By Professor Girma Berhanu, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

EDITORS’ FOREWORD

A Warning Ethiopia Cannot Afford to Ignore

There are moments in a nation’s life when silence becomes complicity. Ethiopia stands at such a moment. The Ethiopian Tribune has long held that the duty of independent journalism is not merely to inform but to name what is happening with clarity, courage, and moral seriousness even, and especially, when what must be named is deeply uncomfortable.

The article we present in this edition “Fascism at Work: Propaganda, Conspiracy, Lies, Hatred, and Incompetence in Ethiopia” is one of the most consequential pieces of political analysis we have published. Its author, Professor Girma Berhanu of the University of Gothenburg, brings to bear rigorous comparative political theory alongside meticulous documentation of on-the-ground realities. The result is a work that demands not merely reading, but reckoning.

Professor Berhanu builds his analysis on Jason Stanley’s framework in How Fascism Works, applying it with unflinching precision to Ethiopia under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. He identifies, one by one, the hallmarks of fascist political practice: the fabrication of mythic history, the systematic destruction of truth, the vilification of intellectuals, the weaponization of identity, and the hollowing out of democratic institutions. His conclusion is not offered tentatively: these are not tendencies that might emerge; they are already defining features of the Ethiopian political order.

We recognise that strong analysis provokes strong responses. We welcome rigorous engagement, challenge, and debate. What we will not accept is the erasure of the evidence or the silencing of those who speak it. The Tribune publishes this work in the conviction that Ethiopia’s future depends on honest diagnosis of its present however painful that diagnosis may be.

We urge every Ethiopian at home and in the diaspora every diplomat, every human rights advocate, every African Union official, and every international observer to read this article in full. The moment for polite understatement has passed.

The Editors

The Ethiopian Tribune Editorial Board

SYNOPSIS

Fascism at Work: Propaganda, Conspiracy, Lies, Hatred, and Incompetence in Ethiopia

By Professor Girma Berhanu, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Overview

This paper offers a comprehensive and urgent analysis of Ethiopia’s contemporary political crisis through the analytical lens of Jason Stanley’s landmark work How Fascism Works. Professor Berhanu argues, without equivocation, that the tactics Stanley identifies as the hallmarks of fascist political practice are not theoretical abstractions in Ethiopia, they are operational realities, increasingly defining the political order under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the ideology of Oromummaa.

Key Arguments

The paper identifies nine structural features of fascist politics all of which the author argues are present in contemporary Ethiopia. These are: the fabrication of a glorified mythic past to legitimize present domination; pervasive and unapologetic propaganda that actively replaces truth with politically convenient falsehood; the structural suppression of intellectuals and critical voices; the cultivation of conspiracy thinking and manufactured paranoia to justify repression; the normalization of ethnic hierarchy and “natural order”; the weaponization of a victimhood narrative by dominant groups; the deployment of law-and-order politics as a mechanism of control; the exclusionary redefinition of national identity; and the systematic erosion of democratic institutions, leaving only a hollowed-out façade.

The Finfinnee Reclamation Framework

A central focus of the paper is the so-called “Finfinnee Reclamation Framework” a discussion draft circulating within the government that the author describes as a blueprint for ethnic domination. The document proposes transferring political authority, economic power, and land rights in Addis Ababa to Oromo stakeholders, invoking international models from Dubai’s “Sovereign Host” approach to Malaysia’s Bumiputera policy as templates for an “Oromo First” agenda. Professor Berhanu argues that this represents a direct assault on Ethiopia’s multi-ethnic federal capital and a flagrant attack on civic equality and shared citizenship. Evidence from the economic decline of Hawassa under the Sidama regional model and the effective “Bantustan-ization” of Harar are presented as real-world warnings of what such policies produce.

Oromummaa, Ethnic Federalism, and Comparative Politics

The paper provides a rigorous examination of Oromummaa as both a cultural framework and a state ideology. While acknowledging that proponents present it as a project of cultural revitalization and emancipation, Professor Berhanu argues that in its operative form under the current government, it exhibits structural features comparable to fascist and ethnonationalist movements: the primacy of a singular collective identity, the construction of existential “enemies,” nostalgic myth-making, the erosion of pluralism, and the subordination of individual and minority rights to ideological cohesion. Drawing on Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction and Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism, the paper situates Oromummaa within a broader comparative political theory framework while carefully noting important historical and contextual differences from European fascism.

Ethiopia’s system of ethnic federalism, introduced under the TPLF in the early 1990s, receives extensive critical analysis. The author characterizes it as structurally analogous to the Bantustan model of apartheid-era South Africa a system that has transformed identity into the primary currency of power, normalized inter-ethnic suspicion and rivalry, and created fertile ground for racialized political mobilization, including the construction of a “Cushitic versus Semitic” dichotomy with dangerous ideological resonances.

The Amhara Crisis and Three Tiers of Victimhood

Professor Berhanu advances a three-tiered analytical framework to account for the full scope of the crisis facing Ethiopia’s Amhara population. First-tier victimhood refers to the direct and documented experience of mass killings, displacement, and the destruction of cultural and religious heritage. Second-tier victimhood refers to the manipulation of narrative the construction by ethnonationalist actors of a counter-victimhood discourse that obscures and denies Amhara suffering while reframing perpetrators as victims. Third-tier or “psychic” victimhood refers to the compounding effect of international invisibility: the failure of global media, diaspora networks, and international institutions to adequately recognize, document, and respond to the scale of atrocity. The campaign described by critics as “Amharafrei” an explicit parallel drawn to the Nazi concept of Judenfrei is presented as a deliberate strategy of cultural erasure encompassing historicide, ethnocide, and linguicide.

Significance and Urgency

This paper is not academic exercise. It is, as its author explicitly states, motivated by moral anger and by the conviction that accurate diagnosis of political pathology is a precondition for meaningful response. Its arguments carry direct implications for Ethiopian citizens, the diaspora, opposition figures, civil society, and the international community alike. The convergence of fascist-style political tactics, ethnic federalism’s structural fragmentation, the ideological entrenchment of Oromummaa, and the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Amhara regions constitutes, in Professor Berhanu’s assessment, a coherent and escalating political crisis not an isolated series of events.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

The synopsis above conveys the structure and stakes of Professor Berhanu’s analysis, but it cannot substitute for the article itself. The full text develops each argument with scholarly depth, primary documentation, comparative historical evidence, and the kind of analytical precision that the gravity of the subject demands. We urge all readers to access and read the complete article at the link below:-

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Sovereignty, Development, and Democratic Unity in the Age of Transactional Geopolitics

By Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)

March 23, 2026

EDITOR’S FORWARD

In moments when a nation stands at the hinge of history, clarity becomes a civic duty. Dr. Mefkereseb G. Hailu’s sweeping and meticulously argued essay, “The Spirit of Adwa Must Carry Ethiopia Through: GERD and the Red Sea,” arrives precisely at such a moment when Ethiopia’s sovereignty, developmental trajectory, and democratic future are being tested simultaneously at home and abroad.

From its opening pages, the article insists on a truth too often neglected in elite political discourse: Ethiopia’s future belongs to its young. As the author writes, “listen to the younger generation the nation is theirs to inherit.” With nearly 65% of Ethiopians under thirty, this is not a rhetorical flourish but a demographic fact that demands institutional response. Dr. Hailu’s insistence that Gen‑Z and Gen‑α must not merely be consulted but empowered is one of the most consequential interventions in contemporary Ethiopian political thought.

Yet this work is not a generational manifesto alone. It is a panoramic examination of the forces shaping Ethiopia’s sovereignty from the self-financed triumph of GERD, described as “a national narrative converted into steel and megawatts,” to the long arc of geopolitical engineering that rendered Ethiopia landlocked in 1993. The author does not shy away from naming the historical actors involved, nor from articulating Ethiopia’s legitimate and peaceful claim to restored Red Sea access.

Crucially, the article refuses the false binary that has long distorted Ethiopia’s public sphere: that one must choose between defending national sovereignty and demanding democratic accountability. Dr. Hailu argues instead that sovereignty without democracy is brittle, and democracy without sovereignty is hollow. As he notes, “The conclusion… is democratic accountability through democratic institutions… not the fragmentation of Ethiopia’s sovereign position.”

This is a work of scholarship, but also of civic courage. It confronts the country’s internal fractures ethnic violence, contested territories, democratic regression without surrendering to fatalism or cynicism. It situates Ethiopia’s challenges within global patterns of coercive mediation, transactional geopolitics, and great‑power opportunism. And it offers a strategic doctrine rooted in Adwa: principled resistance, coalition-building, technological ambition, and the disciplined use of national power.

Above all, this article is a call to responsibility directed at leaders, institutions, and especially the young Ethiopians who will live longest with the consequences of today’s decisions. As Dr. Hailu writes in one of the essay’s most resonant lines, “Stand with Ethiopia on GERD. Stand with Ethiopia on the Red Sea… and ensure that it is the youngest Ethiopians who hold the pen—because it is their story, and it always was.”

The Ethiopian Tribune is proud to present this work. It is not merely an article; it is an invitation to think, to argue, to build and to imagine Ethiopia not as a nation trapped by its past, but as one propelled by its youth, its ingenuity, and its unbroken sovereign will.

The Editorial Board
The Ethiopian Tribune

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

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One hundred and twenty years on, we mourn a man twice over, first to death, then to the rather more deliberate vandalism of political convenience.

BY THOMAS ARAYA 

SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT, ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

“When the telegrapher delivered the news, he got it wrong;

It is not Makonnen who has died, but the poor.”

ETHIOPIAN VERSE, COMPOSED IN MOURNING, 1906

These lines were not written by a courtier angling for a pension, nor by a priest reciting the obligatory liturgy of grief. They were written because an entire country felt the floor give way beneath its feet. One hundred and twenty years ago today, on Megabit 13, 1898 by the Ethiopian calendar, or the 22nd of March, 1906 to those of us consulting a rather more internationally recognised diary, His Highness Ras Makonnen Wolde Mikael departed this world at the age of fifty-four. He left behind him a city that wept, an emperor who was inconsolable, and a legacy that has since been subjected to indignities that would make a lesser ghost very cross indeed.

