Tag: ethiopia
TPLF declares state of emergency to stop protests
The Ethiopian government has declared a state of emergency effective immediately following a week of anti-government violence that resulted in deaths and property damage across the country, especially in the restive Oromia region. (Karel Prinsloo, File/Associated Press)
“We put our citizens’ safety first. Besides, we want to put an end to the damage that is being carried out against infrastructure projects, education institutions, health centers, administration and justice buildings,” said Desalegn on the state Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation.
“The recent developments in Ethiopia have put the integrity of the nation at risk,” he said.
“The state of emergency will not breach basic human rights enshrined under the Ethiopian constitution and won’t also affect diplomatic rights listed under the Vienna Convention,” said Desalegn.
The internet is blocked across many parts of Ethiopia, residents reported Sunday. The government has blocked the internet for more than a week to prevent protesters from using social media to get supporters to attend demonstrations.
Major towns and cities across Ethiopia’s Oromia region are experiencing unrest and widespread violent protests after dozens were killed on October 2 in a stampede triggered when police fired teargas and bullets to disperse protestors at the annual Irrecha thanksgiving celebration in Bishoftu town.
Anti-government protests continued Sunday. Many roads into and out of the capital, Addis Ababa, are blocked by protesters and those who try to drive through are targeted by people who jump out from behind bushes and hurl rocks, witnesses told the Associated Press by phone on Sunday.
The state broadcaster said details of the state of emergency will be communicated to the public later Sunday.
In a separate development, Ethiopian officials summoned Egypt’s ambassador to the country, Aboubakr Hefny, for discussions. The State Minister for Ethiopia’s Foreign Affairs Ministry talked to the Egyptian diplomat after a video appeared online which purportedly shows members of the outlawed Oromo Liberation Front sharing a stage with what Ethiopia’s state broadcaster described as Egyptians.
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
MESSAGE TO AMHARA PEOPLE HOME & ABROAD
The time to build our political, financial, and defense capabilities has come. The past times of struggle and resistance should have empowered us and increased our political awareness.
Let us organize ourselves as an Amhara so, we will become an influential participant in the new Ethiopia instead of a people without representatives. We should learn from the past mistakes and the painful outcomes it costing us up to this day.
In order to accomplish this, we have to reevaluate our past decisions, build our mentality and focus on/around Amhara people and Amhara issues that we need to solve for our people. Standing in solidarity and collaborating with other ethnic groups is very important because we are fighting the same war. However, Do not Blindly BELIEVE / FOLLOW the so-called “Ethiopian unity” dreamers. They are lost themselves. DO NOT BE FOOLED!
As an Amhara myself, I believe we should identify & prioritize our challenges in order to find a smart approach and solutions. Our immediate priority is to free all #Amhara and its people from the current regime, reclaim our land that is forcefully annexed, elect/appoint our local, regional and parliamentary representatives that are Amhara and that have Amhara values that work for Amhara people and secure our best interests in political, economic, militaristic and our entire well-being as a people in Ethiopia.
[ For the political leaders ] Start thinking about the transitional government in Amhara. Prepare the Amhara freedom and self-governing documents.
Freedom is at the door.
አይዞህ አንተ ገበሬ።
Q&A: Recent Events and Deaths at the Irreecha Festival in Ethiopia
The following questions and answers are critical to understanding recent events inEthiopia. Responses are written by Felix Horne, senior Ethiopia researcher at Human Rights Watch. The Human Rights Watch analysis of the situation is informed by 15 interviews with people who witnessed and lived through the events of October 2, 2016, as well as hundreds of other interviews with people caught up in violent government responses to protests across Ethiopia in the past year.
Irreecha is the most important cultural festival to Ethiopia’s 40 million ethnic Oromos who gather to celebrate the end of the rainy season and welcome the harvest season. Millions gather each year at Bishoftu, 40 kilometers southeast of Addis Ababa.
This week, people spoke of increased tension after year-long protests in Oromia. There was an increased presence of armed security forces in Bishoftu compared to previous years.
The government attempted to have a more visible role in the festivities this year. The government and the Abba Gadaas, the council of Oromo traditional leaders, held extensive negotiations about the arrangements for the festival. At the festival, tensions within the massive crowd built when government officials appeared on stage and even more so when the current Abba Gadaas were not present on stage. Instead, a retired Abba Gadaa who is perceived to be closely aligned with the government took to the stage.
A military helicopter flying low overhead increased public concern about the government’s intentions, according to witnesses. Eventually, a man went on stage and led the crowd in anti-government chants. The crowd grew more restless, more people went on stage, and then security forces fired teargas and people heard gunshots.
The security forces have used live ammunition while confronting and attempting to disperse numerous public gatherings in Oromia for almost a year. As Human Rights Watch has documented in many of those protests, teargas preceded live ammunition, so when the pattern seemed to be repeating itself at Irreecha, panic very quickly set in. People ran and fell into nearby ditches, while others were trampled in the ensuring chaos.
- The government said 50 people died, while the opposition says 678. Why is there such a disparity in the numbers?
The Ethiopian government makes it extremely difficult to investigate these types of incidents. The government limits independent media and restricts nongovernmental organizations, both domestic and international, so that currently no one has had the access, expertise or impartiality necessary to determine a precise, credible death toll. Making things worse, over the last few days, the government has restricted internet access, as it has done intermittently throughout the protests.
Based on the information from witnesses and hospital staff Human Rights Watch has spoken to, it is clear that the number of dead is much higher than government estimates. But without access to morgues and families who lost loved ones, and with many people unwilling to speak for fear of reprisals, it is impossible to come up with a credible total. Anecdotal reports from some hospital staff indicate high numbers of dead, but they are also under pressure to keep silent. There are numerous reports of medical staff not being permitted to speak, or being pressured to underreport deaths. They may also have had limited access to the bodies. During the last 12 months, Human Rights Watch hasdocumented several arrests of medical staff for speaking out about killings and beatings by security forces, or in some cases for treating injured protesters.
All of this underscores the need for independent international investigation to document who died and how they died in Bishoftu on October 2.
As a crowd-control method, teargas should be used only when strictly necessary as a proportionate response to quell violence. International guidelines, such as the United Nations Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms, stipulate that the police are expected to use discretion in crowd control tactics to ensure a proportionate response to any threat of violence, and to avoid exacerbating the situation. Police should exercise restraint when using teargas in situations when its use could cause death or serious injury.
The witnesses all said the crowds were not violent, but they were clearly protesting against the government. Witnesses said they believed security forces fired guns into the crowd in addition to in the air but there is thus far no corroborated evidence of people hit by gunfire – but restrictions on access make it impossible to say for sure.
