now forgotten, he continued, “Today, rural people do
 5  THE TOUR AS TRAUMATIC PERFORMANCE, 2010–PRESENT  181

not know this story, even though it was to improve their lives that the
student activists rose up against the government. That is what we were
fighting for, for them.”
Nonetheless, when the Museum first opened, he noted, he visited
only reluctantly. It was painful. But over time and in his professional role
as Director, the rewards and mission of the work eclipsed the pain. Now,
he stated, “I take it [Museum] as my house.”
He also explained that he has forgiven the perpetrators and would be
willing to help them, even those who subsequently wrote memoirs that
try to justify their actions. People are selfish by nature, he explained, to
admit a mistake is very difficult. He offered an example:

Those who read the Bible and those who read the Koran, they argue about
which text tells the truth. It is a belief system: mine is right and yours is
wrong. These are not facts that can be proven or disproven, but beliefs.
So it is with history: people will justify their histories as they justify their
beliefs.

Forgiveness was something he had to learn, and he draws on faith—he

became an evangelical Christian later in his life—to help him. Following
his release from prison, he explained, he wanted revenge on one boy
who had tortured him especially cruelly. This boy had sought him out
while in prison to participate in his torture because the boy thought of
him as a rival for a woman’s affections. But today, Befekadu recognizes
that there were many reasons people participated in torture. Some did it
because they wanted to, but others were forced or were themselves vic-
tims and then became collaborators. He also recognized that the tortur-
ers inflicted a form of violence on themselves: “The experience of being a
torturer made some of them go mad afterwards.” As the Derg’s violence
expanded, it encompassed former collaborators. The prison population
eventually included both tortured former activists and their torturers.
Living side-by-side in the small spaces of prison confinement, the tor-
tured and torturers had to face each other again, but now within a pro-
foundly altered power hierarchy, as fellow prisoners. Befekadu explained
that he and other longer-term prisoners tried to treat the former collabo-
rators humanely. This kindness was unbearable to some and drove them
insane.
He is glad that he never found the boy who tortured him. He does
not want revenge at all anymore. Forgiveness, he told me, putting his
182  B. CONLEY

own decisions in a broader context, is the Ethiopian way. He illustrated

the change in his approach to the perpetrators through another example.
In his neighborhood, he knew a woman who participated in his torture.
When he returned after getting out of prison, she avoided him. But he
took the initiative to speak to her, asking: how are you? How is your
family? And slowly they could speak again, although never addressing the
period of the Terror.
Eshetu Debelie was recruited into the youth movement during the
Revolution. He was arrested in 1977 and spent eight years in prison.
In November 2016, when I first spoke with him, he had worked at the
Museum for only three months (Debelie 2016). For the previous ten
years, he had been an elementary school teacher. His experience with
the Museum changed over time. Before working there, he visited the
Museum and saw many friends in the pictures displayed in the exhibi-
tion. He felt “upside down in the head.” For the first few weeks after
starting his job, he had what he described simply as “trouble” with his
feelings and memories. But since then, he has worked without difficulty.
What he personally saw and experienced was so much worse than what
the Museum displays. While in prison, he always asked, when will it end?
But even then, he compared his situation with those who were killed and
chose to consider himself lucky. The power of the Museum, he told me,
is the way that “it can teach a younger generation, who need to under-
stand from us, the living witnesses, some of Ethiopian history before
they would jump into politics today. We didn’t know the consequences
of our activism.” He remains convinced of the importance of activism in
the 1970s, the ideas debated and advocated at the time remain mean-
ingful to him. The central question on everyone’s lips, how to create a
people’s government, a unique Ethiopian democracy, remains important
even though, he noted, political debates have changed with time. He has
no regrets for, as he termed it, “what we did, what we lost and suffered.”
Muluneh Haile started working at the Museum in 2013, although
he had been a part of the Association from its inception (Haile 2016).
He was 17 when he was arrested in 1978, and held at a special univer-
sity prison for two years. Under torture, he was forced to confess that
he was an EPRP sympathizer, then was released. Before working at the
RTMMM, he was an English teacher at the elementary school level. He
went to university for a law degree, and also studied the history of geno-
cide, including the Holocaust, which gave him a comparative perspective
that, he argued, helped prepare him for working at the Museum.
 5  THE TOUR AS TRAUMATIC PERFORMANCE, 2010–PRESENT  183

When asked about his work, Muluneh said he did not consider the job
difficult and was happy to have his position. He tries, he says, just to tell
the history. He finds encouragement from youth and intellectuals who
visit and commend them on their efforts. For now, he is content with
the job, although he still considers the idea of returning to university for
a master’s degree in law. But he also explained that before being hired
by the Museum, when he first came as a visitor, he saw pictures on the
exhibition wall of his friends and two brothers who were also activists
and had been arrested. “Everything came to mind, bad memories…. I
had started to forget.” Neither of his brothers, who also experienced the
Terror, will come to the Museum, and one of them advised him against
working there, arguing that they had “lost their youth, we’re old now,”
and that Muluneh should be wise and not return to that time period.
The docent who struggled most visibly was Menberu Bekele.
Menberu began working at the Museum when it opened in 2010
(Bekele 2016). During the Revolution, he was a student activist. He
was arrested in 1977, tortured, and held in prison for eight years. His
described his job at the Museum with a combined sense of burden and
pedagogical commitment. When I asked him whether it is difficult to
work in the Museum, given what he had personally suffered, his eyes
welled with tears. He looked off in the distance and repeated the word,
“difficult.” We paused, and after some time during which we sat quietly
together, he insisted that we continue. Understanding that it is difficult
for him, I asked, why does he stay? He offered reasons both of necessity
and personal commitment. He said that it was not possible to get a job
elsewhere, but also he feels obliged to teach the next generation by giv-
ing concrete evidence to society of what happened.
Despite a common thread of wanting to educate new generations, the
array of motivations and personal experiences highlighted by the sur-
vivor-docents is reflected in subtle differences in their approach to the
performance of the tour (discussed below in more depth), all of which
follow the historical arc established by the exhibition. Survivor-docents
prioritized different factors that influenced how they view the Museum
job. They noted variances in when the exhibitions impacted them most:
in their earlier encounters with it or as a steady challenge undiminished
with time. Their ability to filter the past through new frameworks also
differed: Frey and Menberu mentioned the need for work and a sense of
obligation to the past. Both, however, seemed to indicate an on-going
sense of “difficulty”, if not re-traumatization, through their work. As the
184  B. CONLEY

two who had been employed the longest at the RTMMM, one wonders
if their difficulties emerged from their particular circumstances or if the
work itself becomes more difficult with time.
The others came to the Museum after having had careers in different
fields, which may well have supported their sense of agency in accept-
ing a position with the RTMMM, versus feeling forced to do so out of
necessity. Befekadu, Eshetu, and Muluneh noted strong reactions to the
Museum when they first encountered it. Over time, however through
religious beliefs, education about other cases of mass violence and an
ability to foreground gratitude, they spoke of having gained the ability
to balance their past experiences and new roles as docents. Only time will
tell if they might also potentially find the work more difficult the longer
they work there, or if their situations differently prepared them to sustain
a level of equilibrium within the job. From these five men (no women
work as docents), a picture of variations between individual survivors and
their approach to working in the RTMMM begins to emerge.

Comparative Context: Survivors in Memorial Museums

The RTMMM is not alone among memorial museums in employ-
ing survivors of violence it depicts, nor are museums the only con-
text in which survivors provide testimony. What does it mean for the
survivor of genocide or mass atrocity to continue to live a life defined
by past traumatic events? What toll does it take to recount and re-live
them, to be confronted every day with material reminders? There are
no firm answers, because there are no comprehensive studies of survi-
vors who work in memorial museums. But some researchers have studied
the impact of survivor participation in trials or truth and reconciliation
commissions, and others have examined single museums. The results of
both approaches can inform the questions posed in the context of the
RTMMM, and issue a stark warning about the proposed “benefits” for
survivors.

Studies of Victims’ Responses to Truth-Telling in Courtrooms and Truth

Commissions
Despite the ubiquity of claims that truth commissions or prosecutions
will benefit victims, the evidence base suggests that for those who partici-
pate by giving eyewitness testimony, the balance of benefit and detriment
 5  THE TOUR AS TRAUMATIC PERFORMANCE, 2010–PRESENT  185

is uneven (David 2017). Transitional justice mechanisms often appear to

be interested in victims’ well-being as a rhetorical, rather than practical
matter (Robins 2017). Studies of victims who have participated in trials
and truth commissions report at best, a mixed impact.
In a review of research regarding the impact on survivors of giving
testimony in prosecutions or before truth commissions in a diverse range
of country settings (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, across
Latin America, Cambodia, Timor Leste, and across Latin America),
Roman David found that multiple factors influence how survivors will
experience their role as witnesses. These included the larger context of
transitional justice mechanisms (whether reparations were also distrib-
uted, and the perceived leniency of perpetrator sentences in legal pro-
ceedings); a survivor’s health and socio-economic status; and the larger
community’s perspective on the act of witnessing. Further, the studies
described differences within survivor communities of a single country
and across country contexts (David 2017).
Other studies suggests that survivors initially felt a sense of catharsis
through giving testimony, which later dissipates (Brouneus 2010). There
is also significant evidence that the act of giving testimony risks re-trau-
matizing victims. As Martín-Beristain et al. write: the “emotional re-ev-
ocation of past dramatic events has frequently elicited among victims
unexpected intense emotional reactivation of painful past feelings and,
over time, unleashed a state of retraumatization” (2010, 49). Brouneus
(2010) found that higher levels of traumatic and depressive symptoms
among survivors of the Rwandan genocide who participated in a local-
level justice process, gacaca, than those did not. A study of witnesses
who participated in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission
reported that while a small number found that testifying was a positive
and empowering experience, the majority describe their participation as
painful and disempowering, and felt that their expectations were unmet
(Byrne 2004). Studies of the impact of truth-telling and reconciliation
exercises in Sierra Leone appear to confirm Rosalind Shaw’s argument
that truth-telling might not have been culturally appropriate (Shaw
2007), may have caused harm to those who testified through unmet
expectations (Millar 2015). Further, a study of 16 transitional justice
mechanisms in Latin America, found that participation in trials and truth
commissions, “increases negative emotions and symptoms” and does not
aid in individual healing (Martin-Beristain et al. 2010, 59).
186  B. CONLEY

However, not all research found solely detrimental impacts for survi-
vors. A widely cited study of Mayan victims of massacre in Guatemala
(Lykes et al. 2007) found overall positive impact for survivors who par-
ticipated in legal proceedings. Laplante and Theidon document the tem-
porary beneficial effects of truth commissions in Peru (2007, 238). And
studies also revealed differences between the impact on survivors versus
on their communities. Research in Sierra Leone found that a reconcil-
iation program based on testimony demonstrated some benefits at the
social level in terms of promoting reconciliation between groups, but
these gains were at the cost of increasing stress and traumatic symptoms
for victims who testified (Cilliers et al. 2016). Kanyangara et al. (2007)
likewise saw increased trauma in those who testified in Rwanda’s gacaca
proceedings, while noting the micro-social beneficial impact of greater
social cohesion at the village level.
The balance of benefits and detriments for victims of violence partic-
ipation in truth telling exercises whether in courtrooms or truth com-
missions is unclear, but appears to weigh on the side of harmful personal
effects. Mitigating the potentially harmful impacts on survivors has not
been prioritized across transitional justice practices. As Robins has noted:
“Victimisation clearly has the potential to be accompanied by emotional
and psychological impacts that can be severe, but transitional justice has
yet to make psychosocial support to victims central to its practice, despite
continuing reference to the therapeutic capacity of public testimony”
(Robins 2017, 48). David, however, argues that it might be unrealistic to
expect prosecutions of truth commissions to play a palliative role for sur-
vivors who participate in them even if psycho-social supports to witnesses
were improved, given their primary goal is conviction.

Survivors in the Museum

There is less research on what it means to be a survivor-docent. The
little that exists, suggests that the context of a museum might improve
the prospects for a survivor to benefit from participating in telling their
story. Nonetheless, there remains considerable variation within museum
contexts, from survivor to survivor, and within any given survivor over
time as they constantly struggle to make peace with memory of violence.
For instance, when I related Frey’s comment about “hating” working at
the RTMMM to survivors of another recent example of mass violence in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, Hasan Nuhanović and Hasan Hasanović, both of
 5  THE TOUR AS TRAUMATIC PERFORMANCE, 2010–PRESENT  187

whom work with the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery for

the Victims of the 1995 Genocide, they agreed that they, too, have a
complicated relationship between work and memory.
Nuhanović,3 who survived the 1995 genocide at Srebrenica and has
dedicated his life to advocating for memory of the genocide, described
a sense of feeling cornered by the past. While in his situation, other job
opportunities had arisen, Nuhanović understood Frey’s sentiment:

It is the same with me and my colleagues. I dedicated half my life for this
cause. I have lobbied for this place to exist in the first place. […] when you
dedicate your whole life for this kind of work, you miss so many opportu-
nities and this becomes the only job you have because there is nothing else
you can do, there is nothing else you know how to do. Other people have
built their careers in other fields, and I haven’t. Every single day of my life
there was something I had to do on this subject. No one else would do it.
(Nuhanović 2017)

Nuhanović does not primarily work at the Srebrenica-Potočari memorial

museum site, something he said would be extremely difficult for him.
He referred me to a colleague who does: Hasan Hasanović. Hasanović
was 19 years old in 1995 (2017). Before Bosnian Serb forces were able
to occupy the town, he exited Srebrenica with a column of Muslim men
fleeing on foot to government territory. During the perilous trek, he was
separated from his father and twin brother, both of whom were later
murdered after being captured by the Bosnian Serb military. When I
spoke with him, Hasanović had worked for nine years as a docent and
curator at the memorial, an experience, he told me, that became more
difficult over time.
In the beginning, he was occupied with learning how to tell his story,
how to become an effective guide for visitors. The story of Srebrenica,
he noted, is not a story of genocide as a conceptual abstraction, but of
“my family, friends, neighbors, everybody I knew.” He feels burdened
at times by exhaustion and the weight of his work and expressed doubt
that he could continue the work without regular time away to reclaim his
equilibrium.
Despite the fact that his education and credentials have opened more
lucrative opportunities, he decided to stay at the memorial for multi-
ple reasons: a sense of debt to the victims, dedication to preserving the
history, and commitment to conveying the story to next generation of
Bosnians and people who come from other countries. He explained:
188  B. CONLEY

I think my life wouldn’t have any meaning living in the US, UK or rest of
Bosnia… I was offered a number of jobs […] Financially, this job wouldn’t
keep me here. I see myself staying here. I’ve established myself. I’m not
the master of this story, but I think that I know very much of this story.
[…] I am hoping to pass this along to younger people. I am hoping that
someone will come along with passion for this work. It makes me very sad
to think someone would work this job without passion, just as a job. One
day in the future we will find some people who will continue the work
through passion to pass on the story to others.