But this is not merely an occasion for the sort of anniversary column that pats the subject on the head and moves swiftly on. The year 2026 demands more than archival reverence. It demands we look, with clear and slightly uncomfortable eyes, at what has been done or more precisely, what has been not done to the memory of the man his people called the General of the Poor.

The Final Journey: From the Burqa to the Tomb

History records Ras Makonnen’s last days with a poignancy that no dramatist could improve upon. In early 1902 (1894 by the Ethiopian reckoning), the great Ras fell gravely ill. His physicians in Harar, a city he had governed with the quiet authority of a man who understood both swords and diplomacy recommended the superior medical facilities of the young capital, Addis Ababa. And so, on the 12th of January, he set out.

It proved, as these journeys so often do, to be more pilgrimage than medical mission. By the 17th, his caravan had reached the Burqa River, where he paused to observe the Feast of the Epiphany, Timkat amidst the holy waters. There, with the ceremonies swirling around him and his condition worsening with rather poor timing, the Ras made the decision that only a man who knows himself can make: he turned back. Not to Harar, exactly, but to the hills of Kulubi, and to the Church he had served all his life. It was there, on the 22nd of March, 1906, that he drew his last breath.

The mourning that followed was, by any measure, extraordinary. Emperor Menelik II, his cousin, his comrade, and the man with whom he had stood at Adwa a decade earlier, decreed that the forty-day memorial be observed in the capital. On Monday the 30th of April, the air above Addis Ababa was thick with incense and the chanting of thousands of priests drawn from every monastery and cathedral in the central highlands. The following day, St. George’s Day, a vast encampment of tents rose at Se’i Meda. His ceremonial robes were paraded. His golden crown. The medals he wore with that particular quiet dignity of men who have actually earned their decorations. His horses and mules, draped in gold-leafed trappings, walked riderless through the crowds, a sight, one imagines, that reduced grown soldiers to silence.

The Modern Paradox: A Legacy in Fragments

We arrive now at the present day, and the atmosphere changes considerably. We are in the era of “Medemer” a philosophy championed by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed that presents itself as the great weaving-together of Ethiopia’s disparate historical threads into something coherent and proud. Under this administration, “Great Man” history has enjoyed something of a renaissance. The Adwa Victory Memorial stands in the heart of the capital, gleaming and enormous. Unity Park occupies the meticulously restored Grand Palace. The rhetoric regarding the “restoration of the military institution” to its former glory flows freely and often.

One might observe, with only the gentlest of ironies, that restoring an institution’s image is considerably easier than restoring the actual bronze images of the men who built it.

And yet. There exists, in Harar, in the very city that Ras Makonnen built, governed, and made the most cosmopolitan corner of the empire a vacant pedestal. In June 2020, amidst the violent unrest that followed the appalling assassination of the beloved musician Hachalu Hundessa, a mob toppled and smashed the bronze statue of Ras Makonnen. It was not an accident. It was not collateral damage. It was a targeted act a symbolic execution of a man who had already been dead for one hundred and fourteen years and might therefore have reasonably expected to be left in peace.

The state’s response to this act of cultural desecration? A silence so complete it had its own echo.

The Selective Memory of the State

PM Abiy Ahmed has, on numerous occasions, positioned himself as the custodian of Ethiopian military tradition the heir to the generals who routed the Italians at Adwa. He invokes their names. He commissions their memorials. He speaks of continuity. It is stirring stuff, and would be considerably more stirring were it applied with any consistency.

Ras Makonnen was not merely one of the generals of Adwa. He was arguably its most consequential diplomat and strategist the man who had spent years in European capitals learning precisely how the continent worked, and deploying that knowledge in service of an empire that most Europeans had blithely assumed would simply capitulate. To honour Adwa without honouring Makonnen is rather like celebrating a Test match whilst quietly pretending that one of the opening batsmen didn’t exist.

Critics and there are many, though they tend to express themselves carefully suggest that the Prime Minister is performing a delicate, perhaps rather cynical, balancing act. The imagery of the imperial military provides historical legitimacy to the current state. But rebuilding the statue of Ras Makonnen in Harar risks irritating the more nationalist elements of his ethnic Oromo constituency, some of whom have chosen to see Makonnen through the reductive lens of “imperial expansionist” rather than as the vastly more complicated figure he actually was.

And here, here is where the irony becomes almost physically painful. Ras Makonnen was himself of Oromo descent. He hailed from the Wollo Oromo lineage. He spoke multiple languages. He embodied, in his own person, precisely the kind of multi-ethnic, integrated Ethiopian identity that the current administration endlessly claims to champion. The man who is being implicitly erased as a symbol of “imperial oppression” was, in his own right, a son of the very people in whose name the erasure is being conducted.

One is tempted to suggest that whoever is advising the government on the history of its own country might benefit from a library card.

The Cost of Silence

The “selective restoration” we observe across Ethiopia today, where certain statues receive fresh gilding whilst others remain broken in storage or simply absent from their plinths, reveals something uncomfortable about how history is being deployed. It is not being used as a foundation for national identity. It is being used as a political utility: polished when convenient, discarded when inconvenient, and never, under any circumstances, allowed to complicate the preferred narrative of the day.

When the government spends millions on the Adwa Memorial in Addis Ababa whilst “forgetting” the broken bronze in Harar, the message is plain enough: the past is welcome at the table only when it behaves itself. History, in this reading, is not a discipline. It is a decoration.

The mourners of 1906 understood something rather more profound. They understood that Ras Makonnen’s claim on the collective grief of Ethiopia was not bureaucratic or tribal. It transcended ethnicity, rank, and geography. He was a protector of the common person, the one the poet called simply “the poor”, in the fullest and most generous sense of that word.

A continuity with large gaps in it is not, strictly speaking, continuity. It is, at best, a very long ellipsis.

A CALL FOR CONSISTENCY

As we mark this one hundred and twentieth anniversary, the Ethiopian Tribune calls for a rejection of this selective amnesia and calls for it without apology. A military institution is not built on new hardware or sharp uniforms. It is built on the unshakeable honour accorded to the men who came before. To leave Ras Makonnen’s statue in pieces is to hand the mob a permanent veto over national history a rather alarming precedent for any government that claims to represent all Ethiopians to set.

If the Prime Minister genuinely wishes to be seen as a restorer of Ethiopian greatness, he must look beyond the capital’s vanity projects and attend to the wounds in his regional cities. Harar is not a footnote. It is where the empire’s most capable mind governed, built, and is now 120 years after his death dishonoured by a silence that speaks volumes.

The poet, writing in the grief of 1906, was correct: when Makonnen died, the poor lost a father. But if we permit his memory to be quietly partitioned away sacrificed to the expediencies of modern ethnic politics then it is not only the poor who have suffered a loss. It is the soul of the Ethiopian nation itself, which has proved, rather too obligingly, that some of its generals can be erased simply by leaving a pedestal empty long enough for everyone to stop noticing.

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By Yonas Biru, PhD

Editor’s Forward

Ethiopia on the Brink: The Politics of Abundance in an Economy of Scarcity

(A Summary of the full 30‑page article by Yonas Biru, PhD)

Ethiopia today stands at a crossroads where political ambition collides with economic reality. In this sweeping and meticulously argued essay, Dr. Yonas Biru dissects the country’s current trajectory with a clarity and urgency rarely found in contemporary analyses of Ethiopia’s political economy. His central thesis is stark: Ethiopia is governed by a philosophy of abundance a belief that vision, ambition, and positive thinking can override the hard constraints of economics while the nation itself is trapped in an economy of scarcity.

The result, he argues, is a widening gap between rhetoric and reality, between the spectacle of megaprojects and the erosion of the productive foundations that sustain real development. This forward distills the core arguments of the full article, which readers can access in full via the provided PDF link.

A Nation of Contradictions

Dr. Biru opens with a parable: Ethiopia’s economy resembles the elephant touched by blind men each observer perceives a different truth. The glittering skyline of Addis Ababa suggests progress to some, while for others it is a monument to property confiscation and displacement. Government speeches promise a “Digital Ethiopia 2030,” yet 92% of high school students fail the national university entrance exam. The data tell a sobering story: manufacturing has declined, education spending has collapsed, poverty has risen, and foreign direct investment has dried up.

The author’s diagnosis is not merely that Ethiopia is struggling, but that its struggles are structural, self‑inflicted, and accelerating.

The Philosophy of Abundance vs. the Economics of Scarcity

At the heart of the critique is the Prime Minister’s governing philosophy one that treats scarcity as a psychological barrier rather than a structural constraint. Dr. Biru contrasts this with the development paths of China, Vietnam, South Korea, and India, all of which embraced disciplined sequencing, prioritization, and institutional strengthening.

Ethiopia, by contrast, pursues simultaneous megaprojects, prioritizes showpiece construction over productive investment, and attempts to leapfrog into a digital economy without the educational or industrial foundations required to sustain it.

The result is a eucalyptus‑style growth pattern: fast‑growing, shallow‑rooted, and dangerously fragile.

The Shrinking Middle Class: A Nation Consuming Its Future

One of the most compelling sections of the article examines the erosion of Ethiopia’s middle class. In every successful late‑industrializing economy, the middle class expands before construction booms and technological leaps. In Ethiopia, the opposite is happening.

Doctors earn $70–$100 per month. Professors and teachers struggle to afford food and rent. Inflation erodes wages faster than they can be adjusted. Meanwhile, billions are poured into palaces, corridors, and vanity projects.

Dr. Biru’s conclusion is blunt:
No country has ever developed while shrinking its middle class. Ethiopia will not be the first.

Diaspora Investment: From Catalyst to Casualty

Where China and India mobilized their diasporas to build factories, technology hubs, and export industries, Ethiopia has channeled diaspora capital into speculative real estate. Currency devaluation, punitive taxes, and arbitrary property seizures have turned diaspora investment into a trap rather than a catalyst.

