The Church They Cannot Name

ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

Analysis & Commentary | Horn of Africa Affairs

SPECIAL REPORT: FAITH, ETHNICITY & ERASURE

The Church They Cannot Name

How the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church became a target without a headline and why the massacres in Arsi indicted not only the perpetrators, but the silence of the world

4 June 2026

WHEN a ten-year-old boy was shot in a teff field in the Merti district of Arsi, his photograph travelled briefly across Ethiopian social media before disappearing entirely from the international press. His leg was amputated. His name was not reported by the BBC. Al Jazeera did not dispatch a correspondent. CNN did not file a segment. The child survived; the silence was complete.

The date was November 2025. In the weeks surrounding that shooting, more than 140 Orthodox Christian civilians had been killed in the Sherka district of Arsi alone since September. By late October, coordinated attacks across Guna, Merti, Sherka and Holonto districts, carried out on the night of the 24th to the 25th had left at least 24 dead in a single assault, including a toddler and an 86-year-old. The total across October reached 33 confirmed dead. Church representatives in the Arsi archdiocese told reporters that over 200 believers had been killed in Merti district in recent years. Local youths who attempted to share information about the killings were subsequently arrested.

The Oromia regional administration’s response was immediate and unambiguous. The Arsi Zone Administrator, Ibrahim Kedir, declared that no one had been killed. The Oromia regional police described the area as ‘peaceful.’ The Inter-Religious Council of Ethiopia, dispatched to investigate, released a report claiming the victims ‘were not from one faith group’ a formulation that enraged the dioceses in the region and was characterised by prominent Ethiopian political figures as an attempt to dissolve the religious character of what had occurred into a neutralised, depoliticised abstraction.

When governments deny the dead and international media looks away, silence does not merely describe an absence. It becomes a policy.

This essay is concerned with that silence not primarily as a moral failure, though it is certainly that, but as a structural and politically explicable phenomenon. To understand why Arsi received no meaningful international coverage, one must first understand what the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church represents in the contemporary political imagination of Ethiopia’s ruling dispensation, and why it has become strategically advantageous for multiple actors domestic and foreign to render Orthodox Christian suffering legible only through the distorting lens of Amhara ethnic politics.

 

I. THE LABEL AS WEAPON

Professor Girma Berhanu, writing in these pages on 3 June 2026, observed that a painful and recurring pattern had emerged across major international outlets: when Ethiopia is discussed, Amhara perspectives are minimised, generalised, or excluded. The observation is precise, but the problem it diagnoses runs deeper than representation. The mechanism by which Amhara voices are excluded from international discourse is inseparable from the mechanism by which the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is persistently mis-categorised and it is this mis-categorisation that makes violence against Orthodox Christians so consistently invisible.

The EOTC is, by any historical reckoning, a pan-Ethiopian institution. Founded in the fourth century, it predates the category of ‘Amhara’ as a political identity by more than a millennium. Its liturgical tradition, the Ge’ez rite, is shared across Tigrayan, Amhara, and many Oromo communities. Approximately forty-five per cent of the Oromo population is Christian, and Orthodox Christians account for a substantial proportion of that figure. The Church’s membership spans ethnic and linguistic lines in ways that the contemporary ethnic-federal architecture of Ethiopia is systematically unable to acknowledge.

Yet the political weaponisation of ethnicity since the early 1990s has produced a powerful counter-narrative: that the EOTC is, at its core, a vehicle of Amhara cultural supremacy, a relic of imperial domination that must be reformed, broken, or subordinated to achieve genuine multiethnic democracy. This framing, promoted by elements within Oromo ethnonationalist discourse and by certain international analysts sympathetic to it, has served a double function. It delegitimises Orthodox Christian civic action as ethnic chauvinism rather than religious conviction, and it provides intellectual cover for state and non-state actors engaged in what can only be described as targeted violence against the Church and its adherents.

