The Fault Line That Oromuma 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

Happy

0 0 %

Sad

0 0 %

Excited

0 0 %

Sleepy

0 0 %

Angry

0 0 %

Surprise

0 0 %

By Girma Berhanu (Professor)

Watching recent international coverage of Ethiopia’s election, I’ve been left with a question that grows harder to ignore: why are Amhara voices — and Amhara suffering — so consistently absent from the global media narrative?

A recent Al Jazeera segment brought this concern into sharp focus. The panel featured Martin Plaut and other commentators, but included no Amhara representative. More troubling than who was present, however, was what went unsaid.

There was no substantive discussion of the ongoing conflict in the Amhara region. No mention of civilians killed or displaced. No acknowledgment of the humanitarian toll borne by Amhara communities during the Tigray war — or of the violence that has continued since. The panelists referenced security problems in Oromia and Amhara as background factors affecting the election, but never confronted the specific, devastating reality of war in Amhara itself.

This was not an isolated omission.

Months earlier, journalist Mehdi Hasan interviewed Getachew Reda. The Ethiopian voices invited to respond, again, included no Amhara representative. Amhara concerns, again, went largely unspoken.

Across major international outlets — including the BBC and CNN — a painful pattern has emerged: when Ethiopia is discussed, Amhara perspectives are frequently minimized, generalized, or excluded. Coverage may acknowledge instability, conflict, and political crisis, yet routinely fails to examine how Amhara communities are specifically affected, or to include Amhara voices in conversations about the country’s future.

This pattern deserves serious attention.

This is not a call to shield any actor from scrutiny, nor a claim that one community’s suffering outweighs another’s. Ethiopia’s conflicts have brought devastating loss to many communities, and all civilian suffering demands recognition. But equal recognition matters. Representation matters. Accuracy matters.

When international media repeatedly discuss Ethiopia without meaningful Amhara participation—or without directly addressing violence against Amhara civilians—it shapes public understanding in ways that carry real consequences. It influences diplomatic conversations, humanitarian priorities, and historical memory.

I would like to seize this opportunity to commend the American photojournalist Jemal Countess and the Canadian author and journalist Jeff Pearce, who has long been known as a friend of Ethiopia in the face of foreign misinformation campaigns and the continued marginalization of the Amhara population. These are men of courage, sensitivity, remarkable honesty, and genuine journalistic integrity. They remain committed to truth, professional ethics, and conscience despite facing a barrage of attacks for who they are and for the principles they uphold.

The central question is straightforward: who gets to tell Ethiopia’s story?

When one of the country’s largest communities finds itself spoken about but rarely heard from, concern about media imbalance is not merely reasonable — it is necessary.

This is why independent research into international reporting on Ethiopia is urgently needed: to examine whose voices are amplified, whose suffering is documented, and whose experiences remain invisible.

Silence can become part of the story. Selective attention can become a form of erasure. And when that occurs in coverage of conflict and political violence, the consequences extend far beyond any headline.

GIRMA BERHANU
Professor

GOTHENBURG UNIVERSITY
Department of Education and Special Education
Västra Hamngatan 25, A-hus room 168
Mail address: Box 300, 405 30 Göteborg
office: +46-(0)31-786 2325
mobile: +46 704731818
girma.berhanu@ped.gu.se
www.ips.gu.se

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

Happy

0 0 %

Sad

0 0 %

Excited

0 0 %

Sleepy

0 0 %

Angry

0 0 %

Surprise

0 0 %

On a continent where elections are frequently described as historic milestones before a single ballot is cast, Ethiopia’s seventh national poll has managed to be simultaneously predictable and remarkable predictably stage-managed, and remarkably revealing about the condition of the state.

By E. Frashie  |  Addis Ababa Correspondent

1 June 2026

ADDIS ABABA — By half past six on Monday morning, the queues outside polling stations across Addis Ababa had already assumed that particular character of Ethiopian civic patience: long, unhurried, and quietly dignified. For a government anxious about legitimacy, the photographs of citizens lining up before dawn were worth more than any campaign poster. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed understood this perfectly. His first act of the day was not to vote, that came later, but to appear before a carefully curated selection of domestic media outlets for an address that, in its confident sweep and selective omissions, told the electorate precisely what it was and was not supposed to think.

The speech was, by any measure, a performance. Ethiopia, Abiy declared, had foiled the machinations of ‘historical enemies’ who had hired internal proxies to spread propaganda and convince the public that democracy was impossible. The voters, in their wisdom, had rejected this counsel and turned out in their numbers. So far, so standard. But listen more carefully to the subtext and a more pointed message emerges: those who question this election, whether they be opposition politicians, international human rights bodies, or foreign journalists, are enemies or their instruments. The word he chose :- Banda, the Amharic for traitor or colonial lackey, carries particular historical freight in a country whose founding myth is built on resisting foreign interference. It is a word deployed with precision. It is also a word designed to foreclose argument rather than invite it.

Set against the morning’s operational reality, the rhetorical architecture of the speech becomes still more instructive. While the Prime Minister spoke of the Ethiopian people’s heroic civic spirit, the National Election Board of Ethiopia was simultaneously informing journalists at the Skylight Hotel, the nerve centre of the day’s monitoring operations, and, it should be noted, also the base of the African Union observer mission, that no fewer than 143 polling stations in Amhara and Oromia had failed to open at all, on grounds of security. An undisclosed further number had been forced to close early. Voting in Kersa, Kutaber, Gilolopa, and Gosache had been interrupted. How many voters were thereby disenfranchised, NEBE Chairperson Melatwork Hailu did not say. The number remains, as of this writing, undisclosed.

This is not a trivial omission. Ethiopia is a country of some 135 million people, roughly half of whom are under eighteen. The registered voter roll stands at just over 50 million a figure that critics have already disputed, arguing that large swaths of the country affected by ongoing conflicts in Amhara, Oromia, Gambella, and Tigray were effectively excluded from meaningful participation before the day began. Prior to polling day, NEBE had already announced that elections would not be held in 38 districts of Tigray and eight constituencies in Amhara. The figure of 143 closed stations on the day itself adds a further layer of practical exclusion that the official narrative of orderly, nationwide voting rather conspicuously declines to accommodate.

THE NUMBERS GAME

The scale of the exercise is not in dispute. Over 52,000 polling stations. Nearly 200,000 election workers. Forty-seven registered political parties. More than 10,900 candidates. These are impressive figures, and NEBE cited them with justifiable pride. Less prominently featured was the analytical context supplied by Chatham House’s Ahmed Soliman and Abel Abate Demissie, who assessed the contest as likely to be among the least competitive of the seven national elections held since multiparty democracy was nominally introduced in 1991. The Prosperity Party won 96 per cent of parliamentary seats in 2021. It is running unopposed in several dozen constituencies in 2026. The opposition fragmented across more than forty parties, starved of funds, and in several documented cases denied permits to hold rallies comparable to those the ruling party staged at Meskel Square enters this election not as a credible alternative government in waiting, but as democratic scenery.

WION’s correspondents on the ground noted a heavy military presence alongside the familiar picture of enthusiastic queues. That combination visible participation alongside visible security force deployment captures something essential about the texture of this election. Citizens are voting. Whether they are doing so in conditions that meet any recognised standard of free and fair is an altogether different question, and one that the official choreography of the day is not designed to answer.

There is also the matter of what was happening to journalism whilst all of this was unfolding. Reporters Without Borders placed Ethiopia 145th out of 180 countries in its 2025 Press Freedom Index company it shares, in that neighbourhood of the rankings, with Eritrea, North Korea, and Iran. Addis Standard, the country’s most consequential independent digital outlet, had its operating licence withdrawn ahead of the election. The Reporter, the largest-circulation newspaper, had been warned to align its editorial output with government narratives. The irony of an election designed to demonstrate democratic vitality being observed by a press corps operating under these conditions is one that the Prime Minister’s morning address did not find time to address.

UHURU’S CAREFUL ARITHMETIC

Into this environment arrived former Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, leading the African Union Election Observation Mission of 73 short-term observers drawn from 37 African countries. The mathematics of oversight are, at minimum, thought-provoking: 73 observers for a country of 135 million people voting across 52,000 polling stations represents a coverage ratio that would tax even the most optimistic statistician. The AUEOM deployed at the formal invitation of the Government of Ethiopia a detail the AU’s own arrival statement saw fit to mention in its opening sentence, which is a choice.

Kenyatta, speaking to state media approximately three hours before this dispatch was filed, delivered himself of the following assessment: from the polling stations visited, and from reports received from observers elsewhere in the country, voting ‘seems to be going on smoothly.’ Stations had opened ‘on time.’ NEBE staff ‘seem to know what they’re doing,’ and ‘everything seems orderly.’ He expressed hope that ‘the people of Ethiopia will be able to do their civic duty.’

That is three uses of the word ‘seems’ in under forty seconds, from a man who met NEBE Chairperson Melatwork Hailu the previous day and commands a continent-wide observation network. It is the diplomatic equivalent of a restaurant critic writing that the food ‘appeared to be cooked.’ The phrasing is not accidental. Kenyatta is an experienced political operator who knows exactly what his words will be used for by state media, and exactly what weight they can and cannot bear. He has preserved his position for the preliminary statement scheduled for 3 June, when the mission will say something more considered. But the government clip of him saying ‘seems orderly’ will be on Ethiopian state television long before that.

The Intergovernmental Authority on Development has also deployed its own 26-member observer team, led by former Ugandan Vice President Speciosa Wandira-Kazibwe. Their preliminary statement is likewise due on 3 June. Both missions are based, with a symmetry too neat to be entirely coincidental, at the Skylight Hotel the same venue where NEBE staged its official monitoring operations.

WHAT THE CIVIL SOCIETY OBSERVERS FOUND

Rather more pointed in its same-day assessment was the Coalition of Ethiopian Civil Society Organisations for Elections, which deployed 3,149 observers 2,258 stationary and 891 mobile across the country. Their midday report, released whilst voting was still under way, documented a catalogue of procedural concerns that the government’s smooth-running narrative does not easily absorb.

