ANALYSIS · ETHIOPIA AND THE UNITED STATES

Forty-Eight Hours in Two Capitals

In Washington, a Tigrayan-born critic of the Ethiopian state won a seat in Congress and an Ethiopian-American admitted to spying for Addis Ababa. In Addis Ababa, the authorities silenced the country’s oldest independent newspaper. A tale of two cities, and what it costs the Ethiopian government.

By E. Frashie · 5 November 2026

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Dickens wrote of London and Paris on the eve of revolution. The two cities in this story are Washington and Addis Ababa, and the span is not a decade but roughly forty-eight hours, from Monday 2 November to the small hours of Wednesday 4 November 2026. In that window, three things happened that the Ethiopian government would, for different reasons, have preferred not to happen at all, or at least not at the same time.

On Monday, Ethiopia’s media regulator suspended The Reporter, the country’s oldest surviving independent newspaper, indefinitely. On Tuesday, in a federal courtroom in Washington, a former US government contractor pleaded guilty to passing top-secret American intelligence to Ethiopian officials so that they could use it against armed opponents of the state. And on Tuesday night, the voters of Denver sent to Congress a 29-year-old Ethiopian-born lawyer of Tigrayan origin who has spent years accusing the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments of genocide.

Each story has been reported on its own. Read together, they describe a government that is narrowing the space for scrutiny at home just as it is losing control of how it is seen abroad.

Washington I: The Ballot

Melat Kiros won Colorado’s 1st Congressional District with roughly 78 per cent of the vote, defeating the Republican Christy Peterson and the independent Shimon Blau. The Associated Press called the race on election night. The general election was a formality in a safe Democratic seat; the real contest came in June, when she ended the 29-year congressional career of Diana DeGette in the Democratic primary, winning the certified count by 53.2 per cent to 39.8.

She arrives in Washington as the first Generation Z woman elected to Congress and the first Black woman to represent Colorado in the House. She is a democratic socialist, endorsed by the DSA, Justice Democrats and Senator Bernie Sanders. Her campaign was about rents, healthcare and corporate money in politics, and, most controversially, about Gaza. She was fired from a New York law firm in 2023 after refusing to take down an essay defending student protesters.

That essay is where Ethiopia enters the story. Born in Addis Ababa and raised in Denver after her father won the US diversity visa lottery, Kiros wrote it explicitly as a woman from Tigray. In it she described the war of 2020–22 as genocidal and named the perpetrators as the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments. She wrote of three years spent alongside the Tigrayan diaspora pressing for international recognition, and of her father being in Mekelle during the official mourning period of October 2023. In a Denver interview this July, she again described a genocide in Tigray and warned that conflict there might be erupting again. Within weeks, it was.

“Addis Ababa now faces, inside the US legislature, a member whose formative political cause was the indictment of the Ethiopian state.”

Some caution is in order. Kiros campaigned on Denver, not on the Horn of Africa, and a first-term member of the House has little direct leverage over foreign policy. Her rhetoric on Tigray has also been contested from more than one direction: one critic, writing in the pro-Israel JNS, accused her of using Tigray selectively to sharpen her case on Gaza, while some in the Ethiopian diaspora dispute the genocide framing she adopts. And, contrary to what is being said in some diaspora circles, there is no public record of any organisational tie between Kiros and the TPLF. Her stated position is an indictment of Addis Ababa and Asmara, not an endorsement of any Tigrayan faction.

But the symbolism matters, and so does the platform. A member of Congress can write letters, place statements in the record, question officials at hearings, and give visibility to constituents and advocates. For a government that has spent years insisting that the language of genocide is a foreign fabrication, a voice of that kind inside the institution that shapes American aid and sanctions policy is not a trivial development.

Washington II: The Courtroom

The same day Denver voted, Abraham Teklu Lemma, a 54-year-old naturalised American of Ethiopian descent from Silver Spring, Maryland, pleaded guilty to conspiring to transmit US national defence information to the government of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. The US Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, announced the plea; the Justice Department’s national security division called it an extraordinary betrayal.

The facts admitted are stark. Lemma worked as an IT contractor at the State Department, the Justice Department and the National Reconnaissance Office, holding a top-secret clearance. From 2021 until his arrest in August 2023, he removed classified material, including satellite imagery, maps and intelligence reports, from secure facilities and sent it to senior Ethiopian officials in political, military and intelligence roles. According to prosecutors, he hoped the material would help those officials target and kill paramilitary fighters in a regional conflict, and urged them to finish their armed opponents once and for all. Associated Press reporting says he encouraged the use of drones. An FBI counterintelligence official said Lemma admitted that Ethiopian officials used the intelligence in military operations.