The consequences are empirically documented. A 2025 research paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Humanities concluded that the weaponisation of ethnic politics since 1994 had enabled religion to be instrumentalised, resulting in ‘the demonisation of the Amhara people and, by extension, the EOTC.’ A January 2026 Rift Valley Institute report noted that the security crisis had ‘disproportionately affected new regional minorities, in particular the Amharas living outside the Amhara region and Orthodox Christians, where they are a religious minority,’ and linked this directly to the political logic of ethnonational insurgency particularly in Oromia, where violence was being ‘strategically deployed to disrupt political alliances.’

Yet this body of evidence has produced almost no sustained international journalism. The question is why.

 

II. ARSI AS MICROCOSM

The Arsi zone of Oromia is not, for those familiar with Ethiopian ecclesiastical history, an incidental location. It is part of the Arsi Archdiocese, one of the most historic and deeply rooted of the Church’s regional structures. Orthodox Christians in Arsi are not recent settlers; many are the descendants of communities who have inhabited the region for centuries, their faith woven into the landscape through churches, monasteries, and the rhythms of the liturgical calendar.

What occurred in Arsi between September and November 2025 was not, according to multiple independent sources, a spontaneous outbreak of violence. It was sustained, coordinated, and geographically targeted. The attacks in Sherka, Guna, Merti and Holonto were carried out by armed groups operating with a consistency of method targeting farmers in their fields, entering homes at night, shooting worshippers that left church representatives describing the pattern in terms of deliberate ethnic and religious cleansing. The Oromo Liberation Army, which has operated extensively in Oromia since at least 2018, was identified in multiple reports as responsible for or implicated in the attacks.

In February 2026, the violence continued. On the 26th of that month, armed attackers struck a market in East Arsi, killing twenty Orthodox Christians and one Muslim guard. Two days later, gunmen entered a church and opened fire on those gathered for worship. By April, the International Christian Concern was documenting a pattern of killings, looting and forced displacement that it characterised not as isolated incidents but as a growing and repeated programme of violence. Thousands of Orthodox Christians were by that point displaced from their homes across East Arsi Zone.

The Crown Council of Ethiopia, in a statement issued on 31 October 2025, noted with particular gravity that ‘in recent years, the targeted killing of Orthodox Christians in Ethiopia has become a regular occurrence,’ citing additionally the massacre of monks at the Debre Kewakibt Ziquala monastery in June 2025, where four monks were abducted and killed. The statement called upon authorities to protect the faithful from ‘those elements who continue to persecute and kill people, targeting them on the basis of religion, ethnicity or any other criteria.’ No major international news organisation covered the Crown Council’s statement.

The Oromia authorities said ‘no one was killed.’ The international press agreed, not by disputing the claim, but by ignoring the question entirely.

The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, no radical body, confirmed in November 2025 that it had gathered information on killings in East Arsi’s Guna, Merti, Sherka and Holonto districts, and that five further farmers had been killed in Merti in early November, one of them a ten-year-old child. It confirmed that armed groups were responsible. The Inter-Religious Council’s counter-report, attempting to muddy the religious character of the targeting, was denounced by the affected dioceses as an exercise in institutional erasure.

None of this, not the numbers, not the official confirmation, not the children in hospital, not the displaced thousands generated a single substantive segment on the BBC’s Africa coverage, on Al Jazeera’s Ethiopia desk, or on CNN’s international broadcasting. The question of why requires more than an observation about editorial oversight.

 

III. THE POLITICAL ARCHITECTURE OF INVISIBILITY

There is no single conspiracy that explains the erasure of Orthodox Christian suffering in Arsi from international consciousness. What there is, instead, is a convergence of structural incentives, ideological assumptions, and access dynamics that together produce a reliable outcome: the disappearance of this violence from the global record.

The first and most important factor is the framing problem identified above. Because the EOTC has been successfully coded in much international analysis as an ‘Amhara institution,’ violence against its members is perceived however unconsciously as an episode in the ethnic conflict between Amhara and Oromo communities. This coding converts what is, at its core, a programme of religiously and ethnically targeted killing into a ‘both sides’ conflict, one that international editors have learned to treat with the caution they apply to all contested ethnic disputes. The victims become combatants by proxy; their faith becomes a political faction; and the massacre becomes an episode in a war, rather than a crime against a congregation.