For Hasanović, like several of the RTMMM survivor-docents, the work

combines multiple, not necessarily reconcilable, imperatives. A feel-
ing of obligation to the past and to new audiences does not necessar-
ily “empower” in the sense of enabling a survivor to control and master
their traumatic history. As Hasanović and Nuhanović describe their situa-
tion, there is an agency in the fact that they had other opportunities and
made a decision to act as memory-keepers, but their work is entangled in
a history they never wanted to experience. What Hasanović describes as
“passion” for the work captures the fact that eyewitness survivors have a
depth of connection to the violence they speak of. Time will inevitably
change who speaks for and of this history, as generations pass and new
people must become its caretakers. Understanding the social contribu-
tion of any memorial site requires grappling with what the past means
for survivors, and, importantly, what it might come to mean for as-yet
unknown advocates and visitors.
For survivor-docents, the passage of time, as noted by Hasanović,
Nuhanović, Frey, and Menberu, does not necessarily lighten the bur-
den. This is also reflected by the experiences of survivors at the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum, where I worked from 2001 to 2011.
There, more than fifty years after the events of World War II, survivors
still varied significantly in what work they felt comfortable engaging in
and how often they were willing to speak of their personal experiences.
Among the survivor-volunteers (as the USHMM referred to them),
there were enormous degrees of difference in how they could balance
the pain of recalling the past, with their interest in educating new gener-
ations. Some were willing to speak to any audience, day after day. Others
were only able to speak a limited number of times a year; the emotional
stress still overwhelmed them.4 Most others fell somewhere in between.
 5  THE TOUR AS TRAUMATIC PERFORMANCE, 2010–PRESENT  189

Just as the passage of time is a variable factor for survivor-docents,

so, too is the social meaning of suffering, which can alter the encounter
between docent and visitor. Memory that is socially marginalized adds
tension and unpredictability to the experience of the encounter with
the public. This can clearly be seen in an example drawn from a historic
site, Eastern State Penitentiary Historical Site (ESPHS) in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, that now functions as a museum. The Penitentiary opened
in 1829, as an innovator of the then-emerging view that prisoners’
behavior could be permanently altered through “confinement in solitude
with labor.” According to their website, it became a model prison, vis-
ited by over 10,000 tourists in 1858, for instance, while it served as a
functioning prison. Among the techniques it promoted was solitary con-
finement, now considered torture by many advocates for prison reform
(Smith 2006). The prison site was “once the most famous and expensive
prison in the world, [that] stands today in ruin, a haunting world crum-
bling cellblocks and empty guard towers.” The prison closed in 1971,
and since 1994 has functioned as a museum. Its mandate today is to
“interpret the legacy of American criminal justice reform,” as the institu-
tion explains on its website.
To this purpose, in 2016, the staff launched a limited, grant-funded
program to hire four “returning citizens,” formerly incarcerated people,
as docents (Robinson and Zalut 2018, 22). The site’s visitors are over-
whelmingly white, middle class people, 70% of whom identify as having
never broken the law; while this is a typical segment of the population
that composes museum visitorship, it is not at all representative of people
who are or have been incarcerated (Robinson and Zalut 2018, 22–23).
The program that hired “returning citizens” as docents intended to
bridge gaps between the visitors’ experience of a historic structure, pres-
entation of data about the contemporary American prison system, and
the lived experiences of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people.
The returning citizens, like the RTMMM survivor-docents, had
mixed feelings about how to balance their own experiences with their
roles as exhibition guides for the public. One docent, Marvin Robinson
applied for the program simply because “it was a job” (Robinson and
Zalut 2018, 24). He noted that among the most challenging aspects of
constructing his tour—a point that resonates with the RTMMM survi-
vor-docents—was figuring out when to tell visitors about his personal
connection to the prison experience (Robinson and Zalut 2018, 29).
190  B. CONLEY

The program’s director, Lauren Zalut, explained, three in the group

decided that they preferred not to reveal to visitors that they had served
time in prison (Zalut 2016). Robinson, despite describing many positive
impacts of his work at the site and being promoted within the institu-
tion, left a year after he was hired:

I think any public service job can be stressful because the public creates
so many uncontrollable variables and the ESPHS wasn’t any different…
Interactions with visitors could be draining and exhausting…the general
public’s lack of knowledge, or concern about the issues, which are serious,
made it difficult for me to continue working at ESPHS …. (Robinson and
Zalut 2018, 30)

In this context, firsthand testimony is complicated by social stigma.

While far from identical to the situation of RTMMM docents, there are
elements of social and political marginalization that span both contexts.
Survivors of a prison sentence, whether based on political or criminal
charges, may find that their experiences are at odds with a hegemonic
narrative of social progress. This may alienate them from their own past,
which can limit the extent to which they feel comfortable engaging in a
public performance based on that history.
The context of mass violence may impose further burdens on sur-
vivor-docents who see their work as fulfilling a responsibility to the
dead. Assuming responsibility can contribute to, but is not necessarily
the same as, healing in the present. Julia Viebeck studied survivors at
Rwandan genocide memorial sites, focusing on their roles as “care-tak-
ers” who clean the human remains on display. Through the tender work
of treating skeletal remains as objects of individualized concern, Viebach
concludes, survivors are able to give back dignity to victims who were
unceremoniously killed and whose bodies were abandoned on site and
not given a proper burial. The labor of cleaning bones enables survivors
to care for their lost family members “in the present” (Viebach 2014,
82).
Several of her interviewees are quoted as finding solace by view-
ing the remains not as dead, but as “real people,” “bodies sleeping,”
or by giving names to the unidentified skeletal remains (Viebach 2014,
81). However, of the five interviewees she cites, all of whom echo this
intended goal of caretaking for the dead, one also expressed the mixture
of emotions the resonates with the survivor-docents I spoke with. This
 5  THE TOUR AS TRAUMATIC PERFORMANCE, 2010–PRESENT  191

caretaker stated: “I clean with grief, but I do it because there was loss.
I have a bad feeling, but I am patient enough not to resign” (Viebach
2014, 82). The expression includes a sense of commitment and obliga-
tion, and it also speaks of resignation, indicating that the survivor strug-
gles while undertaking the work. In examining the benefits that survivor
docents receive from their memorial work, this example issues a warning
that multiple and potentially cross-purposes are at play: fulfilling an obli-
gation to the dead may comfort a survivor, even as it is experienced as a
stressful or painful burden.
Another factor that impacts the relationship of a survivor-docent to
the past, and hence, to visitors, is how a museum prepares visitors to
meet a survivor-docent, responds to survivors’ physical and emotional
needs, frames testimony within a historical narrative, and either encour-
ages or discourages dialogue. In a study of survivors of World War II
era internment camps in the Japanese American National Museum, Raina
Fox argues that being a docent can provide an “empowering platform”
for survivors, when a museum dedicates energy to supporting this out-
come (Fox 2016). She notes that many of the people who were interned
in these camps simply because they were of Japanese heritage do not
understand themselves as victims. They described themselves as “par-
ticipants in a shared terrible experience, in which agency comes from
the act of endurance” (Fox 2016, 69). Many also choose not to speak
of the events, which can also be a way to reassert control over the past.
Drawing on interviews with those who do engage in public speaking
at the museum, Fox finds that the experience of working in a museum
empowers survivors by allowing them to externalize the traumatic past in
public testimony and by granting them opportunity to shape the histori-
cal narrative for others (Fox 2016, 66).
Providing testimony within a museum context offers a markedly dif-
ferent set of parameters than are found in a courtroom or truth and
reconciliation hearing. As Fox notes, in museums, survivors have wide
latitude in what aspects of the past they choose to emphasize. Survivor-
docents can adapt their story in relation to both the visitor’s knowl-
edge and their own continued processing of the past. The possibility of
learning and adaptation allows survivor-docents to work through their
memories and reshape meaning extracted from the past in relation to
new questions and insights. As a permanent institution, Fox continues,
museums offer the safety of allowing survivors to become familiar in the
192  B. CONLEY

space, to leave and return, establishing a pattern that they can predict
and control.
She further notes the social aspect of the performance of the tour is
a critical factor in how survivor-docents make meaning of their educa-
tional role.5 Docents “rely on sympathetic witnesses to affirm and shape
their stories” (Fox 2016, 72). In this manner, the memorial museum’s
self-selected visitorship may help protect the survivor from people who
in a broader social and political context might minimize, distort or deny
their testimony.
A museum experience is not necessarily supportive of respectful dia-
logic encounter, but—as noted by Liz Ševčenko, a practitioner and
scholar of public education about social justice issues through engage-
ment with historic sites—needs to be actively crafted (Ševčenko 2017).
By being attentive to survivors’ needs, balancing testimony with a his-
torical presentation, preparing visitors for the experience, and comple-
menting the museum experience with educational programming that
reconnects to contemporary issues, a museum can endeavor to provide a
space that supports the possibility for survivor-docent empowerment and
education for its visitors.
This small survey of survivor-docents cannot give us comprehensive
insight into the dilemmas of survivors of traumatic events who never
leave their most harrowing history and instead become educators about
it. But in speaking with and paying close attention to survivor-docents’
reflections on their work, a picture begins to emerge. It becomes clear
that the ability of a survivor to work within a memorial museum differs
by individual, depends on how their community interprets violence, may
change over time, and can be improved through overt efforts to do so.
The study of survivors’ relationships to their past experiences of vio-
lence, and “difficulties” of working at a site dedicated to the history
might be further probed in relation to clinical work on trauma. This was
not my focus. My interactions with the survivor docents concerned their
professional roles inside the Museum. Nonetheless, it is worth noting
that while debates exist within the mental health community concern-
ing optimal therapeutic response to victims of trauma, there is consen-
sus that not every person who experiences a particularly overwhelming
and violent event will have the same reaction. Recovery is likewise varied:
no single therapeutic regimen benefits all who suffer from trauma (van
der Kolk 2014, 3). This variation likewise holds for “truth-telling” at the
intersection of psychology and transitional justice mechanisms; as David
 5  THE TOUR AS TRAUMATIC PERFORMANCE, 2010–PRESENT  193

Mendeloff concludes: “victims’ responses to truth-telling are highly indi-

vidualized and idiosyncratic” (Mendeloff 2009, 615). These insights
appear to also apply to the variations in how survivor-docents reflect on
their experiences working in a memorial museum setting.

The Impact of Survivor Docents’ Testimony on the Narration

of History
There is another issue that arises when survivor perspectives are central-
ized in memorial museums’ exhibitions. What are the affects of making
survivor testimony the central, even the definitive, account of a historical
period? Even when survivors’ narratives are not the core of academic his-
tory, they may become so for public education—especially in the context
of a memorial museum. When this occurs, there is a threat of celebrat-
ing victimhood and silencing other historical perspectives. For instance,
Susanne Buckley-Zistel writes that survivor docents at Hohenshönhausen,
which memorializes state repression in the German Democratic Republic,
are “the embodied past” and their victim status “commands respect and
awe, or at least empathy, compassion and sympathy in a sense combining
authenticity, aura, authority, acknowledgement and vividness” (Buckley-
Zistel 2014, 108–109). However, she continues, in this context, survi-
vors’ stories do not invite conversation and dialogue about the past, but
rather serve to limit views of the past (Buckley-Zistel 2014, 120).
Political theorist Wendy Brown has likewise argued that when his-
tory is interpreted through the lens of victimhood, central to all forms of
juridical narrative, it de-politicizes the contexts for acts of violence even
while reifying the state as protector (Brown 1995). There is an enor-
mous and growing academic discourse on victims and victimhood that
expands beyond the scope of this study.6 Here, I want to note, the differ-
ences between providing space for survivor narratives, depoliticizing his-
tory and reducing historical narratives to one perspective. Museums pair
testimony with historical information; survivors do not uniformly tell a
single story about the past; nor are all survivor-docents’ stories defined
by an absence of political commentary. This is illustrated in the case of
the RTMMM survivor-docents’ narratives of activism, and is a feature
potentially shared by other memorial museums that document violence
perpetrated for political beliefs.
For example, Rebekah Park (2014) documents two different tour
experiences in memorial museums in Argentina that address the abuses
194  B. CONLEY

committed by the former military regime. At one museum, the Space

for Memory and for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights,
also known as ESMA (the Spanish acronym of its former occupants, the
Higher School of Mechanics of the Navy), students trained in human
rights discourse act as docents. At the other, a former prison that now
houses the Archive and Provincial Memory Commission of the Province
of Cordoba, known as D2 (for the Department of Intelligence of the
Provincial Police who previously ran the prison) in Cordoba, former
political prisoners guide tours. Park found that in ESMA, the docents
tried to recreate the experiences of prisoners by retracing their path
through the prison, while emphasizing the process of dehumanization
and the victims’ innocence (Park 2014, 61). Park summarizes the tour as
being about “torture and victimization” (Park 2014, 68). At D2 former
political prisoners emphasized the political ideals that inspired them and
the actions they undertook against the military regime. D2 survivor-do-
cents tied their personal experiences to “the longer history of oppression
in Argentina,” and stressed “a pattern of resistance and oppression since
the 1500s” (Park 2014, 64). These docents painted more complex pic-
tures of the prison experiences and the individuals who were arrested.
This tour, Park concludes, was concerned with “social movements and
state oppression” (Park 2014, 68). Both tours are accurate, but they
describe a narrative arc and lesson learning process for the visiting public
that diverge in important ways.
At the RTMMM, survivor-docents combine the approach of narrating
the political history of a mass political movement and critique of the for-
mer regime, with a human rights approach that culminates in describing
torture and mourning for those killed. The Museum’s aim to promote
“tolerance politics” and guiding ethos of “never, ever again” align more
closely with a human rights approach to violent history than with the
kind of direct political provocation that Park describes occurring at D2.
The RTMMM’s interpretation of its ethical lessons might be considered
vague: how, precisely, “never again” should be interpreted in the present
context is not decided for the visitor. However, in the Ethiopian political
context two factors should be recalled. First, is that political change in
contemporary Ethiopia up to the present moment has been the prod-
uct of extreme violence. Advocating for moderation from all political
actors is a meaningful lesson. Second, for much of the Museum’s exist-
ence, including through 2017 (when I finished on site research), the
government retained significant control over how non-governmental
 5  THE TOUR AS TRAUMATIC PERFORMANCE, 2010–PRESENT  195

organizations functioned and was intolerant of criticism. The RTMMM

staff wisely avoided taking stands that might run afoul of the country’s
limits of political critique.
Survivors’ wide variance of responses to the work of being a docent
complicates any conclusions as to whether working at a memorial site is
either beneficial or harmful. The differences appear to reside across indi-
viduals and within them, over time. There is a high risk of re-traumati-
zation in many contexts in which victims of violence are asked to give
their testimony. Museum work might differ given the greater latitude
survivors have to construct their own story and convey it to the public,
but our short survey suggests that this does not hold evenly across survi-
vor groups. Finally, while narratives of victimhood can depoliticize, there
is no necessary linkage of survivor testimony to de-politicization of the
past, even if the particular circumstances of any memorial museum will
frame what political positions they can and want to adopt.
All of these factors and their uncertainties structure the performance
of the tour in ways that interact with memorial museums’ intended goals
for visitors. In the tour, the tumult of factors that impact how a survi-
vor-docent struggles with and makes sense of their personal experience
of violence spill into and shape the possibilities for building community
with visitors.