The article provides a striking example: a diaspora investor who bought a condominium for 2 million birr in 2019 would lose nearly 40% of their dollar investment if they sold today. The nominal birr gains are illusions; the real returns are negative.

This is not misfortune, the author argues, it is policy failure.

Institutional Decay: Property Rights, Corruption, and the Rise of Political Entrepreneurship

The essay devotes significant attention to the erosion of property rights and the rise of political entrepreneurship. Land is leased to multiple parties. Legally binding contracts are unilaterally rewritten. Properties are seized for corridor projects without compensation. Corruption investigations are launched with fanfare, only to be quietly buried when they implicate senior officials.

In such an environment, productive entrepreneurs are crowded out by politically connected actors. Investment flows not to the most efficient, but to the most favored.

This is not merely an economic problem it is a political one. Weak property rights fuel rent‑seeking, which fuels competition for state power, which fuels instability. Conflict becomes endogenous to the system.

Macroeconomic Fragility: Debt, Foreign Exchange, and the Illusion of Growth

Dr. Biru dismantles the government’s narrative of self‑reliance and rapid growth. Ethiopia is not borrowing less because it needs less; it is borrowing less because no one will lend. All three major rating agencies have downgraded Ethiopia to junk or default territory. The IMF and World Bank classify the country as being in debt distress.

Meanwhile, the government projects 10.2% GDP growth far above the estimates of the World Bank (7.2%) and the UN (5.8%). The author asks a simple question: Where is this growth coming from?

Not tourism, which remains constrained by security and infrastructure.
Not agriculture, which still imports wheat and leaves millions food‑insecure.
Not manufacturing, which has declined to 4.4% of GDP.
Not exports, which remain stagnant.

The only sector expanding is construction an import‑dependent, debt‑driven, speculative bubble.

The Counterfactual: What Ethiopia Should Have Built

Perhaps the most powerful contribution of the article is its counterfactual analysis. What if Ethiopia had invested in:

• electric transmission lines
• large‑scale irrigation
• electrified pumping systems
• agricultural modernization

instead of urban corridors and palatial complexes?

The data are unequivocal:

• Electrified irrigation increases farm profitability by 58–98%.
• Ethiopia spends $4–5 billion annually on fuel imports—three to four times its coffee export earnings.
• Irrigation could raise national agricultural output by 15–30%.
• Ethiopia has over 1 million hectares of viable irrigation potential.

These investments would have strengthened agriculture, boosted exports, reduced fuel imports, and provided raw materials for manufacturing.

Instead, Ethiopia built corridors.

The Coming Crisis: How Structural Fault Lines Interact

The author warns that Ethiopia’s vulnerabilities are not isolated they are interconnected. A foreign‑exchange shock can stall construction, which can trigger a real‑estate crash, which can destabilize banks, which can collapse tax revenues, which can force inflationary financing, which can erode confidence, which can accelerate capital flight.

This is how systemic crises begin.

A Path Forward: Institutional, Fiscal, and Structural Reform

The article concludes with a sequenced set of recommendations:

• Restore constitutional governance and legislative oversight.
• Rebuild credible property rights and rule‑based administration.
• Replace cadre‑driven policymaking with expert‑led institutions.
• Confront systemic corruption with independent enforcement.
• Rebuild trust with the diaspora through a joint commission.
• Rebalance public spending toward productive sectors.
• Address the foreign‑exchange constraint by expanding exports.
• Reinstate fiscal discipline and transparency.
• Reinvest in human capital especially education.
• Institutionalize technocratic policymaking beyond any single leader.

These are not incremental adjustments they are foundational reforms.

A Final Word

Dr. Biru’s essay is not a lament. It is a warning and a roadmap. It argues that Ethiopia’s crisis is not inevitable; it is the result of choices. And because it is the result of choices, it can be reversed by different choices.

But the window is narrowing.

This forward captures the essence of the full 30‑page analysis. For readers who wish to explore the complete argument, data, and case studies, the full PDF is available here.

[Download the full article: Ethiopia on the Brink – The Politics of Abundance in an Economy of Scarcity]

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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

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How a Young Woman from EPRP is Rewriting Ethiopian Political Theatre and What the Ruling Party’s Silence on That Debate Stage Truly Revealed

By Sewasew Teklemariam the Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

There is a particular kind of silence that speaks louder than argument. It is the silence that descends upon a room when someone has said the unsayable with perfect precision, when an accusation is so well-documented, so calmly delivered, and so unanswerable that the only available response is the panicked shuffle of papers and the avoidance of eye contact. That silence fell upon the representatives of Ethiopia’s ruling Prosperity Party during the country’s first major televised multi-party debate of the 2026 election cycle. The person who produced it was not a veteran statesman, not a celebrated economist, not a familiar face from the long and exhausted gallery of Ethiopian opposition politics. She was a former television journalist in her early thirties, representing a coalition whose symbol is a thumbs-up, whose name is Mistresilasie Tamerat, and who, in one broadcast hour, did more damage to the government’s democratic pretensions than two decades of politely worded opposition press releases ever managed.

Ethiopia is preparing to hold its seventh national election in June 2026, with 24 national and 45 regional political parties contesting for power in what many analysts describe as a critical test of the country’s democratic evolution, a description that grows more ironic the more closely one examines the conditions under which that evolution is supposedly occurring. The scale is impressive on paper: 1,300 candidates nationwide, 936 for regional councils, a National Electoral Board with a mandate and a calendar. The substance is considerably less so. Political prisoners remain detained. Conflicts rage in the Amhara region and beyond. The media landscape is captive. International observation is uncertain. In this context, Mistresilasie Tamerat stood before the cameras and said, with the composure of someone who had been waiting for precisely this moment: we do not believe that the electoral process can be described as fair, democratic, or independent. She did not flinch. Neither did the camera.

Her background is essential to understanding the force of the moment. She trained as a journalist and worked as a reporter and political affairs analyst at Asham TV, a career that gave her something most Ethiopian opposition politicians conspicuously lack: the ability to communicate complex arguments clearly, quickly, and under the pressure of broadcast conditions. When she transitioned from journalism into active politics, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party one of the country’s oldest opposition formations, founded in the radical crucible of the 1970s student movement received her and, unusually for a party in a political culture dominated by elderly men, entrusted her with its most senior administrative post: secretary-general. The party also made her coalition secretary for the “Cooperation for Ethiopian Unity,” the five-party alliance that now stands before the Ethiopian electorate with its thumbs raised.

She has said as much herself. The political space, in her own precise formulation, is dominated by long-established figures, and penetrating its leadership structures requires persistence and resilience. Being both young and female in that environment means perpetual proof-of-concept, an exhausting requirement applied to no comparable male colleague of similar ability. What the debate demonstrated is that she has cleared that bar so comprehensively that the requirement itself begins to look absurd. She did not participate in the debate. She commanded it.

“Being both young and female often means having to prove oneself repeatedly in environments where experience is measured narrowly and leadership is traditionally defined.”

The four arguments she deployed were not improvised. They were the product of a politician who understands that in a televised debate, the purpose is not to persuade the other side but to expose it. Her first line of attack concerned political prisoners, specifically, the more than 300 ordinary citizens reported detained in the Amhara region alone, some in connection with the Fano armed movement, others for no apparent reason beyond identity. This was not rhetoric. It was documentation. The Prosperity Party has invested considerable effort in framing the Amhara conflict as a security matter: a necessary state response to armed rebellion, regrettable but inevitable. Mistresilasie relocated that framing to the electoral arena, where it becomes something else entirely evidence that the conditions for a free election do not exist, that citizens are being detained for who they are rather than what they have done, and that any government which presides over this whilst simultaneously claiming democratic legitimacy is engaged in a contradiction it cannot resolve in front of a camera.

Her second argument, that one cannot speak credibly of democratic competition while war continues, was delivered with similar precision. She went further than most opposition politicians dare, calling not merely for ceasefire but for genuine, inclusive negotiations that encompass armed groups currently excluded from peace processes. This is the argument that sustainable peace cannot be achieved through exclusion, and it is one that speaks directly to the lived reality of millions of Ethiopians whose relationship with the state has been defined by violence rather than representation. The Prosperity Party’s representatives had nothing to offer in response that would not have required them to publicly justify policies they had spent considerable energy trying not to discuss.

The arguments on media independence and international observers were, in some ways, the most devastating precisely because they were the least dramatic. They required no statistics, no documentation of specific abuses, no emotional appeal. They required only the observation that these are the minimum conditions for any democratic process worthy of the name conditions so basic that their absence does not require lengthy argument, merely acknowledgement. The government’s representatives could not acknowledge them without conceding the point. They could not deny them without appearing to endorse a system of managed elections. They were, in the language of debate, trapped. The silence that followed was the sound of that trap closing.

The Prosperity Party excels at spectacle. What it struggles with is the rough-and-tumble of genuine democratic accountability and on that stage, there was nowhere left to hide.

It would be too simple to attribute this merely to the personal failings of the individuals who represented the ruling party on that stage. The deeper truth is structural. A party that has governed with the concentrated authority of the Prosperity Party, that has systematically dismantled independent judicial oversight, suppressed critical media, and treated dissent as a category of disloyalty , cannot easily produce, on short notice, the kind of confident, substantive defenders that open democratic debate requires. The machinery of authoritarian governance is not designed to generate intellectual accountability. It is designed to suppress the need for it. When that suppression fails — when someone stands before the cameras and refuses to be managed, the system has no response prepared, because it had convinced itself the moment would never come.

The Ethiopian Citizens for Social Justice , EZEMA, occupies a different position in this story, and in some respects a more troubling one. EZEMA is, by most measures, the most institutionally coherent of the major opposition formations. It has a recognisable leadership, an urban electoral base, and a track record of participating in the formal processes of Ethiopian politics. It also has a track record, less frequently discussed, of accommodation. During the 2021 elections, EZEMA positioned itself against the formation of a transitional government at the precise moment when such a government represented the most credible alternative to the ruling party’s dominance. The practical effect of this position was to align EZEMA, at a critical juncture, with the preferences of the party it nominally opposed. In Addis Ababa in 2021, EZEMA and Balderas together received approximately 32 per cent of the capital’s vote and won zero seats in parliament a result that tells you everything you need to know about the electoral system, but also something important about the limits of a strategy built on institutional respectability rather than principled confrontation.