The most significant finding concerned ballot box handling. At 26 stations monitored by CECOE roughly one per cent of those covered observers were unable to verify that boxes had been demonstrated to be empty before being sealed and opened for voting. This is not a bureaucratic footnote. An unsealed or unverified ballot box is the most elementary mechanism for the pre-stuffing of ballots, and the failure to perform the emptiness demonstration in public is a procedural violation that election law exists precisely to prevent. Beyond this, CECOE documented polling stations established in prohibited locations, unauthorised individuals assisting voters, restrictions on observer access, the distribution of unstamped ballot papers, the exchange of materials between stations, and the presence of individuals inside voting centres who had no business being there. Access was denied to CECOE observers at seventeen stations altogether.

CECOE was careful to note that the vast majority of stations proceeded without incident, and that overall the day was peaceful. This is accurate and ought to be said. It is also the kind of qualification that the government will amplify and the irregularities will be footnoted. The Tribune notes, for the record, that peace and procedural integrity are related but distinct concepts. A peaceful election conducted with systematic procedural violations is not the same thing as a credible one.

THE PROCLAMATION AND THE QUEUE

By evening, a further data point had arrived. NEBE announced, citing Proclamation No. 1162/2019, Article 49, Sub-Article 4, that voting hours would be extended until every voter already standing in line by 6pm had cast their ballot. The legal basis is sound and the decision, on its face, is admirable, no citizen who made the effort to queue should be turned away. But the extension also tells a secondary story about the reliability of the digital voter registration system, which NEBE itself acknowledged had caused delays and longer queues throughout the day. When an e-registration platform deployed across a country of 135 million people generates queues long enough to require a legal extension of polling hours, questions about the system’s fitness for purpose are not unreasonable.

The Prime Minister, in his morning address, had spoken of Ethiopia’s aspiration to become a nation that breeds tech unicorns and meets most of its demands through domestic production. The voter registration app developed by NEBE, reportedly downloaded by over 5.5 million citizens experienced sufficient difficulties on election day to contribute to nationwide delays. The distance between the aspiration and the operational reality is a recurring theme in Abiy’s Ethiopia, and it surfaced again, quietly, in the queues outside polling stations across the country.

THE VISION AND THE VOID

It would be uncharitable and analytically incomplete to dismiss Abiy’s morning address as mere propaganda. Parts of it were more substantive than that. His call to elected officials to serve with ‘clean hands and clean hearts’ rather than focussing on the ‘ego of winning’ was, at minimum, an acknowledgement that the gap between electoral victory and effective governance is real. His framing of the next five years as demanding ‘more effort, deeper thinking, and greater unity than ever before’ suggested a man who understands, or at least affects to understand, that governing Ethiopia in 2026 is an enterprise of considerable complexity.

His promise that the Prosperity Party would ‘gracefully accept whatever election results emerge’ was received with the scepticism it merits, given that the party is running unopposed in multiple constituencies and won 96 per cent of seats at the last election. Accepting results one has pre-arranged is not, strictly speaking, a test of democratic grace. But the rhetorical commitment is on record, and the Tribune will hold it there.

The international media picture assembled around this election is less equivocal than the official one. Al Jazeera, Reuters, CNN, Africanews, and WION all reported the contest within a framework of expected Prosperity Party dominance, significant regional exclusions, fragmented opposition, and meaningful questions about process integrity. The FIDH and the World Organisation Against Torture expressed serious concern at the civic environment in which the election was conducted, citing active armed conflict in Amhara and Oromia as backdrop. Human rights observers noted that the government’s tolerance manifest in pardons issued and exiles welcomed back had been interpreted by some armed groups as weakness, a framing Abiy himself deployed, though he drew different conclusions from it.

One further detail from the day’s events deserves to be recorded, and not only in passing. An election facilitator, unnamed in the NEBE briefing, lost his life in a motorcycle accident in Enamorena Enayer, Gurage Zone, whilst carrying out his duties. He will not feature in the preliminary statements due on 3 June, nor in the Prosperity Party’s victory address when it comes. The Ethiopian Tribune records his name as unknown and his loss as real.

The AU observer mission will speak on Wednesday. The results, NEBE has indicated, are expected within ten days. Abiy Ahmed will almost certainly be returned to office with a majority that renders the word ‘landslide’ barely adequate. The procedural irregularities documented by CECOE will be assessed, weighed, and in all probability found insufficient to alter the outcome. The 143 stations that never opened will remain a footnote. The voters of Kersa and Kutaber and Gilolopa and Gosache will be asked, in due course, to wait for a re-run.

Ethiopia’s seventh general election is, by the metrics its government prefers, a success. The stations opened. The queues formed. The ballots were cast. Uhuru Kenyatta said it seemed orderly. On a continent where elections have been far worse, this is not nothing.

Whether it is enough is a question that the Ethiopian people not the Prosperity Party, not the African Union, not the international wire services will be left to answer for themselves. They have, as Abiy noted with evident satisfaction, been doing so since early morning. The Tribune will be watching when the answers come.

E. Frashie is a correspondent and analytical writer for The Ethiopian Tribune.

The Tribune’s editorial policy requires attribution of all factual claims. Sources consulted for this dispatch include NEBE official briefings, translated transcripts of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s election-day address and AU observer Uhuru Kenyatta’s statement to state media, reports by Al Jazeera, Reuters, CNN, Africanews, WION, CECOE midday observer release, FIDH, Chatham House, and Reporters Without Borders.

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

Happy

0 0 %

Sad

0 0 %

Excited

0 0 %

Sleepy

0 0 %

Angry

0 0 %

Surprise

0 0 %

How regional war, electoral consolidation, diaspora uprising, and conflicting visions of national identity threaten to unravel the Horn of Africa’s oldest continuous state

By Sewasew Teklemariam Ethiopian Tribune columnist

The crisis engulfing Ethiopia in May 2026 cannot be understood as a collection of discrete problems requiring separate solutions. Rather, what is unfolding is a systemic collapse operating simultaneously across multiple registers:-military, political, ideological, and civilisational. These crises are not incidental to one another; they are structurally interconnected, each amplifying the others in ways that threaten to push Ethiopia past a point of reversibility.

At the military register, Sudan’s accusations regarding drone operations and training camps have created a situation in which border escalation has shifted from possibility to probability. Intelligence agencies across multiple countries now accept as baseline reality that Ethiopian territory is being used to facilitate military operations within Sudan, whether through formal government decision or through tolerated proxy activity. The physical evidence—satellite imagery of the Benishangul-Gumuz camp, recovered drone components, convoy tracking data remains technically ambiguous but strategically significant. Neither country has incentive to permit clarity to emerge. Sudan benefits from internationalism of the conflict. Ethiopia benefits from maintaining plausible deniability. This ambiguity, far from creating space for negotiation, instead creates space for escalation: both sides can claim vindication, both sides can justify further military preparations, and both sides can point to the other’s actions as justification for their own.

More fundamentally, the regional realignment orchestrated by Cairo has positioned Ethiopia at the intersection of pressure from three directions simultaneously. From the west, Sudan’s armed forces, supported by Egypt and Saudi Arabia, are consolidating control of the Blue Nile region and preparing for potential cross-border operations. From the north, Eritrea once an ally, now reimagined as an adversary has repositioned itself as a node in a regional coalition opposed to Ethiopian interests, supplied by Iran, financed by Saudi Arabia, and coordinated militarily with Cairo. From the east, Somalia increasingly falls under Egyptian influence, presenting a potential third pressure point. These are not coincidental alignments. They represent a deliberate strategic architecture constructed by Cairo and validated, through its silence or acquiescence, by Washington.

At the political register, the machinery of electoral authoritarianism operates with ruthless efficiency. Opposition leaders are imprisoned on dubious charges. Independent journalists are disappeared from streets and held incommunicado. Media outlets are raided. Civil society organisations face restrictions. All of this occurs whilst the government insists upon its commitment to democratic governance and invites international election observers to witness what is, in reality, a managed electoral process designed to produce predetermined outcomes. The elections scheduled for 1 June 2026 function not as a mechanism for determining government but as a mechanism for legitimising continued Prosperity Party monopoly on power. International observers, faced with a process that is technically procedurally correct but substantively constrained, will likely issue sufficiently ambiguous reports that will allow the government to claim vindication whilst allowing critics to point to the absence of genuine competition. The elections will thus serve simultaneously as a demonstration of commitment to democracy and as a mechanism for consolidating authoritarianism a feat that is possible precisely because electoral procedures and democratic governance have become decoupled from one another.

What makes the political crisis particularly acute is that it is occurring at precisely the moment when the government faces its greatest military vulnerability. The federal army is stretched across multiple insurgencies Oromia, Amhara, parts of Somali region and now potentially facing significant military pressure on the western border with Sudan. The government’s response to this vulnerability is not strategic reassessment but rather tightening of internal control: imprisoning opposition leaders who might challenge resource allocation decisions, silencing media who might scrutinise military spending or strategy, constraining civil society that might ask uncomfortable questions. This is a classic pattern of authoritarian response to weakness: when external pressures increase and internal capacity decreases, the instinct is to consolidate power rather than to build coalition or seek alternative approaches.

At the ideological register, competing visions of what Ethiopia is and what it should become have moved from background context to foreground crisis. The vision articulated by the Prosperity Party centres on technocratic modernisation, pan-Ethiopian identity (as opposed to ethnicity-based federalism), and the pursuit of development through infrastructure projects such as the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. This vision has real appeal to significant portions of Ethiopia’s urban professional classes and to international investors and development institutions. But it has also generated profound alienation among other constituencies who view the Prosperity Party’s approach as a means of centralising Amhara-dominated control, marginalising regional interests, and undermining federalism as a mechanism for protecting minority and ethno-linguistic rights. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front, despite its defeat in the civil war, continues to command loyalty among portions of the Tigray population and operates as a pole of alternative political possibility. The Oromo Liberation Front, though excluded from electoral competition and designated a terrorist organisation, continues to attract support among segments of Oromia’s population. And now, emerging as a new force, are movements seeking to reconnect Ethiopia to visions of earlier historical configurations whether through Tigrayan intellectuals and activists articulating expanded conceptions of Tigrayan or “Geez” civilisational identity, or through Eritrean diaspora movements exploring the possibility of reunification under democratic rather than authoritarian auspices.