Based on the information Human Rights Watch has, it appears that the security forces’ use of force was disproportionate. To the extent that this force was used to disperse protests rather than in response to a perceived threat posed by the crowds, it may also have constituted a violation of the rights to free expression and assembly. The research leads us to the conclusion that the security forces’ disproportionate response triggered the stampede that resulted in so many deaths.
- Why is an independent, international investigation important? Isn’t it the government’s responsibility to investigate?
Yes, ideally the Ethiopian government should investigate. In the past, it has conducted investigations into alleged abuses by security forces that were neither impartial nor credible. Ethiopia’s Human Rights Commission presented an oral report to parliament in June about the protests over the last year, saying the security force response was in all cases proportionate to a threat posed by demonstrators. That conclusion is contrary to the findings of Human Rights Watch and other independent groups that have looked into recent events. It is very clear that security forces consistently used live ammunition to disperse protests, killing hundreds of people. The government’s findings have further increased tensions, underscoring concerns protesters have voiced about lack of justice and accountability.
The lack of credibility of government investigations into the brutal crackdown and the scale of the crimes being committed are a compelling argument for the need for an independent, international investigation into those events and the events on October 2. Ethiopia’s international allies should be pushing hard for this.
Despite growing calls from the EU and from the UN’s most important human rights official, the government has strongly resisted the calls for international investigations. The government has a history of resisting outside scrutiny of its rights record. Access has been requested by 11 special procedures of the United Nations Human Rights Council since 2007, and all were refused except for the special rapporteur on Eritrea. On one hand the government wants to play a leadership role on the world stage, as seen in its membership on the Human Rights Council and the UN Security Council; but on the other it has resisted any international involvement in its own affairs.
The government has been blaming “anti-peace elements” for the deaths, which continues to increase the people’s anger throughout Oromia. The government should instead allow an independent investigation and then acknowledge and ensure accountability for any abuses committed by its security forces. It should also demonstrate a commitment to respecting human rights by creating a forum to listen to protesters’ grievances in Oromia and other parts of Ethiopia. The protesters say that this is about rights denied: security force killings, arrests and torture, economic marginalization, and decades of grievances. Recent protests and the ensuing violence are not about social media trouble makers, or interference from neighboring Eritrea, as the government often contends when abuses come to light.
- What are protesters telling Human Rights Watch about the government response to the protests and about what they want now?
Over the last year, protesters have often told me that each killing by security forces increased their anger and determination. And the fear that was very present in Oromia and elsewhere in Ethiopia is dissipating. Some protesters say they feel they have nothing left to lose. I hear from one man each time he is released from detention. He has been arrested four times during the protests, including once when he was held in a military camp. He says he has never been charged with any crimes, has never seen a court room, and has been beaten each time he has been detained. He told me that in the military camp, soldiers stripped him down to his underwear, hung him upside down and whipped him. His brother was killed in a protest, his father arrested, and two of his closest friends have disappeared. I asked him why he keeps protesting despite the risks, and he said: “We have nothing else to lose. Better to go down standing up for our rights than end up dead, disappeared, or in jail.” I hear similar statements from many protesters, particularly the youth.
While the last year’s protests have been largely peaceful, more and more people are telling me that approach has run its course, that when you protest lawfully and peacefully and are met with bullets, arrests, and beatings, and little is said or done internationally, there is little incentive to continue that approach. Bekele Gerba, a staunch advocate for non-violence and deputy-chairman of the main registered opposition party in Oromia, is in detention and is on trial under the antiterrorism law. Treating those who advocate or engage in non-violent acts as criminals or terrorists sends a very dangerous message.
It seems clear that force will not suppress the protesters’ movement and has in fact emboldened it. When the government is willing to tolerate the free expression of dissent, allow peaceful assemblies, and engage in a genuine dialogue with protesters, it will help to end this crisis.
Most of the several hundred protesters interviewed in depth over the past year have a lengthy list of people close to them who have been arrested, killed, or disappeared, in addition to their own trauma. Older people have similar lists going back many years. Ethiopia needs accountability to rebuild trust with its citizens. The government has had numerous chances to make concessions and address protesters’ concerns. At those times when it has done so, as in January when it cancelled the master plan that ignited the initial protests, the action was taken far too late and done in a way that protesters did not consider credible.
In terms of immediate steps, the government should permit peaceful protests, ensure that no protests are met with excessive force, release those arbitrarily detained, and address grievances including ensuring respect for freedom of assembly, expression and association. This is what we have heard from the hundreds of protesters we have interviewed in the last year.
- What should Ethiopia’s key international allies, such as the US, UK and EU, do to help ensure improved human rights in Ethiopia?
For too long Ethiopia’s major international partners have not adequately raised serious concerns about the complete closure of political space in Ethiopia that has led to an inability to express dissent. At this point they need to take urgent action to ensure that the situation does not further spiral out of control. They should push for an independent international investigation. They should push for those arbitrarily detained to be released. And they should reiterate in the strongest way that lawful peaceful protests should be allowed to occur without the threat of bullets and mass arrests. They have leverage, and they should use it more effectively.
For more background:
On Ethiopia’s general human rights situation, see 2016 World Report on Ethiopia
On the human rights abuses during the Oromo protest, see “Such a Brutal Crackdown”(2016)
On Ethiopia’s repressive media environment, see “Journalism is Not a Crime” (2015)
On the history of abuses in Oromia, see “Suppressing Dissent, Human Rights Abuses and Political repression in Ethiopia’s Oromia Region” (2005) and Amnesty International’s 2014 report
On torture in Ethiopia, see “They Want a Confession”
On the need for an international investigation into the crackdowns, see “Ethiopia’s Bloody Crackdown: The Case for International Justice”
UN Calls for Independent Investigation into Ethiopia Violence
The United Nations Security Council
The UN on Friday called for an independent investigation into deadly weekend violence in Ethiopia, where more than 50 people died in a stampede triggered when police clashed with protesters.
“There is clearly a need for an independent investigation into what exactly transpired last Sunday,” said Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the United Nations human rights agency.
Such a probe was needed “to ensure accountability for this and several other incidents since last November involving protests that have ended violently,” he told reporters in Geneva.
His comments came after a religious festival in the restive Oromia region, to the south of Addis Ababa, ended in tragedy when police fired tear-gas on anti-government protesters, sparking panic in the massive crowd and triggering a stampede.
Protests have subsequently broken out in several parts of the Oromia region and elsewhere, some targeting foreign companies which are regarded as supporting and being backed by the central government.
