Big Brother is watching you in communist East Berlin

 Museum offers fascinating details of methods of the Stasi  

It sounds like something straight out of a sinister novel or a spy film: a workplace where the state security is keeping tabs on everyone, where malign rumors are spread by those up above, and where anyone is in danger of being singled out for punishment.

Yet this is exactly the situation many employees faced when the Ministry for State Security (MfS) or Stasi was active in the former East Germany.

In a world of paranoia and mistrust, workers were considered a possible danger to the communist regime, especially after a workers’ uprising in 1953.

Fascinating details like these are described at a small state museum in Berlin titled Stasi: The Exhibition on the GDR Secret Police. Free to the public, the permanent exhibition in the former communist part of the city details methods, from the bizarre to the brutal, employed by the authorities to keep tabs on their own people.

It was said that the Stasi placed its own officials into companies and reported back to headquarters on activities.

“The MfS tried to sound out the workers’moods, monitor work discipline and find scapegoats when factories failed to achieve production targets,” one signboard at the museum notes

“The MfS would spy on anyone at work suspected of making comments that were critical of the regime. It also selectively spread misinformation to isolate ‘hostile negative elements’ from their colleagues.”

The tactic of isolating potentially threatening individuals by ruining their reputations was said to have become more widely used from the 1970s onwards as an alternative to the violence and arrests employed earlier. It was all about stifling dissent and freedom of thought.

“Friendships were destroyed and professional careers ruined without the victims even realizing why,” a notice says.

Many of these methods were employed well beyond the workplace.

Residents of East Germany, which lasted from 1949 to 1990, could not even escape Big Brother during their holidays.

Holidays were organized by the government, and citizens were largely restricted to travelling domestically or to other Eastern bloc countries.

Yet there were still concerns, the museum notes, that East Germans would have contact with Westerners and could possibly pick up dangerous ideas from them.

“For this reason the MfS ensured that all tourist traffic was monitored and kept under surveillance by the secret police,” a notice says.

Travel agencies were infiltrated with “officers on special assignments,” while tour guides acted as informants. Fellow state security officials helped keep tabs on travel groups visiting the other Eastern Bloc countries.

The Stasi also kept a close watch on sportsmen and women and was desperate to stop them from escaping to the West. As a deterrent, it would continue to “persecute” those competitors who sought asylum overseas. Security officials also worked to ensure that evidence of doping was not unearthed by the relevant sports authorities.

It seemed as though there was no area of life that was left alone by the MfS, with the arts another field that was closely monitored.

According to the museum, there were plenty of informants in the underground arts scenes, and some spheres of the arts world, among them rock bands, self-publishing and free-artist groups, were kept under particularly close watch.

The museum is run by the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic and is located at Zimmerstraße 90, 10117 Berlin.

The Stasi museum is not the only offbeat exhibition in the German capital. Just a short walk away is the Museum Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, which takes its name from the former border crossing and details the history of the Berlin Wall as well as discussing contemporary human rights and democracy issues.

Exhibits range from a video of the former American President Ronald Reagan giving his celebrated “Tear Down This Wall” speech in front of the Brandbenburg Gate to a Volkswagen Beetle adapted so that a person could fit into a concealed space and be smuggled into West Berlin.

Read more: http://blogs.praguepost.com/travel2/38104-big-brother-is-watching-you-in-communist-east-berlin#ixzz2y6pNpKGd 

Ethiopia: “Never, Ever Again” Memorial Held to Commemorate Red Terror Era

Source: Ezega
By Seble Teweldebirhan



Addis Ababa, May 4, 2011 (Ezega.com) – The Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum organized a 5-Day Event during April 26-30 named “Never, Ever Again” to commemorate victims of the Red Terror (Key Shiber).

The museum started the memorial celebration by dedicating the first day, Tuesday, for children. Children were given a tour in the museum with an explanation of the Red Terror and what happend at the time. The second day was titled “No Women No Cry”. Women from different walks of life shared their experiences and survival stories during and after the red terror.