The Scene of the Tour: Survivors’ Perspective

Who Are the RTMMM Visitors?

As the RTMMM staff described them (drawing on interviews with
Bekele, Debelie, Gebre-Medhin, Haile in 2016, and Freysembet 2017)
most visitors fall into one of three main categories. First, are Ethiopian
visitors old enough to have their own memories of the Revolution.
Overall, most are sympathetic to the Museum’s presentation. However,
some of these visitors argue with the docents, saying that they should
have cooperated with the government and not fought against it, or they
advance the Derg’s justifications that the regime did what it had to do
during a period of instability.
The second group is younger Ethiopians, who often know little of the
history. While the period of Mengistu’s regime is taught in school, the
official curriculum includes few details about the Red Terror and older
family members often do not talk about the events. Young Ethiopian
196  B. CONLEY

museum visitors tend to ask a lot of questions. They want to know how
it was possible, how could a people turn against each other in this way?
Why was the violence so extreme? Why didn’t the activists kill Mengistu?
This query is matched by its opposite: why did they rise up against the
government in the first place? The survivor-docents also noted that
young people are struck at how the exhibition narrative presents a polit-
ical perspective that is at odds with the regional politics that dominates
today: they ask why the violence is not portrayed along ethnic lines.
The third group is international visitors, most of whom know noth-
ing of the history and arrive because a tourist book or city guide rec-
ommended the Museum. However, there are some who come because
they have studied Ethiopian history and present themselves as experts,
in a manner that can be dismissive of the survivor-docents. In general,
though, survivor-docents noted the depth of emotional response fre-
quently expressed by international visitors. People sometimes cry, they
told me, and often appear deeply moved by the tour.

How Do Survivor-Docents’ View the Encounter with Visitors?

The RTMMM survivor-docents highlighted several factors that help clar-
ify the performance of the tour from their perspective.
At the RTMMM, none of the survivor docents tell visitors right away
that they personally experienced the history presented. Frey noted that
he tends to reveal this fact toward the end of the tour, after showing
visitors the torture model. Celebrating a survivor identity, which has
occurred in other contexts, does not apply here. For these reasons, and
possibly also for more personal ones governing how they view their pasts,
most of the RTMMM survivor-docents do not foreground their per-
sonal experiences with torture and prison. The exhibition provides the
historical script, focusing attention on particular events and establishing
the overall historical trajectory. Even when they reveal that they suffered
torture and were imprisoned, they do not provide details, but rather give
the information as a statement of fact. Interviewing them about their
experiences likewise reflected this approach to history; the Museum staff
tended to speak in terms of the historical period and had to be prompted
to elicit any statements about their individual experiences.
Nonetheless, the survivor-docents understand the impression they
make on visitors when they reveal that they were participants in the
history displayed. Menberu waits until visitors ask a question, often in
 5  THE TOUR AS TRAUMATIC PERFORMANCE, 2010–PRESENT  197

terms of what he was doing during the time period, then reveals his
experiences. Eshetu likewise does not immediately reveal his firsthand
knowledge of the history, but when he does, visitors often ask why he
participated in the activist movement. Muluneh, however, noted that
he regularly volunteers the fact that he is a survivor to visitors because
he thinks it adds credibility to the information he provides. Visitor
research on the impact of meeting survivors in Holocaust sites in Europe
would seem to confirm his view. For instance, a study of high school-
aged visitors to Holocaust memorials across Europe found that survivor
testimony “made a huge impression,” adding “authenticity” to the expe-
rience of visiting a camp memorial (FRA 2011, 67).
Several of the RTMMM docents discussed how they bring additional
insight to their tours, apart from their personal experiences and what the
exhibitions present. Menberu noted that he adapts his tour depending
on the age and knowledge base of the visitors, trying to introduce the
history in ways that resonate with what visitors already know. Frey com-
plements the narrative in the displays with information about the full
extent of abuses committed by Mengistu, including the period of coun-
terinsurgency and famine. He also tailors his tour to the amount of time
and interest a visitor shows: “To those who listen attentively and want
the fullest history, I’ll tell them to the minutest detail.” Muluneh empha-
sized that he aims to be neutral: “To present the history as factual. This
is why the Museum exists and what its goals are.”
All of the RTMMM docents expressed deep concerns about visitors
who espouse the “wrong” version of history. “Wrong” history includes
minimizing the extent of violence; justifying it as necessary to defeat the
opposition, identified as a “terrorist” group; or simply narration by city
tour guides who have no specialization in the history whatsoever. They
all expressed worries that the publication of memoirs by former Derg
leaders, including Mengistu, have problematically offered an opportunity
for the former perpetrators to re-engage in the work of justifying their
use of violence against the civilian population. The docents noted an
increase in younger people adopting the Derg’s viewpoint as a response
to reading these publications, which for many young Ethiopians, is their
first introduction to the Red Terror. Menberu explained that he tries to
counter these pro-Derg views by explaining how the absence of rule of
law changed the situation.
Not all “wrong” history aims to bolster the Derg’s narrative. Frey,
chuckling, noted that Rastafarians—a religious movement that began
198  B. CONLEY

in Jamaica—are often critical of how Haile Selassie (who until his coro-
nation bore the name Ras Teferi Mekonnen) is portrayed in the exhibi-
tion, since they see the Emperor as the Messiah. Eshetu also noted that
sometimes visitors come with outside guides who simply do not know
the history well at all. He said when this happens, Menberu will often
brusquely interrupt and correct the guide. Eshetu said, he, too, will
speak up, but not as forcibly. Once groups know that the docents are
survivors, they generally alter their posture and listen respectfully.
Rarely, the docents explained, do people formerly affiliated with the
Derg or Meison visit the Museum. However, on one such occasion,
Menberu explained, a man who had been fairly high up within the Derg
came to the Museum. He toured the exhibition and then began to argue
with the survivors. He was dismissive of suffering during the period,
claiming that the violence was un-exceptional: “This kind of thing hap-
pens everywhere; it was not unique to Ethiopia.” The man regularly
passes by the Museum, but has never again visited.
As the past recedes in memory and new challenges emerge in political
and public discourse, RTMMM docents find themselves facing a ques-
tion with increasing insistence: why are the abuses of the current gov-
ernment not also included in the Museum? Befekadu explained what he
tells visitors: “it is not my place to answer this question. The Museum
speaks to the need for national reconciliation and democratic and discus-
sion-based resolution of conflict. We have no mandate to go further, no
freedom to do so” (Gebre-Medhin 2016).
The picture of the tour that emerges from discussions with the docents
is one where empathy is sparked and respect is generally shown for them
as survivors. Learning also seems to occur, as, in their words, the “wrong”
history is corrected. Dialogue likewise occurs, sometimes through con-
tentious exchanges and in ways that jar the survivor-docents—especially
the rare occasions when visitors argue with them in ways that minimize
the human losses suffered. The survivor-docents’ descriptions of the tour
offer a glimpse of idiosyncrasies in how each of them approaches their
interpretation of the past through the lenses of making meaning, that
developed over time and in conversation with visitors.

The Scene of the Tour: Visitors’ Perspective

According to the Museum’s visitation statistics, in the first year it
opened, the RTMMM attracted nearly 70,000 visitors. Attendance has
since leveled out to an average of 35,000 visitors a year.7 The Museum’s
 5  THE TOUR AS TRAUMATIC PERFORMANCE, 2010–PRESENT  199

visitor data categorizes visitors into Ethiopian, students, and interna-

tional, with the overwhelming majority (ranging from 86% in 2010, to
68% in 2015) of visitors classified as Ethiopian. International visitors
have increased over time, initially composing 6% and rising to 28% of
total visitors by 2015. The number of students is a small, but fairly sta-
ble proportion of the overall visitation. Unlike in American or European
contexts, in Ethiopia, schools do not regularly include museum visits in
the curriculum, so this is not surprising.
To gain a sense of how visitors view their tour experience, I, with
the help of two research assistants,8 analyzed 751 visitor comments left
in the Museum’s comment books over the years since it opened. The
Museum has two visitor books: one for Ethiopians and one for interna-
tional visitors. The analysis draws exhaustively on comments left in the
Ethiopian book, and selectively from the international one.
Visitor comments are a limited, but compelling source for under-
standing the visitor experience.9 A researcher cannot craft questions or
probe further, but must simply rely on what visitors chose to write as the
tour concluded. Writing a comment is entirely voluntary. The comments
books at the RTMMM, as in most museums, are positioned at the end
of the tour, near the exit and a donation box. Sometimes docents point
them out, but not always, and otherwise, there is no prompt outside of
the physical presence of books inviting visitors to leave a comment. Self-
selected visitors express whatever they immediately feel like writing as
tour ends. The books are on view inside the Museum and visitors can
read through others’ comments if they wish to do so, and some com-
ments reflected a conversation between one visitor and others’ remarks
on the same page. The books provide space for and most visitors include
their name, home city or country, and comment. None of this informa-
tion must be provided and some opt to leave spaces blank.
Visitor comments offer a snapshot of the how visitors begin to make
meaning from the experience of the tour. At the RTMMM, comments
indicate that visitors deploy multiple lenses through which to make
meaning of the tour experience. Below are three examples that illustrate
how even in a short comment, several expressions are articulated:

It is regrettable to see human beings could commit such atrocities. Such

acts shall never again happen on this earth, and we should pray. The estab-
lishment of this museum is very crucial. Thank you. [Amharic]
I learned more from my visit about what happened in Ethiopia than
from what I read in books. I think the perpetrators who committed such
200  B. CONLEY

massacres, suffering, and misery on their people were those who did not
ask themselves: who are we? What are we? And where are we heading?
[Amharic]
What an eye-opening museum displaying very confrontational historical
and art pieces. It is a heartbreaking history of Ethiopia, however, it should
be told and displayed so that something similar should not take place
again. [English]

Each of these comments suggests that the visitor was deeply moved by
the Museum experience, but they make sense of it through distinct and
multiple frameworks. The first thanks the Museum and strikes a religious
tone, as did many comments (17%). The second specifically references
that the person learned something (as in 9% of comments) during the
tour and accusingly identifies perpetrators as individuals who failed to ask
ethical questions (likewise in 7.5% comments). The third expresses the
idea of learning about history and describes an emotional response (as
did 14% of comments), which prompt the visitor to express the idea of
non-repetition (as in 26% comments). In our coding, we tried to cap-
ture the full range of expressions within each comment, as the goal of
the analysis was to discern what “lesson-learning” occurred during the
tour. We separately coded each expression within any given comment
and resisted over-interpreting comments by simply coding the language
used by a visitor.
The single largest category of expression was overt statements of sup-
port for the Museum (35%). Included in this category are only com-
ments that specifically address the Museum: i.e., “thank you,” “I am
pleased that I visited this Museum,” or “I thank the organizers who built
this Museum.” This does not mean that the remainder failed to support
the Museum; visitors may have been moved to say something deeply
personal, for instance. This was the case for one of the most moving
comments:

I have cried because of these horrifying acts. It shall not happen again. My
love, Hayat, was killed in the Red Terror. Oh my love, look at me.