Medical sources and authorities gave differing death tolls of between 52 and 58, however the opposition believes it is much higher.
“We call on the protestors to exercise restraint and to renounce the use of violence,” Colville said, stressing also that “security forces must conduct themselves in line with international human rights laws and standards.”
He criticised authorities for reacting to the unrest by cutting access to the mobile internet network in parts of the country, including in the capital Addis Ababa.
Instead, he said, the government should “take concrete measures to address the increasing tensions, in particular by allowing independent observers to access the Oromia and Amhara regions to speak to all sides and assess the facts.”
Ethiopia is facing its biggest anti-government unrest in a decade, from the majority Oromo and Amhara ethnic groups which feel marginalized by a minority-led government.
International rights groups estimate at least 500 demonstrators have been killed in a bloody crackdown on protests over the past 10 months.
Source: AFP
Does EU need a new approach on Ethiopia?
-
Addis Abeba. As a valuable friend, the EU needs to push Ethiopia to respect divergent views, and rein in forces who rapidly turn to bullets, beatings, and mass arrests. (Photo: Henrik Berger Jorgensen)
By FELIX HORNE EU Obserrver
In January, the European Parliament passed a 19-point resolution condemning the Ethiopian government’s brutal crackdown on protests that had left more than a hundred dead. Many Ethiopians rejoiced at the resolution. I read it to some Ethiopian friends, who cried.
They had assumed Ethiopia was part of an international order in which no Western institution would dare criticise a trusted ally despite the government’s brutal repression. They hoped the resolution would be a watershed in Europe’s relationship with Ethiopia.
But in the nine months since, the European Parliament’s outrage has not been matched by the European Union or its member countries. This despite the hundreds more Ethiopians killed throughout the country, the detention of tens of thousands, and widespread torture in detention, as we have documented.
Instead, on the sidelines of EU Development Days in June, High Representative Frederica Mogherini and Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn worked on a joint declaration “Towards an EU-Ethiopia Strategic Engagement” that proclaimed business as usual. While demonstrators were being shot, journalists and opposition members locked up, and peaceful activists punished, the EU was silently signing the cheques.
EU officials are quick to point to rare but tepid statements expressing concern for Ethiopia’s human rights situation but it’s not enough. The October 12 European parliamentary hearing on Ethiopia could be the catalyst for much stronger action —built on a willingness to use the considerable leverage that comes with providing various forms of support to the Ethiopian government, including €745 million in European aid for 2014-2020.
Ethiopia’s protests began last November in the largest region, Oromia, over the government’s development plans. Protests soon spread to the Amhara region where grievances focused on complex questions of ethnic identity and the dominance in economic and political affairs of people with ties to the ruling party.
Perfect storm
Security forces have shown no intention of changing their heavy-handed tactics, and the government hasn’t been willing to discuss the issues. The cycle of demonstrations and brutal government responses is feeding Ethiopia’s biggest political and human rights crisis in decades.
How this plays out could jeopardise Europe’s long-term interests in the Horn of Africa.
Ethiopia’s current crisis came as a surprise to many European policymakers, but it follows years of systematic government attacks on fundamental rights and freedoms, cutting off dissent.
Despite widespread frustration with the government, the ruling party is able to hold every one of the seats in the federal and regional parliaments. The courts have shown little independence on politically sensitive cases, misusing an anti-terrorism law to punish peaceful dissent.
There is little scrutiny of abusive security forces in part because of restrictions on independent media and NGOs. All of this has contributed to the complete closure of political space, creating the perfect storm.
An international investigation is needed
The EU is among many donors that have historically been silent about Ethiopia’s human rights abuses, afraid to risk strategic partnerships on development, migration, peacekeeping, and security.
Foreign diplomats and development organisations working in Ethiopia understand that you limit public criticism in exchange for access. The EU claims that “quiet diplomacy” is the most effective way to push Ethiopia in the right direction.
But given the dramatic deterioration in Ethiopia’s human rights record it’s hard to argue that this approach works.
Offering government benefits in exchange for silence is something many Ethiopians, particularly in rural areas, have known for years.
Ethiopia’s government carefully controls access to the benefits of development– including seeds, fertilisers, food aid, and jobs, much of it funded by the EU and its members.
To their credit, some African institutions have broken rank and expressed concern over the killings, including the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the African Union. And the United States, a key ally of Ethiopia, has been stronger than usual in condemning the use of lethal force, with forceful resolutions introduced in the US House and Senate.
Last month the UN’s top human rights official, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, said an international investigation is needed. A recent EU statement at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva echoed his call for an investigation, an important step that needs follow-up.
Investigate the killings
The EU needs a new approach to Ethiopia. Strategic relationships will become obsolete if Ethiopia plunges further into crisis, and all the signs are there. As a valuable friend, the EU needs to push Ethiopia to respect divergent views, and rein in forces who rapidly turn to bullets, beatings, and mass arrests.
Ethiopia’s current approach to dissent guarantees future unrest and makes it less likely that the government will be able to find a way back to gain the trust of its citizens, all of which jeopardises the EU’s long term interests in the Horn.
The EU and its member states should continue to push for an international investigation into the killings, press the government to grant the UN access to investigate, and urge the government to hold to account security force members responsible for abuses.
By taking these steps, the EU and its member states can improve the potential for Ethiopians to be stable long-term partners.
Felix Horne is the senior Ethiopia researcher at Human Rights Watch.
Does EU need a new approach on Ethiopia?
-
Addis Abeba. As a valuable friend, the EU needs to push Ethiopia to respect divergent views, and rein in forces who rapidly turn to bullets, beatings, and mass arrests. (Photo: Henrik Berger Jorgensen)
By FELIX HORNE EU Obserrver
In January, the European Parliament passed a 19-point resolution condemning the Ethiopian government’s brutal crackdown on protests that had left more than a hundred dead. Many Ethiopians rejoiced at the resolution. I read it to some Ethiopian friends, who cried.
They had assumed Ethiopia was part of an international order in which no Western institution would dare criticise a trusted ally despite the government’s brutal repression. They hoped the resolution would be a watershed in Europe’s relationship with Ethiopia.
But in the nine months since, the European Parliament’s outrage has not been matched by the European Union or its member countries. This despite the hundreds more Ethiopians killed throughout the country, the detention of tens of thousands, and widespread torture in detention, as we have documented.
