‘Our Wounds Will Never Heal’: Ethiopia Marks One Year Since Plane Crash
By AFP
Ethiopian Airlines on Tuesday marked the one-year anniversary of the crash of Flight 302, bringing together victims’ families for a ceremony and six minutes of silence in memory of the time the jet took to go down.
Relatives gathered southeast of the capital, Addis Ababa, at the site where the Nairobi-bound Boeing 737 MAX crashed after takeoff on March 10, 2019, killing all 157 people on board and triggering the global grounding of the MAX jets.
Ethiopian pilots also paid tribute to their lost colleagues while UN officials in Addis Ababa held a candle-lit ceremony to remember agency staff among the victims who came from more than 30 countries.
“As friends and family gather in Ethiopia from all over the world to honor the memories of their loved ones, I pay tribute to the victims of this accident and wish their families continued strength,” Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said Tuesday on Twitter.
Security forces blocked journalists from attending the ceremony at the site, though vehicles transporting families could be seen heading there.
Some families have made multiple trips to the site in the past year, including in the immediate aftermath of the crash and when victims’ remains were sent to their home countries towards the end of 2019.
But for Frenchwoman Catherine Berthet, who lost her 28-year-old daughter Camille, this week marked the first time she had set foot in Ethiopia since the disaster.
She decided to attend the ceremony at the urging of her therapist in hopes it would provide some form of closure, she told AFP.
“If you lose your child in a car accident, you can often see the body, and that’s important. I won’t have this chance because my daughter died in a plane crash — her body was turned into a million pieces,” Berthet said.
“So it’s important to go to the country where she passed her final moments.”
Virginie Fricaudet, president of an association of French victims’ families, said she expected Tuesday’s ceremony would help “close a chapter”, though she acknowledged that relatives of the dead were still grieving.
“For me, this commemoration is about bringing together this immense family that is connected by the tragedy,” said Fricaudet, whose brother died on Flight 302.
On Monday, the families of Flight 302’s nine French victims attended a memorial service at the French embassy in Addis Ababa, setting white roses at the base of nine jacaranda trees planted on the embassy grounds a year ago.