Only 3% of the comments similarly made clear that the visitor had a
direct, personal tie to the history. Of these, visitors noted that they had
lost a family member, schoolmates, a particular named individual, or that
they experienced the Red Terror personally, by being arrested or witness-
ing events. Among these comments, were two that appeared one after
 5  THE TOUR AS TRAUMATIC PERFORMANCE, 2010–PRESENT  201

the other, indicating they had toured together. One was by a woman,
whose husband’s remains are in the Museum. She wrote, “Today, our
daughter [name redacted] had the chance to visit her father’s grave
because he was buried in this Museum with dignity….” The daughter
then wrote, “Although I didn’t know my father while he was alive, I am
proud to see his remains kept in this museum with respect and dignity.”
Several comments left by people who had direct experience with the Red
Terror were more explicit: one comment related the story of the visitor’s
last minute escape from a massacre, and another described having to
identify his dead schoolmates.
Various wordings of the phrase “never again”—for example, “It will
never repeated” or “This injustice shall not happen again”—could be
found in 17% of the responses. If one adds to this category the same
general idea, but expressed in terms of “learning for the future,” then
the portion increases to 26% of all responses. Thus, it is the next larg-
est category following support for the Museum. There are subtle differ-
ences between the aspirational “never again” and the idea of “learning
for the future.” Comments in the latter category hinted at a more analyt-
ical response. As examples: “Future generations must learn to stay away
from a political party that could bring violence, trouble and misery to
the society”; and “This generation has a lot to learn from this Museum.”
Nonetheless, the central idea is similar enough to combine these into
one category expressing the idea of non-repetition.
The Museum can be proud that the two most commonly cited expres-
sions are gratitude for its work and expression of its core ethos of “never
again.” Moving beyond these two categories, analysis reveals more sub-
tle expressions of lesson learning. It is important to note that the vast
majority of comments imply that visitors found the Museum experience
powerful and it prompted them to deeper reflection. However, visitors
channeled their reflections into multiple frameworks with none capturing
a majority of visitors’ responses.
The next two most commonly cited expressions found equal percent-
ages (17%) of visitors framing their Museum experience in religious or
national tones. Within these categories, however, the character of the
invocation of religion or nation varied significantly.
The religious comments fell into two sub-groupings. Most of the
religious comments expressed a desire for God to bless the country or
grant peace to the dead, for example: “The only thing I can say is what
happened in our country was both horrifying and sad thing. However,
202  B. CONLEY

with the mercy of God, we are alive and thank God for that” or “May
their souls rest in peace. May God also forgive the criminals.” The tone
of these comments indicates a sense that the past is firmly past. A smaller
sub-group indicated a more unsettled response, either in terms of grap-
pling with what they saw at the Museum or in search of protection for
the future: “It has tormented me beyond I can express it in words.
Nonetheless, I say this shall never happen again and pray to the lord”; or
“I pray God to protect Ethiopia in the future.” The religious comments
reflected Ethiopia’s religious diversity, with comments referencing God,
Allah, Jesus, or the Lord.
A similarly large grouping of comments interpreted the Museum
experience in national terms. Examples of this category include: “Long
live Ethiopia,” “keep Ethiopia safe,” “prevent such acts from happen-
ing again in Ethiopia,” or “It [the Museum] will teach my country the
consequences of horrendous acts.” Inherent in many of these comments
was the idea that Ethiopia had progressed beyond the politics of vio-
lence. Some ventured closer to a political position, for example: “May
God make Ethiopia a country remembered not for its civil war, but for
its development,” which conveys the idea that the country had moved
beyond the brutal politics of the Mengistu era through national eco-
nomic policies. This clearly aligns with the agenda of the EPRDF-led
government. However, a smaller number of comments expressed ques-
tions about the national character that would allow such violence to
occur. Falling into this category is a searing comment: “Ethiopia, when
will you stop eating your children?”
Comments reflected both emotional (14%) and educational (9%)
responses. The most commonly cited emotion was sadness: “…when I
visited, my heart was broken and I was in tears” or “I am out of words to
express my sadness.” One visitor expressly described an empathetic reac-
tion: “I had asked myself how it would feel if I was one of the victims
and I felt sad and afraid.” Other emotions cited include feeling “sorry”
or “horrified.” However, a few visitors indicated feeling “happy” for the
chance to learn about their country’s history.
Visitors expressed the idea of learning from the experience in myriad
ways, comparing the museum experience to other modes of learning,
stating that they better understood why events took place, or seemingly
being exposed to the history for the first time. For example: “I found
this museum different from other museums I have visited. I have learned
a lot more from my visit than I could get from reading books;” “I am
 5  THE TOUR AS TRAUMATIC PERFORMANCE, 2010–PRESENT  203

very sad that the Red Terror took place, I have learned the love of the
martyrs for the people of Ethiopia […]”; and “We didn’t know such a
thing happened in Ethiopia.”
Another widely expressed view of the tour concerned survivors and
victims. This category can be further subdivided into messages con-
cerned with honoring the dead (13%), engagement with survivors (7%),
or on-going injustices against survivors or families of the dead (0.4%).
It is curious that the number of comments addressing engagement with
the docents as survivors is somewhat low; I think it reflects that the sur-
vivor-docents reveal their past in a factual manner, rather than giving a
central place to their individual experiences. The emotional character of
the tour arises more from how the exhibition portrays those who did not
survive.
Visitors touch on the political implications of the exhibition in smaller
numbers and adopt multiple viewpoints: expressly blaming past lead-
ers (7.5%); blaming the current government (6%); embracing the cur-
rent government (3.7%); or embracing the Derg (1.2%). Comments
blaming past leaders are not unexpected, given the exhibition narrative:
“The regime was ruthless, inhuman and committed genocide […]”;
“Mengistu and collaborators will get what they deserve.” Nor, given the
degree of political tensions in the country is it surprising that some peo-
ple would leave the Museum thinking about the current government’s
human rights record: “Today, the EPRDF, like the Derg, is committing
attacks on tribes”; “We are witnessing massive murders more than or
equal to this in our current life.”
The comments that expressed support for the current government
spoke in terms of unity, development, peace, stability, democracy, and
gratitude for the current political system. Examples: “We shall protect
the constitution and democratic system,” “The current regime should be
thanked for paying sacrifices and getting rid of the horrifying system”;
“A horrifying history. We have the responsibility to preserve the peace,
development and democracy that these martyrs died for and made our
country peaceful […]”.
Some of the pro-Derg comments ask for greater nuance on the his-
torical record: “We have seen the cruelty of the Derg, but we haven’t
seen any good deeds the Derg did. It shows you are pushing us to hate
the Derg.” However, others unapologetically repeat the Derg’s slogan:
“Ethiopia First.” One—a clear outlier—among the pro-Derg category
204  B. CONLEY

was especially disturbing and advocated for genocide against the ethnic
group most associated with control of the EPRDF:

It honestly would have been great if the Derg wiped out all Tigrians.
There is no significant and small enemy. The future generation should have
the mentality of Nazi Germany. Communism for life. Above anyone and
anything Ethiopia First! Amen.

The virulent hate speech in this comment, even though it is not repre-
sentative of the Museum’s visitors’ comments, is deeply troubling.10
Criticism of the Museum was expressed in 8% of the comments, but
many visitors who offered critical views paired their concerns with overall
support for the institution. For example: “Beautiful memorial depicting
the resistance movement. There should also be an introduction to the
displays.” Likewise, many of these critical comments concerned refine-
ments to the exhibitions—adding elements of the story from regional
areas, asking for the mention of a specific person, suggesting the use of
multimedia, or citing the need for better maintenance. Five visitors spe-
cifically mentioned the display of bones and how they felt unsettled by
this exhibition element.

What I have seen is quite disturbing and useless. What is the point of dig-
ging out the remains of these victims and displaying them in a Museum?
The history of these victims could have been told through different means.

Overall, the comments indicate that the Museum’s expressed goal

of instilling a lesson of “never again” is widely embraced by visitors.
Further, learning does appear to take place and empathy is sparked.
But precisely what is learned, how deep the lessons go and how visitors
relate these questions to their present, past, or future, is less clear. More
in-depth analysis through visitor interviews and a survey might better
illuminate these questions. What can be said based on the comments, is
that many visitors appear to be engaged with the tour, and the experi-
ence of the Museum is made sense of through a range of filters: political,
religious, national, emotional, and educational. There is clearly general
support for the Museum and the somewhat vague idea of “never again,”
beyond which, the range of expressions are not heavily clustered in one
area that would lead one to conclude that the tour produces a common
set of lessons that could be applied beyond the immediate context of the
tour.
 5  THE TOUR AS TRAUMATIC PERFORMANCE, 2010–PRESENT  205

Perhaps unsurprisingly, visitors appear to refract the experience of the

tour through their pre-existing prisms for making meaning. The multiple
expressions contained within most of the comments suggest that visitors
endeavor to find a place for the tour experience in a manner that forces
them to call upon several different frameworks. Thus, individual com-
ments form a snapshot: illustrating a process whereby the violent history
portrayed in the tour unsettles the visitor, and they fail to place it sol-
idly within a single category. Instead, the tour seems to provoke ques-
tions about how to categorize the past. Thus, while the visit resonates, it
does not do so in a unified direction nor does it do so in relation to the
Museum experience alone.

Community Making and Unmaking in the Memorial

Museum
Memory in this study is defined as an exposure to the past, which aims
to create a new community around an ethical lesson. Analysis of the per-
formance of the tour introduces doubt as to whether memory achieves
its goals in a manner that could move beyond the immediate Museum
context. The tour performance involves the script and stage setting of
the Museum structure and exhibition; it is brought to life through the
encounter between survivor-docent and visitor. It culminates in a pro-
cess whereby multiple communities unsettle each other and expose dis-
junctions that defy any easy resolution into a new framework for making
meaning.

The Jagged Edges of Multiple Communities

Can memory forge a new, ethical community? Probing the answer to this
question first requires recognition that memory is a site at which mul-
tiple experiences converge. Cross-currents of empowerment, mourn-
ing, re-traumatization, agency, exhaustion, and healing reside within the
broad category of survivor-docent. Frey’s interjection that he did not
want to work at the RTMMM points us to recognize that the survivor
community is complicated by individual survivor’s struggles with the
traumatic impacts of the violence. This struggle cannot be summarized
into a singular Survivor experience, but emerges in individualized man-
ners, over time and refracted through new experiences in unpredictable
ways.
206  B. CONLEY

One of the specific forms of violence suffered during the Terror and
by the survivor-docents was torture, and it alters the possibilities for
community-building. As noted in previous chapters, torture is intimate
violence, committed with the intention of exposing and eroding rela-
tions between members of a group. Its target, as noted previously, was
the love that animated activism and drew people together for collective
action. The point of torture during the Red Terror was twofold. It was
ostensibly to force its victims to give names of their comrades so that
the Derg could uncover the network of EPRP activists. But torturers
also intended to destroy the possibility of trust between people, by forc-
ing them to confess and name other activists. Torture demands betrayal:
between individuals, inserting suspicion, and allowing doubt, uncer-
tainty, and fear to dominate relationships. The idea of creating a shared
community on the grounds of this experience is eroded from within,
through the profound shattering of interpersonal relations. The precise
mechanisms of the Terror play a role in disturbing the possibility for
community-building in its wake.
As several survivor-docents noted, their memories include relation-
ships with people who did not survive. These victims haunt the tour.
Sometimes they are literally present(ed), as docents will point out photos
of people they knew among the wall of martyrs. Sometimes they appear
in narratives told by survivor-docents, and sometimes are silent com-
panions in their thoughts. Memorialization may help ease the pain and
localize loss, but it cannot finalize the terms of community given that it
includes people who are no longer living.
Another community served by the Association and Museum is the
broader group of Red Terror survivors, beyond those who work at the
institution. During the time I spent in the Museum, other survivors reg-
ularly stopped by and spent time at the Museum. While I have not dwelt
on this factor in my analysis, it is an important institutional function. The
Museum serves as a meeting place for survivors, on an everyday basis
and on special occasions for conferences and annual memorial activities.
There is a community of people unified by a destructive experience.
Also animating the scene of the tour are visitors. They can be further
disaggregated in ways that help reveal commonalities within subgroups.
However, they arrive on the scene as strangers: bringing with them a
universe of reference points and concerns that a Museum cannot control.
Visitors’ comments suggest that they draw on their full range of per-
sonal, social and political frameworks to make sense of the historical and
empathetic engagement provoked through the tour.
 5  THE TOUR AS TRAUMATIC PERFORMANCE, 2010–PRESENT  207

The tour performance takes place as survivor and visitor engage with
each other and the exhibition, in a manner that is marked by internal
tensions of each encounter. The survivor-docent and visitor interact
through a movement that includes empathetic opening and d ­ isjunction.
The resulting experience inhibits the closure of a unified, newly con-
structed community characterized through shared ethical lessons. In
the tension of individuals’ belonging to and isolation from diverse com-
munities that are activated in the tour and pull in different directions, a
new community cannot be finalized and closed off. The tour proceeds
through inclusion, captured in the dialogic encounter that occurs as peo-
ple come together during the tour; and exclusion through the impossi-
bility of fully reconciling experiences.
The tour of a memorial museum is powerful because it cannot rec-
oncile the diverse communities it engages. The tension of the moment
is more powerful than catharsis; it unsettles. In so doing, the experience
within a memorial museum is structured more like exposure to trauma
than its intended emotional model of empathy.

