Ethiopia: Dealing With Past Human Rights Abuses in Ethiopia: Building the Bridge Between Justice and Peace

opinion

"Let us stand together to say: Never again shall a few people oppress us as a nation. Never again shall the beautiful smiling Coast experience a tyranny of the minority against the majority," President Adama Barrow on Launching Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Gambia on October 15, 2018

"Never, Ever again!" reads one message under a statute of grieving mothers at the entrance of "Red Terror" Martyrs' Memorial Museum in Addis Abeba, Ethiopia. The museum was built to remember a generation who were killed because of their political views and affiliations in the 1960s and 1970s in Ethiopia. In the museum there are several collections of items in display includes victim's clothes, publications, long list of victims' photos and names, and most disturbingly, skulls and bones collected from mass graves, photos of corpses, graphic representation and depictions of prisons and underground torture places. On the other side of the museum there is a list of convicted criminals and their sentences. The tour in the museum is one of the moments in life where one stops, thinks and reflects on what exactly happened in the past in Ethiopia and on which side of history one is remembered. But there is also a question one is hardly able to escape after a visit to this museum: what, if anything, have we, as a country, ever learnt from our past experience?

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