The Agaezi National Union Party’s perspective, articulated from within diaspora and intellectual circles, represents one such competing vision. The ANU’s analysis emphasises what it terms the “Geez Civilisation” and argues that the separation of Eritrea from Ethiopia constituted a catastrophic historical fragmentation engineered through foreign intervention and facilitated by TPLF-EPLF collaboration that should be characterised as treason against the greater Geez national project. From this perspective, the TPLF’s inclusion of Article 39 rights to self-determination and eventual secession in Ethiopia’s 1995 constitution represents a continuation of the fragmentary logic that enabled Eritrea’s separation. The ANU argues that restoring access to the Red Sea, preventing further territorial fragmentation, and rebuilding a unified Geez civilisation should be central to Ethiopia’s strategic vision. This analysis explicitly rejects what it characterises as “landlocked, periphery and minority secessionist” visions and calls for a “public national constitution (not party or government based memorandum)” that prioritises national unity and territorial integrity over ethno-linguistic federalism.

The significance of this perspective lies not in whether it commands majority support it does not but in the fact that it represents a genuine intellectual and political current within Ethiopian and diaspora circles that is gaining articulation and visibility at precisely the moment when competing visions of Ethiopian identity and statehood are being contested most sharply. That multiple, incompatible visions of what Ethiopia should be, how it should be governed, and what its territorial and civilisational boundaries should be, are all being advocated simultaneously, and that none of these visions appears capable of achieving hegemonic consensus, suggests that the political crisis extends beyond the question of whether the June 1 elections are free and fair to the more fundamental question of what constitutional and political framework Ethiopians themselves desire.

The Eritrean dimension of this crisis presents one of the most historically significant developments in the region in decades, yet it remains poorly understood by international observers and inadequately covered by international media. The realignment of Eritrea from Ethiopian ally to regional adversary has occurred gradually over the past three years, but it has accelerated dramatically in 2025 and 2026. The mechanism of this realignment is straightforward: Eritrea’s government, faced with the delegitimation that peace with Ethiopia produced the loss of the external enemy that had justified internal militarisation and authoritarianism has chosen to reposition itself as a regional player aligned with Egypt and opposed to Ethiopia. This choice has been validated through material incentives: Saudi Arabia has provided financial support, Iran has established supply line access through Eritrean territory, and the Trump administration’s decision to lift sanctions on Eritrea has signalled American acceptance of this alignment.

Yet simultaneously, and largely invisible to international analysis, the Eritrean diaspora representing approximately one-third of Eritrea’s entire population has mobilised around the Eritrean Blue Revolution, a pro-democracy movement that has begun to explore the possibility of reunification with Ethiopia under a federal democratic arrangement. The symbolism of the blue flag, representing the federation era of 1952 to 1961, is significant: it suggests that a democratic future might involve not continued independence but rather a reimagined federal relationship with Ethiopia, one that would operate under democratic governance rather than under Eritrean or Ethiopian authoritarianism. This possibility, were it to gain traction, would fundamentally alter the regional configuration that both Cairo and Asmara are currently constructing.

The convergence of Ethiopian pro-democracy movements and Eritrean pro-democracy movements in shared space particularly in Addis Ababa, where the January 2026 Eritrean Blue Revolution gathering occurred represents a potential axis of political transformation that both the Prosperity Party and the Eritrean regime have incentive to prevent. That imprisoned Ethiopian opposition leaders and disappeared Ethiopian journalists represent precisely the sort of political constraint that preempts such convergences is not coincidental. The government’s crackdown is not simply about winning the June 1 elections; it is about preventing the emergence of a political configuration that could threaten fundamental regime interests through the combination of internal democratic movements and diaspora mobilisation.

The Tigray situation presents perhaps the most acute existential threat to Ethiopian territorial integrity and government legitimacy. The region that was the epicentre of a civil war killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions remains, eighteen months after the nominal cessation of hostilities, in a state of political limbo. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front, unable to obtain a party licence to participate in the June 1 elections, operates in a legal and political grey zone. The population remains largely displaced, unable to return to homes, unable to participate in normal economic activity, unable to engage with the political process. The interim administration that the federal government imposed remains administratively incompetent and politically alienating to large portions of the Tigray population. TPLF intelligence networks, dispersed and degraded but not eliminated, continue to operate. And reports suggest coordination between TPLF elements operating from Sudan and Eritrean military forces through the arrangement variously referred to as “Army 70” or the “Tsimdo arrangement.”

The ANU perspective on Tigray is particularly significant here. The ANU argues that Tigrayan identity should be understood as part of the greater Geez civilisation and that Tigrayan interests should be served through reconnection to a unified, unitary national state rather than through autonomy within a federated framework. From this perspective, the TPLF’s assertion of Tigrayan interests through federalism and ultimately through secession (which the ANU characterises as the logical endpoint of ethno-linguistic federalism) represents a betrayal of the greater Geez civilisational project. This analysis suggests that a reconstituted Ethiopia, rebuilt on the foundation of Geez civilisation and committed to territorial integration and Red Sea access, would better serve both Tigrayan and broader Ethiopian interests than would continued federalism or outright separation.

Whether this vision is appealing to the Tigray population itself remains an open question. What is clear is that the Tigray population is deeply alienated from the federal government, deeply traumatised by the civil war, and increasingly engaged with both internal Tigrayan political movements and external Eritrean political movements through kinship networks and historical connections. The possibility of Tigray mobilising around a pro-TPLF political programme, combined with Eritrean mobilisation around the Blue Revolution, combined with broader Ethiopian pro-democracy mobilisation, presents a scenario in which convergent political movements could simultaneously challenge Prosperity Party dominance and Eritrean regime consolidation. That this possibility seems to preoccupy government strategists is evident from the intensity of the crackdown on political opposition and independent media.

The international context that frames these domestic crises is one in which the United States appears to be accepting, or at least not actively resisting, Egypt’s strategy for regional hegemony. The Trump administration’s decision to lift sanctions on Eritrea, justified on Red Sea strategic grounds, implicitly endorses Eritrea’s alignment with Egypt and Sudan against Ethiopia. The absence of American pressure on Egypt to cease its regional encirclement strategy suggests American acquiescence. The failure of the United States to use its leverage with the Ethiopian government to insist upon minimum standards of democratic conduct freedom for opposition leaders, protection for journalists, genuine electoral competition suggests an American calculation that Ethiopia’s strategic position is sufficiently weak that the United States need not invest diplomatic capital in defending Ethiopian democratic governance. From a realpolitik perspective, this may be rational: if Ethiopia is going to be constrained by Egyptian regional hegemony in any case, why expend diplomatic capital fighting battles that cannot be won?

But this calculation appears to discount several possibilities that could alter regional dynamics significantly. The first is the possibility of successful convergence between Ethiopian and Eritrean pro-democracy movements, creating a unified force substantially more difficult for Egypt to manage than either separate movement would be. The second is the possibility that genuine democratic transformation in either Ethiopia or Eritrea could trigger cascading transformation in the other, creating a fundamentally altered regional configuration. The third is the possibility that the very intensity of external pressure on Ethiopia could trigger internal mobilisation in ways that the government cannot control. The fourth is the possibility that the June 1 elections, rather than producing the legitimation that the government seeks, instead produce a legitimacy crisis that international observers cannot finesse through ambiguous language.

The question of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam sits beneath much of this regional tension, though it is rarely explicitly discussed in coverage of the immediate crises. The dam fundamentally alters water flows in the Nile system, reducing downstream availability for Egypt and Sudan. For Egypt particularly, the GERD represents an existential threat to national survival in ways that international law, diplomatic negotiation, and technical solutions have thus far failed to address. Egyptian strategic responses have thus necessarily taken the form of regional containment: preventing Ethiopia from emerging as sufficiently powerful to resist Egyptian pressure. Supporting Sudan’s armed forces, aligning with Eritrea, leveraging Somalia through military presence in AUSSOM, developing partnerships with Saudi Arabia to constrain Iranian influence in the region all of these strategic moves can be understood as components of a broader strategy to ensure that Ethiopia remains constrained and unable to fully exploit the advantages that the GERD provides.

It is from this perspective that the ANU’s emphasis on Red Sea access becomes strategically significant. If Ethiopia were to gain reliable access to Indian Ocean shipping through either Eritrean or Sudanese Red Sea ports, its economic and strategic position would be transformed. This is precisely what Cairo wishes to prevent. Egypt’s regional strategy is thus fundamentally about ensuring that Ethiopia remains landlocked, economically dependent, and politically constrained unable to pursue independent strategic interests, unable to fully exploit the GERD’s potential, unable to emerge as a regional power. The ANU’s vision of a reconstructed Ethiopia with access to the Red Sea through reunification with Eritrea, or through some other territorial reconfiguration, thus represents precisely the strategic nightmare that Egyptian planners most fear.

The convergence of these multiple crises military pressure from Sudan and Eritrea, political crisis manifested in electoral authoritarianism and opposition imprisonment, ideological contestation over what Ethiopia is and should be, the Tigray political limbo, the GERD strategic tension with Egypt, and now the emergence of diaspora movements that could potentially alter regional dynamics creates a situation of genuine systemic instability. None of these crises appears susceptible to solution through the mechanisms currently being pursued. Military preparations in Sudan and Eritrea will not produce Ethiopian capitulation; they will produce Ethiopian military mobilisation and further regional escalation. Electoral management and opposition imprisonment will not produce political legitimacy; they will produce legitimacy deficits and post-election contestation. Continued ambiguity regarding the training camps and drone operations will not produce de-escalation; it will produce further miscalculation as both sides act on differing interpretations of the evidence. The attempt to govern Tigray through interim administration without genuine political incorporation will not produce stability; it will produce continued alienation and continued risk of renewed conflict.