Trauma and Unsettling
Studying trauma in the context of memorials and museum, Jenny Edkins
(2003) focuses attention on the question of the character of a commu-
nity that emerges out of exposure to traumatic history. Community, she
notes, is a collective that needs to produced and reproduced; belonging
to a nation, family, or other seemingly natural grouping is always a pro-
cess. Memory of a violent past—especially state-sponsored violence—
strips away the appearance of givenness of a community. Violent histories
reveal how the present community was constructed through an effort
to destroy other ways of imagining community. Trauma, thus, unsettles
frameworks for making and sharing meaning about a political commu-
nity by revealing their violent and contingent foundations. She writes,
trauma exposes “the contingency of the social order and in some ways
how it conceals its own impossibility,” most of us, she continues, “would
rather not listen” (Edkins 2003, 5).
However, the perspectives of the survivor-docent and the visitor com-
ments suggest that in the course of the RTMMM tour, visitors do lis-
ten. Learning and empathy occur through dialogue and disruption as
exposed in relation to a traumatic past. The comments reflect visitors’
endeavors to repair this disruption by trying to re-inscribe the past into
their given frameworks for making meaning. In Edkins’ analysis, akin to
208  B. CONLEY

that of other analyses of the confluence of memorialization and politi-

cal power, exposure to traumatic history disrupts, only to be immediately
countered by an impulse to cure these interruptions by re-inscribing
them into a master narrative. In the context of a state-sponsored memo-
rial museum, often there is an endeavor to tame traumatic history in a
manner that rationalizes the political status quo. However, rarely is the
effort completely successful. In the case of the RTMMM, a civil society
museum about a marginalized history, it is even less successful. The expe-
rience does not readily resolve the tensions of history for its visitors.
The multiplicity of frameworks referenced in RTMMM comments,
do not suggest a simple progression from a pre-existing homogenized
visitor’s self-perception, transformed though traumatic witnessing into
an ethical community. Rather, the performance of the tour engages the
internal tensions that compose both. Almost every visitor comment
included multiple expressions of response. In so doing, the comments
should be viewed not as finished products. The comments are expres-
sions composed as the visits is ending, and which capture the process
of attempting to make meaning in relation to a marginal memory. The
traumatic history interrupts and triggers a visitor’s desire to re-produce
community by making sense of the marginal memory they have encoun-
tered. However, the comments suggest that the process falls short,
and instead reveals the ragged edges between frameworks.
Marginal memory resists an effort to build communities, and in this
failure to do so, it offers its greatest contribution. Communities can-
not be stabilized on traumatized ground. This is not what memory of
violence and loss does. Memory—especially marginal memory—unrav-
els. In this sense, as Edkins argues in her analysis of the US Holocaust
Memorial Museum, at the RTMMM, “the excesses of the story that is
told breach the constraints of the memorial museum” (Edkins 2003,
163).
In the work of Caruth and Edkins, exposure to trauma functions as
an exposure to a narrative (one’s own or another’s) that is composed of
both what is present and what cannot be presented. Caruth suggests a
possibility for ethics to emerge from this exposure: “as the story of the
way in which one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another,
the way in which trauma may lead, therefore, to the encounter with
another, through the very possibility and surprise of listening to anoth-
er’s wound” (Caruth 1996, 8). Edkins likewise extracts the possibility
for political resistance to hegemony through traumatic stories. When the
 5  THE TOUR AS TRAUMATIC PERFORMANCE, 2010–PRESENT  209

contingency of political narratives is revealed, the activist can be empow-

ered to “reclaim memory and rewrite it as a form of resistance” (Edkins
2003, 216).
In the context of the RTMMM, the traumatic history presented con-
cerns a community defined by political activism, not ethnic identity.
In so doing, it is at odds with the dominant organization of Ethiopian
society under the political dispensation founded by the EPRDF, and
reflected in much of the political opposition. As visitors encounter Red
Terror history, they struggle to make sense of it within the terms of the
community that they bring with them to the exhibition. The tour cannot
establish a new community defined in much specificity beyond a general
sense of recognition of the historical violence and a hope that it does not
recur. Beyond this, the visiting public endeavors to re-inscribe the expo-
sure to violent history within their existing, multiple lenses for communi-
ty-making. To the extent they fail, the Museum succeeds in its mission to
unsettle the present.
Exposure to traumatic history through the memorial museum reveals
vulnerabilities in the production of individual and group identity. This is
neither a priori of benefit or detriment to democratic politics: it is hasty
to describe traumatic history in ethical, rather than functional terms. In
some contexts, marginalized memory can provide a powerful counter-
weight to predominant political narratives and participate in opening
space for new ideas and voices. However, in other contexts, a constant
traumatic reminder of the unraveling of community can reinforce a sense
of perilous risk and uncertainty that drives people to seek protection
or revenge, and to frame politics in negative terms solely composed of
resistance to what exists, rather than in a discourse of what might yet
be. Memory from the margins, as the RTMMM suggests, contains what
Walter Benjamin described as a “weak messianic force”: the ability to dis-
rupt the present, but not to promise salvation.

Postscript
At the end of my 2017 interview with Frey, I asked a final set of ques-
tions regarding the lessons the Museum tries to convey. He expressed
considerable skepticism about the impact of “never again,” but none-
theless returned to its formulation and managed to extract a sliver of
optimism.
What does the Museum’s core message of “never again” mean to you?
210  B. CONLEY

Nothing.
I am losing hope in human beings. We human beings are hypo-
crites. We pretend as if we have learned from the past, but we didn’t.
We just commit the same mistakes over and over again. And we say,
never ever again. We have lots of experiences—the First World War, the
Second World War, the Ethiopian dictatorship, the Cambodian civil
war, et cetera, et cetera. We’ve got Syria, Libya, Yemen, Congo—every
part of the world. They are committing the same mistakes. […] Nazis
Germany used to say, Germany first. Fascist Italy used to say, Italy first.
The Ethiopian dictators used to say, Ethiopia first. And now, Trump says
America first. This is why it’s full of trash.
Of course, there are a few people who are genuine when they say that.
The majority of us are big liars.
So what do you hope for when someone comes through the Museum? A
young Ethiopian student, let’s say. What do you want them to understand?
The Museum was built for the young generation to educate them. I
tell them: You’ve seen everything that the Derg has done to people in
this country. If you have any questions concerning that period, you can
ask freely and I will tell you up to my knowledge. What I want to tell
you is: Please don’t repeat it again. When you have opportunity to serve
in government, don’t resolve political differences with guns. Do it by
talking, sit around a table together in a diplomatic and democratic way,
a civilized way. Time and again I tell this to young Ethiopians, not to
repeat it again.
Do you have hope for that?
A very, very, tiny hope. People might change, you never know.

Notes
1. Freysembet preferred to use only his given name. Interview August 2017.
2. See discussion in Chapter 4.
3. Nuhanović committed his life since 1995 to establishing the facts of and
educating about the history of genocide at Srebrenica. His personal con-
nection is through the loss of his entire family: Bosnian Serb forces killed
his father, mother, and brother. His family was forced off a UN base just
north of Srebrenica at Potočari where they, along with some 30,000
other Bosnian Muslims were sheltering. Before they were allowed to
board buses that were supposed to carry all of the Bosnian Muslim com-
munity to government territory, Hasan’s family was selected by Bosnian
 5  THE TOUR AS TRAUMATIC PERFORMANCE, 2010–PRESENT  211

Serb military for further “interrogation.” His mother died while in deten-
tion. His brother and father were taken to killing sites and murdered
along with some 8000 other Bosnian Muslims. Nuhanović was an early
and strong advocate for establishing a memorial at Potočari—the site
where he and many other Srebrenica survivors last saw their loved ones.
4. Based on the author’s personal experience over ten years working at the
USHMM, 2001–2011.
5. Discussions with colleagues from Rwanda’s Kigali Genocide Memorial
Centre and the USHMM hint that working in archives can be particu-
larly difficult for survivors or even younger researchers, as the labour is
often conducted in isolation and puts the individual in constant contact
with the historical documents that dryly catalogue the process of vio-
lence. Again, only anecdotally, my colleagues thought that people work-
ing in these conditions struggled more because they lacked the social
interactions around the history that emerge from speaking with the
public.
6. See, for example, the Handbook of Victims and Victimology (ed. Sandra
Walklate, London: Routledge), a second edition of which was published
in 2017. It reflects an academic discourse that is much further developed
in domestic contexts of “everyday” crimes than in transitional justice dis-
course, although critical analysis of the lens of “victim” is, nonetheless, a
growing area of inquiry in this field as well.
7. Data was provided by the RTMMM and covers the years 2010–2015,
which was the most recent data available when it was provided in 2016.
8. Researchers Makda Taddele and Batul Sadliwala helped analyze and code
the comments. The vast majority of comments were in Amharic, trans-
lated by Makda Taddele, the next largest language grouping was English.
Additional translation help was provided by Mohamed Nabil Bennaidja,
Mayu Tanaka, Yair S. Cohenca, and Peter Freudenstein.
9. I would like to thank Elizabeth Cantor, Educational Outreach
Coordinator at Tufts University’s Aidekman Arts Center, for suggesting
that I examine the visitor comment books.
10. When I worked at the USHMM, I curated an exhibition that asked for
visitors to write a response to how they would respond to contempo-
rary threats of genocide. The comments suggested that visitors over-
whelmingly took the prompt seriously. While visitors did not commit
themselves to specific political agendas, but seemed, much like at the
RTMMM, to search within their given modes of engaging social issues
to find a place for response. Nonetheless, a small handful of respond-
ents took the opportunity to make anti-Semitic comments. The pres-
ence of a minority of people willing to embrace genocidal ideology, even
in a fairly stable democratic society like the United States, is perhaps to
212  B. CONLEY

be expected, nevertheless should be countered. The potential for harm

when these views are normalized, especially by powerful leaders, is clear
in everyday acts of prejudice and rendered irrefutable in the US con-
text when Heather Heyer was killed by a neo-Nazi, white supremacist in
Charlottesville, Virginia on August 9, 2017. Likewise, in Ethiopia, views
like those expressed in this hateful comment reflect perspectives that can
become extremely dangerous if not denounced by leaders.

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 5  THE TOUR AS TRAUMATIC PERFORMANCE, 2010–PRESENT  215

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 CHAPTER 6

Conclusion: On Memory and Future

Transitions

Introduction
Ethiopia was an early actor in what became an era of democratization:
as the Cold War waned, the time of military coups and dictators
appeared to fade along with it, allowing accountability, elections, and
peacebuilding to take center stage. The Ethiopian case never quite fit this
rosy picture of transitions. Over time, fewer and fewer cases seemed to
fit, and many actors within states that once advocated for change now
struggle with their own internal political insurgencies of a sort. The lib-
eral order is deeply wounded. Making sense of today’s complications will
require drawing on many examples, including Ethiopia. The uncertainty
of the present moment informs the central questions of this study: what
is the place of memory in democratization? Does it serve to fuel partisan
resentments, hastening a retreat from the principle of democracy? Does it
help weave a fragile fabric of a common stance against violence? Or, does
it do something altogether different?
The history of the RTMMM, set against the backdrop of Ethiopia’s
1974 Revolution, the era of military regime, through brutal counterin-
surgency, to the rise of a new government under the EPRDF, and into
current political changes suggests an oblique relationship between mem-
ory and political transitions. A different way of viewing memory, from the
margins, and a different way of viewing democracy, not as an endpoint,
but a process, are necessary to capture the contributions of this Museum.

© The Author(s) 2019 217

B. Conley, Memory from the Margins,
Memory Politics and Transitional Justice,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13495-2_6
218  B. CONLEY

Memory from the margins reveals how social and political meaning is
composed simultaneously of history’s winners and losers. The RTMMM
does not provide an alternate map toward a more just politics. It pro-
vides testimony that other visions of society have been possible and were
brutally suppressed. A “weak messianic” power resides therein: if the
present is not the only historical possibility, then the present and future,
too, are places of uncertainty and as of yet unrealized possibilities. This
is true as much for international processes as local ones. In this sense of
openness, there is an affinity with democracy, as a political system pred-
icated on the boundless process whereby those with no entitlement
nonetheless make claims. Both margins and democracy are formed by
open-ended possibility. However, there is no security in this open hori-
zon that change necessarily moves along a straight path of progress,
nor is there is a direct line tethering memory to any particular political
agenda.

A New Memorial Museum for a New Transition?

On January 3, 2018, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn
made a surprising announcement: the government would release all
political prisoners at a notorious prison, the Ethiopian Federal Police
Force Central Bureau of Criminal Investigation, known as Ma’ekelawi.
Ma’ekelawi was a site where constitutional rights and police profession-
alism disappeared, giving way to torture and brute force (BBC 2018).
Once emptied, Hailemariam stated, the prison would be turned into a
museum.
The proposal to create a memorial museum on the site of an oper-
ating prison came during a rocky period in Ethiopian politics. Meles
Zenawi, leader of the EPRDF government since 1991, died in office on
August 20, 2012, leaving a gap that no successor could fill. Hailemariam
took up the position without contest, but was unable to command the
people or to rally internal consensus within the EPRDF coalition. Large-
scale protests gained momentum starting in 2014, sparked by tensions
over the expanding outer limits of Addis Ababa, encroaching on Oromia
Region, and quickly spreading to other areas and issues, particularly in
Oromia and Amhara areas. Security forces cracked down on demonstra-
tions with excessive force. Human Rights Watch described the response
to a protest by Oromo in Gincha on November 12, 2015:
 6  CONCLUSION: ON MEMORY AND FUTURE TRANSITIONS  219

Security forces regularly arrested dozens of people at each protest, and in

many locations security forces went door-to door-at night arresting stu-
dents and those accommodating students in their homes. Security forces
also specifically targeted for arrest those perceived to be influential mem-
bers of the Oromo community, such as musicians, teachers, opposition
members and others thought to have the ability to mobilize the commu-
nity for further protests. Many of those arrested and detained by the secu-
rity forces have been children under age 18. Security forces have tortured
and otherwise ill-treated detainees, and several female detainees described
being raped by security force personnel. Very few detainees have had access
to legal counsel, adequate food, or to their family members. (Human
Rights Watch 2016)