Instead, on the sidelines of EU Development Days in June, High Representative Frederica Mogherini and Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn worked on a joint declaration “Towards an EU-Ethiopia Strategic Engagement” that proclaimed business as usual. While demonstrators were being shot, journalists and opposition members locked up, and peaceful activists punished, the EU was silently signing the cheques.
EU officials are quick to point to rare but tepid statements expressing concern for Ethiopia’s human rights situation but it’s not enough. The October 12 European parliamentary hearing on Ethiopia could be the catalyst for much stronger action —built on a willingness to use the considerable leverage that comes with providing various forms of support to the Ethiopian government, including €745 million in European aid for 2014-2020.
Ethiopia’s protests began last November in the largest region, Oromia, over the government’s development plans. Protests soon spread to the Amhara region where grievances focused on complex questions of ethnic identity and the dominance in economic and political affairs of people with ties to the ruling party.
Perfect storm
Security forces have shown no intention of changing their heavy-handed tactics, and the government hasn’t been willing to discuss the issues. The cycle of demonstrations and brutal government responses is feeding Ethiopia’s biggest political and human rights crisis in decades.
How this plays out could jeopardise Europe’s long-term interests in the Horn of Africa.
Ethiopia’s current crisis came as a surprise to many European policymakers, but it follows years of systematic government attacks on fundamental rights and freedoms, cutting off dissent.
Despite widespread frustration with the government, the ruling party is able to hold every one of the seats in the federal and regional parliaments. The courts have shown little independence on politically sensitive cases, misusing an anti-terrorism law to punish peaceful dissent.
There is little scrutiny of abusive security forces in part because of restrictions on independent media and NGOs. All of this has contributed to the complete closure of political space, creating the perfect storm.
An international investigation is needed
The EU is among many donors that have historically been silent about Ethiopia’s human rights abuses, afraid to risk strategic partnerships on development, migration, peacekeeping, and security.
Foreign diplomats and development organisations working in Ethiopia understand that you limit public criticism in exchange for access. The EU claims that “quiet diplomacy” is the most effective way to push Ethiopia in the right direction.
But given the dramatic deterioration in Ethiopia’s human rights record it’s hard to argue that this approach works.
Offering government benefits in exchange for silence is something many Ethiopians, particularly in rural areas, have known for years.
Ethiopia’s government carefully controls access to the benefits of development– including seeds, fertilisers, food aid, and jobs, much of it funded by the EU and its members.
To their credit, some African institutions have broken rank and expressed concern over the killings, including the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the African Union. And the United States, a key ally of Ethiopia, has been stronger than usual in condemning the use of lethal force, with forceful resolutions introduced in the US House and Senate.
Last month the UN’s top human rights official, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, said an international investigation is needed. A recent EU statement at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva echoed his call for an investigation, an important step that needs follow-up.
Investigate the killings
The EU needs a new approach to Ethiopia. Strategic relationships will become obsolete if Ethiopia plunges further into crisis, and all the signs are there. As a valuable friend, the EU needs to push Ethiopia to respect divergent views, and rein in forces who rapidly turn to bullets, beatings, and mass arrests.
Ethiopia’s current approach to dissent guarantees future unrest and makes it less likely that the government will be able to find a way back to gain the trust of its citizens, all of which jeopardises the EU’s long term interests in the Horn.
The EU and its member states should continue to push for an international investigation into the killings, press the government to grant the UN access to investigate, and urge the government to hold to account security force members responsible for abuses.
By taking these steps, the EU and its member states can improve the potential for Ethiopians to be stable long-term partners.
Felix Horne is the senior Ethiopia researcher at Human Rights Watch.
In Ethiopia, Nobody cares how many protesters the dictatorial government kills. Not the UN, not the USA and not CNN
EYEWITNESS / This is Africa, and nobody cares how many protesters the dictatorial government kills. Not the UN, not the State Department, not Black Lives Matter, and not CNN
TimesofIsrael
In the Amhara region, the eye of the storm, an Israeli witnesses deadly clashes that threaten to plunge the nation into chaos
BAHIR DAR, Ethiopia: What does it feel like at ground zero of a popular uprising? For the past two decades, Ethiopia has been considered one of Africa’s success stories. Its rate of economic growth has been the measure of all things, even as a once-promising democracy has hardened into authoritarian party rule.
In recent days, Ethiopia has seen a stampede kill scores of protesters whose deaths are blamed on security forces, spurring further clashes. On Monday, Israel issued an advisory to its citizens traveling to Ethiopia, the second of its kind in several weeks. The earlier warning came shortly after I returned from Ethiopia, where I found myself in the eye of the storm in the Amhara region in the country’s center. Towns there have been in open revolt against the federal government, which has sent in thousands of troops in an effort to regain control.
These eruptions — the latest in Oromia, southeast of Addis Ababa, and the unrest I encountered in Amharia in August — are fueling the east African nation’s worst conflagration since 1991, when rebels from the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) took control in Addis Ababa, ending the rule of communist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam.
During my visit in August, I found myself an incidental witness to the alchemy of transformation, the moment when political protests morph into violent insurrection. What happens in Ethiopia will reverberate across Africa — and with its deep cultural, political and economic ties to Israel, these worrying developments will resonate here as well.
The first sign that something was amiss was that the WiFi in my hotel in Addis Ababa wasn’t working. The demure young woman behind the counter gave me a meaningful look when I asked her whether there was somewhere else in the area I could find an internet connection. “Nowhere,” she said, with a bitter edge in her voice. I knew that the government strictly controlled internet access, sometimes turning it off when a protest was planned so as to neutralize the organizing power of Facebook and WhatsApp. “Is it the government?” I asked. She nodded, almost imperceptibly, and lowered her voice. “They managed to stop the Oromo,” she said, referring to the most populous Ethiopian ethnicity, centered to the south and east of Addis Ababa where demonstrations had been quelled. “But the Amhara? Maybe not.”
I was due to fly the next day, together with a friend, Yehoshua Engelman, to Bahir Dar, one of Ethiopia’s most beautiful cities and the capital of the Amhara region. I had first traveled to Ethiopia in the summer of 1990 when 25,000 Ethiopian Jews were waiting to move to Israel. It was love at first sight for me, and I had returned many times since then. For Yehoshua, who, like me, is an Israeli and a rabbi, it was the first time.
‘We want the old Ethiopia back again, before the government divided and conquered us’
We’d come to Bahir Dar for sightseeing. But when we arrived, a crowd had already begun to gather, internet blackout or not. It all seemed spontaneous: A small group of young men could be seen walking nonchalantly towards the town’s central square from the south, a few more wandered in from the west; human droplets coalescing into a stream. By the time we caught up with the crowd, there were hundreds, and then thousands, and finally tens of thousands, walking towards a bridge on the northern outskirts of the town. Alongside the bridge was a large army camp, and rumor had it that trapped on the other side were activists from Gondar, an Amhara stronghold where five protestors had been killed several weeks before. The plan was for the Bahir Darians to meet the Gondar delegation and bring them back safely across the bridge.
