‘Torture Museum’ a Testament to Horrors at Ethiopian Political Prison

Quietly, in sorrow and anguish, the tour group listened to a former inmate relate the horrors of what had been one of Ethiopia’s most notorious prisons.

As the tale of torture, brutality and suffering was spun out, tears welled up in some eyes and involuntary gasps escaped the 22 Eritrean men, women and children.

Suddenly, a young woman pulled her shawl across her mouth and bolted from the room, overcome with nausea. The guide did not pause in his narration.

It has happened before.

“Many who come here lost loved ones in this place,” the guide, Ghirmay Meherteab, 44, explained later. “For them, the experience is especially painful.”

Mariam Ginbi Prison is a former maternity hospital converted 13 years ago into a detention center for political prisoners by the government of President Mengistu Haile Mariam, who was driven into exile in May, 1991.

The new provisional government of Eritrea turned the prison into what is popularly known as “the torture museum,” a memorial to a cruel past that is dedicated to a better future.

In a small, barren room that served as the prison clinic, Ghirmay pointed to a metal trapdoor that opens to reveal a dark cell dug into the raw earth. It was there, he said, that clinic attendants temporarily disposed of patients who had died or were thought to be dying.

“After you were thrown in, if you revived, you would find yourself with cadavers, with no light, no air, the stench of rotting flesh,” Ghirmay explained. “If you still lived after a week or so, they would bring you out. But usually, if you went in alive, you came out dead.”

Tortures that brought patients to the clinic included being forced to dance on broken glass and being trussed upside down on a horizontal metal bar, then beaten on the soles of the feet with ropes and metal bars.

No records were kept of the people held at Mariam Ginbi or how many died. Ghirmay estimated 1,600 men and women were held at any one time and 600 to 700 died or were executed each year.

Ghirmay, a businessman who belonged to a rebel cell in Asmara, was held for two years and four months. His family bribed prison officials to release him three months before Mengistu fell.

He is one of eight former prisoners who have led more than 100,000 Eritreans through the prison since it reopened as a museum six months ago.

“I think it is important that we do this so our people will learn and know and remember,” Ghirmay said. “It is something we should never forget and never let happen again.”