THE PRICE OF A PARDON

Ethiopia greeted 2019 with the release of some 600 prisoners. The government calls it forgiveness. History suggests a more familiar — and more troubling — ritual.

By E. Frashie

The Ethiopian Tribune  ·  Enkutatash, 11 September 2026

On the eve of Enkutatash, as families across the country prepared to mark the turn into 2019, the Ethiopian government released more than 600 prisoners in what state media presented as a gesture of national reconciliation. Among those freed was Christian Tadele, the former member of the House of People’s Representatives whose detention since August 2023 had become a touchstone in the argument over the state’s treatment of Amhara political voices. The 86-year-old historian Tadios Tantu, long described as the country’s oldest political prisoner, is also reported to be among the freed, though the Tribune has yet to confirm it. Fana Media Corporation, the state-affiliated broadcaster, cast the releases as the first tangible fruit of the National Dialogue — a turning of the page, it said, from confrontation towards ‘the pen and ideas, not guns and force’.

It is a seductive image for a New Year: prisoners restored to their families, a prime minister speaking the language of forgiveness, a human rights commission crediting five months of quiet work. Yet the arithmetic and the mechanism of this release repay closer reading than the festive framing invites — for how a government releases prisoners can disclose as much as the fact that it has.

A release, or a pardon?

The first tell is in the vocabulary. Fana’s own headline described the move not as a release but as a pardon, and the distinction is not cosmetic. A release implies the state accepts it had no cause to hold a person. A pardon implies a guilt the state has elected to excuse. According to reporting by Meseret Media, carried by the diaspora outlet Borkena, the freedoms granted this week were conditioned on precisely that admission: those released are said to have signed a document acknowledging that their part in the Amhara struggle was a mistake, accepting responsibility for lives lost and property destroyed, and undertaking never to repeat such conduct — on pain of forfeiting any protection thereafter.

This is reconciliation offered on one party’s terms. It requires the prisoner, not the government, to concede the moral argument. For a figure such as Tadele — detained days after he criticised the Prime Minister from the floor of parliament, and held for more than two years without a concluded trial — the demand to sign such an undertaking is itself a statement about who the government believes owes the apology.

From the cell to the cabinet

None of this is new. It is, rather, the latest staging of a ritual Ethiopia has performed before — one in which the state first condemns and then crowns. When the leaders of Kinijit, the Coalition for Unity and Democracy, were freed in July 2007 after the bloody aftermath of the 2005 election, they too walked out only once they had signed a letter accepting partial responsibility for the violence and forswearing unconstitutional means. The document Meseret Media describes this week is that letter’s direct descendant; the choreography has scarcely altered in two decades.

What came after the 2007 release is the more instructive part. Birtukan Mideksa, the former judge and Kinijit vice-chair who had been convicted of attempting to overthrow the constitutional order and sentenced to life, would in 2018 be sworn in to run the country’s elections as chair of the National Electoral Board — appointed by the very state that had caged her, and lauded by Abiy Ahmed as one who would ‘never surrender, even to the government’. Berhanu Nega, elected mayor of Addis Ababa in 2005 and never permitted to take the office, fled into exile, founded the armed movement Ginbot 7, and was condemned to death in absentia as a terrorist. In 2018 parliament struck out both the death sentence and the terrorist designation; by October 2021 he sat in Abiy’s cabinet as Minister of Education.

Herein lies the paradox the New Year framing cannot dissolve. The same constitutional order, through the same courts, can find a citizen guilty of the gravest offences against the state — treason, terrorism, the attempt to unmake the constitution itself — and then, when the political weather turns, not merely pardon that citizen but instal them among the highest officers of the land. Guilt and elevation become interchangeable, settled not by the judgment of a court but by the calculation of a palace. A verdict, in such a system, is less a finding of fact than a bargaining chip held in reserve.

It is a phenomenon with few parallels. The nearest is Northern Ireland, where the Good Friday Agreement saw paramilitary prisoners released and former commanders — Martin McGuinness among them — rise to govern. But there the releases were the negotiated price of a peace settlement ratified by referendum, not the recurring largesse of an executive that dispenses and withdraws guilt at will. Ethiopia’s version has no such settlement to anchor it. It simply revolves: today’s terrorist is tomorrow’s minister, and today’s minister may yet be tomorrow’s prisoner.

From the cell to the spotlight

If for the politician imprisonment can be a route to office, for the artist and the entertainer it has proved something subtler: a route to canonisation. Here the state does not do the rewarding — society does, converting the very punishment into prestige.