A young man with a tuft of hair growing from his chin appointed himself our guide. His name was Mesfin, and he had graduated with a BA in Natural Resource Management from Bahir Dar University, but had been unable to find a job for more than a year “This protest is about three things,” he said, choosing his words with precision. “Identity, democracy and unfair distribution of resources. If you are not a member of the ruling party,” he lamented, “or at least part of their ethnic group —the Tigrayans — you can’t get any of the good jobs. That’s the identity part. And democracy? There is no democracy! The entire parliament is from one party! The army is controlled by the party! So are the big businesses. And now the government is taking land that was traditionally Amhara and making it part of Tigray.”
The pop, pop of gunfire could be heard from far away, muffled by the distance. As a river of us walked towards the bridge, a mighty stream was moving quickly in the opposite direction. “No good,” said a middle-aged man wearing a battered fedora who was walking fast, away from the bridge. He paused for moment. One finger pointing outwards, he hit his right hand cross-wise against his left wrist in a mime of a rifle aiming and shooting. We kept walking. The sound of gunfire subsided.
A quarter of an hour later, we saw a mass of people in the distance. Smoke rose from a building we could just make out on the right. And then, without warning, there were more gunshots, no longer remote, and hundreds of people stampeded past us, away from the shooting. We didn’t know it then, but dozens of demonstrators had been mortally wounded in that second flurry of gunfire.
Government troops in Bahir Dar, August 7, 2016 (Courtesy Micha Odenheimer)
Soldiers in combat fatigues rushed past us and disappeared, as demonstrators scattered and hid in the farmland on the side of the road. With the soldiers gone, the crowd reassembled, walking now towards town, chanting and singing ecstatically. A group of young men held a large rectangular flag above the crowd — three stripes, green, yellow, and red. “You see the flag,” Mesfin said. “It’s the old flag of Ethiopia, without the star in the middle, and the diagonal lines.” He explained that the ruling Tigrayan led coalition — the EPRDF — had altered the flag. “It’s supposed to symbolize Ethiopia’s ethnic diversity, but for us it represents Ethiopia disintegrating into chaos.”
The EPRDF had federalized the country by creating ethnic states. Ostensibly, this was in order to give more autonomy to the different tribes and languages that form Ethiopia’s rich ethnic mosaic. Unlike the Amhara, who had imposed their culture, language and rule on Ethiopia’s tribes, the Tigrayans would recognize and affirm the myriad ethnic identities within the country. But the EPRDF had installed their loyalists in the local government of each state. The widespread perception was that the government favored Tigrayans in terms of jobs, development projects, and business opportunities. Federalization, combined with lack of democracy, had inflamed ethnic tensions. “The flag means we want the old Ethiopia back again,” Mesfin added, “before the government divided and conquered us.”
The crowd thickened and swirled — an eddy in the human river — in front of a government building guarded by soldiers. “Laiba, laiba,” — thieves, thieves — the crowd taunted the soldiers. Teenagers in the crowd began to throw stones at a billboard with a message from the government, tearing craters in the board, and suddenly there was shooting, and the smell of teargas in the air. The crowd dispersed, and we ran too, into a maze of dirt-paved alleyways and finally into another large street. A cloud of smoke rose from a tear-gas grenade; we tried to avoid it, but our eyes burned and our lungs felt scorched. It’s Mesfin’s first experience with tear gas. “Will this do permanent damage to my lungs?” he asks, his voice quivering with apprehension.
We are not surprised when one of the women says to us: ‘Do you know Hadera? My cousin is in Hadera’
People were huddling behind locked doors and shuttered windows, but we found a café whose door is a crack open; when we approach, the owner pulled us in. Seven or eight men and women were sitting around the large room, trapped by the soldiers and the shooting.
“How many demonstrators were killed?” we asked. For the rest of our time in Bahir Dar, this is the question everyone asks each other; nobody really knows the answer. Everyone ventures a number — 28, or 40, or 60 — but qualifies what they say with “This is what I heard,” or “A friend saw 20 bodies in just one hospital.”
“Where are you from?” we are queried. We are Israeli”, we answered. And the classic response in the Ethiopian highlands: “Israel, oh, we love Israel. You are ourzemat, our family.” Bahir Dar is close to some of the villages from which thousands of Falash Mura, Ethiopian Jews converted to Christianity by missionaries 100 years ago, emigrated to Israel. Thousands more are still in Gondar, hoping their turn for aliyah will come. That’s why we are not surprised when one of the women says to us: “Do you know Hadera? My cousin is in Hadera.”
A man of about forty, wearing dress pants and a pink shirt, completes the inevitable pattern of Ethiopian conversation with an Israeli: “You are Christian, right?”
“No, we are Yahudi, Jews.”
“But you believe in Jesus Christ?” comes next, said in a hopeful tone.
Yehoshua, the kinder of us two, says “We believe he was a very great sage and prophet.” I don’t like his answer. This is no time for sugar-coating. “Our prophets tell us that when the messiah comes, there will be no more war. No more this.” I gesture outside, to the empty streets where the soldiers are hunting for the young men throwing stones and burning tires as roadblocks. “You don’t believe he is the Son of God?”
“The Bible says we are all the children of God,” I answer. The man nods, he likes the sentiment, but still looks at us with pity, which I interpret to mean, “Poor fools, without Jesus how can they know salvation?”
And yet, in Ethiopia to be an Israeli is to partake in mythic history. Ethiopian Orthodox Christians see themselves as descendants of Solomon and Sheba, and believe that their church possesses the Ark of the Covenant. For the Amhara, Israel connects back to the Ethiopia of Haile Selassie and the other Solomonic Kings, the Greater Ethiopia they long for. Sometimes their memory fails them. “There has been no democracy here for the past 25 years!” a young man of about 23 tells me, as if before that there was democracy. “Are you joking? I ask him? Do you know what it was like under Mengistu Haile Mariam?” I say, referring to the last Amharic President (for Life) whose reign of terror makes the EPRDF look gentle in comparison. The young man stares at me, blank-faced. Mengistu is ancient history, already forgiven and sentimentalized.