One of EZEMA’s own representatives captured this posture with an inadvertent candour before this year’s election. Despite the ongoing conditions the detentions, the lack of media freedom, the contested electoral environment the party acknowledged it had “no option but to participate in the election, if the government proceeds on its current track.” It is a sentence worth reading twice. It concedes the entire argument. It acknowledges that the conditions are inadequate. It then proceeds to participate anyway, not out of confidence but out of resignation. Compare this to Mistresilasie’s formulation: the process cannot be described as fair, democratic, or independent and here are the specific conditions that must change before it can be. One is a statement of principles with demands attached. The other is a statement of defeat dressed as pragmatism. The contrast, aired before a national television audience, was merciless.

The social media dimension of this story is not a footnote. Ethiopia is a country with a median age below 20. An overwhelming majority of its population has known no political dispensation other than the EPRP’s former enemies and, since 2018, the Prosperity Party. This is a generation whose relationship with politics has been defined by spectacle without accountability, by promises without delivery, and by the particular exhaustion that comes from watching one’s country torn apart by conflicts that feel simultaneously inevitable and entirely unnecessary. The appetite for a political figure who is young, female, articulate, and genuinely confrontational was not manufactured by social media. It was waiting. Mistresilasie gave it somewhere to go.

By contrast, the opening statements by ESDP and EZEMA, positioned at [00:04:53–00:08:15], produced what the analytics reveal as a characteristic “dip”: that moment, well known to anyone who has studied long-form political broadcast data, when casual viewers make their decision to stay or leave. ESDP’s pitch of gradual reform and EZEMA’s invocation of social justice are not unworthy positions. But they are positions that a viewer already fatigued by years of unfulfilled political promises will recognise and, the data suggests, will choose not to engage with further. The drop-off at this juncture is a verdict rendered not in ballot boxes but in closed browser tabs, and it is a verdict that the parties concerned would do well to examine. A political platform that cannot hold a free audience’s attention for eight minutes of prime-time debate is a platform with a communication problem that no amount of ideological refinement will resolve. The audience did not leave because the arguments were wrong. They left because the arguments felt familiar in the worst possible sense: competent, cautious, and utterly unexciting.

The TikTok virality, the comment threads declaring “she is who we wanted to become” these are not merely expressions of admiration for a single politician. They are an expression of political hunger: the demand of a generation for representation that actually looks like them, speaks like them, and is willing to say in public what they say to one another in private. That this hunger has found its focus in someone representing a coalition whose electoral history is modest and whose internal consolidation is incomplete is, simultaneously, the most interesting and the most precarious aspect of the current moment.

Because this column owes its readers scepticism as well as appreciation, certain questions must be put. Mistresilasie Tamerat has demonstrated, with considerable flair, the capacity to articulate what is wrong with Ethiopian politics and the electoral environment in which it currently operates. She has been notably less specific about what her coalition’s governance would look like in practice. Social democratic ideology and a commitment to equitable development are principles. They are not, in themselves, a programme for managing a country with rampant inflation, a currency under significant pressure, endemic unemployment, and a security situation that cannot be wished away with negotiations, however inclusive. The debate stage rewards the sharp identification of failures. Governing requires the harder discipline of proposing credible remedies.

The coalition’s internal cohesion presents a further question. Of the five parties that formed the Cooperation for Ethiopian Unity alliance, only three remain actively engaged in the electoral process. A coalition that cannot fully consolidate before the election begins is one whose ability to hold together under the pressures of governance or even the pressures of a contested result must be considered uncertain. And whilst the demand for minimum conditions before participation is principled, the coalition has not yet articulated the clear red line that would tell the public: if these conditions remain unmet, we will withdraw and say publicly why. Without that line, the demand for conditions risks becoming a rhetorical position rather than a constitutional one.

None of which should obscure the significance of what has already happened. In a debate that the ruling party entered expecting to perform its usual controlled dominance, a young woman representing a minority coalition with a thumbs-up symbol and a name that translates as the Secret of the Trinity walked onto the stage and turned the performance inside out. She exposed the Prosperity Party’s inability to defend its record under genuine scrutiny. She implicitly indicted EZEMA’s decades of dignified accommodation. She gave the youngest generation of Ethiopians a face to attach to the possibility of a different kind of politics. She did all of this calmly, precisely, and entirely on her own terms.

“In a political landscape where the bar for meaningful opposition is depressingly low, she cleared it with visible ease and the camera caught every moment.”

The numbers, as it happens, are not merely anecdotal. An analysis of the YouTube broadcast of the seventh general election’s first debate officially titled “የ7ኛው ጠቅላላ ምርጫ የመጀመሪያው የክርክር መድረክ” reveals a viewing pattern that tells its own story about where public attention truly resided during more than two hours of broadcast. The Coalition for Ethiopian Unity, known by its Amharic designation TIBIBIR, did not merely win the argument in the room. It won the audience at home, repeatedly, and at the moments that mattered most.

The broadcast’s viewership data identifies four distinct peaks where audience engagement spiked, and the pattern is instructive. The first came at [00:02:18], barely two minutes into proceedings, when inter-party friction first surfaced during the direct questioning phase the segment in which each party had two minutes to put questions directly to its opponents. YouTube’s retention analytics consistently show that confrontational exchange drives re-engagement: viewers who have wandered lean back in; those who had the broadcast running in the background pick it up. The second, and arguably most consequential, peak arrived at [02:05:12] the precise moment at which the TIBIBIR representative delivered her direct assessment of the Prosperity government’s economic record. The single word “failed” is, in broadcast terms, what analysts call a high-engagement unit: a declaration short enough to clip, sharp enough to share, and specific enough to be held accountable. The critique of the cost of living, the inability to pay rent, to afford daily meals, moved the debate from the abstractly political to the viscerally personal, producing the kind of resonance that generates not just initial views but re-watches, the metric that most accurately measures genuine impact. Within one minute, at [02:06:13], a second peak followed, driven by the explanation of the coalition’s campaign symbol, the raised thumb, and the closing appeal to voters. Audiences who skip to the end of long political broadcasts are not disengaged; they are specifically seeking the summary, the verdict, the moment of meaning. The fact that TIBIBIR’s symbol and final statement produced a measurable viewership spike at exactly this point suggests that the coalition had successfully generated sufficient curiosity earlier in the broadcast that viewers returned to hear how it concluded.

The coalition did not merely win the debate. According to the broadcast’s own viewership curve, it owned the moments the audience came back to watch twice.

There is a lesson here that extends well beyond the mechanics of YouTube analytics. Political communication in the digital age does not reward the measured and the moderate. It rewards the specific, the confrontational, and the emotionally resonant. Mistresilasie Tamerat did not go viral because she was young or because she was female, though both facts added to the novelty of the moment. She went viral because she said something true, in plain language, to a camera, without flinching. In a media environment flooded with managed statements and rehearsed equivocation, that quality, the quality of simply meaning what one says, is rarer and more powerful than any focus-grouped slogan. The viewership data confirms what the debate room already knew: when she spoke, people stopped scrolling.

The thumbs-up is, in the end, a simple gesture. It means: yes. Yes, there is something worth approving of here. Yes, this is possible. Yes, we see you. In the context of an Ethiopian election whose integrity remains in serious doubt, whose conditions remain deeply problematic, and whose outcome remains controlled by forces that have never willingly relinquished power, this small affirmative gesture is either a political act of considerable bravery or a symbol that will be crushed, like so many before it, beneath the weight of the system it challenges.

Which of these it turns out to be will be determined not in one debate, however memorable, but in the months that follow in whether the coalition holds, in whether the conditions are partially met or entirely ignored, in whether the international community chooses to observe or to avert its gaze, and in whether a generation of young Ethiopians can convert the emotional energy of a TikTok moment into the harder, slower, more dangerous work of political organisation. Mistresilasie Tamerat has earned the right to be taken seriously. Ethiopia has not yet earned the right to call what is happening a democracy. Between those two facts lies the entire story of this election.

The debate has begun. Whether it will be permitted to conclude on the people’s terms is the only question that matters.

The Ethiopian Tribune is an independent publication. This column reflects political analysis and does not constitute endorsement of any party or candidate.

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Memory, Martyrdom and the Mirage of the New Dubai

By Endex Ethiopian Tribune Chief Editor

A Date That Refuses to Fade and a City That Cannot Recognise Itself

Fly into Bole International Airport on any given morning and the new visitor to Addis Ababa will likely be struck by something unexpected. Glass towers catch the equatorial light. Half-finished luxury condominium blocks crowd the skyline. Billboards in Arabic and English advertise residential developments with names that evoke the Gulf. A certain class of returning diaspora, a certain strain of breathless travel writing, and a particular kind of investor prospectus have begun circulating a phrase that would have bewildered the city’s founders: Addis Ababa is the new Dubai.

Do they know it is Yekatit 12?

To ask that question in February 2026 as the Ethiopian calendar turns again toward Yekatit 12, the date on which 19 February 1937 falls,  is to ask something more urgent than whether visitors to Addis Ababa are aware of a historical tragedy. It is to ask whether the city’s newest patrons, its most vocal claimants, and its most ambitious planners have absorbed the ethical inheritance of that day: that Addis Ababa has already been declared, once before, the exclusive property of a foreign power and a particular vision of luxury. That it was reordered by force. That people died approximately 19,200 of them in seventy-two hours alone, by Ian Campbell’s careful estimate (Campbell, 2017), so that it might become someone else’s imperial capital.

The Dubai comparison is not merely aesthetic vanity. It is a political symptom. And Yekatit 12 is the historical lens through which its contradictions become visible.

