Gentrification, is that you?
and a policy under fire
Hi there,
I want to start this week’s edition by thanking those of you who have been sharing and forwarding this newsletter (and email) within your networks. I appreciate you so much! Big shout out to Sebene Selassie, author and fellow Substacker who writes Ancestors to Elements – a newsletter on ‘exploring the paradox of being human’.(Highly recommend checking it out.)
To everybody who reads this newsletter and finds it useful – please share this with friends and colleagues who you believe will appreciate this work this week. I’m reluctant to do paid ads on social media platforms for now due to some reasons (if you’re really curious to know, hit reply and I’ll let you know) so I’m hoping that this community of ours will grow through you.
For new, subscribers, welcome, I’m Maya Misikir, a freelance reporter based in Addis Abeba, and I write Sifter, this weekly newsletter on Ethiopia where I curate the week’s top five stories in under ten minutes.
Oh, and one final thing; your votes from last week have been duly noted. Expect an update on the report on media and religion next week!
Now, to the news.
Peace: the transitional justice policy
The Ministry of Justice says that the draft National Transitional Justice Policy (Policy) is in its last stages before send off for approval to the Council of Ministers. The only thing left is incorporating the feedback from the validation workshops, according to a statement it shared on Facebook.
The Policy1 is also part of the recommendations from a joint investigation on rights violations in the country (done by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission).
The main purpose of the Policy is to ensure accountability, following two years of war in Tigray region and other conflicts in the country (and documented human rights violations and war crimes).
The draft Policy, underway since early 2023, is the result of 58 nationwide consultations, involving stakeholders across the board according to the statement.
But has this draft Policy been inclusive?. Here’s an excerpt on what the Ministry of Justice has to say about that:
Indeed, the level of engagement demonstrated by the public was not only reassuring, it also reaffirmed the public’s greater sense of ownership and confidence in the process – as offering a national solution grounded on accountability, truth, reconciliation and justice.
Other less than glowing reviews include one written by the former spokesperson for the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, Aaron Masho. He co-wrote that this Policy, ‘will ensure impunity for war crimes committed in Tigray’ in a story that came out on Foreign Policy last week.
Here’s an excerpt:
But expecting criminal accountability from the state that perpetrated most of the atrocities documented by human rights groups is a fool’s errand. In their probe into the 2020-2022 war, international investigators verified the mass killings of Tigrayans by Ethiopian and Eritrean troops in a pattern that had the makings of “androcide”—the systematic murder of men and boys.
In another story published by Addis Standard, two experts, one from the Harvard University School of Law, and another from the Institute for Security Studies, are also much less optimistic.
In the article they talk about how the transitional justice policy was not inclusive in expert selection (‘absence of representation from the Tigray region’!), that it lacks clear framework for the role of non-Ethiopian experts (‘Ethiopian experts face undue pressure and they’re also biased’), and that the current conflicts in the country may make it impractical to implement (not to be used as an excuse to abandon it in the name of, ‘pursuing stability’). You can read the full analysis on Addis Standard here.
The full statement from the Ministry of Justice here, the story on Addis Standard here and the must-read piece on Foreign Policy here, all in English.
Displacement: the urban kind
Residents living along the part of town in Addis Abeba known as Piassa, have been told that they have three months to pack up and relocate. These orders have come from the local administration so that they can make way for a city rehabilitation project according to a story run by Ethiopia Insider last week.
The residents complained that they had been given a short time to relocate and that they have also not been given any replacement plots according to the same story.
At a meeting where over 700 residents were present, people raised concerns about how this was very sudden and that it will be a tough transition as most of them are from low-income families, according to the story.
In return, residents were told by a professional who had conducted an assessment, that the areas they occupied, adjacent to the newly inaugurated Adwa Victory Memorial, were ‘not conducive for residence as it was in in the city center’.
The project is expected to be fast-tracked and as a result some residents have been told to pack up and leave within three days (!), lest they face the consequences for holding up progress.
The full story on Ethiopia Insider, in Amharic, here.
Press freedom: not applicable to all
I’m sure many of have read or come across the news that a foreign journalist spent most of the past week behind bars in Ethiopia. French journalist, Antoine Galindo was imprisoned while in the country to ‘cover the African Union Summit and the other news on Ethiopia’, as explained by Indigo Publications group, the publisher of Africa Intelligence where he works.
Here’s an excerpt from their press release:
Antoine Galindo, a journalist known to the Ethiopia Media Authority, had informed the Ethiopian authorities of his assignment in the country and had a visa authorising him to work there as a journalist.
He was arrested during an interview with Bate Urgessa, the spokesperson for opposition political party, the Oromo Liberation Front.
Why was he arrested? According to a representative of the government, instead of focusing on the AU Summit, he was ‘gathering information about Ethiopia’s internal political issues.’
While it has shocked many people that the Ethiopian government went as far as to detain a foreign journalist, Antoine was let go last Friday, after multiple institutions decried his arrest. He left the country promptly thereafter.
Bate, unfortunately, still remains in jail and a report by Ethiopia Insider, talks about what happened at the hearing in detail. This is not the first time Bate has been arrested. Addis Standard covered a story in March 2022 when he was in critical condition following a hunger strike in prison.
Here’s an excerpt from the latest statement on the issue from the Committee to Protect Journalists:
“Ethiopian authorities must now release all journalists—eight others at least—who have suffered months of imprisonment under very difficult conditions, and provide guarantees that international journalists will be allowed the access they need to report and will not face retaliation for doing their jobs.”
The full story on Antoine’s arrest on the Guardian here, and CPJ’s statement on his release here.
Security: we don’t know her (XIX)
Fighting in Ethiopia’s Amhara region has been on and off since July last year. Ever since the order to integrate the local militia into the country’s formal structure came, the region has devolved into a center of open conflict between federal troops and local militia (Fano), drone strikes and serious human rights violations.
I compile the updates here, if you want to go through what has taken place chronologically. As you can see, this is the 19th part in the series.
Last week Thursday, residents of the region’s capital city, Bahir Dar, reported hearing gunshots according to a story by Reuters.
Here’s an excerpt:
“Ethiopian government forces battled militiamen on Friday in the capital of the Amhara region, Bahir Dar, the regional administration and residents said, in the first fighting there since the early days of the conflict last year.”
A day after these reports came out, the region’s Communication Bureau put out a statement saying that the country’s defense forces along with the region’s security were ‘cleaning out the rebel group by conducting house to house searches’.
The statement added that the rebel group (Fano) was leveraging local and foreign ‘extremist media houses’ to make it look like there’s fighting going on when they’re ‘fleeing’ instead. (Signaling yet another unfortunate harbinger for press freedom).
The story on Reuters here and the region’s Communication Bureau statement, in Amharic, here.
Labour rights: miners have not been found
Last month, I wrote an update about the artisinal opal miners trapped in a cave in Ethiopia’s Amhara region. At the time, local officials had said that the position of the mines have made it difficult to extract the miners safely.
This marks the fourth week since the day the miners were caved in, and a report by BBC Amharic from last week talked about the families of the miners who are trying different means to get them out including using explosives. The story says there have been similar incidents in the past in the area where artisanal miners were rescued after 11 days.
The numbers of miners caved in is not yet confirmed, with the numbers ranging from at least eight to close to 30.
The full story on BBC Amharic here.
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That’s all for this week. I’ll be back next week with more updates!
In the meantime, you can help support my work by forwarding this to friends and family (and help them keep up with what’s going on).
Initially, this was published saying that the Policy came as a result of the peace deal that ended the war in Tigray. This is incorrect, as the Policy was initiated before the start of the Tigray war.
Thank you Maya.