The only excuse you'll ever need
and an investigation on Oromia region
Hi there,
My weekend was spent recovering from an incredible but busy week in Nairobi, Kenya at the Africa Media Festival. Big shout out to Baraza Media Lab for bringing people together to talk about important things like gender and authoritarianism on the continent, and ‘Afriethics’ (what does it mean for media ethics and standards to be African?).
For new subscribers, welcome to Sifter, this newsletter on Ethiopia. I’m Maya Misikir, and I’m a freelance reporter based in Addis Abeba, who writes the week’s top 5 stories under 10 minutes!
While this week’s updates is focused mostly on security issues across the country, I’m thinking of adding a section on a report done on media and religion in Ethiopia for the next one. Older subscribers will remember an edition I did based on a report on media and ethnicity in Ethiopia entitled, ‘The Ethnification of the Ethiopian Media’.
If you would like to read one on media and religion in Ethiopia, let me know below.
Now, to the news.
Report: the only excuse you’ll ever need
Either press charges or let them go, says the latest Amnesty International report to the Ethiopian government on the condition of people detained under the country’s state of emergency.
The (latest) state of emergency, declared in August last year, when conflict started in the country’s Amhara region, has just been extended for another six months. I wrote an update when that happened earlier this month.
The state of emergency is being used to, ‘silence peaceful dissent by arbitrarily detaining prominent politicians critical of the government and journalists’ says the report.
One of the first things that followed the declaration of the state of emergency was the arrest of prominent opposition political party member (the National Movement of Amhara) and member of parliament, Christian Tadele. Since then, other politicians and media workers have shared the same fate.
Here's an excerpt from the report:
“The Ethiopian government must stop resorting to old tactics of denying basic rights through the pretext of emergency laws. Ethiopians face another armed conflict in Amhara region, a serious humanitarian crisis in Tigray, a dire security situation in Oromia and pervasive impunity nationwide. The role of the media and the right to freedom of expression is as vital as ever,” said Tigere Chagutah, Amnesty International’s Regional Director for East and Southern Africa.
This regime isn’t the first to ‘frequent’ state of emergencies as a means of fulfilling its every whim and fancy, and the full report by Amnesty also talks about that here.
Investigation: the committee behind the orders
The insecurity in Ethiopia’s Oromia Region has reached alarming levels over the past few years as fighting continues between the federal government and the region’s rebel faction, the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA).
Just last week, 15 civilians were killed after three days of fighting between the two factions in the region’s North Shoa region according to a story by Addis Standard. Hundreds of thousands have been displaced by this fighting so far and both sides have shifted blames on the attacks taking place.
A new investigation by Reuters says that the region’s government has a special unit, a security committee, responsible for ordering ‘extra-judicial killings and illegal detentions to crush an insurgency there’.
Who makes up this committee? According to the story, the president of Oromia region, Shimelis Abdissa (who leads the committee), as well as head of security for the region, Ararsa Merdasa, among other high-level officials in the region.
What did the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission say about this security committee (known as the Koree Nageenyaa in the local Afaan Oromo language)?
Here’s an excerpt from the story:
Reuters presented its findings to the head of the state-appointed Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC), Daniel Bekele. In an interview, Bekele confirmed the existence of the Koree Nageenyaa. He said its aim was to address growing security challenges in Oromiya, but it “overreached its purpose by interfering in the justice system with widespread human rights violations.”
The story mentions that part of the extra-judicial killings carried out under the order of this committee included the death of elders from Oromiya’s pastoralist Karayyuu tribe. Addis Standard had reported on this when it first happened in December 2021. This latest investigation tracks the phone calls made giving the order, names the people involved and talks about the final decision on who was blamed for the killings.
The story, which talks about Ethiopia’s ‘long history of using a clandestine security apparatus to quell dissent’, the committee’s work in keeping protestors off the streets, and an internal document with over a thousand people’s names on it destined for arrest, here.
Meanwhile, another story on Wazema Radio (in Amharic) says that a reshuffle of officials across all of Oromia’s administrative structure is now imminent. If you want more on this story in English, hit reply and let me know.
The recent report by Addis Standard on the details of the latest fighting in the region, here.
Food: the drought in Ethiopia’s Afar region
I have reported on the food insecurity in Ethiopia’s Tigray region where millions are waiting to get support as aid agencies overhaul their distribution system following reported widespread theft of food. You can find that story on The New Humanitarian here.
But food insecurity is not just a crisis that Ethiopia’s Tigray region is facing. In the country’s Afar region, more and more people, affected by the impact of climate change-induced drought, need food support.
Here’s an excerpt from a story on Addis Standard:
Mohammed Hussen, the head of the Afar Disaster Prevention and Food Security Office, revealed that a survey conducted across six zones over three weeks identified up to 600,000 people in the region affected by the drought.
The Commission identifies Afar, along with Amhara and Tigray, as the three most vulnerable regions.
Afar region also has high malnutrition rates in children because of this and to make matter worse, a post by Wazema Radio says that here have reported clashes in the border areas between the region and neighboring Somali region last Friday.
The full story on Addis Standard on the effects of the drought in Afar, here.
Security: we don’t know her (XVIII)
The conflict in Ethiopia’s Amhara region has led to more civilian causalities over the past week. A drone attack killed 30 civilians in a town called Sasit, according to a recent report by Action On Armed Violence.
The report says that the drone struck a bus with 50 passengers as it dropped off people in the town last Monday.
The organization, which conducts research on global armed violence, says that there were 79 incidents of explosive weapons use in Ethiopia over the past decade, and 48 of those happened in 2021 and 2022!
All kinds of movement between two of the region’s cities, Dessie and Debre Berhan, have also been banned after eight people were reportedly killed by the region’s militia (known as Fano).
The people who were killed, ‘were all native Oromos and were identified by their ID cards before they were taken away and killed by the armed group’ according to the story on Addis Standard.
The roads were ordered closed, ‘to avoid civilian harm during a strong military operation to be conducted aiming to crackdown against the armed group.’
The last time there was a ‘cracked down against the armed group’, dozens of people were killed. These extra judicial killings in the region carried out by Ethiopian National Defense Forces may amount to war crimes says Amnesty International.
The full report by Action On Armed Violence here and the story by Addis Standard here. A chronological table of contents on the updates regarding the security in the region since the initial stage of the conflict last year, here.
Tigray: after the peace deal
The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission has released a report assessing the state of human rights in Ethiopia’s Tigray Region following the peace deal that ended the war in the region in November 2022.
In particular the assessment was conducted in July of last year and highlights what it says are some encouraging and worrying trends in the region.
Despite improved humanitarian access, the report says that it is still very limited because of aid suspension, and inadequate support from the federal government.
Healthcare and education facilities need attention and are far from the functional capacity they were before the conflict. A lot of schools in the region are being used as shelters for people displaced from their homes. In some places, they serve as both; as schools in the day and shelter during the night.
The report also explains the methodology on how the Commission compiles its report. Notably, it says that for serious allegations (amounting to grave crimes), the ‘cases should be based on at least one source of first-hand (primary) information which is assessed as credible and was independently corroborated by at least two other independent and reliable sources.’
Mass displacement has stopped after the peace deal, says the report, but there are cases of isolated forced displacement from places under the control of Amhara or Eritrean forces (12,000 more arrivals this month).
One incident documented by the Commission is of flyers being distributed in the region’s Alamata town (under control of Amhara forces) ‘warning ethnic Tigrayan residents to ‘urgently leave or face the consequences.’
The full report by the Commission here and a shorter executive summary here.
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That’s all for this week. I’ll be back next week with more updates!
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This is all very 💔.
Thank you Maya.