While the government altered the development plans that initially trig-
gered protests, the momentum soon escalated beyond Oromia: for
instance, in August 2016, deadly protests broke out near Gondar,
between Amhara and Tigrayans (Davison 2016). A ten-month state of
emergency was declared on October 9, 2016, marked by mass deten-
tions, restrictions on communications and public gatherings, and perse-
cution of government critics. As quickly as the state of emergency was
lifted in August 2017, new protests emerged. In 2017, dozens died as
fighting erupted between Oromo and Somali people and up to 400,000
people were displaced (Jeffrey 2017). Violence targeting people because
of their ethnic identity further occurred at football matches and on uni-
versity campuses (Baye 2018). The pattern of protests, crackdowns, the
imposition of the state of emergency could not suppress the core con-
cerns of diverse elements of the population. Reflecting the structure of
the state, demands are often articulated in ethno-nationalist terms—and
violence (by and against protesters) likewise often reflects ethno-national
identity.
Political grievances in Ethiopia include a broad range of issues, but
primarily, demands for the political and economic systems to be more
transparent and inclusive. The opposition also includes a minority who
fan the flames of ethnic tensions, in hopes that it burns a path for their
personal ambitions. The country further faces a generational divide,
whereby Ethiopians in the 40s and younger, who did not lead in the
effort to overthrow or protect Mengistu’s regime, grew up with the one-
party state, organized by nation, and focused on development as the
backdrop to their expectations and concerns. They do not primarily judge
220  B. CONLEY

the present in contrast to the past, but rather in relation to their expec-
tations for what development ought to deliver, personally, within their
national groups, and as measured against increasingly globalized points
of comparison.
The country has experienced undeniable economic achievements.
According to the World Bank, Ethiopia’s gross domestic product (GDP)
grew at a rate of 2.7% in 1990, by 2010 it had risen to 12.6%, a stunning
rate that dropped to the still impressive 7.6% in 2016 (World Bank 2018).
The government’s achievements include (Clapham 2018): increased agri-
cultural capacity, expanded roads and communications systems, invest-
ments in education, development of the health system, and increased
endeavors to meet its own energy needs as well as positioning the coun-
try to export energy through the construction of the Great Ethiopian
Renaissance Dam. Ethiopia has also won favor from western states by con-
tributing to the war on terror, mediating conflicts in African countries, and
making good use of donor funds. It has attracted direct foreign invest-
ment in enterprises like floriculture, textile production, and agriculture.
Development brings new sets of challenges. One example, relevant to
the topic of this study: today, the roads around Addis Ababa are con-
gested with the constant rumbling of red construction trucks, infamous
for causing deadly roadside accidents. One rumor is that Chinese manu-
facturers cheaply produce the trucks with bad brakes; another is that the
need for drivers outpaces adherence to standards for their employment.
With dark humor, and for younger people probably without recognizing
the historical reference, many Ethiopians refer to the trucks as the “red
terror” (Fig. 6.1).
Development is disruption with opportunity: but the balance of whose
lives are disrupted and to whom the opportunities bring the greatest
profit, is rarely equitably calibrated. Combine economic disgruntlement
with ethnic nationalism, democratic shortcomings, and lack of politi-
cal openness, and the result will invariably be—as it is in Ethiopia—risk
of destabilization. Both economic and political change is necessary to
respond to people’s demands. Nonetheless, as Alex de Waal writes, change
“has its dangers, especially in a country in which governing institutions
could be disrupted with relative ease, leaving perilous gaps in the politi-
cal economy, law and order, and intellectual leadership that have been so
essential to Ethiopia’s recent transformations” (de Waal 2018, 19). The
demands for change vary: from consensus around the need to reform the
 6  CONCLUSION: ON MEMORY AND FUTURE TRANSITIONS  221

Fig. 6.1  Today’s “red terror”: a dust-covered, red construction truck, on its

way into Addis Ababa (Bridget Conley/World Peace Foundation 2017)

political system to make it more inclusive, to replacing one set of primary

beneficiaries with another, to throwing away the entire structure, EPRDF,
and federalism. The resultant uncertainty of how the country will move
into the future fuels instability.
On February 15, 2018, Hailemariam resigned, and a state of emer-
gency was re-imposed. The new prime minister, Abiy Ahmed took over
on April 2. Although he rose through the ranks of the EPRDF, as a teen
he joined the fight against Mengistu in its final days, Abiy’s position
prior to becoming Prime Minister was Deputy President of the Oromia
Region. He has positioned himself as understanding the clamor for
change, a willing and energetic reformer. At the time of writing, he has
been in office less than a year and has already lifted the state of emer-
gency and reached out to political opposition, both inside the country
and among the expatriates.
222  B. CONLEY

Among those in the political opposition to whom Abiy engaged with,

by sending his predecessor, Hailemarian Dessalgn for a personal meet-
ing in Zimbabwe, was Hailemariam Mengistu (Addis Standard 2018).
A photo from the meeting shows the two former leaders smiling as they
stand side by side. Mengistu appears as a now diminished and rotund
former dictator waiting to see if his legacy will yet be varnished. Abiy
faced pressure from critics of the move, who found his olive branch to
Mengistu unacceptable, as well as those who argued that he should issue
an amnesty to the former military dictator. Abiy’s ambiguous response
provided no comfort to Mengistu’s former victims: “‘Ethiopia’s consti-
tution clearly stipulates the ‘Red Terror’ crimes cannot be covered under
an amnesty law,’ Abiy said. ‘So Col. Mengistu will not … return home.
But if the law in the future allows, that may change’” (Meseret 2018).
In addition to reaching out to formerly outlawed political actors,
including Mengistu and armed movements that have now pledged to
lay down their weapons, Abiy led a historic reconciliation with Eritrea,
opening the border and announcing new economic collaboration. Under
him, the government released many political prisoners, including ones
charged with treason and terrorism. He has announced new economic
policies, including partially privatizing previously government-run indus-
tries, like telecom and the airline. His message and popularity ring with
optimism: “take down the wall, build the bridge” (Marsh 2018). His
credentials reside in his political experience within the ERPDF, especially
responding to Oromo concerns over controlling their land when faced
with large-scale development projects, his youth, the investment of hope
that many Ethiopians seem to have made in him, and the early reforms
he has undertaken; a sharp contrast with those of the intellectual rigor,
tight discipline, deliberative (within the Party), and war-hardened charac-
ter of the generation of leaders that preceded him.
Despite Abiy’s popularity and the pace of reforms—or possibly in
response to them—rising inter-ethnic violence poses a serious challenge
to the country. Diverse issues have sparked incidents: local level ten-
sions over land or administrative issues, resistance to entrenched and
corrupted local leaders, and even a football match. Like a single match
dropped into a dry forest, these local issues in the context of widespread
political grievance often articulated in ethnic discourse, have the capacity
to quickly transform into wildfires. The overall increase of violence sug-
gests a turbulent socio-political scene, where ambiguity opens the door
for political uncertainty about the scale and pace of change, and prompts
 6  CONCLUSION: ON MEMORY AND FUTURE TRANSITIONS  223

new jockeying for position among multiple actors, some of whom are
armed.
The scale is alarming: by the end of summer of 2018, Ethiopia topped
the world in terms of displacement: 1.4 million people were newly inter-
nally displaced, many as a result of local violence that surged between
armed groups associated with the Oromo and Gedeo, and along the
Somali border (IDMC 2018). Nonetheless, while violence captures
headlines, it does not describe the country: not all protests or demands
for change have deployed nor been met with violence. The vast majority
of the country is stable, and there have been counter-protests with
­people taking to the streets in the name of peaceful politics and against
ethnic targeting. But there are clear warning signs.
Political change was necessary and inevitable. Whether it can be man-
aged peacefully, inclusively and in a manner that foregrounds the coun-
try’s long-term prospects remains to be seen. What Abiy and other
Ethiopian leaders can or might do is beyond the scope of this study. Of
interest here is a reform that came within days of Abiy’s leadership. On
April 6, 2018, the Addis Standard reported that a new notice could be
found on Ma’ekelawi prison’s entrance: it had closed, and all remain-
ing prisoners were transferred to a temporary Addis Ababa police com-
mission facility (Addis Standard 2018). Will it now be converted into a
museum?
The idea to do so did not originate with Hailemariam’s statement. It
was first proposed in an editorial from the Addis Standard on June 28,
2016. There, the magazine’s editors described the prison as:

… a legal black hole that was never made subject to public scrutiny; it
remains beyond and above any form of accountability….[and] a symbol of
a regime that acts contrary to the values, principles, and rules of the consti-
tution it championed. (Addis Standard 2016)

The prison’s continued functioning, the authors wrote, marked a

betrayal of the country’s constitution. Returning to and re-animating the
building blocks of Ethiopia’s political dispensation, the piece asserted,
would guide the country forward. The prison belongs to the past—and
hence should be treated as a site whose time is gone: “Ma’ekelawi should
be a place to remember the past and not to live the present” (Addis
Standard 2016). Drawing on examples from other countries—Kenya,
South Africa, Senegal, and Poland—of detention centers transformed
224  B. CONLEY

into museums as part of political transitions, the authors argued that a

memorial museum could serve as a symbol of dismantling an entire
structure of repressive institutions and practices.
Could a new prison memorial museum help symbolize a new dem-
ocratic transition in Ethiopia? Examples in Africa and beyond can
inform response to this question, but so can Ethiopia’s own memorial
and museum landscape. The Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum
offers distinct insights into what a new prison museum might be able to
contribute.

Insights from the RTMMM for a New Prison Memorial

Museum
Points of Comparison
The RTMMM’s origin story differs from a potential Ma’ekelawi prison
museum in one major way: the RTMMM was created to memorialize
violence committed by a regime that had been overthrown, not one in
power. In Ethiopia, the 1991 “transition” in the form of regime change
offered a dramatic narrative starting point. Change as a process whereby
democratic space is expanded through reform is messy and uncertain.
The lack of clarity in the present and future, likewise alters what mem-
ories are deemed relevant. A Ma’ekelawi prison museum could play a
powerful role in this context. As noted earlier, Frey, one of the RTMMM
survivor-docents (Chapter 5), was imprisoned there during the Red
Terror; the prison was also used by earlier governments. Should it be
transformed into a museum, Ma’ekelawi would tell a story of continuity
in how the Ethiopian state has related to its various political oppositions
over a long duration. It would not demonize a single, particular regime,
and hence would not necessarily lionize the new, but would point to the
more complex and troubling—thus potentially relevant—place of violent
coercion across Ethiopian political history.
But there are similarities with the RTMMM as well: the experience of
political prisoners and torture is at the heart of both narratives, even if
the scale and degree of lethality was significantly higher during the Red
Terror. Both sites relate histories suggesting that the present moment is
the product of multiple paths; those taken and those violently suppressed
by governmental authorities. A diverse range of views of the state and
 6  CONCLUSION: ON MEMORY AND FUTURE TRANSITIONS  225

how it ought to be structured compose the stories of political prisoners

from the 1970s and today.
Given the current turbulent state of politics, the question of the rel-
evance of multiple pasts is reopened for all of the museums discussed
in this study. Will the martyrs memorial museums in Tigray, Amhara
and Oromia regions survive the transition? Will the stories they relate,
which combine the idealism of an initial insurgency, and the steady bend
toward a fused system of people, party, and state, remain historically sali-
ent even as the system changes? Will the smaller, marginal history of the
Red Terror, told at the RTMMM find new relevance or will it get caught
in political riptides? The answers are not yet apparent.
However, several of the factors that impact what history is deemed
relevant and the social-political role of memorialization do emerge from
the study of the RTMMM. How Ethiopia grapples with five central
questions regarding memorialization will determine the potential contin-
ued relevance of the existing memorial museums and the possibilities for
a new one.

Why Memorialization?
Before addressing the question of what memorialization might be
expected to contribute to Ethiopia’s evolving democratic sensibilities,
one must first be attentive to why memorialization even appears as a log-
ical or desirable endeavor. It emerges from deeply personal loss of loved
ones and the tireless of efforts of discrete memory-keepers who dedi-
cate themselves to honoring individuals and ideas that did not survive
history. The centrality of mourning to a memorial museum is nowhere
more clear than in the question faced by Red Terror memory-keepers of
how to create a final resting place for human remains. In these material
objects, the memory of past violence is localized in physical form and
poses an acute question. The question is not should one pretend that the
objects, and hence memory of past violence, exists or not; but what to
do in response to them. Answers to this question are influenced by the
agency of memory-keepers, in a context that is shaped by multiple forces.
Among these forces is the pre-existing national context in which
certain memory narratives are already told and certain memorial forms
are already privileged. National models influenced the creators of the
RTMMM, as museums were mounted during a museal moment of
Ethiopian history during its transition following the defeat of Mensigtu
226  B. CONLEY

in 1991. Transnational actors and juridical narratives further influenced

the discrete forms and practices found in memorial museums around the
world and in Ethiopia. Sometimes these practices are the result of direct
influence of one model on another, but the RTMMM suggests that
there is a deeper underlying narrative continuity that parallels the rise
of various juridical forms, prosecutions, truth commissions or memorial
museum, all of which are predicated on the logic that public displays of
evidence of past harms will produce a better future.
However, the global rise of the memorial museum is not limited to
this context, in multiple forms it “boomed” globally in the 1980s and
1990, suggesting world historical factors are also at play. Memory dis-
course has become globally relevant because it responds to increasingly
globalizing conditions of disruption whereby political ideologies that
had in the past structured and made meaning of complex realities no
longer hold sway. These same narratives rationalized enormous suffering
and the imposition of violence; it makes no sense to romanticize them.
However, recognizing the narrative role they played in organizing reality,
helps shed light on why their decline coincides with the rise of new ways
to organize reality, including memory discourses.
No single factor alone explains the global rise of memorial muse-
ums nor the particular institution of the RTMMM in Ethiopia. Rather,
it is the convergence of personal, national, transnational, and globaliz-
ing factors. This particular alignment of forces may not hold for other
memorialization efforts. But it reveals that the answer to the question,
why memorialize?, involves both factors within and beyond the control
of memory-keepers.

How Does a Museum Construct Meaning?

The potential contributions that a memorial museum might make to
a political transition are predicated on the manner through which any
museum constructs knowledge and invites visitors to engage. Museums
make meaning by occupying public space, issuing an invitation to visit
and presenting a narrative through assemblage. Regardless if the central
exhibition narrative concerns the construction of state authority or the
destruction of a past vision and people, museums juxtapose universal
principles and an overriding narrative, with the multiple meanings con-
tained within discrete artifacts, photos, and testimony. An exhibition is
assembled by selecting an array of components that form footholds for
 6  CONCLUSION: ON MEMORY AND FUTURE TRANSITIONS  227

both understanding and challenging the overarching narrative. Herein,

resides the museum’s most powerful potential impact: the way it inter-
rupts its own story. Presentation through assemblage issues an invitation
to interpretation that can wander in multiple directions, depending on
what a visitor brings with them to the experience.
The relative “success” of a museum depends on the degree of crea-
tivity and professionalism brought to the work of assembling the pieces
together, such that an invitation to engage is issued. The belief that a
museum can control all the stories it introduces is not only inaccurate,
it works counter to the fundamental strength of the museum as an
institution.