‘Why are you doing this?’ Yehoshua says as they beat the boy over the head
Yehoshua and I venture back onto the streets. A team of soldiers is patrolling. Young men are throwing stones. The soldiers run after them; the boys disappear into the alleyways. I want to film the soldiers, but I am scared; our whiteness protects us as long as we stay out of the soldiers’ way, but “aiming” the camera, “shooting” film in order to show the world — these are military metaphors for a reason. Filming is a hostile act. It’s impossible to get a clear, steady shot with my Samsung J5 without exposing myself to the possibility of a soldier’s gaze. It’s impossible to know how the soldiers will react. Their fingers already at the triggers, they could shoot reflexively, without thinking — a mistake they might regret, but I would already be dead. I hide behind a tree, but a soldier sees me, and gesticulates wildly — he’s coming to grab the camera. A split second before he reaches me, a boy bursts out of an alleyway, with a soldier in hot pursuit; my soldier joins the chase, my camera is saved. The boy is caught: they are beating him on his head with a wooden baton, he tries to break away, but he lurches and stumbles as if drunk, the soldiers catch him and beat him again.
Yehoshua, tall and bearded, has been calmer than me throughout. I am unsure whether this is because he is more spiritually advanced or more foolhardy. Yehoshua walks over to the soldiers and chides them in his upper class British accent: “Why are you doing this?” he says as they beat the boy over the head. “You must stop doing this.” They continue as if he was not there. “Yehoshua,” I say. “Let’s get out of here!”
We walk past a church; it’s packed with mourners who are wailing and dancing in the ecstatic manner of Ethiopian funereal customs; a father holds up photographs of his son, slain that day in the demonstrations. A woman tugs at my shirtsleeve: “This will not end,” she tells me. “They have gone too far.” A man chimes in: “Please, tell the world what is happening. We are being slaughtered.”
This is Africa, and nobody cares how many protesters the dictatorial government kills. Not the UN, not the State Department, not Black Lives Matter, and not CNN
I can’t help but think about my homeland. In Israeli politics, I’m center-left. I’m against the occupation, but I don’t believe the situation is Israel’s fault, at least not exclusively. And Israeli soldiers have never fired wholesale into crowds of demonstrators, killing dozens at a time, as Ethiopian troops have. But seeing the soldiers patrolling the shuttered, burning streets, an alien presence hunting stone-throwing boys, their body language as tense as a cocked rifle, I can’t help but think of our own soldiers and the Palestinians. History matters, but it also doesn’t; I know that the Amhara were as bad as or worse than the Tigrayans are now when they controlled Ethiopia. I know the Palestinians have rejected peace on numerous occasions, that the withdrawal from Gaza empowered Hamas. But I also understand: soldiers in neighborhoods where people oppose their presence is a recipe for disaster; the power of the present eclipses historical truth.
And I also think: this is Africa, and nobody cares how many protesters the dictatorial government kills. Not the UN, not the State Department, not Black Lives Matter, and not CNN. At least 50 people were killed in Bahir Dar during the day of protest I describe. Amnesty International estimates that, so far this year 700 people have died in such protests across Ethiopia. Yet until Olympic marathon runner Feyisa Lilesa, an Oromo, crossed the finish line with arms raised in a gesture of protest against his government, the violence in Ethiopia stayed below the radar of nearly all news organizations with the notable exception of Al Jazeera.
“If the general strike continues another day or two, there will be a big explosion,” a dreadlocked young man tells me in the evening. He had gone to the demonstrations with a friend; the friend had been shot to death. “There are a lot of people in this town who are day laborers. They only have money for food if they worked that day. If the protests continue, they’ll start to be desperately hungry; most of them would rather die in a protest than be consumed by hunger. The majority of Ethiopians have not enjoyed the fruits of the country’s economic growth, and anger at the EPRDF government is fueled by the undeniable linkage between economic opportunity and loyalty to the regime. The blend of capitalism and autocratic favoritism is a rich stew nourishing poverty and fury.
It appears that the woman at the funeral was at least partly right: the regime went too –far. The shootings have produced a critical mass of anger and desperation. Since that day in Bahir Dar, in cities and towns across the Amhara region, the population has chased the local administration out of town and installed their own mayors and councils. The homes of officials associated with the government have been set on fire. Flower farms run by foreigners from Holland, Israel, Belgium, Italy and India have been overrun by mobs, their greenhouses ransacked. Thousands of soldiers have been deployed to the Amhara region, but it’s unclear which side the local police will take. The Amhara and the Oromo, where hundreds have also been killed in demonstrations, comprise 60 percent of Ethiopia’s population; the Tigrayans are only six percent. Film of the latest demonstrations, broadcast by opposition groups, show men with rifles shooting into the air — this is a sea-change from Bahir Dar, where the demonstrators were unarmed. Now, six weeks or so later, with dozens more dead and reports of soldiers killed and captured, protestors and the regime seem to be at an eerie stalemate, with the next outbreak of violence sure to come soon. Meanwhile, in Israel last week hundreds of Ethiopian-Israelis demonstrated in front of the US embassy in Tel Aviv, asking for US intervention against the Ethiopian regime’s killing of protestors in the Amhara and Oromo region. Similar demonstrations in front of Ethiopian embassies took place in Washington and Ottowa.
There was an ecstatic element in the protests I witnessed in Bahir Dar, and an ecstasy as well in the anguish of mourning, and a feeling of purpose that at a certain moment becomes contagious. Only two weeks before we arrived in Bahir Dar, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had returned from a triumphant visit to four African countries, including Ethiopia, where he had been lionized with the pomp usually reserved for leaders of superpowers. Israeli businessmen are bullish on Africa: Netanyahu spoke of investments in agriculture as well as cooperation on security. Ethiopia has been a partner in containing the spread of Islamic militants in East Africa, But “security” means training and sometimes arming police and soldiers whose primary function is keeping autocratic regimes in power.
In May 1991 I was in Addis Ababa after the Tigrayan rebels had surrounded the city but before they had entered. The soldiers of the Mengistu regime had raided the army storehouses and were selling everything from rifles to army boots on the street. I had just finished my basic training as an immigrant with the Israeli army, and saw some ex-soldiers selling army boots that looked strikingly similar to the boots we were issued in the IDF. For two dollars, I had a new pair of boots. Only much later did I turn the boots around and see the Hebrew insignia stamped in rubber on the sole: “Israel Defense Forces” — evidence of at least the most basic level of military aid that Israel had provided the reviled Mengistu regime.
If Israel wishes to have boots on the ground in Africa, the protests in Ethiopia should give pause. Security cooperation with dictatorial regimes must be considered carefully, even from a real-politic, if not an ethical, perspective. Without democratization, without policies that put the poorest people first, Africa will continue to slowly, inexorably, explode.