I. The New Dubai Narrative: What It Means and Who It Serves

The comparison to Dubai carries different meanings depending on who is speaking. For some international observers and diplomats, it gestures toward Addis Ababa’s undeniable growth, its expanded road networks, its Chinese-built light railway, its emergence as the diplomatic capital of the African continent, home to the African Union and a proliferating constellation of UN agencies. The city accounts for more than thirty per cent of Ethiopia’s GDP while housing less than five per cent of its population (CSA, 2008). By certain measures, the analogy is not absurd.

But the Dubai comparison being circulated in a more specific, and more troubling, register is not primarily about economic dynamism. It is about a particular aesthetic and a particular clientele. It refers to UAE investors who have secured controlling stakes in high-end residential developments in the city’s expanding districts. It refers to the direct financial relationships cultivated between the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Gulf capital relationships that have channelled foreign direct investment into visible, photogenic infrastructure while the social fabric beneath it strains under contradictions the glass facades do not reflect.

When visitors from abroad describe Addis Ababa as the new Dubai, they are often, whether they know it or not, describing a city being remade for a particular class of people. The Emirati investor. The returning high-net-worth diaspora. The international NGO professional who wants a rooftop pool and a concierge. What they are less likely to be describing — because these people are no longer visible in the neighbourhoods being redeveloped are the approximately 100,000 residents displaced from the city’s central and peri-urban areas to make room for this transformation. Communities removed from Kolfe, Gulele, Kirkos and the expanding metropolitan fringe, relocated to peripheral blocks far from their livelihoods, their schools, their social networks.

One hundred thousand people cleared. A skyline polished for the richest Gulf citizens.

Do they know it is Yekatit 12?

Historian Ian Campbell has documented how Italian fascist urban planners in the late 1930s envisioned reordering Addis Ababa along precisely these lines: European quarters to enjoy paved roads, sanitation and modernist boulevards; indigenous districts relegated to peripheral zones with minimal services (Campbell, 2017). Anti-miscegenation laws enforced social separation. By 1939, approximately 50,000 Italians resided in Ethiopia, concentrated in the capital. The colonial premise was explicit: Addis Ababa was to become a European imperial city, with Africans in subordinate spaces.

The mechanisms today are different. There are no Blackshirts. The legal instruments are municipal development orders, master plans and market forces rather than racial laws. Yet the spatial logic, the clearing of the poor and the indigenous to make room for an aspirationally cosmopolitan elite, carries an uncomfortable historical resonance that the Dubai enthusiasts have not paused to examine.

II. The Conservative Ethiopian Nationalist Argument: Menelik’s City Belongs to All Ethiopians

Before examining the Oromo elite claim on Addis Ababa, it is necessary to give serious attention to a counter-argument that Ethiopian nationalist conservatives have long advanced one that is historically substantive, frequently overlooked in international commentary, and which contains within it a profound and under-appreciated irony.

Conservative Ethiopian nationalists argue, with considerable historical justification, that Addis Ababa was founded as a city for all Ethiopians. Emperor Menelik II established the capital formally in 1886, choosing the site, known to surrounding Oromo communities as Finfinne , for its elevation, its climate and its hot springs. His empress, Taytu Betul, is credited with naming it Addis Ababa: New Flower. From its founding, it was conceived not as a tribal or ethnic capital but as the seat of a multi-ethnic empire that Menelik was in the process of consolidating.

Here the nationalist argument introduces its most pointed historical observation, and it deserves to be stated clearly and without embarrassment: Menelik II himself, by bloodline and ancestry, was of mixed heritage that included Oromo lineage. This is not a fringe claim. It is documented in Ethiopian dynastic history. The same applies, with varying degrees of genealogical complexity, to Emperor Haile Selassie I, whose family connections crossed the ethnic boundaries that contemporary political discourse treats as ancient and impermeable. And it applies, most strikingly of all, to President Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Derg strongman whose brutal seventeen-year rule is among the darkest chapters in Ethiopian history and who was himself of partial Oromo descent.

The conservative nationalist argument draws from this a pointed observation: none of these leaders not Menelik, not Haile Selassie, not even Mengistu ever claimed Addis Ababa as an exclusively Oromo city. None of them framed the capital as the sovereign possession of a single ethnicity. Whatever their failures, and those failures were considerable and in Mengistu’s case catastrophic, each of them conceptualised Addis Ababa as a city in which all Ethiopians, Amhara, Oromo, Gurage, Tigrean, Somali, Sidama and all others, had the right to dwell, to trade, to worship and to call home.

This is not a trivial point. It means that the framing of Addis Ababa as exclusively Oromo space,  Finfinne for the Oromo and by implication not equally for other Ethiopians, represents not the recovery of an ancient tradition but the invention of a new and exclusionary politics. Even the emperors and dictators of Oromo blood who preceded the current era did not make this claim. They governed, badly or well, as Ethiopians over Ethiopians.

The conservative nationalist position has its own blind spots and its own uses as political instrument. Ethiopian nationalism has historically suppressed minority identities, denied linguistic rights and used the rhetoric of unity to justify assimilationist policies that caused genuine harm to Oromo, Somali and other communities. The 2014-2016 protests that mobilised hundreds of thousands of Oromo demonstrators, and that cost hundreds of lives at the hands of federal security forces, were not manufactured grievances. They arose from real injustice.

But the nationalist argument about Addis Ababa’s civic universalism contains a democratic insight that transcends its ideological packaging: a city founded by a man of partial Oromo ancestry, built by labour from every corner of the empire, grown through the settlement of dozens of communities across more than a century, cannot be retrospectively converted into the exclusive patrimony of one ethnic group — even the ethnic group from whose land it grew.

If Menelik , Oromo by blood among other things, built a city for all Ethiopians, then the claim that his city belongs to Oromos alone is, at minimum, a selective reading of his own project. And if that claim is advanced by an elite class whose members have accumulated land, political appointments, business licenses and international celebrity under the banner of Oromo rights, while 100,000 poor residents, many of them Oromo themselves are cleared to make room for Gulf-financed towers, then the contradiction becomes not merely intellectual but moral.

III. The Oromo Elite Claim: Justice, Selectivity and the Dubai Exit

The claim of Oromo elites to Addis Ababa as fundamentally Oromo space is historically grounded in the displacement and dispossession that accompanied the city’s expansion across what had been Oromo farmland and grazing territory. The 1995 Constitution’s recognition of Oromia’s “special interest” in the capital under Article 49 reflects a constitutional acknowledgement of this history (Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, 1995). The protests of 2014-2016 demonstrated that these grievances commanded mass support across Oromia (Human Rights Watch, 2016).

Yet within elite Oromo political discourse, something else has also been operating alongside these legitimate arguments: a language of exclusive possession that sits uncomfortably beside the behaviour of those who advance it most loudly.

No figure encapsulates these contradictions more sharply than Feyisa Lilesa. At the 2016 Rio Olympics, Lilesa crossed the marathon finishing line with his arms raised in an X — the gesture of Oromo protest performed before a global audience while his fellow protesters were being shot in the streets of Oromia. It was an act of extraordinary symbolic courage that forced the world to look at Ethiopia when it preferred to look away.

Yet the story does not end at the finishing line. Reports emerged that Lilesa was subsequently involved in a road incident in Addis Ababa in which children were struck by his four-wheel drive vehicle. Rather than face accountability within the country whose cause he had embodied, he departed. To Dubai.

The irony is almost architectural in its precision. The man who became the international face of Oromo resistance against a government he accused of dispossessing and killing his people who converted that resistance into celebrity, political protection and material wealth,  chose, when accountability arrived at his own door, to flee to the very city whose model of glittering exclusivity is now being applied to Addis Ababa to dispossess the very communities he claimed to represent.

Dubai does not do accountability. It does luxury and impunity and the purchased anonymity of the very wealthy. That an Oromo elite should flee there and that this should be treated as a private matter of no political relevance  is not a footnote. It is a window into the class character of an elite that speaks the language of historical justice while living the life of Gulf-adjacent privilege.

IV. The Shared Bloodline the Politicians Prefer to Forget

The conservative nationalist observation about Menelik’s Oromo ancestry opens a deeper question that contemporary Ethiopian identity politics systematically suppresses: after more than a century of intermarriage, shared urban life, military service, commercial partnership and cultural exchange in Addis Ababa, the ethnic categories being deployed to divide the city’s past and future are far less stable than any of their champions acknowledge.

Haile Selassie presided over a modernising empire with genuine Oromo lineage in his family tree and chose to govern as an Ethiopian emperor rather than an Oromo king. Mengistu Haile Mariam, a man of Oromo and Konso descent who instituted one of the most brutal dictatorships in African history, never once claimed to be governing in the name of Oromo sovereignty. Whatever the crimes of these regimes, and they were grave, their ethnic self-positioning was consistently toward an Ethiopian identity that encompassed rather than excluded.

The irony that contemporary Oromo elite nationalism, which presents itself as liberation from Amhara imperial domination,  finds its most direct historical refutation not in Amhara voices but in the choices of leaders who shared Oromo blood and chose Ethiopia anyway, is one that the current political discourse is structurally unable to process.

This does not mean that Oromo historical grievances are invalid. It means that the ethnic framework being used to prosecute those grievances is considerably more constructed, more recent and more politically motivated than its proponents acknowledge. As the 2007 census indicates, Addis Ababa is approximately 47 per cent Amharic-speaking, 19 per cent Oromo-speaking, 16 per cent Gurage-speaking, with significant further diversity in the remainder. These communities did not arrive as colonial settlers. They arrived, over generations, as Ethiopians, many of them poor Ethiopians seeking livelihoods in the capital that Menelik built and that every subsequent government maintained as a shared national space.

V. Displacement as Continuity: From Fascist Segregation to Market Erasure

Italian occupation of Addis Ababa from 1936 to 1941 was spatial as well as military. Urban planning documents from the period proposed redesigning the city along racial lines, displacing Ethiopians to peripheral zones while European quarters received paved roads, sanitation and modernist architecture (Campbell, 2017; Labanca, 2002). The demographic shock of Yekatit 12, approximately 20 per cent of the city’s population killed in seventy-two hours, emptied neighbourhoods that Italian settlers then filled.