The second factor is access. The Oromia regional government, under the political architecture of Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party, has not been hospitable to independent journalism in areas where OLA-linked violence is occurring. Journalists who have attempted to report from Sherka, Merti or Holonto have encountered military checkpoints, obstruction, and the risk that local sources will be arrested as indeed happened to youths who shared information about the November killings. Without boots on the ground, international desks default to official sources; and the official Oromia sources were saying, unambiguously, that nothing had happened.

The third factor is what might be called the denominational blind spot. It is a fact, uncomfortable for some, that violence against Orthodox Christian communities in Africa receives systematically less international media attention than equivalent violence against Muslim communities, or against Protestant minorities in authoritarian contexts. This is not primarily a conspiracy; it reflects the distribution of journalistic focus, the preoccupations of editorial boards, and the particular attentiveness that certain NGO networks have cultivated with major news organisations. Orthodox Christianity is perceived, in much of the global North, as a conservative and somewhat archaic tradition. This perception colours coverage in ways that its practitioners rarely have the platform to contest.

The fourth factor is one that Professor Berhanu’s essay illuminates with particular clarity: the structural exclusion of Amhara voices from the panels, briefings and expert circuits that feed international journalism. When Al Jazeera assembles a panel on Ethiopian democracy, and no Amhara representative is present, the conversation proceeds without the constituency that has been most directly subjected to organised violence under the current political order. When Mehdi Hasan interviews Getachew Reda on the future of Ethiopia, and the Amhara dimension of the post-Tigray settlement is not raised, the absence shapes what millions of viewers understand to be the relevant landscape of Ethiopian politics. The silence in Arsi and the silence on international panels are not separate phenomena. They are the same phenomenon.

Two silences, one structure: the voice not invited to the panel and the village not visited by the correspondent are governed by the same logic of erasure.

 

IV. THE PROSPERITY PARTY AND THE ASSAULT ON THE CHURCH

To understand Arsi fully, one must situate it within the broader strategy of the ruling Prosperity Party towards the EOTC, a strategy that has proceeded along two tracks simultaneously. The first is institutional: the engineering, in January 2023, of an illegal parallel synod in Oromia and the Southern Nations, orchestrated by three bishops led by Abune Sawiros and, according to extensive and credible reporting, backed by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s inner circle. The goal of this schism was the fragmentation of the Church along ethnic lines, converting it from a pan-Ethiopian institution into a contested space divided between an ‘Oromia Church’ and a rump ‘Amhara Church.’ This effort ultimately failed, defeated by mass non-violent civic action from Orthodox Christians across the country. But the attempt was revelatory.

The second track is security: the failure, whether through incapacity or design, to protect Orthodox Christian communities in Oromia from the militia violence that has killed hundreds in recent years. EOTC leaders from Arsi and Bale reported more than 200 Orthodox killed since 2024, communities frequently described in official and semi-official communications as ‘Amhara Christians’ a label that, once applied, removes them from the category of Ethiopian citizens requiring state protection and relocates them in the category of ethnic encroachers whose presence in Oromo land is itself a political provocation.

This is the mechanism by which the label becomes lethal. When an Orthodox Christian farmer in Arsi is killed, and the official response characterises the dead as ‘Amhara Christians in Oromia,’ the state has not merely misidentified the victim. It has pre-authorised the crime by establishing that the victim’s presence was itself anomalous, and that the violence visited upon them is a legible if regrettable consequence of ethnic geographic politics. The victim is twice erased: first in death, then in classification.

This logic is not unique to Ethiopia. It is the grammar of all ethnic cleansing operations in the modern era, from the Balkans to Myanmar: the target community is first categorised as alien, then their victimisation is absorbed into the narrative of an ethnic dispute, and finally the international community, confronted with a ‘both sides’ story, opts for studied neutrality. The EOTC and its communities in Arsi are living through a version of this grammar. The unique feature of the Ethiopian case is that the Church against which it is being deployed is among the oldest continuous Christian institutions on earth.