In Ethiopia, Nobody cares how many protesters the dictatorial government kills. Not the UN, not the USA and not CNN
EYEWITNESS / This is Africa, and nobody cares how many protesters the dictatorial government kills. Not the UN, not the State Department, not Black Lives Matter, and not CNN
TimesofIsrael
In the Amhara region, the eye of the storm, an Israeli witnesses deadly clashes that threaten to plunge the nation into chaos
BAHIR DAR, Ethiopia: What does it feel like at ground zero of a popular uprising? For the past two decades, Ethiopia has been considered one of Africa’s success stories. Its rate of economic growth has been the measure of all things, even as a once-promising democracy has hardened into authoritarian party rule.
In recent days, Ethiopia has seen a stampede kill scores of protesters whose deaths are blamed on security forces, spurring further clashes. On Monday, Israel issued an advisory to its citizens traveling to Ethiopia, the second of its kind in several weeks. The earlier warning came shortly after I returned from Ethiopia, where I found myself in the eye of the storm in the Amhara region in the country’s center. Towns there have been in open revolt against the federal government, which has sent in thousands of troops in an effort to regain control.
These eruptions — the latest in Oromia, southeast of Addis Ababa, and the unrest I encountered in Amharia in August — are fueling the east African nation’s worst conflagration since 1991, when rebels from the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) took control in Addis Ababa, ending the rule of communist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam.
During my visit in August, I found myself an incidental witness to the alchemy of transformation, the moment when political protests morph into violent insurrection. What happens in Ethiopia will reverberate across Africa — and with its deep cultural, political and economic ties to Israel, these worrying developments will resonate here as well.
The first sign that something was amiss was that the WiFi in my hotel in Addis Ababa wasn’t working. The demure young woman behind the counter gave me a meaningful look when I asked her whether there was somewhere else in the area I could find an internet connection. “Nowhere,” she said, with a bitter edge in her voice. I knew that the government strictly controlled internet access, sometimes turning it off when a protest was planned so as to neutralize the organizing power of Facebook and WhatsApp. “Is it the government?” I asked. She nodded, almost imperceptibly, and lowered her voice. “They managed to stop the Oromo,” she said, referring to the most populous Ethiopian ethnicity, centered to the south and east of Addis Ababa where demonstrations had been quelled. “But the Amhara? Maybe not.”
I was due to fly the next day, together with a friend, Yehoshua Engelman, to Bahir Dar, one of Ethiopia’s most beautiful cities and the capital of the Amhara region. I had first traveled to Ethiopia in the summer of 1990 when 25,000 Ethiopian Jews were waiting to move to Israel. It was love at first sight for me, and I had returned many times since then. For Yehoshua, who, like me, is an Israeli and a rabbi, it was the first time.
‘We want the old Ethiopia back again, before the government divided and conquered us’
We’d come to Bahir Dar for sightseeing. But when we arrived, a crowd had already begun to gather, internet blackout or not. It all seemed spontaneous: A small group of young men could be seen walking nonchalantly towards the town’s central square from the south, a few more wandered in from the west; human droplets coalescing into a stream. By the time we caught up with the crowd, there were hundreds, and then thousands, and finally tens of thousands, walking towards a bridge on the northern outskirts of the town. Alongside the bridge was a large army camp, and rumor had it that trapped on the other side were activists from Gondar, an Amhara stronghold where five protestors had been killed several weeks before. The plan was for the Bahir Darians to meet the Gondar delegation and bring them back safely across the bridge.
A young man with a tuft of hair growing from his chin appointed himself our guide. His name was Mesfin, and he had graduated with a BA in Natural Resource Management from Bahir Dar University, but had been unable to find a job for more than a year “This protest is about three things,” he said, choosing his words with precision. “Identity, democracy and unfair distribution of resources. If you are not a member of the ruling party,” he lamented, “or at least part of their ethnic group —the Tigrayans — you can’t get any of the good jobs. That’s the identity part. And democracy? There is no democracy! The entire parliament is from one party! The army is controlled by the party! So are the big businesses. And now the government is taking land that was traditionally Amhara and making it part of Tigray.”
The pop, pop of gunfire could be heard from far away, muffled by the distance. As a river of us walked towards the bridge, a mighty stream was moving quickly in the opposite direction. “No good,” said a middle-aged man wearing a battered fedora who was walking fast, away from the bridge. He paused for moment. One finger pointing outwards, he hit his right hand cross-wise against his left wrist in a mime of a rifle aiming and shooting. We kept walking. The sound of gunfire subsided.
A quarter of an hour later, we saw a mass of people in the distance. Smoke rose from a building we could just make out on the right. And then, without warning, there were more gunshots, no longer remote, and hundreds of people stampeded past us, away from the shooting. We didn’t know it then, but dozens of demonstrators had been mortally wounded in that second flurry of gunfire.
Government troops in Bahir Dar, August 7, 2016 (Courtesy Micha Odenheimer)
Soldiers in combat fatigues rushed past us and disappeared, as demonstrators scattered and hid in the farmland on the side of the road. With the soldiers gone, the crowd reassembled, walking now towards town, chanting and singing ecstatically. A group of young men held a large rectangular flag above the crowd — three stripes, green, yellow, and red. “You see the flag,” Mesfin said. “It’s the old flag of Ethiopia, without the star in the middle, and the diagonal lines.” He explained that the ruling Tigrayan led coalition — the EPRDF — had altered the flag. “It’s supposed to symbolize Ethiopia’s ethnic diversity, but for us it represents Ethiopia disintegrating into chaos.”
The EPRDF had federalized the country by creating ethnic states. Ostensibly, this was in order to give more autonomy to the different tribes and languages that form Ethiopia’s rich ethnic mosaic. Unlike the Amhara, who had imposed their culture, language and rule on Ethiopia’s tribes, the Tigrayans would recognize and affirm the myriad ethnic identities within the country. But the EPRDF had installed their loyalists in the local government of each state. The widespread perception was that the government favored Tigrayans in terms of jobs, development projects, and business opportunities. Federalization, combined with lack of democracy, had inflamed ethnic tensions. “The flag means we want the old Ethiopia back again,” Mesfin added, “before the government divided and conquered us.”