The question that now faces Ethiopia and the international community is whether the convergent nature of these crises will be recognised and addressed holistically or whether, through habit and institutional inertia, the international community will continue to treat them as separate problems a military conflict with Sudan, an electoral process in Ethiopia, a political situation in Tigray each requiring separate solutions and separate diplomatic tracks. If the latter approach continues, then the trajectory toward regional war becomes increasingly probable. If a more holistic approach were pursued one that recognised that military escalation in Sudan/Eritrea, political legitimacy deficits in Ethiopia, diaspora mobilisation for democratic transformation, and competing visions of Ethiopian identity are all components of a single systemic crisis then alternative pathways might become visible.

Such pathways might involve: genuine space for opposition political competition in advance of the June 1 elections; a serious negotiated settlement for Tigray that involves genuine political representation rather than interim administration; a diplomatic track focused on de-escalation in Sudan that does not require Ethiopian capitulation but does require acknowledgment of underlying security concerns; serious engagement with the Eritrean Blue Revolution and with Eritrean pro-democracy movements as legitimate actors in regional politics rather than as marginal movements to be suppressed; and a fundamental reconsideration of the GERD’s regional implications and the development of a framework that addresses Egyptian water security concerns without requiring Ethiopian subordination.

Whether such a holistic approach is possible remains deeply uncertain. The political actors involved—Prosperity Party leadership in Ethiopia, SAF leadership in Sudan, Eritrean regime leadership, Egyptian strategists all have incentive structures that favour continued escalation or continued management of current tensions rather than fundamental transformation. The international community, particularly the Trump administration, appears to have accepted, explicitly or implicitly, an outcome in which Egyptian regional hegemony is established and Ethiopian power is constrained. And the cascading nature of the crises means that each moment that passes without fundamental reorientation increases the probability that some triggering event a military escalation that spirals out of control, an electoral outcome that is contested violently, a Tigray political crisis that reignites will push the region past a point of reversibility.

What remains clear is that the June 1 elections cannot function as a resolution of Ethiopia’s political crisis. Whether they succeed in producing a compliant parliament that legitimises Prosperity Party rule, or whether they fail in this objective and instead produce contested results and post-electoral violence, the underlying problems will remain unaddressed. The military pressure from Sudan and Eritrea will not abate. The diaspora movements for democratic transformation will not disappear. The Tigray political limbo will not resolve itself. The competing visions of Ethiopian identity and national purpose will not achieve consensus. And the regional configuration orchestrated by Cairo, validated by Washington, and now being operationalised by Sudan and Eritrea will continue to constrain Ethiopian options and continue to amplify regional instability.

The tragedy of the moment is not that the outcome is predetermined but that the mechanisms for addressing the systemic nature of the crisis recognition of interconnection, willingness to pursue transformation rather than incremental management, openness to alternative regional configurations appear largely unavailable to the political actors most capable of producing them. Instead, what is likely is a continuation of tactical escalation and crisis management, with periodic moments of acute danger when miscalculation produces unintended military escalation, until some catastrophic event forces a fundamental recalibration of the entire regional system.

Whether that recalibration comes through democratic transformation, military defeat, or some other mechanism remains unknowable. What is knowable is that the current trajectory, if maintained, appears increasingly likely to produce outcomes substantially worse than the crises currently being managed.

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

Happy

0 0 %

Sad

0 0 %

Excited

0 0 %

Sleepy

0 0 %

Angry

0 0 %

Surprise

0 0 %

By Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)

Editorial Foreword

It is with considerable gratitude that the Ethiopian Tribunepresents the final instalment of Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu’s four-part analytical series on the Abraham Accords and their implications for Ethiopian sovereignty, geopolitical positioning, and national strategy. Over the past months, this series has established itself as the most rigorous and unflinching examination of the architecture reshaping the Gulf–Red Sea–Horn region combining legal-historical analysis, strategic assessment, and an uncompromising focus on the conditions required for Ethiopian agency.

This final instalment, “Assab, Sovereignty, and the Endgame,”moves beyond architecture into operational reality. It addresses what Parts 1–3 have prepared: the political, military, and diplomatic conditions under which Ethiopian sovereignty is recovered; the enduring legal foundations on which that recovery stands; the closing strategic window that demands urgent action; and the binary choice that now confronts the Ethiopian state and people.

What This Instalment Addresses

Internal Constraints and Public Accountability. Hailu opens with an ultimatum addressed directly to the Ethiopian people and the Ethiopian government emerging from the June 2026 election. Sovereignty is not produced as a by-product of external alignment; it is produced by populations that demand it and discipline themselves to defend it. The “monkey habit of ethnic entrepreneurship” the operational mechanism by which external opportunities are squandered through factional competition remains the binding constraint on Ethiopia’s four singular interests. The path forward runs through civic discipline, not elite pronouncement.

The Legal Foundation: Residual Rights and Continuous Chain. Part 4 reasserts the legal record established in Part 3 with load-bearing clarity: Italy never held absolute sovereignty; Resolution 390(V) explicitly preserved Ethiopian sea access irrespective of Eritrean political status; the OAU’s uti possidetis principle, applied to its founding moment with Eritrea as Ethiopian territory, locks Eritrea in as Ethiopian territory; the 1993 abandonment was performed ultra vires by an unmandated transitional government; and the Algiers Agreement, by addressing only the land boundary, preserves rather than extinguishes Ethiopian residual rights.

The Government Policy Track: Alignment and Divergence. Hailu conducts a rigorous reading of four substantial policy-track articles published in the Horn Review between November 2025 and April 2026 the most extensive Ethiopian articulation of maritime sovereignty since 1991. He identifies six critical strengths: maritime recovery is reframed as a state imperative; the legal record on Italy’s non-sovereignty is established with rigour; Resolution 390(V)’s protective function is correctly characterised; the 1962 incorporation is defended as restoration rather than annexation; the 1993 referendum is named for its constitutional illegitimacy; and the “depoliticisation” of landlockedness is correctly diagnosed. He simultaneously identifies four critical weaknesses: the AU’s complicity in 1993 goes unnamed; settlement options are hedged toward conciliation where assertion is required; Eritrean independence is accepted as settled while challenging only its conditions; and Saudi engagement reproduces a supplicatory frame. The interpretation is stark: if the government fails to extend the policy track beyond these stops-short, the inference becomes unavoidable that the government may not have been serious about recovering sovereign sea access in the first place.

The Mature Strategy: Political, Diplomatic, and Military Tracks. Hailu then presents the strategic synthesis required across three concurrent tracks. Politically: a civic mandate anchored across multiple regional constituencies and won on a programmatic platform that includes explicit positions on the four singular interests, giving the resulting government legitimacy to pursue sovereign sea access as a national project. 

Diplomatically: offence, not defence converting the Hexagon’s southern arc into a central strategic partnership; engaging bridge actors from positions of leverage rather than supplication; and confronting the AU and UN multilateral forums with the legal record of Italian-claim contingency, OAU complicity in 1993, and the ultra vires character of the TPLF-led abandonment. Militarily: credible deterrence and prepared option conventional capability, asymmetric capability, and doctrinal preparation sufficient to seize and hold the Doumeira–Beilul corridor through the “attack, hold, and negotiate” formula.

The Convergence Point: 2027–28. The military strategist’s calendar (the closing window) and the politician’s calendar (the construction curve of civic compact, macroeconomic depth, and global-capital integration) converge at 2027–28. At that point, if political, diplomatic, and military preparation is sustained, Asmara faces a choice between negotiated settlement that preserves Eritrean political existence on terms that include Ethiopian sovereign access, or confrontation that the strategist has prepared to win. This is the moment of maximum Ethiopian leverage.

Eritrea’s Path: Coexistence or Parasitism. Hailu addresses the Eritrean question with historical honesty and strategic clarity. Both populations were brutalised; the 1993 separation was not popular consent but rebel-group imposition; Eritrea’s current garrison-state offers its own population no future. The post-operation settlement envisaged preserves Eritrean separate political existence while establishing economic relationship with Ethiopia that addresses Eritrea’s developmental crisis. The objective is sovereign Ethiopian access to the sea alongside sovereign Eritrean access both nations benefiting from the recovery of a coastline that was never legitimately surrendered.

The Binary Choice. The instalment concludes with the operative ultimatum: if the conditions are met civic mandate, sustained diplomatic offence, military preparation, macroeconomic stabilisation, and leverage-based engagement with regional partners then sovereignty is recovered and the four singular interests become attainable. If any condition is abandoned, the geopolitical architecture amplifies the internal fractures; GERD becomes a factional prize; the coastline remains permanently lost; and Ethiopia’s demographic trajectory produces fragmented territory governed by competing oligarchies that external patrons exploit. The choice is binary and operational: bananas for the few and dismemberment for the many, or sovereignty for the nation and prosperity for the generations that follow.

The Election Analysis Ahead

Dr. Hailu has indicated his intention to return with a companion article examining the June 2026 election as the constitutional moment at which the political track is operationalised. That analysis examining the election’s conduct, possible outcomes, the programmatic test for every candidate, and the meaning of a Pan-Ethiopian mandate promises to be as rigorous and uncompromising as the series that precedes it. The Tribune looks forward to bringing that perspective to its readers with the same analytical independence and strategic clarity that has defined this four-part examination.

This series stands as the most comprehensive independent analysis of Ethiopian sovereignty, Horn of Africa geopolitics, and the Abraham Accords architecture available to English-language readers. It is offered to the Ethiopian public and to scholars of the region as a contribution to the urgent and necessary conversation about what sovereignty means, what conditions make it attainable, and what price is paid when it is abandoned for the comfort of dependency.

