TYRANTS tend to be oddly punctilious about recording their atrocities. But even by the standards of his peers, Mengistu Haile Mariam, Ethiopia’s former dictator, was an incorrigible archivist. The security services of his regime, which took power in 1974, learned the habits of bureaucratic procedure from true masters, the East Germans, who sent Stasi agents to Ethiopia as consultants. When Mr Mengistu fell and fled in 1991, he left behind thousands of pages of memoranda, death warrants and even the minutes of a meeting in 1975 when his ruling committee, known as the Derg, voted to murder the imprisoned emperor, Haile Selassie.
These files form the basis for thousands of criminal cases brought by an Ethiopian special prosecutor since Mr Mengistu fell. The charge sheet and evidence for his trial in absentia for genocide run to some 8,000 pages. Though he remains a sheltered guest of Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, a court sentenced him this year to life in prison, so ending the special prosecutor’s work. But what will happen to all that fragile and incriminating paper?
A woman named Hirut Abebe-Jiri has made it her mission to see that the historical record is preserved. Herself imprisoned and tortured during a purge known as the “Red Terror”, Ms Hirut has set up an organisation to archive, translate and index the Derg’s files, and make them available on the internet through a partnership with the University of North Dakota in the United States. A Canadian resident, she recently went back to Addis Ababa, which she fled as a refugee, and signed an agreement with the government that calls for the transfer of the documents into the hands of her Ethiopian Red Terror Documentation and Research Centre. Her model is Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Programme, which documents Khmer Rouge atrocities in the 1970s.
Despite many trials over the years, many Ethiopians still do not know what happened to family members who disappeared during the Red Terror. Ms Hirut hopes that her archive and its website will let Ethiopians—including those in the diaspora—learn the truth.
She knows the power of written words: they brought justice in her own case. During the Red Terror, Ms Hirut, then 17, was imprisoned and beaten up. Years later, she discovered that the man who had ordered her torture, a notorious Derg functionary called Kelbessa Negewo, had emigrated to the United States and was working as a bellhop at a hotel in Atlanta, Georgia. Along with two other former victims, she sued him in an American court. The most powerful evidence against him was his own memos to his superiors, in which he boasted about his “struggle to eliminate the anti-revolutionaries”. Last year, after more than a decade of legal battles, he was deported back to Ethiopia. He is now serving a life sentence for murder.