The Perishing of Ethiopian Medical Doctors
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The Ethiopian Tribune
The Perishing of Ethiopian Medical Doctors
Through the Lens of Achille Mbembe’s Theory of Necropolitics
by Professor Girma Berhanu · University of Gothenburg
Editor’s Foreword
Some essays are written to settle a question. This one is written to insist that a question be asked at all. Over the past three years, a quiet and terrible arithmetic has accumulated in the public domain: Ethiopian medical doctors disproportionately of Amhara origin dying in numbers their colleagues can no longer treat as coincidence. Some were shot by unidentified gunmen. Others died suddenly, of illnesses never publicly explained. In case after case, no independent investigation followed, and the families were left to bury both their dead and their questions.
Professor Girma Berhanu approaches this subject with the discipline it demands and the restraint it deserves. A scholar at the University of Gothenburg and a longstanding contributor to these pages, he refuses the easy consolations of certainty. Where others have speculated about vaccines, about coordinated campaigns, he draws a firm line between what is documented, what is alleged, and what remains unknown. He treats rumour as rumour and evidence as evidence, and asks the reader to do the same.
Yet this is not a detached study. Two years ago the author’s own cousin, an accomplished surgeon who had practised in Ethiopia, Greece, and Bulgaria was murdered while jogging near his home in Addis Ababa. His killers were never found. That loss sits beneath every measured sentence of this essay, and it is precisely the author’s refusal to let private grief overwhelm public reasoning that gives the piece its force.
To make sense of what he and his interviewees describe, Professor Berhanu reaches for Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics the theory that political power decides not only how populations are governed, but who is protected and who is left exposed to death. Read alongside Lauren Berlant’s notion of slow death, the framework lets him name something his informants feel but struggle to prove: the condition of healing others while living, in one physician’s chilling phrase, as a “dead man walking.â€
The Tribune has followed the violence in the Amhara Region, the shrinking space for the country’s intellectuals, and the erosion of civilian protection across many issues. This essay belongs to that record. It does not deliver a verdict. It delivers something harder and more necessary a demand for the transparent, independent investigation that Ethiopia’s dead have so far been denied.
Synopsis
Drawing on interviews with five Ethiopian medical professionals at home and abroad, alongside public reporting and years of close observation, Professor Girma Berhanu examines a disturbing pattern: the deaths of Ethiopian doctors of Amhara origin killed in the region’s ongoing conflict, or dying in circumstances that were never explained.
The essay is careful about what it claims. It confirms that healthcare workers have been among the victims of violence: the World Health Organization condemned the fatal shooting of three health workers in North Mecha in April 2026; the outlet Ethio Focus has documented at least twenty-one health professionals killed or seriously injured in the Amhara Region; and Human Rights Watch has warned that such attacks may amount to war crimes. Individual cases anchor the abstraction — Getnet Misganaw, a health-centre head shot on official duty near “Sebat Minchâ€; Dr Tsegahun Sime, detained in Bahir Dar and reported dead hours later. But it stops short of asserting that all Amhara doctors are being systematically targeted for their ethnicity, insisting instead that motive and pattern remain open empirical questions.
Its analytical spine is Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, the exercise of power not only through killing, but through the production of conditions in which certain populations are left chronically exposed to death. Through this lens the author argues that many Amhara medical professionals now practise their vocation in a state of persistent insecurity: healing others while fearing for themselves.
Professor Girma Berhanu situates the present within a longer history of exclusion from the dismissal of forty-two Addis Ababa University professors in the early 1990s to the recurring vulnerability of the Amhara educated class and draws on comparative atrocity studies, which show that educated elites are often among the first to be targeted. He advances no single conspiracy. He argues, rather, that the convergence of history, testimony, and documented harm is grave enough to demand what has so far been withheld: transparent, independent investigation.
Professor Berhanu’s complete essay follows below.