Thursday was a symposium titled “Then and now: similarities and differences in grassroots revolution”. Different speakers who had been through revolutions in the past shared their experiences, and the stories of Red Terror were told by those who had experienced it first hand.

What went wrong at the time and what was the lesson from that experience were the issues the symposium tried to address. On Friday and Saturday the Museum had a musical tribute to the martyrs, honoring family and friends. “Tezta” an all day contemporary fine art exhibition and films that memorize Red Terror were also parts of the five-day event.

The Museum was established in March 2010 by the ‘Red Terror Martyrs’ Families and Friends Association. It permanently exhibits pictures, materials, documents and the remains of the victims that tell a story that is probably still in the memory of the present generation. The display begins from the time when students revolt against the Hailesellasie rule and shows how this revolution was stolen from the students by the military.

Pictures at the musim demonstrate the 17 years of brutal rule of the Derg and its leader Mengistu Hailemeriam. From the time the Emperor was detained by the military administration up to the time the regime ordered the killing of the 60 high officials and families of the Emperor is displayed and supported by photos and documents signed by Mengistu Hailemariam himself and his closest officials.

Some of the pictures of the victims of the red terror and the remaining of their bodies are on display permanently at the museum.

Red Terror (Key Shiber) (1978-79) is remembered as a brutal period in Ethiopian history with torture and mass murder of Ethiopians by the then military regime Derg led by Mengistu Hailemariam.

Though the terror still has its controversies and disagreements when it comes to the question of responsibility, it is undeniable that thousands of men, women, and youth were murdered, tortured and multilated in the most inhuman way under the guise of building a better Ethiopia.

According to the report by Amnesty International, around half a million people, most of them young students, were killed at the time.

Mengistu Hailemariam, who lives in Zimbabwe as a fugitive, repeatedly denied any responsibility for the terror. He blames the opponents of his regime who started the killing of Derg officials by calling their action “White Terror”. The response from the military regime for the ‘White Terror’ was handing out guns to ordinary people who were considered to be “Abyot Tibeka” or ‘Guards of the Revolution’.

Mengistu was found guilty of genocide in absentia in January 2007 and sentenced to life in prison.

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Seble Teweldebirhan is Addis Ababa based Reporter for Ezega.com. She can be reached by sending email through this form.

katyn massacre memorial in katyn

 
Names of 22,000 Polish prisoners of war killed by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's secret police in 1940 are carved on the wall of the memorial in Katyn, Russia.
AP Photo
Source: discovery

• Russia's Vladimir Putin and Poland's Donald Tusk honored 22,000 Poles murdered by Soviet forces.
• Soviet propaganda had blamed Nazi Germany for the massacre.
• Tensions remain between the Poles and the Russians, but both sides urge reconciliation.

katyn massacre victims memorial

 

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

A visitor paid respects in September at a monument in Kharkiv, Ukraine, dedicated to Polish officers murdered in the Katyn massacre.

Source WSJ

MOSCOW—Russia's parliament accepted Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's responsibility for the 1940 Katyn Forest massacre of 22,000 Polish prisoners—a declaration that Poland's leaders welcomed, cautiously, as a step toward justice for an atrocity that still poisons the two countries' relations.

Russian parliament admits guilt over Polish massacre

Symbolic acknowledgment of culpability over Katyn murders in 1940 signals Russia's willingness to face up to its past

• Tom Parfitt in Moscow
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 26 November 2010 18.28 GM

A memorial dedicated to the Polish officers murdered in the Katyn forest in 1940. Photograph: Dario Thuburn/AFP/Getty Images