 

V. WHAT THE WORLD CHOSE NOT TO SEE

There is a standard objection to the argument presented here, and it deserves a direct response. That objection runs as follows: Ethiopia is a country with multiple simultaneous crises the Tigray war, the Amhara conflict, the Oromo insurgency, the Somali border tensions. International media has limited bandwidth; not every atrocity can receive equal coverage; and the absence of reporting on Arsi reflects resource constraints rather than ideological selection.

This objection would be more persuasive if the same standard were applied consistently. It was not applied to the June 2025 bombing of the Mar Elias Church in Damascus, Syria, which received extensive and immediate coverage across every major Western outlet, with detailed analysis, expert commentary, and on-the-ground reporting within hours. That attack killed thirty people. In Arsi, over a comparable period, more than 140 were confirmed dead in Sherka alone and the silence was total.

The differential is not explained by resource constraints. It is explained by the differential legibility of victims. Syrian Orthodox Christians killed by an ISIS-linked bomber fit a recognisable international narrative: the endangered Christian minority, the Islamist perpetrator, the secular state struggling to contain extremism. This narrative has an established audience, an established set of NGO interlocutors, and an established emotional grammar in Western journalism. Ethiopian Orthodox Christians killed by OLA-linked militants in a region governed by a ruling party whose leader received the Nobel Peace Prize do not fit that narrative. Their suffering requires context that most editors are unwilling to supply and most correspondents have not been briefed to seek.

This is what Professor Berhanu means when he writes that ‘silence can become part of the story’ and that ‘selective attention can become a form of erasure.’ The erasure of Arsi from the international record is not a passive omission. It is an active consequence of the architecture of international attention and that architecture, as he rightly notes, shapes diplomatic conversations, humanitarian priorities, and historical memory.

It is worth noting, in this context, the tribute Professor Berhanu pays to photojournalist Jemal Countess and journalist Jeff Pearce individuals who have pursued the truth about anti-Orthodox and anti-Amhara violence in Ethiopia at personal and professional cost. That such figures must be mentioned as exceptions, rare exemplars of integrity in a field that has largely looked away, is itself a measure of how far the norm has departed from what journalism is supposed to be.

 

VI. THE OLDEST CHURCH IN THE WORLD AND THE NEWEST SILENCE

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is not a political party. It is not a militia. It is not an instrument of any ethnic group’s hegemony, however vigorously that claim is prosecuted by its enemies. It is a living, ancient institution with a canon of scripture that predates the Arab conquest of North Africa, with illuminated manuscripts that predate the printing press, with a monastic tradition in Lalibela and on Lake Tana that has preserved theological and cultural knowledge through every catastrophe that the Horn of Africa has endured over seventeen centuries.

That this institution is under assault through schism, through land confiscation, through the killing of its priests and monks and farmers and children in their fields is a matter of historical record. That this assault has been made possible, in part, by an international discourse that has accepted the framing of the Church as ‘the Amhara institution’ is a matter of consequence that extends beyond Ethiopia’s borders.

Because if the oldest church in sub-Saharan Africa can be rendered invisible by the application of an ethnic label if two hundred dead in a single district of Oromia can be waved away by a regional administrator saying ‘no one was killed,’ and the world’s major newsrooms can nod along in silence then we have learned something important about the limits of the international community’s commitment to the protection of religious minorities and the documentation of atrocity.

What occurred in Arsi between September 2025 and April 2026 was not a communal conflict. It was not a land dispute. It was not the regrettable by-product of a complex civil war in which all sides bear responsibility. It was, as the Church’s own representatives described it, the targeted and sustained killing of a community on the basis of their religion and their ethnicity a campaign of elimination conducted in broad daylight, denied by the authorities responsible for the area’s security, and ignored by the institutions that exist, in theory, to bear witness.

The witnesses who did speak the dioceses of Arsi, the Crown Council, the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, the International Christian Concern, the few independent journalists who managed to file from the ground spoke into a void. This essay is an attempt, however belated, to fill some part of that void. Not because the filling of a void in a periodical constitutes accountability. But because accountability begins, always, with the refusal to be silent.