The occupation ended. The Yekatit 12 Monument at Sidist Kilo stands today as architectural testimony. Its bas-reliefs depict bound prisoners, grieving mothers and burning homes. The victims commemorated there are remembered as Ethiopians, not as members of discrete ethnic communities. The fascist bullets, as the historical record makes clear, did not distinguish between Amhara, Oromo, Gurage or Tigrean.

The spatial logic the massacre enabled clearing people from land to create a city for a different and more powerful class of inhabitants, has found new expression in the development model the Dubai analogy celebrates. The 100,000 displaced residents of contemporary Addis Ababa were not killed. They were relocated. But relocation at distance from livelihood is its own form of civic death. Markets disappear. Children travel hours to schools they used to walk to. Social networks built across generations dissolve. The language of development and master planning, deployed today as it was deployed in Italian urban policy documents of the 1930s, does not announce itself as violence. It announces itself as progress.

When Gulf investors purchase luxury residential blocks on the cleared land, and when Oromo political elites celebrate the assertion of Oromo sovereignty over the same city whose poor Oromo residents are among those being cleared, the question of who the Dubai transformation actually serves becomes impossible to avoid.

• VI. What the Three Claims Have in Common

Three distinct claims on Addis Ababa are currently in circulation. Gulf-inflected international capital claims it through investment and the transformation of its skyline into a mirror of Gulf urbanism. Oromo nationalist elites claim it through ethnic sovereignty and historical dispossession. Conservative Ethiopian nationalists claim it through the civic universalism of Menelik’s founding and the multi-ethnic imperial tradition.

Each of these claims, when pushed to its absolute, requires the exclusion of someone else. Gulf capital excludes the poor regardless of ethnicity. Oromo ethnic sovereignty excludes the Amhara grandmother who has lived in Merkato for fifty years, the Gurage trader whose family has been in Kolfe for three generations, the Tigrean civil servant whose children were born in the city. Conservative Ethiopian nationalism, in its less reflective iterations, has historically excluded Oromo cultural identity from legitimate expression in the public sphere.

The lesson of Yekatit 12,  as articulated in both historical scholarship and the ethical reflection that the date demands — is precisely that absolutism in civic ownership destroys cities. The victims of 19 February 1937 were drawn from every community that Addis Ababa contained. The shared trauma of that massacre produced the shared memorial at Sidist Kilo. The date did not belong to one ethnic group. The grief did not sort itself by tribe.

If there is an argument that transcends the current political fragmentation, it is the one contained in the historical behaviour of Menelik himself a man of mixed blood including Oromo ancestry who founded a city and named it New Flower and appeared, whatever his other failings, to intend it as a place where Ethiopians of all origins might dwell. Not perfectly. Not without violence and hierarchy and the injustices of empire. But as Ethiopians, together, rather than as ethnic populations sorted into zones of belonging and exclusion.

Knowing the Date, Reading the City

Each year the Ethiopian calendar turns to Yekatit 12. The date does not demand resentment. It demands remembrance and, more than remembrance, the kind of recognition that sees patterns,  the recurring logic of declaring a plural city the exclusive possession of a single power, whether that power is Italian fascism, Gulf capital, ethnic nationalism or imperial nostalgia.

Addis Ababa is both Finfinne and Addis Ababa. It is Oromo geography and Ethiopian capital. It is local homeland and African diplomatic centre. It was founded by a man of Oromo blood who called it New Flower for all his subjects. It was massacred by fascists who wanted it for Europeans alone. It was rebuilt by Ethiopians of every origin. It is currently being partially remade for Gulf investors and a thin wealthy stratum, at the cost of 100,000 of its poorest residents.

The conservative nationalist who invokes Menelik’s civic universalism is right that the city was never meant to belong to one ethnic group alone and should acknowledge that this universalism came with imperial violence that demands recognition. The Oromo nationalist who invokes historical dispossession at Finfinne is right that land loss is a genuine grievance, and should acknowledge that the man who built the city on that land shared their blood and did not build it for Oromos alone. The Gulf investor who sees the next Dubai should be asked, plainly and on the record: do you know what was cleared to build this? Do you know it is Yekatit 12?

If they all know, if the date is genuinely understood rather than merely observed, then they know that memory is not about the past alone. It is a compass for the future.

That compass, at the moment, is pointing somewhere that the martyrs of Yekatit 12, of every ethnicity who fell together on those three days in February 1937, would not have recognised as the city for which they died.

References

Campbell, I. (2014) The Plot to Kill Graziani. Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa University Press.

Campbell, I. (2017) The Addis Ababa Massacre: Italy’s National Shame. London: Hurst.

Central Statistical Agency (CSA) (2008) 2007 Population and Housing Census of Ethiopia. Addis Ababa: CSA.

Del Boca, A. (1969) Italiani in Africa Orientale. Rome: Laterza.

Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (1995) Constitution of the FDRE. Addis Ababa.

Human Rights Watch (2016) Such a Brutal Crackdown. New York: HRW.

Labanca, N. (2002) Oltremare: Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana. Bologna: Il Mulino.

Marcus, H. (1994) A History of Ethiopia. Berkeley: University of California Press.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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FORWARDING: Yekatit 12 – From Oblivion to Memory (Inaugural Newsletter)
This groundbreaking newsletter, created by descendants of Ethiopians imprisoned during the Italian Fascist occupation (1935-1941), chronicles the Yekatit 12 massacre of February 1937 and its aftermath. The publication represents a collective refusal to forget honouring those who suffered imprisonment, exile, and death while resisting colonial violence.

Future quarterly editions will feature prisoners stories, scholarly reflections, and testimonies that illuminate this suppressed history with honesty and depth.

Essential reading for anyone committed to historical truth and remembrance. We encourage you to read, reflect, and share this critical work of remembrance.

Download the PDF

Source: https://www.fromobliviontomemory.org/asinara/

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Ethiopia’s economic debate is increasingly shaped not by what appears in the national budget, but by what happens outside it. Across ministries, agencies and development bodies, a growing share of public revenue is now raised through so-called contributions, commissions and special charges that sit beyond the formal tax system. These collections are rarely debated in parliament, seldom time-limited and often weakly linked to measurable outcomes. What began as an emergency practice has, quietly, become a governing habit.

For ordinary Ethiopians, the effects are felt not in policy documents but in daily transactions. Traders speak of new charges appearing without warning. Salaried workers notice deductions they struggle to interpret. Small businesses recount inspections that end with payments rather than guidance. The frustration is not simply about money; it is about uncertainty. When obligations change frequently and explanations are thin, people stop planning for growth and start planning for survival.

Economists warn that uncertainty is among the most damaging forces in any economy. It discourages investment, compresses ambition and raises the cost of risk. In Ethiopia, where private enterprise is already navigating inflation, foreign exchange shortages and weak demand, unpredictable charges act as a further brake. The economy remains active, but its capacity to expand is steadily eroded.

Supporters of these off-budget collections usually advance a familiar defence. Ethiopia, they argue, is under exceptional strain. Debt servicing costs are high, security demands remain pressing and public expectations continue to rise. Formal tax reform is slow and politically sensitive. Contributions, commissions and special levies are therefore presented as pragmatic tools, necessary to keep institutions functioning in difficult times.

At first glance, this logic appears reasonable. Governments everywhere must balance ideals against constraints. Yet the defence begins to weaken when the practice becomes permanent rather than temporary. Emergency measures are meant to bridge gaps, not replace systems. When institutions rely on extraction instead of reform, necessity quietly turns into dependency.

The deeper problem is not revenue collection itself, but the absence of a clear link between payment and value. In public finance, legitimacy depends on reciprocity. Citizens accept taxation when they can see how it supports services, infrastructure and opportunity. When money is collected merely to sustain institutions, without visible improvement in performance, trust declines. Over time, compliance becomes grudging rather than voluntary.

This erosion of trust has tangible economic consequences. Businesses shorten their planning horizons. Entrepreneurs postpone expansion. Capital becomes cautious, then mobile. Skilled workers begin to consider exit options. None of this happens overnight. It unfolds gradually, often unnoticed by policymakers until the damage is well advanced.

Ethiopia is not the first country to face this dilemma. Around the world, states under fiscal pressure have experimented with parafiscal measures, especially during periods of crisis. The outcomes are remarkably consistent. Where extraction became routine, growth slowed, informality expanded and political resistance hardened. Where governments corrected course, recovery followed.

In parts of Latin America, repeated emergency levies introduced during debt crises fragmented tax systems and undermined compliance. Businesses faced overlapping obligations, many poorly defined and inconsistently enforced. Investment retreated, and capital flight accelerated. Fiscal stability returned only after governments simplified revenue systems, restored legislative oversight and rebuilt credibility.

Closer to home, several African economies have encountered similar tensions. Special charges introduced to shore up revenue initially generated income, but over time discouraged formalisation and weakened trust. Where reform-minded governments intervened, the solution was not harsher enforcement but rationalisation. Temporary measures were sunsetted, tax bases widened through growth, and administrative efficiency improved.

East Asia’s experience offers perhaps the clearest contrast. During their periods of rapid development, countries such as South Korea and Taiwan faced immense fiscal demands. Yet they resisted the temptation to extract indiscriminately. Instead, they prioritised productivity, industrial expansion and employment. Revenue followed growth, rather than preceding it. Taxes were transparent, predictable and legislated, even as the state played an active economic role.

The common thread across these cases is not ideology, but discipline. Successful governments maintained clear boundaries between taxation and fees. Anything compulsory passed through law. Institutions were required to justify their budgets through performance, not pressure. Citizens were treated as partners in development, not merely sources of revenue.

In Ethiopia, the expansion of off-budget contributions suggests those boundaries are weakening. Institutions increasingly ask where money can be collected, rather than how value can be created. This shift in mindset has long-term consequences. When survival depends on extraction, reform becomes optional. Inefficiency hardens. Accountability fades.

The human cost of this trajectory is often underestimated. Economic pressure does not need to be dramatic to be decisive. For skilled professionals and entrepreneurs, the calculation is incremental. Each additional charge, each new uncertainty, nudges the balance away from investment and towards exit. The result is a quiet but persistent loss of talent and capital.

