Hirut Abebe-Jiri is a rare example of how a genocide survivor can find justice. A victim of Ethiopia's Red Terror pogroms of the mid-1970s, Abebe-Jiri is now on a mission to document these crimes in a central archive – and online.
As a teenager living in Ethiopia in the 1970s, Abebe-Jiri was unlawfully imprisoned by members of the then-Marxist regime known as the Derg. Some estimated that more than 100,000 Ethiopians were murdered under the Derg's campaign.
In 2006, the senior official who oversaw Abebe-Jiri's captivity and torture was brought to trial in an Ethiopian court after being extradited from the United States. He is currently serving a life sentence.
For many survivors, this would be closure. But not for Abebe-Jiri, as she is now on a journey to publicly document the crimes committed during the Red Terror.
"We need to study it [the Red Terror]," Abebe-Jiri said in an interview with the BCC World Service. "These people were not from another planet. These people were living in our neighbourhood, our families knew each other, we went to the same church, and then all of a sudden when the worst came, they did all these atrocities."
But how can such a public archive of crimes against humanity help bring justice and reconciliation for victims?
Although Abebe-Jiri's priority is to preserve history, the database of atrocities that she is building could be used to prosecute the remaining perpetrators of the Red Terror.
Some of its masterminds are still living in exile like Mengistu Haile Mariam, who now resides in Zimbabwe. An archive of his and other Derg leaders' crimes may lead to extraditions.
Boosting her efforts is the former Derg regime's meticulous record-keeping. Some 600,000 of these documents have already been used in trials of Red Terror perpetrators.
Perhaps the organizers of mass killings and rapes in Darfur or eastern Congo will be better at hiding their crimes in fear of future tribunals. But Abebe-Jirir is among a growing number of human rights proponents who are using the Web to document or report alleged atrocities by armed groups and governments.
In the case of elections in Iran and Kenya and protests in Myanmar, activists have used online social media tools like Twitter, blogs and digital cameras to broadcast unfolding violence across the globe.
To some extent, these first-person stories via the Web have given greater transparency to humanitarian crises that would have been obscured. They might even be used as evidence for future prosecutions.
What remains to be seen is if such online shaming of human rights violators will not only document crimes against humanity but also stop them.