—The Editors —

Read the Full Article

Part 4/4: Assab, Sovereignty, and the Endgame

Available as PDF via the link below

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

Happy

0 0 %

Sad

0 0 %

Excited

0 0 %

Sleepy

0 0 %

Angry

0 0 %

Surprise

0 0 %

EDITOR’S FORWARD: PART 3 — ETHIOPIA’S INTERNAL CONSTRAINT

The third instalment of Mefkereseb G. Hailu’s analysis arrives at the moment when Ethiopia’s strategic arithmetic becomes most urgent and most brutal. Parts 1 and 2 traced the architecture that has created, paradoxically, the most favourable external environment Ethiopia has faced in its modern history—the convergence of Israeli technology, Emirati capital, American security infrastructure, and demographic weight at a single strategic node. Yet that architecture, Hailu argues, can only be converted to national gain by a state capable of negotiating as a unit. A fractured Ethiopia finds in that same architecture the most efficient mechanism for dismemberment that the country has yet faced.

This instalment turns inward, but not to domestic policy abstracted from strategy. It does the opposite: it demonstrates that the internal and external are inseparable. The ethnic federalism that converts diversity into zero-sum bargaining, the personalist governance that substitutes leadership for institutions, the patronage networks that convert national assets into factional prizes, these are not merely unjust. They are the fracture lines through which external competitors penetrate Ethiopian strategic space. Every day that ethnic entrepreneurs mobilise constituencies against one another, they are simultaneously constructing the entry points for Cairo’s encirclement, for proxy cultivation, for the dismemberment that begins not with invasion but with the subtle repositioning of factional clients.

The author’s central concept the “monkey habit of ethnic entrepreneurship” will strike some as provocative. It should. It is meant to. The term names a specific political economic phenomenon with identifiable actors, predictable behaviours, and measurable costs. It is not a metaphor for poor manners but an operational mechanism: the conversion of identity into a tradable asset, the manufacture of grievance, the cultivation of victimhood narratives that locate every problem outside the constituency and every solution within the entrepreneur’s gift. The author demonstrates that ethnic entrepreneurs from rival groups are functionally allies, dependent on each other for the perpetuation of the inter-group mistrust from which they profit. They constitute a guild.

The analysis extends to the June 2026 election as a constitutional moment. This is not an endorsement of any candidate or party, nor is it naïve about the constraints under which the vote will be held. It is instead a recognition that elections offer something that no other mechanism currently available to Ethiopians provides: a moment in which voters can articulate, through their choices, whether the next political phase will be organised around programmes or around identities. The choice is not between Abiy Ahmed and an imagined optimum but between coalitions whose composition and mandate will determine whether the policies pursued afterward can be Pan-Ethiopian or will revert to ethnic-bargained variants of the same failed dispensation.

The article grapples unflinchingly with the Red Sea sovereignty question tracing the legal chain from Wuchale through Resolution 390(V), documenting the AU’s foundational hypocrisy, exposing the constitutional irregularity of the 1993 Eritrean referendum and the 2000 Algiers Agreement. It does so not as an exercise in historical recrimination but as the foundation for a strategic argument: that the window for recovering sovereign maritime access remains open while Egypt’s encirclement is still consolidating, and that the geopolitical moment that makes such recovery conceivable will not remain open indefinitely. The analysis of “attack, hold, and negotiate” as a strategic option is presented with equal weight to the political preconditions that make such an option survivable. The reconciliation lies in timing: the strategist’s calendar (dictated by deteriorating military balance) and the politician’s calendar (dictated by civic consolidation requirements) converge around 2027–28.

Yet the core argument remains domestic. A country whose internal politics is organised on ethnic lines cannot conduct a war of recovery that requires the cohesion of all major constituencies. Tigrayans will not fight for an Oromo-coded leadership’s coastline; Amhara will not accept casualties for a state perceived as having abandoned them; Oromo will not mobilise enthusiastically for an objective they perceive as Pan-Ethiopian but excluding their concerns. The military operation might succeed at the front; it would lose at home. This is why internal unity is not sentimental aspiration but the binding constraint on every external objective.

The article’s treatment of Abiy Ahmed as a political actor neither saint nor villain but a figure whose trajectory reveals the operational mechanics of the monkey habit will be controversial. The argument is narrower and more strategic than either supporters or critics commonly advance: in a country whose institutional infrastructure remains weak, whose opposition parties remain organisationally thin, whose civic ecosystem is still recovering from constraint and war, the choice presented to Ethiopians is not between Abiy and a robust civic alternative. It is between Abiy and what would actually emerge if he were defeated which, on present evidence, is not a Pan-Ethiopian civic coalition but a fragmentation contest among ethnic-entrepreneur factions whose combined effect would be to deliver to the balancing coalition (Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Eritrea, Somalia) precisely the porosity it is working to engineer. The argument for engaging Abiy strategically rests on the absence of a credible alternative; the argument against permitting any leader unconditional power rests on the institutional discipline that civic citizenship requires.

The economic dimensions Birr depreciation, foreign-exchange scarcity, inflation, the compression of household real incomes receive analysis not as technical problems to be solved by experts but as the medium through which political outcomes are produced. Economic discontent is being channelled through ethnic categories. A young Amhara man unable to find work interprets his predicament as Oromo capture of the federal economy. A young Oromo man unable to find work interprets the same condition as elite betrayal of his constituency. A Tigrayan trader unable to access foreign exchange interprets the situation as deliberate federal punishment. These interpretations are not wholly fabricated; each contains elements of truth. But all of them mistake structural macroeconomic conditions for ethnic conspiracy, and ethnic entrepreneurs profit from the conversion.

The author’s fear, articulated in his transmission note, deserves reflection. He fears that the nation is not prepared to stave off the storms hurling upon it. That fear is justified. The encirclement is not theoretical 15,000 Egyptian troops in Somalia, military access at Assab and Doraleh, the Sunni leadership contest pressing Ethiopia’s Muslim communities as one more potential fracture line, Eritrea’s emergence from isolation. The window is closing. Whether Ethiopians recognise it and act on it is the question on which everything turns.

This instalment represents the most rigorous analysis of Ethiopia’s internal constraint yet to appear in these pages. It will anger some. It will clarify for others. It will provide to those Ethiopians still persuaded that their country’s future is worth fighting for the intellectual foundation on which that fight must rest: that a unified Ethiopia pursuing civic citizenship is not a luxury reform to be deferred until conditions are easier, but the most urgent strategic action available to Ethiopians today. The window for civic consolidation is open now because the external environment is favourable. It will close when one or more external actors decides that a fragmented Ethiopia serves its interests better than a unified one.

Part 4 will address the decisive question: Assab, the sovereign coastline, and the endgame examined as a sovereignty-and-deterrence problem that demands both international mediation and domestic civic consolidation.

Readers are encouraged to access and study the full PDF of the article at the following link.

Part 3 examines the internal dynamics that make institutional coherence possible or impossible.

Author: Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)
Date: 26 April 2026
Series: The Abraham Accords — Part 3 of 4
Topic: Competition and Permissive Disorder in the Gulf–Red Sea–Horn

The Editor
Ethiopian Tribune
April 26, 2026

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

Happy

1

100 %

Sad

0
0 %

Excited

0
0 %

Sleepy

0

0 %

Angry

0
0 %

Surprise

0
0 %

ትንታኔ፦ የኢትዮጵያ ትሪቢዩን የፖለቲካ እና የኢኮኖሚ ጉዳዮች ክፍል

መጋቢት 16 ቀን 2018 ዓ.ም (ማርች 25፣ 2026)

በዓለም አቀፍ የቴክኖሎጂ ዘርፍ ከፍተኛ ድንጋጤን በፈጠረ ውሳኔ፣ በሎስ አንጀለስ የሚገኝ የዳኞች ቡድን በቴክኖሎጂ ግዙፎቹ ሜታ (Meta) እና ጎግል (Google) ላይ ከዚህ ቀደም ታይቶ የማይታወቅ የሽንፈት ውሳኔ አስተላልፏል። ይህ ብይን የማህበራዊ ሚዲያ ኩባንያዎች “ሆን ተብሎ ለተቀነባበረ የዲጂታል ሱሰኝነት” በሕግ ተጠያቂ የተደረጉበት የመጀመሪያው አጋጣሚ ነው። የሕግ ባለሙያዎች እንደሚሉት ከሆነ፣ ይህ ውሳኔ እንደ ኢትዮጵያ ባሉ በማደግ ላይ ባሉ አገራት የሚገኙ በሚሊዮን የሚቆጠሩ ወጣት ተጠቃሚዎችን ጨምሮ፣ መላውን የዲጂታል ዓለም ገጽታ መሠረታዊ በሆነ መልኩ ሊቀይረው ይችላል።

የፍርዱ ይዘት

ሳምንታት ለፈጀው ከፍተኛ የምስክርነት ቃል መስማት ሂደት በኋላ፣ የዳኞች ቡድኑ ሜታ (የኢንስታግራም፣ ፌስቡክ እና ዋትስአፕ እናት ኩባንያ) እና ጎግል (የዩቲዩብ ባለቤት) ሆን ብለው ተጠቃሚን ሱሰኛ የሚያደርጉ የመገናኛ መድረኮችን ቀርፀዋል የሚል መደምደሚያ ላይ ደርሷል። ዳኞቹ እነዚህ የዲጂታል መድረኮች አወቃቀር በሕግ ሰነዶች ላይ ‘ኬሊ’ ተብላ በተጠቀሰችው የ20 ዓመት ወጣት የአእምሮ ጤና ላይ ቀጥተኛ ጉዳት ማድረሳቸውን አረጋግጠዋል።

የከሳሿ የሕግ ባለሙያዎች እንደ “infinite scrolling” (ገደብ የለሽ የመረጃ ፍሰት) እና የፍላጎት ስልተ-ቀመሮች (algorithms) በአጋጣሚ የተፈጠሩ ሳይሆኑ፣ የሕፃናትን ደህንነት መሥዋዕት በማድረግ ተጠቃሚዎችን ለረጅም ሰዓት ለማቆየት ታስበው የተሰሩ መሆናቸውን በማስረጃ አቅርበው ተከራክረዋል።

የኩባንያዎቹ መከላከያ ውድቅ መደረግ

የሜታ ጠበቆች ጉዳዩን እንደ ግል ችግር በመፈረጅ ኩባንያውን ከተጠያቂነት ለማዳን ጥረት አድርገው ነበር። ኬሊ በግል ሕይወቷ መከራ ቢደርስባትም፣ ኢንስታግራምን መጠቀምዋ ለሥነ-ልቦና ቀውሷ መንስኤ እንዳልሆነ ወይም “ጉልህ አስተዋጽኦ” እንዳልነበረው ተከራክረዋል።