None of this implies that Ethiopia lacks patriotism or resilience. On the contrary, citizens have repeatedly demonstrated willingness to endure hardship when it is clearly linked to collective progress. What undermines that willingness is not sacrifice itself, but the sense that sacrifice is being demanded without direction or return.

There is also a political dimension that cannot be ignored. When revenue collection escapes parliamentary scrutiny, democratic accountability weakens. Legislatures exist not merely to approve budgets, but to legitimise extraction by linking it to public purpose. Bypassing that process may seem efficient in the short term, but it carries long-term costs for governance.

Critics of reform often argue that Ethiopia cannot afford restraint. Yet the evidence suggests the opposite. Extraction without growth narrows the future tax base. Growth without extraction expands it. The choice is not between revenue and development, but between short-term relief and long-term viability.

Progressive democratic governments that have faced similar constraints have learned this lesson through experience. They have moved to simplify revenue systems, protect predictability and focus on enabling economic activity. They have accepted that sustainable finance depends on confidence as much as coercion.

For Ethiopia, the path forward does not require abandoning revenue mobilisation. It requires re-anchoring it. Contributions must be exceptional, clearly defined and time-limited. Institutions must be incentivised to improve performance rather than seek payments. Parliament must reclaim its role in legitimising compulsory collections.

Most importantly, economic policy must return to first principles. Wealth is created through productivity, innovation and work. Revenue is a by-product of that process. When the order is reversed, economies strain and societies lose faith.

The debate sparked by recent analysis is therefore not a technical quarrel about fees. It is a question about the kind of state Ethiopia wishes to be. A state that finances itself by expanding opportunity builds resilience. A state that finances itself by constant extraction exhausts it.

History offers ample warning, but also reassurance. Countries that recognise the limits of extraction early can correct course. Those that delay pay far more to recover. Ethiopia remains at a moment of choice.

Whether that choice is taken will shape not only fiscal outcomes, but the relationship between citizens and the state. In the end, no economy grows on pressure alone. Growth rests on trust, clarity and the shared belief that effort leads somewhere worth reaching.

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An investigation into how Jeffrey Epstein’s tentacles reached Ethiopia, and what it reveals about power, complicity, and the global reckoning with sexual predation

By E Frashie Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

In the grand tradition of British scandals involving the powerful and the predatory, the Jeffrey Epstein affair has proven to be the gift that keeps on giving—or rather, taking. As the US Department of Justice released millions of documents related to the convicted sex trafficker and financier, Britons watched with grim familiarity as two of their own, Lord Peter Mandelson and Prince Andrew, found themselves ensnared in the lengthening shadow of Epstein’s crimes. For Ethiopians and East Africans, however, the revelations have taken on a peculiar local dimension: their country appears in approximately 334 of the released documents, raising uncomfortable questions about who knew what, and when.

The British experience offers a cautionary tale. Lord Mandelson, the Labour grandee and former EU trade commissioner, has faced renewed scrutiny over his association with Epstein, leading to swift rejection of his potential appointment as US ambassador and intense public opprobrium. Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, has become a pariah within his own family, stripped of royal duties and forced to settle a civil sexual abuse case brought by Virginia Giuffre for a reported £12 million. Both men’s falls from grace illustrate a crucial shift in public tolerance: proximity to a convicted paedophile is no longer merely unfortunate it is damning.

For Ethiopia, a nation already grappling with internal conflicts, economic challenges, and questions of governance, the Epstein connection represents yet another unwelcome international embarrassment. But it also raises profound questions about how predators like Epstein exploited developing nations, and whether enough is being done to investigate his network in Africa.

Britain’s reckoning with the Epstein scandal has been particularly visceral, perhaps because it touches upon enduring anxieties about privilege, power, and paedophilia within the establishment. Lord Mandelson’s association with Epstein reportedly introduced through mutual connections in elite circles—has proven politically toxic. Despite his protestations that he had no knowledge of Epstein’s crimes during their acquaintance, the court of public opinion has rendered its verdict. His nomination as ambassador to Washington was effectively dead on arrival, with both Conservative and Labour figures expressing alarm.

The Mandelson affair echoes the Prince Andrew debacle but with notable differences. Whilst Andrew’s relationship with Epstein was documented through photographs, flight logs, and eventually legal testimony, Mandelson’s connection appears more tangential, dinners, social gatherings, the sort of networking that defines elite circles. Yet in the post-Epstein era, such distinctions matter less than they once might have. The question is no longer “Did you know?” but “Should you have known?” and increasingly, “Why didn’t you ask?”

Prince Andrew’s trajectory from the Queen’s favourite son to virtual exile illustrates the mechanism of social rejection in real time. The now-infamous BBC Newsnight interview in November 2019, in which he claimed he couldn’t have been at a nightclub with Virginia Giuffre because he was at Pizza Express in Woking and suffered from a medical condition preventing him from sweating, became a masterclass in self-immolation. Public revulsion was swift and comprehensive. Corporate sponsors fled. Charities distanced themselves. The military stripped him of honorary titles.

What united both men’s downfalls was their association with a man whose crimes were, by 2008, a matter of public record. Epstein’s initial conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor, a sweetheart plea deal that saw him serve just 13 months, should have ended his social acceptability. That it didn’t speaks to the power of wealth, influence, and the willingness of elites to overlook uncomfortable truths.

Epstein’s 2019 arrest on federal charges of sex trafficking minors and his subsequent death by apparent suicide in a Manhattan jail cell merely confirmed what investigators had long suspected: his earlier conviction represented only a fraction of his crimes. The subsequent releases of court documents, flight logs from his private jet (dubbed the “Lolita Express”), and now the DOJ files have painted a portrait of industrial-scale sexual exploitation involving girls as young as 14.

Yet the released documents reveal something far more disturbing than the already horrific sex trafficking operation. Buried within thousands of pages are references to Epstein’s fascination with eugenics, transhumanism, and what can only be described as a God complex that would make Lucifer himself envious. Witnesses and associates described Epstein’s interest in using his New Mexico ranch to seed the human race with his DNA, impregnating multiple women to create a “superior” bloodline a scheme that echoes the darkest chapters of 20th-century pseudoscience.

The files contain disturbing allegations that extend beyond sexual abuse into territory that seems almost mediaeval in its barbarity. Court testimonies reference Epstein’s circle discussing practices that blur the line between scientific experimentation and occult ritual. One particularly harrowing account describes conversations about cellular regeneration theories and the procurement of biological materials from young victims allegations that, whilst unproven in court, paint a portrait of a man whose depravity knew no bounds.

Whether these represent literal truths or the exaggerations of traumatised witnesses struggling to articulate unspeakable experiences, they underscore a crucial point: Jeffrey Epstein was not merely a sex offender but a man who believed himself above natural and moral law. His interest in cutting-edge science, from artificial intelligence to genetics, was inseparable from his conviction that wealth and intellect entitled him to treat human beings, particularly young girls, as experimental subjects. This, then, was the “Lucifer” that Professor Berhanu Nega might have unwittingly invoked.

The revelation that Berhanu Nega, now Ethiopia’s Minister of Education, received scholarship funding from Jeffrey Epstein takes on an almost prophetic irony given the professor’s own public statements. During his years in opposition to the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) government, Nega famously declared that he would “work with Lucifer himself” if it meant overthrowing the regime he despised.

It was not mere rhetoric. Nega’s political journey has been one of scorched-earth pragmatism. Having left the United States, where he held academic positions, he took the extraordinary step of accepting Eritrean citizenship to wage an armed insurgency against the Ethiopian government. His organisation, Ginbot 7, launched attacks from Eritrean territory, making common cause with one of Africa’s most repressive regimes a government that has held no elections since independence in 1993 and operates what human rights organisations have described as an open-air prison.

The insurgency failed militarily but succeeded in keeping Nega relevant. When Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2018, Nega was among the formerly exiled opposition figures welcomed back to Addis Ababa. His transformation from armed rebel to Minister of Education was swift and, to many observers, bewildering. That he now oversees the education of Ethiopia’s children whilst having received funding from a convicted paedophile strikes many Ethiopians as a cosmic joke in exceptionally poor taste.

Nega has maintained that he had no knowledge of Epstein’s crimes when he received the scholarship funding in the early 2000s. This is plausible, Epstein’s 2008 conviction came later, and his ability to maintain a veneer of respectability amongst academics was well-documented. Yet the symbolic resonance remains inescapable: a man who vowed to work with Lucifer did, in fact, accept money from perhaps the closest thing to a living embodiment of evil that modern America has produced.

The question now confronting Nega and the Ethiopian government is whether historical ignorance absolves present responsibility. Should a Minister of Education, responsible for safeguarding children, remain in post whilst associated, however tangentially, with the world’s most notorious child sex trafficker?

The Epstein connection to Ethiopia becomes more disturbing when examined alongside recent developments in the country’s digital infrastructure. According to documents circulating amongst civil liberties advocates and technology researchers, the Ethiopian government has harvested DNA and biometric data from approximately five million children as part of a digital identity programme. The initiative, ostensibly designed to improve access to education and health services, has raised alarm bells amongst data protection experts.

What transforms this from a concerning privacy issue into a potential Epstein connection is the funding architecture. Investigative journalists have identified links between the biometric programme and funding arrangements involving entities connected to Epstein’s network of technology investments. Moreover, contracts with United Arab Emirates-based businesses, some of which appear in the periphery of the Epstein files, suggest a complex web of financial relationships that demand scrutiny.

The UAE connection is particularly troubling. Epstein maintained extensive business relationships in the Gulf states, where privacy laws and less stringent regulatory oversight provided convenient cover for questionable transactions. That Ethiopian government contracts for biometric data collection involving children might flow through similar channels raises urgent questions.

To be clear: there is no evidence of direct Epstein involvement in Ethiopia’s digital ID programme, which postdates his death. But the pattern is familiar developing nations desperate for technological advancement and foreign investment, complex funding arrangements involving offshore entities, and programmes that collect sensitive biological data from vulnerable populations. These are precisely the conditions that predators like Epstein exploited.