The Justice Department has not named the conflict or the armed groups. The period covered, 2021 to 2023, spans the Tigray war, the Amhara insurgency and the conflict in Oromia, and those distinctions matter: which civilians lived beneath which drone strikes is the question this case raises and does not yet answer. Lemma faces between ten years and twenty-one years and ten months under the plea agreement, subject to the court’s approval, and is due to be sentenced on 14 April 2027. The Ethiopian government has made no public statement.

“A government that suspends a newspaper for harming diplomacy has just been named in an American espionage plea.”

Addis Ababa: The Silence

On Monday 2 November, the Ethiopian Media Authority announced on Facebook that it had suspended, indefinitely and with immediate effect, the registration of Media and Communication Center PLC, publisher of the Amharic Reporter and the English-language The Reporter, together with its digital platforms. The authority invoked Media Proclamation No. 1238/2021 and said a year of monitoring had found repeated legal and ethical breaches.

The charges were vague in the way such charges usually are: content contrary to Ethiopia’s national interests; sensationalised coverage of sensitive political and economic matters; selective reporting from national forums; and distorted information harmful to foreign investment, tourism and diplomacy. The suspension is to last until the paper meets what the authority calls its legal and professional obligations, conditions it did not define.

The timing was pointed. Two days earlier, The Reporter had run an editorial titled “Press Freedom Is Not A Luxury!”, warning that Ethiopia’s private press was in one of the most precarious periods in its history. The suspension fell on the UN’s International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists. The paper had already been barred from covering the House of Peoples’ Representatives since late last year, and its journalists have been arrested before. Human Rights Watch notes that it was the country’s last privately owned Amharic newspaper.

The pattern is familiar to readers of this paper. Ethiopia ranks 148th of 180 countries in the Reporters Without Borders index; RSF counts five journalists in detention, four of them on terrorism charges. This year alone has seen the expulsion of the French correspondent Augustine Passilly, and further licence actions against other outlets. The Reporter, a bilingual institution of more than two decades, is not a partisan or fringe outlet. That is precisely why its suspension is a statement.

The Ledger: What It Costs Addis Ababa

Put the three stories side by side, and the contradictions become the analysis.

The diplomacy charge turned inside out. The Media Authority suspended The Reporter partly for publishing content that harms Ethiopia’s diplomacy. Within a day, a US federal court recorded that officials of the Ethiopian government had received stolen top-secret American intelligence for more than two years. No headline in an Addis Ababa newspaper could do the damage to Ethiopian–American relations that the plea record does. The regulator’s logic, that diplomatic harm comes from journalists, collapses on contact with the facts.

The sovereignty narrative under strain. The government’s posture in the Tigray, Amhara and Oromia conflicts has rested on sovereignty: these are internal security operations, and foreign commentary is interference. The Lemma case shows the state reaching into the secure systems of a foreign government to prosecute those operations. It also hands American critics a concrete question: did US intelligence, obtained illegally, inform strikes in which civilians died? Congress has every reason to ask, and now has a member with a personal stake in the answer.

The silence that compounds. Addis Ababa has said nothing about Lemma. It has said a great deal about The Reporter. The asymmetry is revealing: a government confident in its conduct would answer an espionage plea and tolerate a critical newspaper. This one is doing the opposite. With the domestic press curtailed, Ethiopians are left to learn about their own government’s intelligence operations from American court filings and foreign wires.

The diaspora as a political arena. Kiros’s election and Lemma’s plea come from the same diaspora, and from opposite ends of it. One is a Tigrayan-born critic who turned grievance into elected office; the other an Ethiopian-born insider who turned access into service to the state, by his own admission urging it to finish its enemies. Ethiopia’s conflicts are no longer contained within its borders. They are fought in Denver precincts, in Maryland server rooms and in the comment sections of diaspora media. A government that cannot tolerate The Reporter at home will find it far harder to manage a diaspora that now includes a member of Congress.

“Ethiopians are left to learn about their own government’s intelligence operations from American court filings.”

The timing of the war. All of this lands after the collapse of the Pretoria Agreement and the federal offensive in Tigray this autumn. Washington has applied pressure in more than one direction, including visa restrictions on TPLF hardliners, which this paper has covered. A neutral American posture depends on confidence that Addis Ababa is a reliable partner. The Lemma plea does not end that confidence, but it gives every sceptic in the State Department and on Capitol Hill a file to point to.

Coda

In Dickens, the two cities are bound together by the people who move between them. So it is here. The same week a Tigrayan daughter of Addis Ababa won the right to speak in the American Congress, the Ethiopian state took away the right of its oldest independent newspaper to speak in Addis Ababa. And the only detailed public account of how that state hunted its armed opponents came not from its own press, which it is busy closing, but from a federal courtroom in Washington.

There is a lesson in that for the Ethiopian authorities, if they wish to learn it. Suppressing The Reporter will not stop Ethiopia’s story from being told. It only ensures that it will increasingly be told elsewhere, by others, and on their terms.

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