ሆኖም ዳኞቹ በዚህ መከላከያ አልተረቱም። ይልቁንም ኩባንያዎቹ ራሳቸው ያደረጓቸውን የውስጥ ጥናቶች ጨምሮ፣ እነዚህ መድረኮች ልክ እንደ ቁማር የአንጎልን የደስታ ስሜት (dopamine) ቀስቃሽ በሆነ መልኩ መገንባታቸውን የሚያሳዩ ማስረጃዎችን በመጥቀስ ውሳኔያቸውን አጽንተዋል።

በዛሬው ዕለት በዓለም አቀፍ የቴክኖሎጂ ኢንደስትሪ ላይ እንደ መብረቅ የተሰማው የሎስ አንጀለስ ፍርድ ቤት ውሳኔ፣ ሜታ እና ጎግልን ብቻ ሳይሆን እንደ ቲክቶክ (TikTok) ያሉ ሌሎች ግዙፍ መድረኮችንም ስጋት ላይ ጥሏል። የ20 ዓመቷን ኬሊን የካሳ ጥያቄ መሠረት በማድረግ የተሰጠው ይህ “ታሪካዊ” ብይን፣ የቴክኖሎጂ ኩባንያዎች ለተጠቃሚዎቻቸው የአእምሮ ጤና ያላቸውን የሕግ ተጠያቂነት አዲስ ምዕራፍ ከፍቷል።

የብይኑ መሠረት እና የቲክቶክ ስጋት
ምንም እንኳን የዚህኛው ክስ ትኩረት በሜታ (ኢንስታግራም) እና ጎግል (ዩቲዩብ) ላይ ቢሆንም፣ የፍርዱ መሠረታዊ ምክንያት ግን እንደ ቲክቶክ ያሉ መድረኮችን በቀጥታ የሚነካ ነው። ዳኞቹ ኩባንያዎቹን ጥፋተኛ ያደረጓቸው በሚከተሉት ነጥቦች ነው፦

የአልጎሪዝም አወቃቀር፦ ተጠቃሚው ሳያስበው ለሰዓታት እንዲቆይ የሚያደርጉ “ሱስ አስያዥ” ስልተ-ቀመሮች።ሆን ተብሎ የተሰሩ ዲዛይኖች፦ ልክ እንደ ቲክቶክ “For You Page” ሁሉ፣ ወጣቶችን ከእውነታው ዓለም የሚነጥሉ ማራኪ ግን ጎጂ ይዘቶችን የሚያስቀድሙ አሰራሮች።
የሕግ ባለሙያዎች እንደሚሉት፣ ቲክቶክ በአሁኑ ወቅት በአሜሪካ እና በአውሮፓ መሰል ክሶች እየቀረቡበት በመሆኑ፣ ይህ የሜታ እና ጎግል መሸነፍ ለቲክቶክም “የመጨረሻው ማስጠንቀቂያ” ተደርጎ ተወስዷል።

“የዲጂታል መድኃኒት” ተጠያቂነት

“ይህ ውሳኔ በኢትዮጵያ ያሉ ወላጆች እና ተቆጣጣሪ አካላት የማህበራዊ ሚዲያ አጠቃቀምን እንደ ቀላል መዝናኛ ብቻ ሳይሆን፣ ከፍተኛ ጥንቃቄ እንደሚሻ ‘ምርት’ እንዲመለከቱት ያደርጋል።”

የሜታ ጠበቆች “ኢንስታግራም ለኬሊ ችግር መንስኤ አይደለም” ብለው ቢከራከሩም፣ የሎስ አንጀለሱ ውሳኔ ግን የቴክኖሎጂው ዲዛይን ራሱ “መርዝ” ሊሆን እንደሚችል አረጋግጧል።

ቀጣዩ እርምጃ ምን ሊሆን ይችላል?
ይህ ብይን በመቶዎች ለሚቆጠሩ ተመሳሳይ ክሶች መንገድ ከፋች በመሆኑ፣ ወደፊት ኩባንያዎቹ የሚከተሉትን ለውጦች እንዲያደርጉ ሊገደዱ ይችላሉ፦

• ለታዳጊዎች የሚቀርቡ “ሱስ አስያዥ” ባህሪያትን መቀነስ።
• በየቀኑ የሚፈቀደውን የሰዓት ገደብ ማጥበቅ።
• ለደረሱ ጉዳቶች በቢሊዮን የሚቆጠር ዶላር ካሳ መክፈል።

በሎስ አንጀለስ ፍርድ ቤት በሜታ እና ጎግል ላይ የተሰጠው ውሳኔ ለኢትዮጵያ ትልቅ ደወል ነው። ሆኖም ለኢትዮጵያ ጉዳዩ ይበልጥ ውስብስብ የሚሆነው፣ እነዚህ “ሱስ አስያዥ” የተባሉ ቴክኖሎጂዎች በራሱ በመንግሥት እና በከፍተኛ አመራሮች ዘንድ እንደ ዋነኛ የሥራ እና የፕሮፓጋንዳ መሣሪያ በመወሰዳቸው ነው።

የመንግሥት “ዲጂታል አባዜ” እና የተጋላጭነት ስጋት

ጠቅላይ ሚኒስትር ዐቢይ አሕመድን ጨምሮ ከፍተኛ የመንግሥት ባለሥልጣናት አዳዲስ የቴክኖሎጂ ውጤቶችን (እንደ ቲክቶክ፣ ኤክስ እና ፌስቡክ) በከፍተኛ ሁኔታ መጠቀማቸው ይታወቃል። መንግሥት “ዲጂታል ኢትዮጵያ 2025” በሚል መሪ ቃል ዜጎች ወደ ቴክኖሎጂው እንዲገቡ እያበረታታ ባለበት በዚህ ወቅት፣ የቴክኖሎጂው “አዳኝ” (Predatory) ባህሪ ግን ችላ ተብሏል።

ተባባሪነት ወይስ አጠቃቀም?

መንግሥት እነዚህን መድረኮች ለፖለቲካዊ መልዕክት ማስተላለፊያነት ሲጠቀም፣ ሳያውቀው ወጣቱ ትውልድ በእነዚህ “ሱስ አስያዥ” ስልተ-ቀመሮች (Algorithms) ውስጥ እንዲዘፈቅ በር ይከፍታል። ይህም መንግሥትን የቴክኖሎጂ ኩባንያዎቹ “ያልተፈረመ ስምምነት” ተባባሪ ያደርገዋል።

የፖለቲካ ጉዳት፦ “የአልጎሪዝም ፖለቲካ” እና አለመረጋጋት
በአሜሪካ የተሰጠው ብይን እንደሚያሳየው፣ እነዚህ መድረኮች የተሰሩት ሰውን ስሜታዊ በማድረግ ረጅም ሰዓት እንዲቆይ ነው። በኢትዮጵያ ፖለቲካ ውስጥ ይህ ትልቅ አደጋ አለው፦

የሐሰት መረጃ መስፋፋት፦ ስልተ-ቀመሮቹ (Algorithms) ይበልጥ አነጋጋሪ እና ስሜት ቀስቃሽ የሆኑ የጥላቻ ንግግሮችን እና የሐሰት ወሬዎችን ለተጠቃሚው በማቅረብ ሱስ ያስይዛሉ። ይህ ደግሞ በኅብረተሰቡ ውስጥ ዋልታ ረገጥ ፖለቲካ እንዲነግሥ እና ብሔራዊ መግባባት እንዲጠፋ ያደርጋል።

የወጣቱ ትውልድ መደንዘዝ፦ ወጣቱ በቲክቶክ እና በፌስቡክ ሱስ ውስጥ ሲወድቅ፣ ለፖለቲካዊ ተሳትፎ እና ለሀገራዊ ጉዳዮች ያለው ንቁ ተሳትፎ እየቀነሰ ይሄዳል (Digital Narcissism)።

የኢኮኖሚ ጉዳት፦ ምርታማነት እና የውጭ ምንዛሬ ፍሰት
ከኢኮኖሚ አንጻር የማህበራዊ ሚዲያ ሱስ ለኢትዮጵያ ከፍተኛ ኪሳራ እያመጣ ነው፦

የምርታማነት መቀነስ፦ በሚሊዮን የሚቆጠሩ ወጣቶች እና የመንግሥት ሠራተኞች በሥራ ሰዓት በእነዚህ መድረኮች ላይ የሚያሳልፉት ሰዓት ለሀገር ውስጥ ምርት (GDP) እድገት ትልቅ እንቅፋት ነው።

የውጭ ምንዛሬ ፍሰት፦ ኢትዮጵያውያን በእነዚህ መድረኮች ላይ ማስታወቂያ ሲያወጡ ወይም የቲክቶክ “ስጦታዎችን” (Gifts) ሲለዋወጡ፣ በድብቅም ይሁን በግልጽ ከፍተኛ መጠን ያለው የውጭ ምንዛሬ ከሀገር ይወጣል። ኩባንያዎቹ (ሜታ፣ ጎግል፣ ቲክቶክ) በኢትዮጵያ ተጠቃሚዎች ቢከብሩም፣ ለሀገሪቱ የሚከፍሉት ግብር ወይም የሚያበረክቱት የኢኮኖሚ ድርሻ አነስተኛ ነው።

የሕግ ክፍተት፦ ተኩላው በበግ ለምድ
ኢትዮጵያ የ”ኮምፒውተር ወንጀል አዋጅ” እና የ”መገናኛ ብዙኃን አዋጅ” ቢኖራትም፣ እነዚህ ሕጎች በዋናነት የሚያተኩሩት ይዘት (Content) ላይ እንጂ በቴክኖሎጂ ኩባንያዎቹ “ሱስ አስያዥ ዲዛይን” ላይ አይደለም። መንግሥት የቴክኖሎጂዎቹ አድናቂ በመሆኑ፣ ኩባንያዎቹን በሕግ ከመጠየቅ ይልቅ “ለዲጂታል ዲፕሎማሲ” ቅድሚያ ይሰጣል።

