‘The world stayed quiet, so we came to London’: Amhara protesters name the supply chain of violence

On a crisp December evening outside the UAE embassy, Britain’s Ethiopian diaspora confronted not just a foreign power, but the machinery of international complicity

London | 20 December 2025

The winter sun was already low by 4pm, casting long shadows across the pavement outside the United Arab Emirates embassy in South Kensington. Despite the cold, the light was sharp and clear, the kind of December afternoon that makes everything feel exposed, visible, impossible to ignore. Which was, perhaps, exactly the point.

The crowd had come with photographs, blown up to poster size, of mass graves. Of villages reduced to rubble. Of faces: young men, old women, children, all missing. A nurse from North London, who left Ethiopia in 2018, held one such photograph aloft. “This is my cousin’s son,” she said, her breath visible in the cold air. “He was 19. University student. They found his body three months after the drone strike. What was left of it.”

She was one of approximately 300 protesters who gathered yesterday evening, 19 December, outside the UAE’s diplomatic mission in what has become a recurring pattern of mobilisation by Britain’s Amhara community. The demonstration was organised by London Fano, a diaspora activist group that has coordinated a series of increasingly high-profile actions throughout 2025. But this was no spontaneous outburst of emotion. This was strategic, forensic, and increasingly international in its accusations.

The target wasn’t symbolic. It was specific.

“We’re not here because we’re angry,” said a software engineer from Manchester who’d travelled down for the protest. “We’re here because we’ve done our homework. The drones killing our people, we know where they come from. The money funding the military campaign, we know where it comes from. And now we’re saying it out loud.”

The allegation at the heart of yesterday’s demonstration is one that has been building in Ethiopian diaspora circles for the past two years: that the United Arab Emirates has provided armed drones, financial backing, and political cover to the Ethiopian government’s military campaign against Fano militias and, critics argue, against Amhara civilians more broadly.

It’s a claim that transforms what might appear to be an internal Ethiopian conflict into something far more troubling, an internationalised theatre of violence, where foreign governments bear responsibility for atrocities committed thousands of miles from their own borders.

Multiple sources, including investigative reports from conflict monitoring organisations and testimony from survivors, point to the use of armed drones in attacks on populated areas within Ethiopia’s Amhara region. The UAE’s alleged role in supplying or facilitating these weapons has been noted, though officially denied, by Emirati authorities.

Standing in the embassy’s shadow, protesters held banners in Amharic and English. One read: “Your drones. Our dead.” Another, more pointedly: “How many Yemenis? How many Tigrayans? How many Amharas? Stop arming dictators.”

The reference to Yemen wasn’t incidental. Many in the crowd drew explicit parallels between the UAE’s role in the Saudi-led coalition’s campaign in Yemen and its alleged involvement in Ethiopia, two conflicts, they argued, connected by the same arsenal and the same disregard for civilian protection.

“They test their toys on us,” said one protester, a young IT consultant who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals against family still in Ethiopia. “We’re the laboratory. And the world calls it ‘regional politics’.”

To understand why the term “Amhara genocide” resonates so powerfully in the diaspora, and why yesterday’s protest felt less like theatre and more like testimony, requires reaching back three decades, to the moment when Ethiopia’s political map was redrawn along ethnic lines.

In the 1990s, following the overthrow of the Mengistu regime, Ethiopia’s new government introduced an ethnic federalist system that divided the country into regions based on dominant ethnic groups. The intention, its architects argued, was to accommodate Ethiopia’s extraordinary diversity and address historical marginalisation.

The reality was more complex and, many Amharas argue, catastrophic. Overnight, Amharas who had lived for generations in what became Oromia, Benishangul-Gumuz, or other regions found themselves minorities in their own homes. Political representation became ethnicised. Land disputes became ethnic flashpoints. And violence, when it came, followed ethnic lines with devastating predictability.

What followed over the next 30 years was a pattern that human rights organisations have documented with increasing alarm: expulsions, massacres, mass arrests, and a persistent culture of impunity that meant perpetrators rarely faced consequences.

“This didn’t start with Abiy Ahmed,” said a lecturer who has written extensively on Ethiopian ethnic politics and who stood at the edge of the protest, observing. “It didn’t start with Fano. It started the moment identity became weaponised in the constitution. Everything since then has been an escalation of that original violence.”

The current phase, from April 2023 to the present, represents not a rupture with this history, but its technological intensification.

April 2023 marked a turning point. Armed conflict erupted between the Ethiopian federal government and Fano militias, loosely organised Amhara defence forces that emerged, supporters say, in response to government plans to disarm regional security forces and in the face of escalating attacks on Amhara communities.

By August 2023, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government had declared a state of emergency in Amhara region. What followed was what human rights organisations describe as a systematic campaign: mass arrests of civilians, journalists, and activists; communications blackouts that prevented documentation and outside reporting; and the deployment of military hardware, including armed drones, in populated areas.

The testimony that emerged from this period, collected by organisations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as by diaspora-led documentation projects, paints a harrowing picture: villages attacked from the air, civilians killed in marketplaces and places of worship, sexual violence deployed as a weapon of war, and mass disappearances that have left families with no answers and no bodies to bury.

Perhaps the most chilling statistic to emerge from independent analysts: over two million Amharas reported as untraceable in census data comparisons between 2023 and 2025.

Two million people. The population of Paris. Gone from the data, if not yet from the world’s conscience.

“That number should have triggered UN emergency protocols,” said one protester, a former humanitarian worker who now lives in Bristol. “Instead, it triggered us. Because no one else was coming.”