The collection of children’s DNA in particular evokes Epstein’s documented fascination with genetics and eugenics. His stated desire to “seed the human race” with his genetic material, his funding of research into human longevity and enhancement, and his connections to the transhumanist movement all suggest a man obsessed with biological manipulation on a grand scale.

For five million Ethiopian children to have their genetic information collected and stored in databases accessible to foreign contractors recalls the darkest elements of the Epstein files. What safeguards exist to prevent this data being sold, shared, or exploited? Who has access? What purposes, beyond the stated administrative ones, might it serve?

These questions acquire particular urgency given Ethiopia’s political instability and history of surveillance. The EPRDF government, which Nega spent years fighting, was notorious for its extensive security apparatus. The current government under Abiy Ahmed has shown little inclination toward greater transparency or respect for privacy rights. The Tigray conflict demonstrated the willingness to use technology, including telecommunications shutdowns, as weapons of war.

The majority of Ethiopian references in the released documents relate to market intelligence reports that Epstein commissioned from consultants, suggesting he had, or was considering, investments in the country. One confirmed investment was iCog Labs, an artificial intelligence research laboratory co-founded by Ben Goertzel, a prominent AI researcher, and Getnet Aseffa. The emails reveal Goertzel’s energetic cultivation of Epstein as a funder, with repeated assurances that “the guys” in Ethiopia were doing “amazing things”, the sort of vague enthusiasm that signals either genuine excitement or, more cynically, the massaging of a wealthy patron’s ego.

The iCog Labs connection is particularly relevant because it illustrates Epstein’s modus operandi in respectable society. By positioning himself as a patron of cutting-edge scientific research, he also funded Harvard University’s Programme for Evolutionary Dynamics and MIT’s Media Lab, Epstein purchased legitimacy. Scientists and academics who accepted his funding found themselves in an impossible position after his crimes became undeniable: return the money and acknowledge poor judgment, or keep it and face accusations of complicity.

Given Epstein’s documented interest in artificial intelligence, genetics, and human enhancement, his funding of an AI laboratory in Ethiopia takes on sinister overtones. Was this genuine philanthropic interest in African technological development, or was Ethiopia, with its limited regulatory oversight and desperate need for investment, an attractive location for research that might face ethical objections elsewhere?

More colourful, if less consequential, are the emails from Shaher Abdulhak, a Yemeni billionaire who died in 2020 and who addressed Epstein as “cousin brother” a term of endearment that sounds rather less charming in English than presumably intended. Abdulhak’s pitches to Epstein included the gloriously ill-conceived idea of creating an energy drink from khat (a stimulant plant chewed across the Horn of Africa and Yemen) mixed with lemon juice to compete with Red Bull.

More seriously, Abdulhak sought a $20 million loan for National Tobacco Enterprise Ethiopia, claiming his Sheba Investment Company owned 60% of it. Whether Epstein provided the funds remains unclear, though the brazen nature of the request speaks to the casual corruption that characterised elite interactions with the financier.

Buried in the correspondence is one email that transforms the Ethiopian connection from merely embarrassing to potentially sinister. In a message apparently sent to Abdulhak, Epstein mentioned that a “good friend who runs a modelling agency” believed there were “interesting girls” in Ethiopia.

In isolation, this phrase might be innocuous. In context, an email from a convicted sex offender who trafficked underage girls internationally, it becomes chilling. The term “interesting girls” echoes the euphemistic language Epstein and his associates used to discuss recruitment of victims. Modelling agencies, legitimate and otherwise, have long been identified as potential vectors for exploitation, offering young women from impoverished backgrounds promises of international careers whilst potentially exposing them to abuse.

Court documents from Epstein’s trials reveal a recruitment pattern that was both systematic and global. Victims were often approached through seemingly legitimate channels, modelling scouts, educational programmes, employment opportunities, before being groomed and trafficked. The operation relied on local recruiters who understood cultural contexts and could identify vulnerable targets.

Ethiopia, with its poverty, limited opportunities for young women, and a culture where deference to wealthy foreigners remains common, would have been an ideal hunting ground. That Epstein’s private jet received permission to land in Ethiopia, and that he mentioned visiting the country in correspondence with Steve Bannon, confirms he had physical presence there.

There is no direct evidence in the released documents that Epstein trafficked Ethiopian girls or engaged in criminal conduct within Ethiopia. But the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, particularly when so much of Epstein’s operation was deliberately hidden. Victims have described being trafficked to numerous countries, being flown on his private jets to locations where their passports were confiscated and they were kept in conditions resembling sexual slavery.

For Ethiopian law enforcement and civil society, these revelations demand investigation. If Epstein visited Ethiopia, whom did he meet? Were any young Ethiopian women recruited through his network? Did any of his associates, the modelling agency friend, for instance, operate in the country?

The reaction amongst Ethiopians and East Africans to the Epstein revelations has been complex, reflecting broader ambivalences about corruption, foreign influence, and accountability. On social media and in diaspora communities, there is genuine anger, not merely at Epstein, but at the Ethiopian individuals and institutions that enabled his presence.

The revelation about Berhanu Nega has proven particularly divisive. His supporters argue that accepting scholarship funding from Epstein over two decades ago, before the full extent of his crimes was publicly known, represents an unfortunate association rather than complicity. His critics counter that a man who vowed to work with Lucifer cannot now claim shock at having done precisely that.

The controversy has reignited broader questions about Nega’s judgment and principles. His acceptance of Eritrean citizenship to fight Ethiopia, making common cause with a regime at least as repressive as the EPRDF he opposed, already raised eyebrows. His seamless transition from armed insurgent to government minister suggested a pragmatism that borders on opportunism. The Epstein connection adds another troubling layer.

Yet there is also a strain of fatalism in East African responses, a sense that corruption and exploitation by wealthy foreigners is simply business as usual. Ethiopia has long experience with foreign actors from colonial powers to modern corporations and NGOs extracting value whilst leaving minimal benefit. In this reading, Epstein is merely the latest in a long line of predators, and focusing on him distracts from structural problems.

This cynicism, whilst understandable, is dangerous. It normalises exploitation and discourages the accountability mechanisms necessary to prevent future abuses. The global reckoning with Epstein’s crimes has demonstrated that exposure and prosecution are possible, albeit belatedly.

The convergence of Epstein’s eugenic obsessions with Ethiopia’s biometric data collection programme represents a thoroughly modern nightmare. Epstein’s interest in “improving” the human race through selective breeding was, at least in his expressed ambitions, constrained by biology how many women could he impregnate? But contemporary genetic databases and artificial intelligence offer possibilities that would have seemed like science fiction even a decade ago.

The five million Ethiopian children whose DNA has been harvested now exist as data points in systems whose full capabilities and access protocols remain opaque. In the wrong hands, such databases could enable precisely the sort of genetic manipulation and selection that Epstein fantasised about. Even in benign hands, the data represents extraordinary value pharmaceutical companies pay enormous sums for genetic information from diverse populations.

That contracts related to this programme involve UAE-based entities with peripheral connections to Epstein’s network may be coincidental. But given the pattern of Epstein’s investments, artificial intelligence in Ethiopia, genetic research globally, transhumanist projects, the possibility of intentional targeting cannot be dismissed.

The Ethiopian government’s response to questions about data security has been, at best, inadequate. Officials tout the benefits of digital identity whilst providing few details about encryption, access controls, or international data-sharing agreements. For a government that has demonstrated willingness to use technology repressively, and which employs a Minister of Education who received funding from a paedophile eugenicist, assurances ring hollow.

What the Epstein files ultimately reveal, whether the references are to Britain, Ethiopia, or the dozens of other jurisdictions touched by his crimes, is the banality of elite evil. Epstein was not a Bond villain operating from a secret lair. He was a fixture of respectable society, funding university departments, advising the wealthy, socialising with princes and presidents.

His crimes were enabled not by exotic conspiracy but by the mundane mechanisms of wealth and power: the assumption that rich men deserve privacy, the reluctance to ask awkward questions of generous donors, the willingness to overlook earlier convictions in exchange for access and funding.

For Ethiopia, the lessons are particularly stark. When Professor Berhanu Nega vowed to work with Lucifer himself to achieve his political aims, he articulated a principle, that ends justify means, which is fundamentally corrupting. Whether he knowingly accepted money from a monster is less important than his demonstrated willingness to do so. That such a man now oversees the education of Ethiopia’s children, whilst his government harvests their genetic data through murky international contracts, should alarm anyone concerned with child welfare.

The parallels with Britain’s experience are instructive. Lord Mandelson and Prince Andrew discovered that wealth, title, and power provide no immunity from public judgment when the crimes are sufficiently heinous and the association sufficiently close. Both have been effectively exiled from polite society, their legacies permanently tarnished.

Ethiopian figures connected to Epstein deserve similar scrutiny. The fact that Ethiopia is poorer than Britain, that its media infrastructure is weaker, that competing crises demand attention none of these absolve the moral responsibility to investigate and, where appropriate, demand accountability.

As more files are released and investigations continue, the full extent of Epstein’s Ethiopian connections may become clearer. For now, Ethiopians are left with uncomfortable questions, partial answers, and the knowledge that their country appeared on the radar of one of history’s most prolific sexual predators a man whose interests in genetics, artificial intelligence, and young girls may have found fertile ground in a nation desperate for investment and incapable of effective oversight.

If Berhanu Nega truly made a Faustian bargain, working with his Lucifer to achieve power, the devil has certainly had his due. The question now is whether Ethiopia’s children will pay the price for their elders’ moral compromises. With five million of them reduced to data points in databases connected, however tenuously, to a dead paedophile’s trans humanist fantasies, the answer may already be written in code we’ve yet to fully decrypt.

The Ethiopian Tribune continues to investigate the Epstein files and welcomes information from readers regarding any connections between Epstein’s network and activities in the Horn of Africa. We particularly seek information about the biometric data collection programme, its funding sources, and its international partnerships.

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

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