የሎስ አንጀለሱ ብይን ለኢትዮጵያ የሚሰጠው ትምህርት ግልጽ ነው፤ ቴክኖሎጂን ማድነቅ እና መጠቀም አንድ ነገር ሲሆን፣ የቴክኖሎጂ ኩባንያዎች ዜጎችን (በተለይም ታዳጊዎችን) ለትርፍ ሲሉ ለሱስ እንዳይዳርጉ የመቆጣጠር ኃላፊነት ደግሞ ሌላ ነው። መንግሥት የቴክኖሎጂ አፍቃሪነቱን እና የቁጥጥር ኃላፊነቱን ማመጣጠን ካልቻለ፣ ውጤቱ “ዲጂታል ሱስ የተጠናወተው እና በፖለቲካ የተከፋፈለ” ትውልድ መፍጠር ይሆናል።

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

Happy

0 0 %

Sad

0 0 %

Excited

0 0 %

Sleepy

0 0 %

Angry

0 0 %

Surprise

0 0 %

By Professor Girma Berhanu

Introduction

The ongoing violence directed against Christian Amhara communities in the Arsi Zone raises serious concerns regarding the protection of vulnerable populations in Ethiopia. Recent reports indicate an intensification of targeted attacks, including killings, abductions, and the destruction of civilian property, particularly in districts such as Shirka, Guna, and Aseko. Investigations by the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission have documented incidents since late 2025 in which armed groups carried out attacks that resulted in deaths, injuries, and displacement of local residents, severely undermining the security and basic rights of affected communities.

These developments must be understood within the broader context of Ethiopia’s complex and evolving conflict dynamics. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has documented widespread human rights violations in multiple regions of the country, including Oromia and Amhara. In 2023 alone, thousands of civilians were killed in violent incidents across these regions, while thousands were subjected to abuses such as arbitrary detention, torture, and forced displacement. Such patterns indicate that the current violence is not an isolated phenomenon but part of a broader cycle of armed conflict and intercommunal tensions orchestrated by the system.

Historically, Amhara communities living in parts of Oromia have periodically faced episodes of mass violence and forced displacement. Several documented incidents—including massacres targeting civilians identified as ethnically Amhara—illustrate the recurring nature of such attacks. One example occurred in 2020 in western Oromia, where hundreds of Amhara civilians were killed in an attack widely reported by international media and human rights observers. These events underscore the vulnerability of minority communities residing outside their region of ethnic majority.

In recent months, observers and human-rights organizations have expressed concern over what appears to be a renewed escalation in violence. Reports describe killings, kidnappings, and large-scale displacement in parts of Oromia, with civilians caught between insurgent groups, local militias, and government forces. The insurgency involving the Oromo Liberation Army has contributed to a deteriorating security environment in which civilians are frequently exposed to abuses by multiple actors. However, the group claimed the violence aimed to fracture collective opposition by pitting communities against one another, including along Oromo–Amhara and Christian–Muslim lines. The OLA further stated that “whether in uniform or without, whether carrying a gun or a pen,” any actor who “weaponizes innocent civilians for political ends” would be considered its enemy, adding that it would confront such forces decisively.

Despite the gravity of these developments, the international response has often been perceived as limited compared with the scale of the humanitarian and human rights concerns involved. Scholars and policy analysts have noted that Ethiopia’s overlapping conflicts—spanning regions such as Tigray, Amhara, and Oromia—have complicated international engagement and reduced sustained attention to localized patterns of violence against minority communities.

Given these conditions, the situation warrants sustained monitoring, systematic documentation, and deeper international engagement. Strengthening mechanisms for independent investigation, accountability, and civilian protection remains essential for mitigating further violence and ensuring that vulnerable communities are afforded the protections guaranteed under international human rights and humanitarian law.

Atrocities in Arsi: A Human Rights Crisis in Ethiopia’s Oromia Region

The country of Ethiopia has been engulfed in war, massacres, and displacement at an alarming rate since Prime Minister Abiy came to power. The victims are mostly Amharas, particularly those who belong to the Orthodox Church. Such incidents have become increasingly common in the Oromia region. The perpetrators are often described as state-sponsored paramilitary groups and the so-called OLF, with each side blaming the other. This situation has continued for approximately eight years. Millions of people have lost their lives, properties have been destroyed, and displacement has become a defining feature of the new Ethiopia. The crimes being committed against Ethiopia and the defenseless Amharas are unbelievably horrifying and multifaceted. Yet both national actors and the international community remain largely silent.

The current spree of massacres in Arsi is telling. It took now over 6 months unabated. Many known media and newspapers have reported the atrocities. A good gesture is that three major Ethiopian religious bodies condemned the killing of 21 civilians in Shirka Woreda, East Arsi, urging swift investigations, accountability and stronger protection to prevent further inter-religious tensions. The Permanent Synod of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Inter-Religious Council of Ethiopia, and the Ethiopian Islamic Affairs Supreme Council have each issued statements condemning the killing of 21 civilians in Shirka Woreda, East Arsi Zone of Oromia Region. They urged authorities to take immediate action to bring the perpetrators to justice and strengthen protection for residents. In their statements, the religious institutions denounced the attack and called for swift, transparent investigations, warning against attempts to exploit the incident to incite further violence. The known Borkena news outlet has reported the massacres continuously.

Violence in Arsi Zone and Competing Narratives

The Oromo Liberation Army has accused what it described as “mercenaries” of moving through the Arsi Zone and deliberately targeting Orthodox Christian civilians in order to inflame inter-religious and inter-ethnic tensions. The group has denied responsibility for attacks against civilians and instead alleged that unidentified armed actors are attempting to provoke conflict between communities.

In a statement dated 1 March 2026, the Permanent Synod of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church reported that it had received information from its dioceses indicating that at least 21 civilians were killed in an attack in East Arsi. According to the statement, several survivors were abducted and their whereabouts remain unknown, while homes and property belonging to more than ten households were burned. The Synod emphasized that the victims were Orthodox Christians with no involvement in any armed conflict and stated that perpetrators who invoke religion to justify violence do not represent the teachings of any faith tradition. It further warned that such attacks risk creating divisions among religious communities that have historically coexisted in relative harmony and called upon Muslim and Christian leaders to jointly condemn the violence.

The Ethiopian Islamic Affairs Supreme Council similarly expressed deep sorrow over the killings of what it described as innocent Orthodox Christian civilians in Shirka Woreda. In its statement, the council stressed that the attack does not represent any religious teaching and warned that such incidents threaten long-standing traditions of inter-religious coexistence and mutual respect. Independent reporting and advocacy sources have also highlighted the severity of the violence in the region. According to reports cited by the media outlet Borkena, districts including Shirka, Merti, Guna, and Holonto have experienced repeated attacks in which civilians were killed or injured, property was destroyed, and communities were displaced. These reports characterize the situation as a significant escalation of violence in the Arsi Zone.

The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has documented a pattern of attacks affecting civilians in the area in its March 2026 reporting. According to the commission, recent incidents resulted in dozens of deaths, including multiple killings in Shirka and Merti districts, alongside cases of injury, abduction, and missing persons. The EHRC also noted broader patterns of insecurity in parts of Oromia since 2025, where recurring attacks on civilians have contributed to a wider humanitarian and human rights crisis. Eyewitness accounts collected by investigators and journalists describe highly coordinated attacks in which armed assailants targeted households and villages, leading to civilian deaths and widespread displacement. These testimonies indicate that communities have been subjected to intimidation, destruction of homes, and forced migration, contributing to a deteriorating humanitarian situation in the region.

At the same time, responsibility for the violence remains contested. Federal and regional authorities have repeatedly attributed many attacks to the Oromo Liberation Army, while the OLA has denied involvement and accused government forces or affiliated militias of staging or exploiting violence in order to justify security operations. This cycle of mutual accusations has complicated efforts to establish accountability and has hindered independent verification of events on the ground. The resulting climate of uncertainty underscores the need for impartial investigation. Without credible and transparent inquiries into the perpetrators of these attacks, the persistence of violence risks normalizing impunity and further undermining social cohesion in Ethiopia’s ethnically and religiously diverse society. Strengthening mechanisms for independent investigation, civilian protection, and accountability therefore remains critical to preventing further atrocities and restoring trust between communities.

Borkena. (2022, September 27). Ethiopia: Attack in Horo Guduru Wollega, Oromia region. https://borkena.com/2022/09/27/ethiopia-horo-guduru-wollega-oromo-region/

The ‘New Auschwitz’? Mass Violence and the Targeting of Civilians in Arsi Zone

Many years ago, I visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, located on the grounds of the former Auschwitz concentration camp, the largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp during World War II. Several years later, I also visited a Jewish cultural center and museum in Riga, Latvia, which similarly commemorates the persecution and destruction of Jewish communities during the Holocaust. Today, Auschwitz-Birkenau and other Holocaust memorial institutions serve as powerful sites of remembrance, preserving the memory of immense human suffering and reminding visitors of the catastrophic consequences of hatred, discrimination, and systematic dehumanization.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum provides a detailed historical account of the camp complex and the atrocities committed there. It stands as a solemn warning about what can occur when prejudice, exclusion, and ideological extremism are allowed to escalate unchecked. The enduring message of such memorials was eloquently articulated by Ellen Germain during the 75th anniversary of the museum on 13 July 2022. She emphasized the responsibility of future generations to safeguard historical truth:

“We must safeguard your testimony, their testimony, so that truth will never die. The world must never forget. The world must never deny. The world must never downplay the Holocaust. We must remain ever on guard, and we must do far more to teach the lessons of the Holocaust and apply them in our own time. We must counter hate and lies with tolerance and truth. And we must stand up for human dignity and freedom wherever they are imperiled.”

