Abera Tolla
It was January 1978, the height of Derg’s Red Terror campaign. At 21, I was a last year student at the business department of the Addis Abeba University (AAU). Derg’s campaign of terror was targeting university students. Its brutal crackdown against the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Party (EPRP) and the All Ethiopian Socialist Movement (MEISON) forced students to give up on peaceful struggles and take arms. The majority of students from Tigray and Eretria in the north have already left the campus en mass and the remaining, especially Oromo students and students from other parts of the country, were participating in urban student movements, which made universities the prime targets of Derg’s brutality.