Consider Tewodros Kassahun, the singer known to every Ethiopian as Teddy Afro. In December 2008 he was convicted of manslaughter over a 2006 hit-and-run that killed a homeless man in Addis Ababa, along with leaving the scene and driving without a licence; sentenced to six years, reduced on appeal to two, he was freed in 2009. He always denied it — his defence was that he had been abroad that night — and to a great many Ethiopians the case, brought more than a year and a half after the death and set against his 2005 opposition anthem ‘Yasteseryal’, was persecution dressed as justice. Whatever the truth of that night, the effect of the verdict is not in dispute: Teddy emerged not diminished but consecrated. The albums that followed sold in extraordinary numbers; an honorary doctorate arrived in 2021; his 2026 comeback commanded the national conversation. The cell had become part of the legend.

The pattern persists in miniature, and in real time. In December 2025 police detained the TikTok creator Adonay Berhane — twenty-five years old, nearly four million followers, freshly crowned ‘TikToker of the Year’ — over little more than an open-necked shirt, one of several young creators swept up after an awards night on suspicion of ‘undermining public morality’. By the time of his release the following spring, the arrest had done for him what no run of content could: it made him a cause. The morality his detention was meant to defend was eclipsed by the freedom his detention was seen to violate, and he walked out larger than he went in.

The through-line is unmistakable, and peculiar to few places on earth. In Ethiopia, to be punished by the state is to be handed a kind of capital — political, cultural, or both. The politician banks it as office; the artist banks it as glory; and the ledger, either way, records the same startling entry — that the surest route to elevation may run through a prison gate.

The six hundred, and the others

The figure of 600 itself merits scrutiny. Set against the pool from which it was drawn, it resembles less a general amnesty than a filtered one. Meseret Media reports that roughly 1,300 political prisoners were approached with the pardon offer; a separate account, from the outlet Memesita, counted around 300 releases tied specifically to the Amhara conflict, and adds that those freed had first to complete government ‘rehabilitation training’. If some hundreds walked free, a comparable number did not — and the reason, in at least some cases, was a refusal to sign.

Reconciliation contingent on confession is not reconciliation between equals.

Around thirty prisoners and journalists are reported to have declined the document, insisting they had no crime to apologise for. Their reward, by the same account, was not continued detention in a known facility but a removal under cover of night. On 26 August, several were said to have been taken from Abba Samuel prison to an undisclosed location — among them the former Amhara Students’ Association president Sisay Melkamu, together with Belay Sisay, Marew Sileshi and Colonel Solomon Teferi. Others named as refusing include Dr Wondwossen Assefa, Dr Sisay Awgichew, the journalists Gobez Sisay and Dawit Begashaw, and Yohannes Buwalew. Their whereabouts, at the time of writing, remain unconfirmed.

If accurate, this is the shadow cast by the New Year gesture: the same initiative that returned some men to their families appears to have driven others deeper into the dark. The two facts are not in tension; they are two faces of a single logic, in which liberty is the reward for compliance and disappearance the price of principle.

The Commission’s role

Presiding over the process was the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission and its Chief Commissioner, Birhanu Adelo, who called the outcome a singular chapter in the country’s history. The Commission’s involvement is offered as a warrant of the initiative’s integrity. Its recent record complicates that reassurance. This is the same body that, in June, pronounced Ethiopia’s seventh general election peaceful and in keeping with international standards — a verdict that itself drew charges of partiality from observers who saw a narrower reality.

A national human rights institution that lends its name to a pardon-for-confession scheme, rather than pressing for the unconditional release of those held without trial, has arguably inverted its mandate. The question worth asking is not whether the Commission laboured for five months, as it says, but to what end that labour was turned: the freeing of the wrongly held, or the extraction of admissions that retrospectively license their detention.

A caveat, and what to watch

A word on sourcing is owed to the reader. The celebratory account of this release reaches us through state-affiliated media; the critical account — the pardon document, the refusals, the transfers — rests substantially on a single chain of reporting from Meseret Media by way of Borkena. The release of Tadios Tantu, too, is something the Tribune has yet to confirm against a firm source; the most recent reporting available still described the historian as detained. As of this writing the Commission had not published, on its own website, the statement now quoted in its name; its public feed still ended several days before the release. These are claims the Tribune will continue to test, and readers should weigh them as such.

What is not in doubt is the shape of the bargain the government has extended as it enters the new year. The Prime Minister has cast the implementation of the National Dialogue as an exercise in reconciliation and mercy. The men who signed have their freedom; the men who would not sign have passed from view. Between those two outcomes lies the true content of Ethiopia’s New Year message — written not in the language of forgiveness, but in the grammar of power.

E. Frashie writes long-form analysis for The Ethiopian Tribune.