What Distinguishes the Meaning-Making Strategies of a Memorial

Museum Dedicated to State-Sponsored Crimes?
Memorial museums draw on a juridical analytical lens and established
museum professional practices; and in combining the two, transform
both into a distinct way of viewing and inviting others to view a history
of violence.
The memorial museum is juridical in how it approaches historical
events through the lens of narrowly defined historical period during
which violent events took place. It introduces stock characters of victim
and perpetrator, and presence of evidence of destruction, and invites its
visitors to pass moral judgment. A key distinction of the RTMMM is the
political character of its exhibition protagonist: a political movement.
In this, it breaks with juridical logic of innocent victims, and centralizes
focus on political activism.
In further distinction from other juridical forms, particularly prosecu-
tions or truth commissions, the memorial museum is designed to be per-
manent and voluntary, extending an open-ended invitation to the public.
It therefore focuses attention on how the past continues to mark the
present well beyond the timeline of a telescoped transitional moment. As
a permanent institution open to the public, the memorial museum high-
lights the fact that the audience for the past, and hence, for a political
transition, changes over time.
Memorial museums are also distinct from national history museums,
by focusing on the lives and ideas that were destroyed. While many
such institutions retain a quiet undercurrent of progress in the defeat
of perpetrators, this rationalization of the present is conveyed alongside
228  B. CONLEY

enormous loss. In this manner, such institutions do not address the

complexities of new political agendas, rather they focus attention on
­
what has been excluded on the path to the present moment. This limi-
tation defines their contribution. These differences are not just supple-
mentary, they are transformative—the memorial museum experience is
distinct from both the national history museum and juridical mechanisms
of prosecutions or truth commissions.

Who Is a Memorial Museum for?

The RTMMM became possible through the work of memory-keepers,
brought together in mourning, but with diverse interpretations of the
past, struggles with memories of violence, and perspectives on the pres-
ent. In the first instance, the memorial museum was for them in honor of
the loved ones they lost. Nonetheless, significant differences of opinion
made their mark on the final institutional form, precise shape, exhibition
narrative, and content of the RTMMM.
At the RTMMM, like many memorial museums, the tour is guided by
people who have themselves experienced the violence depicted. For sur-
vivors who work in a memorial museum, the experience can empower,
but it is also defined in relation to a traumatic past that re-structured
the possibilities for their lives. Some people gain an advantage, others
have their sense of agency eviscerated by the psychological, social, phys-
ical or financial losses entailed in mass violence. Traumatic memories do
not pause and ask for permission before altering the present: they inter-
rupt and shape the present. Thus, the experience of traumatic violence
does not result in a single “survivor profile” whereby participating in any
truth-telling exercise will necessarily be empowering or disempowering.
Instead, the character of the experience for the survivor-docent is idio-
syncratic, deeply personal, changes with time (not necessarily improving)
and can be improved through institutional intention.
As an institution open to and for the visiting public, a memorial
museum is also for complete strangers who enter its doors and embark
on a visit. At the RTMMM, the exhibition provides the script, and the
interactions between survivor-docent and visitor animate the scene.
While a memorial museum might be described as “for” these sets of
actors, neither survivor-docent nor visitor is a singular self-contained cat-
egory. It is perhaps more accurate to describe the Museum as a space
 6  CONCLUSION: ON MEMORY AND FUTURE TRANSITIONS  229

dedicated to creating the possibility for interactions between people

over the course of the tour. Through the perspectives of survivor-docents
and visitor comments at the RTMMM, the tour is revealed as deeply
unsettling and impactful, where learning occurs and emotional connec-
tion are forged, but where the outcome in terms of directives for today
are ambiguous. Visitors feel the disruptive power of the tour, and try to
re-inscribe what they have learned and the emotional tumult provoked
within their existing frameworks. The impact of the Museum reveals gaps
between frameworks and history: it demonstrates where the edges of the
present fail to explain or accommodate all of the past. In so doing, com-
munity is not finalized—for any particular agenda.

How Does a Memorial Museum Speak to Politics?

Two judgments on the socio-political affects of telling the story of his-
torical, state-sponsored violence in a memorial museum dominate anal-
ysis. In favor of the institutions, are arguments that they contribute to
peacebuilding and democratization by honoring past individual suffering,
creating a new common narrative and issuing a warning about the poten-
tial for abuse of power. Against memorial museums are arguments that
they solidify the tensions of the past, becoming markers of intransigent
grievance and transcribing political demands into righteous claims based
on victimhood. Both positions are deceptive: memory from the margins
does not obediently support political use-value, neither in support of
democratic state-building, nor for partisan advantage.
Memory of violent history cannot be deployed as a high-tech weapon
aimed toward a political goal, and leaving room for debate only about
whether the end result is a democratizing or fracturing impact. It can
be channeled—and many powerful actors have set their sites on doing
so—but it is never entirely subject to individual or collective will. In this
first instance, both the memorial landscape and political fields are already
structured by memory. There is no stepping outside of a context in
which the past is purified of politics, nor in which politics is purified of
the past. The past is always memorialized in politicized fashions, power-
ful actors mount statues and museums, some sites are transformed, while
others are abandoned. The politics of memory is simultaneously a poli-
tics of forgetting—and this work is woven through all narratives of social
meaning. It is already there and evolves over time.
230  B. CONLEY

Another reason to be suspicious about bifurcated analysis of the social

role of memory of violence is that there is no such thing as an abstract
category of “memory.” There are only specific memories of particular
pasts that play out in a distinct context. In the effort to move seamlessly
across examples, the stakes of privileging a certain memory discourse
over another are elided, both within national and international contexts.
Memory discourses need not be viewed as in competition with each other,
as Michael Rothberg argues in his concept of multidirectional memory,
but selecting a starting point is a crucial matter. This volume has argued
for the distinct insights that are possible by starting from the margins.

Memory from the Margins

Memory in this study is a term that describes the convergence of three
forces: (a) a public project (in the sense of being available to the public),
that (b) references a violent past, with (c) the aim of producing a new
community, responsive to ethical claims to do something in the present.
Several critical points follow from this definition. First, memory marks a
particular point of overlap between three factors, none of which can be
reduced to the others. Each of memory’s constituent three factors pulls
in different directions. The point of convergence is not a stabilized loca-
tion. This renders analysis of the meaning of memory practices particu-
larly vulnerable to vacillations over time.
Second, as noted above, there is space for agency in constructing
meaning at the intersection of memory’s component parts, but it is not
unlimited. Making meaning from the past is always framed by multiple
factors, among them are the techniques, limits, and possibilities of any
given mode of presenting the past. In the context of a museum, the pro-
cess of creating narrative through assemblage and the performance of
the tour determine how history and meaning are conveyed. Further, the
character of the past events, the key actors, forms of violence, and rela-
tionships destroyed and produced through violence, delimit what can
be done through a memory project. Finally, the demands of the present
alter what can be asked of the past. The way in which certain parts of the
past are considered “actionable” today, is refracted through various con-
temporary lenses for making meaning.
Thus, the memory of violence is an unfaithful factor in the pursuit
of any political agenda. Memory’s unruly character is particularly pro-
nounced when memory moves from the margins, revealing disjunctions
 6  CONCLUSION: ON MEMORY AND FUTURE TRANSITIONS  231

between the past and a contemporary call to ethics. The sense of move-
ment captured in the position of “from” the margins is important; as a
memory discourse becomes dominant, its disruptive capacity is dimin-
ished (although I would argue never to the point of disappearing).
Further, margins are relative and nested: thus, one must always posi-
tion analysis in reference to multiple margins.

Ethiopia on the Margins of Transitional Justice

Ethiopia is on the margins of transitional justice discourse. During its
initial transition in 1991, the lessons it might offer were at odds with
the assumptions about the then-developing transitional justice paradigm.
However, over time, insights from the Ethiopian example appear more
salient, even if they do not necessarily translate into easily applied policy
recommendations. Ethiopian history is in many ways an anomaly in the
African context; never having been colonized, its leaders across multiple
transitions have benefitted from inheriting a state, including a bureau-
cracy that evolved in its national context over time. The rebels who won
the war in 1991, had an intellectual basis for the processes and programs
of governance, and a deep commitment to development. Identifying
poverty as the country’s foremost challenge, they implemented policies
designed to reduce poverty and prioritize economic growth. Political
opponents today can point to serious shortcomings and uneven enjoy-
ment of the benefits of economic development. The transition of 1991
was as democratically incomplete, as it was a radical new departure.
The Ethiopian case would suggest that transitional justice mechanisms
require both state structures and political ideology built on analysis of
distinctly national needs. Even then, stability, development, and politi-
cal rights follow different paths, and require additional transitions. These
lessons for transitional justice may not be of much value to international
policymakers, who want to know what programs to support in a country
in order to produce the desired outcome of somewhat stable, democratic
states. It may not be helpful to argue that stability and democracy cannot
be implemented through discrete policy mechanisms, premised on elite
pacts and telescoped into the passage of several years time. Nonetheless,
this appears to be part of the Ethiopian example.
Difficult as it might be to translate such insights into policy rec-
ommendations, they are not entirely at odds with efforts to reform
transitional justice practices at the conceptual level. For instance,
232  B. CONLEY

Makua Mutua argues that transitional justice has become a “cottage

industry” of “dogmatic universality” and what is needed is “an agenda
that assumes a more holistic approach to repairing human relationships
in postconflict and especially postcolonial settings” (2015, 5). Paul
Gready and Simon Robins have criticized the dominant transitional
justice model for how it emphasized institutions over “contextualized
engagement with the welfare of the people” (2014, 341). They posit the
need for transformative justice: “transformative change that emphasizes
local agency and resources, the prioritization of process rather than per-
ceived outcome and the challenging of unequal and intersecting power
relationships and structures of exclusion at both the local and the global
level” (Gready and Robins 2014, 340). Their call to action presents a tall
order: shifting away from international top-down policies in conversation
with state-level actors, toward communities and everyday concerns.
The Ethiopian example suggests that the key question is whether a
state is capable enough to continually transition over a long duration
in response to new or unmet claims made by its own people. This may
require a theory of democracy, rather than one of transitions.

Memorials and Museums on the Margins of Transitional Justice

Mechanisms
Memorials and museums exist on the margins of transitional jus-
tice mechanisms in large part because their impact is difficult to quan-
tify (Hamber et al. 2010). What, precisely, do they accomplish? The
RTMMM suggests that the primary contribution of a memorial museum
may reside not in a role as handmaiden to a particular political outcome,
but in modeling a movement of disruption of socio-political status quo.
By refusing to abide by presumptions about which parts of history mat-
ter in the current power alignments, in displaying parts of history that
were lost along the way, and institutionalizing the past as a permanent
reminder, memorial museums unsettle the present. However, this role
cannot be a priori described in a normative fashion—it does not promise
a better, more just or alternate path than that which presides.
Memorial museums offer the simple interjection that the present is
composed of both that which is and that which was destroyed. In this
insight, no less powerful for its simplicity, memorial museums demand
of its visitors and thus of society, the capacity to recognize alternate
views of the present. Memorial museums and other cultural investments
 6  CONCLUSION: ON MEMORY AND FUTURE TRANSITIONS  233

intent on pushing the limits of how the present is understood are

important to the precise degree that they are unrelated to a particular
political agenda.

The Red Terror on the Margins of Ethiopian History

The Red Terror is the story of an activist movement from the early
days of the 1974 Revolution against the Imperial regime when the mil-
itary regime rose to power. The “success” of the Terror, measured in
terms of the military regime’s thoroughness of brutality, means that
the legacy of this history does not belong to any of the country’s con-
temporary organized political actors: neither the EPRDF, nor any of
the organized opposition, including the EPRP, whose membership suf-
fered terribly during the violence. The history has no easily locatable
status in today’s political turmoil. Some might argue that the Museum
emerged out of the EPRDFs justification for their rule and hence, is
tied to their political legacy. But the Red Terror is not the story of
their rise to power, its history concerns political activism of a different
character. More importantly, the RTMMM tells a story of the extremes
of brutality that a state can achieve in order to silence alternate views.
In this narrative, the RTMMM makes its signature contribution: rec-
ognizing the losses from the past re-opens a sense of indeterminism for
the future; this can fuel instability, but it is also the grounds of possi-
bility for yet another transition.

Democracy from the Margins

To explore the ways in which memory might serve a democratic transi-
tion, is to bear witness to how the complications of memory are entan-
gled with the complications of democracy. Democracy can stand in for
any number of ideas: a way of legitimizing political practices in the name
of the people, a government predicated on a representational model,
a set of political practices determined by competition among organ-
ized parties, a society defined by equality before the law, governmental
institutions that are transparent and accountable. The emphasis placed
on any one of these—philosophy of governance, or an organizational,
political, social, or institutional model—will alter how one interprets
the relevance of memorialization endeavors to a particular outcome.
An approach from the margins directs our attention to how memorial
234  B. CONLEY

museums’ focus on stories of violent exclusion, raises questions about the

nature of political community. It suggests that the desire to finalize the
terms of political community is impossible. In this, it echoes with a view
of democracy theorized by Jacques Rancière as a performance from the
margins that continually aims to expand and contest the limits of what
constitutes the public sphere.