 

VII. THE PANEL THAT PROVED THE POINT

On the occasion of Ethiopia’s June 2026 general election, the broadcaster TRT World’s programme The Newsmakers aired a segment titled ‘Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed seeks re-election amid fears of renewed civil war.’ It ran for approximately twenty-nine minutes. It is, for the purposes of this essay, a document of considerable instructive value not primarily for what it said, but for what it demonstrated about the architecture of international media representation of Ethiopia in practice, in real time, before a global audience.

The programme was structured in two parts. The first was a solo interview with Getachew Reda, identified on screen as adviser to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed on Eastern African affairs and former president of the Tigray interim regional administration. The second was a panel of three analysts: Maza Gidei Gebremedhin, described as an international relations specialist, speaking from Washington; Robel Alemu, senior analyst and director of communications at the Amhara Association of America, speaking from Toronto; and Tsedale Lemma, journalist and founder of the Addis Standard newspaper, speaking from Frankfurt.

The presenter introduced this arrangement as a broadening of the discussion. In terms of the claims this essay has advanced, it was something rather more precise than that: it was a live demonstration of the erasure thesis, conducted under studio lighting, with credentials displayed, and streamed to an international audience.

One Amhara voice. Two Tigrayan voices. One figure from a publication with a documented record of minimising Amhara suffering. This was presented as ‘balance.’

Begin with Getachew Reda. His credentials as the interview’s primary subject were presented straightforwardly: adviser to Abiy Ahmed, former Tigray interim president. What the introduction did not dwell upon and what the presenter did not press was the particular quality of the political journey being described. Getachew Reda is a former senior official of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front: the organisation whose nearly three-decade dominance of Ethiopian politics Abiy Ahmed’s rise was explicitly designed to end, and whose subsequent armed conflict with the federal government produced hundreds of thousands of dead, the displacement of millions, and documented atrocities against civilian populations in Tigray, Amhara, and Afar alike. He is now, in the service of that same Abiy Ahmed, a figure of the federal establishment commenting on the fairness of an election from which the communities most subjected to state violence were systematically excluded.

When asked about the Amhara and Oromia regions, Getachew’s framing was revealing in its precision. He acknowledged ‘low-intensity conflicts’ in both areas, but his concern was not with the casualties or the humanitarian toll. His concern was with the fact that armed opposition elements were attempting to prevent people from voting. The violence itself the aerial strikes, the displacement, the killings was not his subject. The vote was his subject. Amhara suffering, in this framing, was relevant only insofar as it furnished evidence of the opposition’s illegitimacy, and irrelevant insofar as it might have furnished evidence of the government’s.

This is a form of rhetorical erasure so efficient that it barely registers as such. The dead are not denied; they are simply not mentioned. The conversation moves on. The presenter, to her credit, noted that ‘all parties involved have been accused of various atrocities.’ But this is the standard diplomatic hedge of professional broadcast journalism the gesture toward balance that preserves the impression of impartiality while declining to pursue the specificity that would make the accusation land.

Then came the panel. And here the structural problem identified by Professor Berhanu the systematic exclusion of Amhara voices from the expert circuits that feed international journalism was displayed with a clarity that no amount of editorial analysis can improve upon. Of the three panellists assembled to represent ‘opposition’ perspectives on the Ethiopian election, two were Tigrayan and one was the founder of a publication whose coverage has repeatedly been criticised, including by contributors to this newspaper, for insufficient engagement with the specific character of anti-Amhara and anti-Orthodox violence in Oromia.

The Amhara Association of America’s Robel Alemu, speaking from Toronto, was the exception and the exception proved the rule. In the space of approximately ninety seconds, he delivered the most substantive account of the humanitarian catastrophe in Ethiopia offered by any participant across the entire twenty-nine minute broadcast. He named the Lemkin Institute’s active genocide alert for the Amhara people. He cited the Amhara Association’s own documentation of more than 370 aerial strikes by state forces against civilian infrastructure health centres, schools, places of worship. He referenced a BBC report documenting mass rape in the Amhara region, with the majority of cases implicating government forces. He noted UNICEF’s figure of nine million children out of school nationally, with half drawn from Amhara. And then and this is the sentence that this essay has been building toward he stated directly that on election day itself, an active massacre was taking place in the Arsi area, implicating local militants, with attacks continuing against ethnic Amhara and Orthodox Christian communities.