Inside the warm confines of international conference rooms, mechanisms exist. The UN Special Adviser on Genocide Prevention has issued warnings. Amnesty International has published reports. Human Rights Watch has called for investigations. The European Union has expressed concern in carefully calibrated statements.

But out here, in the fading December light, with photographs of the dead growing heavier by the minute, those mechanisms felt a universe away.

“We live in a multiverse,” said the Manchester engineer. “In one universe, there’s the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There’s the Genocide Convention. There are rules. In the other universe, the one where we actually live, two million people vanish and the UN issues a statement ‘noting with concern’. Which universe are we supposed to believe in?”

It’s a question that cuts to the heart of the protest movement’s growing sophistication. This isn’t simply about raising awareness or expressing solidarity. It’s about forensically documenting the gap between international law as written and international law as practiced, and about naming, specifically and publicly, the actors who benefit from that gap.

The UAE, in this framework, isn’t merely a passive observer or neutral trading partner. It is, protesters argue, an active participant in the machinery of violence.

As the afternoon stretched into evening and the temperature dropped, organisers began projecting images onto a white sheet hung between two poles. Satellite imagery showing before-and-after shots of villages. Drone footage captured by residents showing aircraft circling before attacks. Medical reports documenting injuries consistent with explosive munitions.

“We’re not asking people to take our word for it,” said one of the organisers. “We’re showing them the receipts. Every claim we make, we can source. Every number, we can justify. This is evidence. We’re just lacking a court to present it in.”

The frustration in her voice was palpable. So too was the determination.

Britain’s Amhara community, estimated at between 50,000 and 80,000 people, concentrated in London, Manchester, and Birmingham, has become something unprecedented: a de facto opposition not to a government, but to international silence itself.

Throughout 2025, they have maintained a relentless schedule of action. Protests in August, October, and November, each building on the last. Meetings with MPs. Submissions to parliamentary committees. Social media campaigns that have reached millions. Legal consultations exploring whether diaspora members can bring cases under universal jurisdiction statutes.

“We’re doing the job that international institutions won’t do,” said an academic observer. “Documenting. Amplifying. Demanding accountability. It’s exhausting. But what’s the alternative? Going home and pretending it’s not happening?”

As the crowd began to thin, some heading to nearby cafés, others to the Tube, still others remaining in small clusters to continue conversations, several protesters attempted to articulate why the situation feels so intractable, so resistant to easy solutions.

Four themes emerged repeatedly.

Political marginalisation. Despite being one of Ethiopia’s largest ethnic groups, Amharas remain systematically excluded from meaningful power-sharing arrangements in the current political dispensation. This breeds resentment, mistrust, and the sense that peaceful political channels are closed.

Ethnic federalism as weapon. A constitutional system designed to accommodate diversity has instead institutionalised ethnic competition, turning identity into a zero-sum political resource and enabling targeted violence along ethnic lines.

Unresolved historical grievances. Territorial disputes, particularly over areas like Welkait, which Amhara nationalists claim was illegally incorporated into Tigray region—remain open wounds that political entrepreneurs exploit for mobilisation and that fuel cycles of violence.

Culture of impunity. Time and again, perpetrators of mass violence against Amharas have escaped accountability. This creates a perverse incentive structure: violence works, and violence is cost-free. Each unpunished massacre becomes implicit permission for the next.

Together, these four pillars create what conflict analysts call “permissive conditions” for atrocity crimes. Separately, each is concerning. Combined, they are combustible. And into this volatile mixture, the alleged introduction of foreign military hardware and financial support transforms a dangerous situation into a potentially genocidal one.

As the last protesters packed away their banners and the projected images were switched off, the nurse with the photograph of her cousin’s son stood for a moment longer, staring up at the embassy’s facade.

“I used to think someone would come,” she said quietly. “The UN. The ICC. Someone. I used to think that’s what international law was for, to protect people like us. But no one’s coming. So we came here instead. To London. To make our case in the only court that will hear it: the court of public witness.”

It’s a poignant articulation of what yesterday’s protest represented. Not an appeal for sympathy, but a demand for complicity to be named. Not a request for charity, but an insistence on accountability.

The UK Amhara diaspora has become something between a human rights documentation project, a political opposition movement, and a prosecutorial team building a case for future tribunals. They are archiving testimony. They are mapping perpetrators. They are following money and weapons across borders.

And they are refusing, absolutely refusing, to let the world forget.

Walking away from the embassy as the last protesters dispersed into the London night, one question lingered in the cold air: if two million people can become untraceable, if drones can strike civilian populations with impunity, if mass graves can fill while international bodies issue statements of concern, then what exactly are universal human rights universal to?

The Amhara protesters have their answer: rights are universal only when people fight to make them so. Yesterday, they fought with photographs and banners and testimony. They fought with evidence and persistence and the stubborn refusal to accept that atrocity is inevitable simply because it’s distant.

“We’ll be back,” said one of the organisers as she helped fold up the last of the banners. “Next month. The month after. However long it takes. Because somewhere, someday, there will be a reckoning. And when that day comes, no one will be able to say they didn’t know.”

The sun had set by then. The streets were quiet and the embassy’s lights glowed against the darkening sky. And London carried on, as London does, unaware that it had just served as a venue for something between a protest and a trial, a trial where the evidence was presented, the accused were named, and the verdict is still pending.

But the case, make no mistake, is being built. One cold December evening at a time.

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The Ethiopian government and the UAE did not respond to requests for comment by time of publication.