On Democracy and Marginal Memory

Rancière’s proposes that democracy is premised on a radical equality
that enables re-definition of the political community. Democratic poli-
tics in his sense is the process through which those who are excluded
from power assert claims of equality to those entitled to exercise power.
Democracy is thereby foremost characterized by how those who do not
have the entitlement to power or to influence the modes of governance
nonetheless demand that right. It is a movement from the margins,
against the grain and in contrast to the purported stability or natural
state of the existing construction of power and authority.
Thinking democracy in this manner requires analysis of both those
who govern and those would be governed. Historically, Rancière argues,
there have been two great arguments for who is entitled to govern. One
is human or divine kinship, a “superiority of birth”; and the other is the
superiority of “productive and reproductive activities, that is, the power
of wealth” (2006, 46). Both instances create oligarchies: the limited
field of those who govern. He might have added the rights of the con-
queror or specialist in violence, augmenting his framework. Democracy
is a principle premised on upturning those legitimations. Rancière locates
democracy not in constitutional forms or institutional practices, but in a
movement of making claims by those who “have no more title for gov-
erning than they have for being governed” by those who are “entitled”
to govern (Rancière 46). His argument turns the question of legitimacy
on its head: democracy is not a system legitimated in reference to the
people, the law, or delivery of services (the technocratic system), but a
way of seeing and claiming rights where none previously existed. It is, in
this sense, unfounded, disruptive, and indeed unsettling.
At the heart of his formulation is a question of the community that
legitimates governance. Rancière argues that there is no final closing off
of the terms of the community upon which democratic processes can be
 6  CONCLUSION: ON MEMORY AND FUTURE TRANSITIONS  235

built: no definition of the people or mode of representing the people

that finalizes the concept of what is possible. Democratic politics is not
about establishing the correct origin story; the origin, he argues, is a post
hoc discovery, constructed in order to legitimate the present, not preced-
ing it (2006, 51). Societies are always organized as oligarchies, the gov-
ernment is necessarily government by the few over the many. A corollary
of this analysis is that government as oligarchy always seeks to “shrink
the public sphere, making it into its [government’s] own private affair
and, in so doing, relegating the inventions and sites of intervention of
non-State actors to the private realm” (2006, 55). Democratic politics
is the process through which those who do not govern issue demands
for this space to be enlarged. He rejects defining democracy through
both the discourse of universalizable benchmarks (notably elections), and
identitarian politics, changing the identity of those who rules, both of
which seek to “correct” the terms of political community and practice.
Rancière describes the process of asserting claims in terms of an
opposition between the promised universality of concepts of citizen and
human, and their particular instantiations. Rights are a performance of
claiming new rights that are inserted into the gaps between universal
promises and political actuality. In Rancière’s terms, democracy is move-
ment: “the action of subjects who, by working the interval between
identities, reconfigure the disruptions of public and the private, the uni-
versal and the particular” (2006, 61–62). It is a process of perpetual
action, of shifting between margins as dominant narratives reclaim new
ground and new demands are put forward.
Democracy, in short, is a way of thinking about politics that resists
imagining that the work is finished. One must imagine democratic poli-
tics then, not as tied to identities that are stabilized, regardless as nation
or citizen or party, but in a movement “that ceaselessly displaces the lim-
its of the public and the private, of the political and the social” (Rancière
2006, 62). As such, it cannot be implemented by others, in the name
of the oppressed or the rightful owners of a political sphere; it is always
claimed and reclaimed by those who have no entitlement, and there-
fore every right to issue claims. In this sense, too, democracy cannot be
simplified to constitutional or institutional formulae, which are put for-
ward by those who govern, even if in the name of the “people,” however
defined. Democracy is a movement of disruption through the assertion
of essentially unfounded claims; the degree to which a society or political
236  B. CONLEY

system might be described as democratic can be assessed by the diversity

of positions from which claims can be made and the capability for claims
to contest the limits of the public sphere.
There is a perhaps surprising affinity between the movement he
describes in democracy, and memory from the margins. Both function
as disruption of the idea of a finalized democratic community; neither
reconsolidates into an established political agenda.

Memory Unsettles
Understanding the potential contributions of a memorial museum to
a political transition, especially a memorial museum from the margins,
requires that one abandon the idea that memories of mass violence—that
is, the systematic destruction and brutalization of individuals who com-
pose a significant part of society—can be tamed, cured, or easily man-
aged. One must likewise eschew the facile view of democracy as a system
that behaves according to its Utopian formulaic promises—a safe, stable
way of organizing state and society. Democracy is not the sum of proce-
dures: elections, institution-building, and rule of law. Democracy is not
about arrival at some end point, in which violence of the past is relegated
to the museum. It is, as Rancière has argued, the revelation that “the
government of societies cannot but rest in the last resort on its contin-
gency” (2006, 47).
Memory from the margins likewise functions as a challenge to the idea
of settled political community; it does so in terms defined by the experi-
ence of past violence. Marginal memory disrupts and interrupts, provid-
ing testimony that the present is constructed through loss just as much
as triumph. These processes are characterized simultaneously by inten-
tions and by what exceeds intentions. The tension that arises as a result
reveals disjunctions between the past and a call to community that mem-
ory cannot sustain nor fully justify. Thus, the end result is a revelation of
the constructed character of present: formed through violence and loss,
just as much as triumph and ideology. The present is not the sum result
of all that was planned; it is the contingency of what came to pass. When
the present is recognized as contingent, it also opens to realization that
claims can be made that have no “right” to be made in the present sys-
tem, that the future is likewise open and undetermined. But there is no
guarantee that this inherent indeterminacy will be resolved in line with
any particular political agenda.
 6  CONCLUSION: ON MEMORY AND FUTURE TRANSITIONS  237

A Lesson from the Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum

Is now the time for a new momentous Ethiopian transition—one replete
with new memorial museum structures? That the government put for-
ward the idea of transforming Ma’ekelawi prison into a museum should
be taken as a sign of hope. That the new leadership is undertaking
political reform is likewise an optimistic indicator. Whether the reforms
will settle into a new system founded on peaceful politics—what the
RTMMM founders described as “tolerance politics”—will depend on
the character of public debate that the country is willing to engage in;
not on the actions of a single leader nor on replacing one group with
another. If change is solely defined in terms of getting rid of the old,
then new limits of “democratic” politics will be quickly redrawn. The key
factor will be if a different kind of discussion starts to unfold, one that
remains open to multiple visions of both the past and future.
The Ma’ekelawi prison museum might yet make a contribution in
this mix. Allowing visitors to freely access a place that across successive
regimes has epitomized control, surveillance, coercion and lack of trans-
parency would be a positive disruption. If it is possible for the govern-
ment to gather the sense of purpose and commitment to transform itself
into a more democratic posture—a rare evolution to occur without some
form of extreme external pressure—then such a museum could become a
site for making meaning into the future. This will be particularly true if it
is met by a public willing to visit and allow multiple pasts to influence the
present.
Transforming a prison structure to fit a new purpose is fundamentally
easier than transforming how a state and society function, but it is not a
bad place to start. The RTMMM presents a powerful argument from the
margins, that a museum’s place is precisely as an ambiguous instigation
to recognize the multiple histories that produced the present and define
the possibility for a future that is open to new claims.

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 Index

A Brett, S., 30, 118

Abbink, Jan, 124
Abebe-Jirut, Hirut, 3, 19, 42, 169
Addis Standard, 222, 223
Amnesty International (AI), 77
Aneme, Girmachew Alemu, 119, 120
Arnold-de Simine, Silke, 42, 171, 172
Arthur, Paige, 15, 116
Assmann, Aleida, 33
Association of Red Terror Survivors,
Families, and Friends, 122, 139
B Cohen, Stanley, 25
Balsvik, Randi Rønning, 60, 62
Barsalou, Judy, 30, 118
Baxter, Victoria, 30, 118
Baye, Zelalem Teshome, 219
BBC News, 218
Bekele, Menberu, 180, 183, 195
Benjamin, Walter, 37, 38, 209
Bennett, Tony, 109, 110, 135, 136
Beristain, Carlos Martín, 186
Bickford, Louis, 30, 31, 117, 118
Blunt, Elizabeth, 13
Brouneus, Karen, 185
Brown, Kris, 31, 117, 135
Brown, Wendy, 115, 116, 193
Buckley-Zistel, Susanne, 28, 158, 193
Byrne, Catherine C., 185
C
Campbell, Ian, 98
Caruth, Cathy, 175, 176, 208
Cilliers, Jacubus, 186
Clapham, Christopher, 220
Coliver, Sandra, 12
Conley, Bridget, 14, 47
Conrad, Sebastien, 33
Craps, Stefan, 175
Cronin-Furman, Kate, 17
D
Dale, Penny, 61
David, Roman, 185
Davison, William, 219

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 241
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2019
B. Conley, Memory from the Margins, Memory Politics and Transitional
Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13495-2
242  Index
Debelie, Eshetu, 50, 80, 180, 182, 195
Della Porta, Donatella, 52
de Waal, Alex, 8, 14, 59, 60, 65, 70,
77, 87–89, 95, 119, 220
Donham, Donald, 1, 54, 174
Dube, Oeindrile, 186
Duclos-Orsello, Elizabeth, 174
E I
Edkins, Jenny, 207–209
Emanuel, Gedion Wolde, 123, 124,
142, 146, 148, 149
European Union Agency for
Fundamental Rights (FRA), 197
F
Fassin, Didier, 175
Foucault, Michel, 38, 75, 115
Fox, Raina Elise, 191, 192
Freysembet, 169, 179, 195, 210
G
Gebrehiwot, Mulugeta Berhe, 26, 89,
95, 119
Gebre-Medhin, Befekadu, 150, 180,
195, 198
Gessesse, Tadesse, 146
Giorghis, Fasil, 133, 139, 140, 142,
146, 147, 151–153, 161
Gready, Paul, 16, 18, 31, 41, 116,
121, 122, 232
Guevara, Che, 49
H Lata, Leenco, 106
Haile, Muluneh, 180, 182, 195
Halbwachs, Maurice, 21
Halliday, Fred, 57
Hamber, Brandon, 31, 118, 232
Hasanović, Hasan, 186–188
Hirsch, Marianne, 31, 115, 171
Hobsbawm, Eric, 29
Human Rights Watch, 88, 218,
219
Huyssen, Andreas, 32–34, 108
Ibreck, Rachel, 8, 31
Internal Displacement Monitoring
Centre (IDMC), 223
International Committee of Memorial
Museums in Remembrance of
the Victims of Public Crimes
(ICMEMO), 113
J
Jarzombek, Mark, 152
Jaspers, James, 52
Jeffrey, James, 219
K
Kansteiner, Wulf, 175
Kanyangara, Patrick, 185, 186
Kebede, Messay, 55, 56, 58, 64, 65,
67, 71, 76, 99
Kim, Hunjoon, 17
King, Kimi L., 17
L
Landsberg, Alison, 171
Laplante, Lisa J., 186
Lefort, Rene, 119
Levy, Daniel, 30, 34
Lykes, M. Brinton, 186

M Pérez-Armiñan, Maria Luisa Cabrera,
Marsh, Jenni, 222
Martin-Beristain, Carlos, 185
McConnachie, Kirsten, 115, 116, 174
McEvoy, Kieran, 115, 116, 174
Meernik, James, 17
Mendeloff, David, 192
Mengistu, Haile Mariam, 3, 8, 9, 11,
19, 20, 23–25, 66, 71, 72, 76,
77, 79–81, 86–88, 90, 91, 98, 99,
122, 140, 141, 151, 157–159,
195, 197, 202, 219, 221, 222
Meseret, Elias, 222
Miethe, Terance D., 55
Millar, Gearoid, 185
Molyneux, Maxine, 57
Mutua, Makau, 18, 232
N Rothberg, Michael, 31, 34, 42, 175,
Nahum, Fasil, 56
Naidu, Ereshnee, 28, 30, 31, 42, 118,
232
Negewo, Kelbessa, 5, 10
Nichols, Angela, 17
Nora, Pierre, 29, 33
Nuhanović, Hasan, 186–188, 210, 211
O Selassie, Haile, 3, 8, 9, 56–58, 61, 198
Olsen, Tricia D., 17
Ottaway, Marina, 63, 90
P Shaw, Rosalind, 185
Paez, Dario, 185
Palmary, I., 118
Park, Rebekah, 193, 194
Parmelee, Jennifer, 119
Pausewang, Siegfried, 59
Payne, Leigh A., 17
Index   243
186
Philippot, Pierre, 186
R
Rancière, Jacques, 234–236
Rechtman, Richard, 175
Reiter, Andrew G., 17
Renshaw, Leyla, 93
Rice, Andrew, 10, 11, 13
Rieff, David, 29, 135
Rime, Bernard, 185, 186
Rios, M., 30, 118
Robinson, Cynthia, 177
Robinson, Marvin, 189, 190
Robins, Simon, 16, 18, 31, 41, 116,
121, 122, 232
Rosenblatt, Adam, 92, 94
230
Ryle, John, 121
S
Sandell, Richard, 138
Scarry, Elaine, 7
Schaefer, Charles, 119, 120
Schafer, Stefanie, 28
Sembet, Gebrewold, 139, 143, 145,
150
Ševčenko, Liz, 30, 31, 42, 118, 192,
232
Shewarega Yigletu, Kurabachew, 51
Siddiqi, Bailal, 186
Sikkink, Kathryn, 17
Skopoal, Theda, 54
Smith, Peter Scharff, 189
Snzaider, Natan, 30, 34
244  Index
Sodaro, Amy, 30, 31, 42, 117, 118,
156, 157
Sontag, Susan, 160, 172
Stewart, Brandon, 17
T Wagner, Sarah, 30
Tareke, Gebru, 54, 55, 58–60, 63,
65–68, 77, 78
Tefera, Melaku, 147
Teffera, Hiwot, 9, 39, 40, 53, 55, 56,
60, 62, 63, 66, 68, 69, 73, 75,
78, 79
Tewelde, Naizgi Kidane, 148, 154,
161
Theidon, Kimberly, 186
Tilly, Charles, 54
Toggia, Pietro, 63, 70, 72, 73, 76, 77
Tola, Babile, 57, 63, 64, 68, 69,
71–74, 77, 82, 92
Tronvoll, Kjetil, 119, 120
Tsige, Ayene “Nunu”, 91–93, 123,
124, 127, 141–143, 146–150
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, 36, 37, 53
Turse, Nick, 13
U
United Nations General Assembly, 28
V Zenawi, Meles, 95, 96, 102, 119, 218
van der Kolk, Bessel, 192
Vaughan, Sarah, 27, 128
Venger, Olesya, 55
Verdery, Katherine, 29
Viebach, Julia, 190, 191
W
Walklate, Sandra, 211
Whigham, Kerry, 31
Wiebelhaus-Brahm, Eric, 17
Wiebel, Jacob, 67, 71–73, 76–78, 95
Williams, Paul, 42, 113, 137, 157,
161, 163
Winter, Jay, 33, 110, 111
Wolde, Mekonnen, 149, 150
Woodroofe, Louise, 76
World Bank, 111, 220
Wube, Seifu Eshete, 123, 124, 142,
146, 148, 149
Wuerth, Ingrid, 18
Y
Young, James E., 31
Yusef, Helawe, 143, 148
Yzerbyt, Vincent, 186
Z
Zalut, Lauren, 189, 190
Zegeye, Abebe, 59
Zewde, Bahru, 51, 54, 57, 58, 60–64,
70–73, 77, 78, 87