Arsi. Named. On international television. On the day of the Ethiopian election.

Robel Alemu named Arsi on international television. Within seconds, the presenter moved to Maza on Eritrea. Neither of his fellow panellists ever returned to a single word he had said.

The presenter thanked him and pivoted immediately to Maza Gidei Gebremedhin on the subject of a potential Ethiopia-Eritrea war. The question of Arsi the massacres, the aerial strikes, the genocide alert, the nine million children was not returned to. Not by the presenter. Not by Maza, whose response routed the conversation firmly through the prism of Tigrayan victimhood under a prospective Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict, emphasising that any future war would be fought ‘on the lines of Tigray, on the bodies of Tigrayan women, on the bodies of Tigrayan men.’ Not by Tsedale Lemma, who offered a fluent and well-informed analysis of the geopolitical dangers of Abiy Ahmed’s Red Sea ambitions important analysis, accurately framed but who did not once, across the entirety of her contributions, acknowledge the existence of the Arsi massacre, the Lemkin genocide alert, the documented rape campaign in Amhara, or the aerial strikes on civilian targets.

It is important to state clearly what this observation is not. It is not a claim that Tigrayan suffering is less important than Amhara suffering, or that Tsedale Lemma’s analysis was without merit, or that the TRT programme was uniquely or exceptionally deficient. The suffering in Tigray was real, massive, and is still unresolved. The analysis offered by Maza and Tsedale was, in its own terms, coherent and informed.

The observation is more precise and more structural than a comparison of suffering. It is this: a programme that assembled three ‘opposition’ analysts to comment on an Ethiopian election in which Amhara communities were among the most severely affected by state violence managed to produce, through the composition of its panel and the direction of its questioning, a broadcast in which the one representative of those communities stated his case once and was not heard from again on those specific terms. The panel did not engage with what he said. The presenter did not return to what he raised. The broadcast closed without any panellist having responded to the genocide alert, the aerial strikes, the rape figures, or the election-day massacre in Arsi.

This is the mechanism Professor Berhanu describes operating in plain sight. It does not require bad faith from any individual participant. Maza Gidei Gebremedhin was not lying when she spoke of Tigrayan vulnerability; she was speaking her genuine concern. Tsedale Lemma was not performing indifference when she analysed the Red Sea question; she was doing the work she knows how to do. The presenter was not malicious in her pivots; she was managing a panel format under time pressure. And yet the aggregate effect of all these individually defensible decisions was the production of a broadcast in which the systematic killing of Orthodox Christians in Arsi named on air by a panellist with direct organisational knowledge disappeared from the conversation within thirty seconds and was never retrieved.

This is what institutional erasure looks like when it operates not through censorship but through the ordinary mechanics of editorial selection, panel composition, and the distribution of follow-up questions. It is, in many ways, more difficult to challenge than censorship, because no single decision can be identified as the act of suppression. The suppression is the sum of the decisions; and the sum, in this case, was the burial, on international television, of an active massacre.

The TRT programme, in other words, did not merely illustrate the argument of this essay. It enacted it.

 

 

This essay draws on reporting by DNE Africa, Borkena, the International Christian Concern, the Global Human Rights Defence, the Rift Valley Institute, and the Crown Council of Ethiopia. The TRT World programme ‘Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed seeks re-election amid fears of renewed civil war’ (The Newsmakers, June 2026) is cited by transcript. This essay was developed in dialogue with the arguments advanced by Professor Girma Berhanu in his Tribune essay of 3 June 2026, ‘The Erasure of Amhara Voices in International Coverage of Ethiopia.’

 

ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE  |  ethiopiantribune.com