These reflections underline a critical principle: remembrance is not solely about honoring the victims of the past, but also about recognizing warning signs in the present. The lessons of the Holocaust compel societies to remain vigilant when patterns of discrimination, dehumanization, and targeted violence begin to emerge. When communities are singled out because of their identity—whether ethnic, religious, or cultural—the risk of escalating persecution becomes real.

It is within this broader moral and historical framework that contemporary reports of violence against civilians in the Arsi Zone must be considered. While historical contexts differ, the persistence of attacks against vulnerable populations raises urgent questions about protection, accountability, and the international community’s responsibility to respond when civilians become targets of systematic violence.

More than seventy-five years after the crematoria ceased their inhuman work, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum continues to preserve the former camp complex as a permanent site of memory. The preservation of this Holocaust memorial serves an essential purpose: to help future generations understand the consequences of hatred, racism, and systematic violence, and to ensure that such atrocities are never repeated. The site also stands as enduring evidence against those who attempt to deny or distort the historical reality of the Holocaust.

Yet the lessons of these memorials are not confined to the past. The warning they convey—that societies must remain vigilant against hatred, persecution, and mass violence—remains deeply relevant today. Reports from several contemporary conflicts suggest that civilians continue to face grave abuses, including in the ongoing war in Ukraine and in parts of Ethiopia.

Particularly troubling are reports of attacks against civilians in the Arsi Zone of the Oromia Region. Accounts from religious institutions, local sources, and human-rights observers describe killings, abductions, and the destruction of homes affecting vulnerable communities. These reports raise serious concerns about the protection of civilians and the ability of affected populations to seek safety during episodes of violence. While historical contexts differ greatly from those of the Holocaust, the recurrence of violence against civilians underscores the enduring importance of remembering past atrocities and applying their lessons to contemporary crises. Memorials such as Auschwitz remind the world that indifference to suffering, denial of abuses, and failure to protect vulnerable populations can have devastating consequences. Ensuring accountability and safeguarding human dignity therefore remain essential responsibilities for governments, civil society, and the international community alike.

Violence, Silence, and Moral Responsibility

Reports emerging from parts of Oromia Region, particularly in areas such as Arsi Zone and Wollega, describe widespread violence against civilians, including killings, displacement, and the destruction of homes and livelihoods. Observers and advocacy groups have raised concerns that armed actors operating in the region have targeted vulnerable communities and that humanitarian access has at times been restricted, making independent verification and relief efforts extremely difficult. Allegations have also surfaced that bodies of victims have been burned and that attacks on civilians have been carried out with extreme brutality—imagery that evokes memories of some of the darkest chapters of twentieth-century violence.

This paper seeks to draw attention to what many observers describe as a deeply underreported humanitarian tragedy unfolding in these regions. While the historical contexts differ greatly from those of the Nazi concentration camps, the scale of civilian suffering and the persistence of violence raise urgent moral and political questions. Reports indicate that armed groups operating in the region, sometimes in environments where security institutions have failed to provide adequate protection, have created conditions in which communities live under constant fear of attack. As a result, thousands of civilians have reportedly been displaced and forced to flee their homes, creating a growing humanitarian crisis.

The failure of state institutions to adequately protect citizens exacerbates this tragedy. When attacks occur repeatedly without credible investigation or accountability, communities lose confidence in the ability of authorities to safeguard their security and basic rights. Observers have therefore called for independent investigations into allegations of mass killings, human rights abuses, and other violations in order to establish the facts and ensure that perpetrators are held accountable under the rule of law.

Ethiopia today faces immense human suffering and a profound national crisis. Many citizens feel that the country’s political future is increasingly shaped by competing ethno-nationalist movements and armed actors. In such an environment, atrocities—including killings, arrests, and the mistreatment of civilians—risk becoming normalized. The silence of political leaders, humanitarian actors, and international institutions in the face of such reports has raised troubling questions among many Ethiopians about whether the suffering of their communities is receiving adequate attention.

Religious and moral leaders may have an especially important role to play in such circumstances. Ethiopia is a deeply religious society in which spiritual institutions often serve as sources of moral guidance and social cohesion. Leaders from all faith traditions—Christian, Muslim, and indigenous spiritual traditions—can help promote reconciliation and emphasize the shared humanity of all Ethiopians. Their voices are particularly important in reminding communities that violence committed in the name of religion or ethnicity contradicts the ethical principles that faith traditions claim to uphold.

Periods of national crisis also highlight the importance of collective moral responsibility. Philosophical discussions of responsibility emphasize that institutions and leaders bear a duty to prevent harm when they possess the power to do so (Risser, 1996). Silence in the face of injustice can enable further abuses, while moral leadership can help mobilize societies toward peace and accountability. As the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn warned in The Gulag Archipelago, ignoring evil allows it to grow and ultimately undermines the foundations of justice.

Understanding why societies sometimes fail to respond to mass atrocities has also been explored by scholars. Psychologist Paul Slovic describes the phenomenon of “psychic numbing,” in which large-scale human suffering paradoxically leads to reduced emotional engagement and weaker public action (Slovic, 2007). People often respond strongly to the suffering of a single identifiable victim, yet become increasingly indifferent when confronted with statistics describing thousands of victims. This dynamic may help explain why some humanitarian crises fail to receive sustained international attention.

Political scientists have also highlighted how ethnic identity can be mobilized by political elites in ways that intensify violence. According to James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, ethnic violence is frequently linked to strategic political mobilization in which elites frame conflicts in ethnic terms in order to consolidate power or mobilize supporters (Fearon & Laitin, 2000). Such narratives can generate fear, deepen divisions, and ultimately legitimize violence against perceived out-groups.

These dynamics underscore the importance of resisting propaganda, rejecting narratives that dehumanize other communities, and reaffirming the shared dignity of all citizens. Throughout history, attempts to manipulate ethnic identity for political purposes have produced devastating consequences. Divide-and-rule strategies and discourses of ethnic superiority can create cycles of resentment and retaliation that undermine national cohesion and long-term stability.

Ethiopia’s future therefore depends on a renewed commitment to accountability, justice, and reconciliation. Independent investigations, protection of civilians, and responsible leadership are essential steps toward breaking cycles of violence. Equally important is the willingness of citizens, community leaders, and institutions to confront injustice openly and to reject the normalization of cruelty and hatred.

As writer E. A. Bucchianeri observed, “It’s not unpatriotic to denounce an injustice committed on our behalf; perhaps it’s the most patriotic thing we can do.” Speaking out against violence and defending the dignity of all human beings is not an act of division—it is a necessary foundation for a just and peaceful society.

In conclusion, I argue that the Abiy regime’s leadership incompetence, systemic cruelty, and moral vacuum have directly fueled Ethiopia’s current crises—the result of a leadership class lacking fundamental moral intelligence. Beheshtifar, Esmaeli, and Moghadam (2011) define moral intelligence as the “central intelligence for all humans,” distinct from both cognitive and emotional intelligence. Lennick and Kiel, the architects of this concept, identify its four pillars as integrity, responsibility, forgiveness, and compassion. Ethiopian ethnonationalists, particularly Oromo extremists, exhibit a profound deficit in these competencies—a legacy of moral decay inherited from their TPLF predecessors. For those lacking this essential intelligence, deception and malice become the standard, creating a pervasive political pathology that defines the current era.

References

Beheshtifar, M., Esmaeli, Z., & Moghadam, M. N. (2011). Effect of moral intelligence on leadership. European Journal of Economics, Finance and Administrative Sciences, 43, 6–11.

Cohen, S. (2013). States of denial: Knowing about atrocities and suffering. Polity Press.

Eurasia Review. (2021, May 16). The logic behind events in Ethiopia (Op-ed). https://www.eurasiareview.com/16052021-the-logic-behind-events-in-ethiopia-oped/

Eurasia Review. (2022, April 13). Victims and victimization in Ethiopian politics: Targeting the Amhara on three fronts (Op-ed). https://www.eurasiareview.com/13042022-victims-and-victimization-in-ethiopian-politics-targeting-the-amhara-on-three-fronts-oped/

Eurasia Review. (2022, July 26). Oromummaa unchained: Ethnic apartheid and territorial expansion in Ethiopia (Op-ed). https://www.eurasiareview.com/26072022-oromummaa-unchained-ethnic-apartheid-and-territorial-expansion-in-ethiopia-oped/

Fearon, J. D., & Laitin, D. D. (2000). Violence and the social construction of ethnic identity. International Organization, 54(4), 845–877.

Lind, G. (2008). The meaning and measurement of moral judgment competence: A dual-aspect model. In D. Fasko Jr. & W. Willis (Eds.), Contemporary philosophical and psychological perspectives on moral development and education (pp. 185–220). Hampton Press.

Risser, D. T. (1978). Power and collective responsibility. Kinesis, 9(1), 23–33.

Risser, D. T. (1996). The social dimension of moral responsibility: Taking organizations seriously. Journal of Social Philosophy, 27(1), 189–207.

Slovic, P. (2007). “If I look at the mass I will never act”: Psychic numbing and genocide. Judgment and Decision Making, 2(2), 79–95.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (n.d.). Collective moral responsibility. http://www.iep.utm.edu/collecti/

The New Yorker. (2022, October 3). Did a Nobel Peace Laureate stoke a civil war? https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/03/did-a-nobel-peace-laureate-stoke-a-civil-war

The Washington Post. (2022, July 18). Ethiopian genocide commands attention. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/18/ethiopian-genocide-commands-attention/

White, J. R. (2005). Auschwitz: A new history. History: Reviews of New Books, 34(1), 19. https://doi.org/10.1080/03612759.2005.10526737

The views, arguments, and conclusions expressed in this article are solely those of the author, Professor Girma Berhanu, and do not represent the editorial position of the Ethiopian Tribune. Readers are encouraged to consult multiple sources when forming their own judgments on the complex and evolving situation described.

Contact information:

Girma Berhanu

Department of Education and Special Education (Professor) University of Gothenburg

Box 300, SE 405 30

Göteborg, Sweden

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

Happy

0 0 %

Sad

0 0 %

Excited

0 0 %

Sleepy

0 0 %

Angry

0 0 %

Surprise

0 0 %