In a symbolic admission of guilt, Russia's parliament has declared that Joseph Stalin ordered his secret police to execute 22,000 Polish army officers and civilians in 1940, in one of the greatest mass murders of the 20th century.
Today's acknowledgment of Stalin's personal culpability over the Katyn massacre comes amid a cautious thaw between Moscow and Warsaw, whose recent relations have been thorny at best. It was also seen as a sign that Russia may finally be ready for muted self-scrutiny over its totalitarian past.
Mikhail Gorbachev admitted in 1990 that the NKVD was to blame for the massacre, after a half-century of the Soviets blaming it on Nazi troops. However, there has never been a formal statement which implicates the Soviet leadership in such explicit terms.
Officials in Warsaw greeted the declaration positively. "It is a good step, an important sign," Poland's speaker of parliament, Grzegorz Schetyna, told reporters. It would ensure a "better atmosphere" for Russian president Dmitry Medvedev's visit to Warsaw next week, he added.
The 21,768 officers, doctors, policemen and other public servants – captured by the Red Army when it swept into Poland after the outbreak of the second world war in 1939 – were mainly shot in Katyn forest near Smolensk in western Russia and in several other places.
The current improvement in ties accelerated after Poland's then president, Lech Kaczynski, and 95 other people including scores of high-ranking government and military figures, died in April when their plane crashed on landing at Smolensk. The passengers were on their way from Warsaw to attend an event commemorating the 70th anniversary of the massacre.
In the wake of the crash, Russia's prime minister, Vladimir Putin, made unequivocal statements about Soviet responsibility for the Katyn massacre and urged reconciliation. Historian Natalya Lebedeva, a Russian member of the two countries' intergovernmental commission on "especially complex questions", told the Guardian that Putin's words had helped the healing process. "Both Russia and Poland realise it is time to stop the confrontations," she added.
Moscow and Warsaw have clashed in the past decade over Poland's admission to the EU and Nato, and over US plans for missile defence sites in eastern Europe.
However, Eugeniusz Smolar, a senior fellow at the Polish Institute of International Affairs, said that the Kremlin now felt it had to engage with Warsaw as a major economic power in the region.
A change to pro-Russian leadership in Ukraine and the prospect of Russia joining the US missile defence shield also helped. "On a human level, Poles were also very touched by so many Russians coming to our embassy in Moscow to show sympathy after the Smolensk disaster," he added.

Colombia: UN rights office condemns leftist rebel massacre of farm workers

source: reliefweb

The United Nations human rights office in Colombia has condemned the massacre of 14 farm workers in the northwest of the country and warned leftist rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - Popular Army (FARC-EP) that they were incurring war and could be subject to the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The workers were shot dead on 23 August in Valdivia municipality of Antioquia province in an attack which the authorities attributed to members of FARC-EP's front 36, the office noted. "The Office warns that with killings like that of Puerto Valdivia, the FARC-EP members are indulging in conduct that constitutes war crimes," it said in a statement issued in Bogota, the Colombian capital.
"Moreover, murders of this type, by their generalized and systematic character, would possess the characteristics of crimes against humanity, and thus those responsible could be subject to the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice," it added.
It called on the FARC-EP secretariat to "publicly assume the responsibility that arises from this atrocious act and odder its members to refrain at all times from attacks against the civilian population."
Hundreds of thousands of people are estimated to have been killed and millions displaced in four decades of fighting in the Andean country between leftist guerrillas, government forces and right-wing paramilitaries.

UN News Service:

Over 45,000 people visit “Red Terror” Martyrs Memorial Museum

Source: waltainfo
Addis Ababa, October 13 (WIC) –More than 45,000 people have reportedly visited the “Red Terror” Martyrs Memorial Museum over the past seven months.

Museum Administrator, Yohannes Gebre Hiwot told to WIC that 2,000 of the visitors are foreigners, while the remaining are Ethiopians, including students.

He said the “Red Terror” Martyrs Memorial Museum was established to remember Ethiopians who were massacred by the Derg regime.

Moreover, the museum was established to implant the spirit of unity, peace and tolerance among the new generation, Yohannes indicated. 

The museum consists of photos and bodies of the victims, weapons used by the fascist Derg regime, as well as documents, and newspapers remembering the victims.

According to Yohannes, people can visit the museum for free.