Following the failed December 1960 coup d'état led by Columbia U-grad Girmame Neway and his brother Mengistu, His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I is said to have shuddered at the very thought of returning to his blood-drenched palace at Sidist Kilo.
The carnage at Genete Leul Palace took place in the Green Salon, two floors below the monarch's bedroom. In that conference room—named after its lustrous olive-green drapery, the Emperor lost his closest and most trusted allies. The coup that began with lofty ideals and promises of a new age in Ethiopia had taken a nasty turn when the two brothers made a fatal decision to engage in a murderous rampage that set Ethiopia toward the now familiar path of extra-judicial killings of political opponents.
Before HIM moved out of Genete Leul in1961 where he had lived since 1932, he donated the palace and its grounds to HSU (now AAU). Today, the university president and his staff occupy the first floor of Genete Leul while the rest of the palace has been converted into a museum, which also houses the Institute of Ethiopian Studies. It is unfortunate the G
reen Salon is not part of the museum--it just sits there, a stone's throw from where the university president's assistants mill aimlessly about, and hidden from the eyes of visitors who leave the former palace without spending a second in the room where so many who played significant roles in writing Ethiopia's modern history lost their lives.
reen Salon is not part of the museum--it just sits there, a stone's throw from where the university president's assistants mill aimlessly about, and hidden from the eyes of visitors who leave the former palace without spending a second in the room where so many who played significant roles in writing Ethiopia's modern history lost their lives.
The Jubilee Palace was completed in 1955 to commemorate HIM's jubilee anniversary of his coronation. Most of us have seen glimpses of the palace through tall eucalyptus trees on our way down Menelik Avenue. As your car hurls down the steep decline the splendor of the palace and the formidable grounds on which it sits take a backseat in anticipation of that hump that allows every Addis resident the opportunity to experience, if only for a second, what it feels like to be on a ferenj rollercoaster. Alas, it is common to see grown men gunning their engines to get maximum thrill from a gut-wrenching leap, only to immediately hit their brakes in sheer terror with the possibility they may send their car careening over the bridge at the bottom of the hill.
Despite the various rulers that have entered the gates of the Jubilee as leaders of Ethiopia since 1974—Aman Andom, Teferi Benti, Mengistu Hailemariam, Girma Woldeyes, and Meles Zenawi—one glance at the Jubilee today, and you associate it with the Conquering Lion of Judah. And it is under the gigantic portico of the palace that the Emperor entered the Volkswagen and was driven to his dethronement and subsequent death by strangulation. On that day, Ethiopia's history began to unravel, and soon, Ethiopians turned into violent killers.
On its face, the EPRDF's announcement would build "a 1 million dollar mausoleum" at Meskel Square to honor Ethiopian victims of genocide is commendable. But its timing reeks of a self-serving act of deflective culpability. I say this with a heavy heart: it bleeds for the families of the victims of the Derg—my own included—but two wrongs can never make a right and at some point, the EPRDF must realize that the generation of kids that perished in the 1970s would have suffered the same fate under its rule. Most of the victims of the Red Terror were kids—mostly boys who knew little of governance, representative democracy, constitutionalism, or international politics, but knew one thing when they saw and experienced it: tyranny. For demanding the right to fairly elect their leaders, Ethiopian kids have been mowed down by their own governments since the mid-1970s. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Only those governments whose hands are clean of the blood of their people have the right to build edifices that honor victims of genocide. The EPRDF cannot claim that right and at this point it should instead use the mausoleum funds to compensate the victims of the June and November 2005 killings as well as the thousands of Ethiopians who have been unjustly arrested and detained for disagreeing with electoral fraud. This author is willing to wait a bit longer for a Red Terror Memorial.
But that memorial has already been built. The Emperor's dethronement was a watershed moment in modern Ethiopian history. On September 11, 1974, when HIM was led out of his palace, Ethiopia changed forever. The significance of that moment had dire consequences for millions of Ethiopians and perhaps it is time to give that time, place, and moment, the appropriate historical pause it deserves. We should never forget the Emperor was a victim of genocide, too.
Here's one suggestion: The Jubilee Palace where the big man now resides belongs to the Emperor. It belongs to HIM as Versailles does to Louis XIV. In its marble halls echo the voices of the descendants of a long and ancient line of Ethiopian monarchs (the Solomonic, if you believe). But most important, it belongs to the people of Ethiopia. The Jubilee must therefore become (1) a museum of an ancient Ethiopian monarchical past now gone; (2) a memorial for all those who have died in the name of Ethiopia—in foreign wars (against Great Britain, Italy, Somalia, and Eritrea) and in the name of democracy (while protesting tyranny). I want every Ethiopian mother who lost a son or a daughter in the name of that country, wearing her tattered clothes, adorned in her butter-soaked hairdo, smelling of the rustic aromas of Ethiopian life, to remember her child while standing on an engraving of her child's name on the floors of the pristine palace.
As every high school kid in the U.S. gets to visit Washington, D.C. its memorials, national archive, and its constitution, every Ethiopian child should enter the Jubilee Palace and walk through its halls and hollow grounds to remind herself of what it took to be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. I dream to live long enough to see that day.
To my brother M--hoping to see your name engraved. And to the doc. Also, to all the kids who perished then and now.