The crowd thickened and swirled — an eddy in the human river — in front of a government building guarded by soldiers. “Laiba, laiba,” — thieves, thieves — the crowd taunted the soldiers. Teenagers in the crowd began to throw stones at a billboard with a message from the government, tearing craters in the board, and suddenly there was shooting, and the smell of teargas in the air. The crowd dispersed, and we ran too, into a maze of dirt-paved alleyways and finally into another large street. A cloud of smoke rose from a tear-gas grenade; we tried to avoid it, but our eyes burned and our lungs felt scorched. It’s Mesfin’s first experience with tear gas. “Will this do permanent damage to my lungs?” he asks, his voice quivering with apprehension.
We are not surprised when one of the women says to us: ‘Do you know Hadera? My cousin is in Hadera’
People were huddling behind locked doors and shuttered windows, but we found a café whose door is a crack open; when we approach, the owner pulled us in. Seven or eight men and women were sitting around the large room, trapped by the soldiers and the shooting.
“How many demonstrators were killed?” we asked. For the rest of our time in Bahir Dar, this is the question everyone asks each other; nobody really knows the answer. Everyone ventures a number — 28, or 40, or 60 — but qualifies what they say with “This is what I heard,” or “A friend saw 20 bodies in just one hospital.”
“Where are you from?” we are queried. We are Israeli”, we answered. And the classic response in the Ethiopian highlands: “Israel, oh, we love Israel. You are ourzemat, our family.” Bahir Dar is close to some of the villages from which thousands of Falash Mura, Ethiopian Jews converted to Christianity by missionaries 100 years ago, emigrated to Israel. Thousands more are still in Gondar, hoping their turn for aliyah will come. That’s why we are not surprised when one of the women says to us: “Do you know Hadera? My cousin is in Hadera.”
A man of about forty, wearing dress pants and a pink shirt, completes the inevitable pattern of Ethiopian conversation with an Israeli: “You are Christian, right?”
“No, we are Yahudi, Jews.”
“But you believe in Jesus Christ?” comes next, said in a hopeful tone.
Yehoshua, the kinder of us two, says “We believe he was a very great sage and prophet.” I don’t like his answer. This is no time for sugar-coating. “Our prophets tell us that when the messiah comes, there will be no more war. No more this.” I gesture outside, to the empty streets where the soldiers are hunting for the young men throwing stones and burning tires as roadblocks. “You don’t believe he is the Son of God?”
“The Bible says we are all the children of God,” I answer. The man nods, he likes the sentiment, but still looks at us with pity, which I interpret to mean, “Poor fools, without Jesus how can they know salvation?”
And yet, in Ethiopia to be an Israeli is to partake in mythic history. Ethiopian Orthodox Christians see themselves as descendants of Solomon and Sheba, and believe that their church possesses the Ark of the Covenant. For the Amhara, Israel connects back to the Ethiopia of Haile Selassie and the other Solomonic Kings, the Greater Ethiopia they long for. Sometimes their memory fails them. “There has been no democracy here for the past 25 years!” a young man of about 23 tells me, as if before that there was democracy. “Are you joking? I ask him? Do you know what it was like under Mengistu Haile Mariam?” I say, referring to the last Amharic President (for Life) whose reign of terror makes the EPRDF look gentle in comparison. The young man stares at me, blank-faced. Mengistu is ancient history, already forgiven and sentimentalized.
‘Why are you doing this?’ Yehoshua says as they beat the boy over the head
Yehoshua and I venture back onto the streets. A team of soldiers is patrolling. Young men are throwing stones. The soldiers run after them; the boys disappear into the alleyways. I want to film the soldiers, but I am scared; our whiteness protects us as long as we stay out of the soldiers’ way, but “aiming” the camera, “shooting” film in order to show the world — these are military metaphors for a reason. Filming is a hostile act. It’s impossible to get a clear, steady shot with my Samsung J5 without exposing myself to the possibility of a soldier’s gaze. It’s impossible to know how the soldiers will react. Their fingers already at the triggers, they could shoot reflexively, without thinking — a mistake they might regret, but I would already be dead. I hide behind a tree, but a soldier sees me, and gesticulates wildly — he’s coming to grab the camera. A split second before he reaches me, a boy bursts out of an alleyway, with a soldier in hot pursuit; my soldier joins the chase, my camera is saved. The boy is caught: they are beating him on his head with a wooden baton, he tries to break away, but he lurches and stumbles as if drunk, the soldiers catch him and beat him again.
Yehoshua, tall and bearded, has been calmer than me throughout. I am unsure whether this is because he is more spiritually advanced or more foolhardy. Yehoshua walks over to the soldiers and chides them in his upper class British accent: “Why are you doing this?” he says as they beat the boy over the head. “You must stop doing this.” They continue as if he was not there. “Yehoshua,” I say. “Let’s get out of here!”
We walk past a church; it’s packed with mourners who are wailing and dancing in the ecstatic manner of Ethiopian funereal customs; a father holds up photographs of his son, slain that day in the demonstrations. A woman tugs at my shirtsleeve: “This will not end,” she tells me. “They have gone too far.” A man chimes in: “Please, tell the world what is happening. We are being slaughtered.”
This is Africa, and nobody cares how many protesters the dictatorial government kills. Not the UN, not the State Department, not Black Lives Matter, and not CNN
I can’t help but think about my homeland. In Israeli politics, I’m center-left. I’m against the occupation, but I don’t believe the situation is Israel’s fault, at least not exclusively. And Israeli soldiers have never fired wholesale into crowds of demonstrators, killing dozens at a time, as Ethiopian troops have. But seeing the soldiers patrolling the shuttered, burning streets, an alien presence hunting stone-throwing boys, their body language as tense as a cocked rifle, I can’t help but think of our own soldiers and the Palestinians. History matters, but it also doesn’t; I know that the Amhara were as bad as or worse than the Tigrayans are now when they controlled Ethiopia. I know the Palestinians have rejected peace on numerous occasions, that the withdrawal from Gaza empowered Hamas. But I also understand: soldiers in neighborhoods where people oppose their presence is a recipe for disaster; the power of the present eclipses historical truth.
And I also think: this is Africa, and nobody cares how many protesters the dictatorial government kills. Not the UN, not the State Department, not Black Lives Matter, and not CNN. At least 50 people were killed in Bahir Dar during the day of protest I describe. Amnesty International estimates that, so far this year 700 people have died in such protests across Ethiopia. Yet until Olympic marathon runner Feyisa Lilesa, an Oromo, crossed the finish line with arms raised in a gesture of protest against his government, the violence in Ethiopia stayed below the radar of nearly all news organizations with the notable exception of Al Jazeera.
“If the general strike continues another day or two, there will be a big explosion,” a dreadlocked young man tells me in the evening. He had gone to the demonstrations with a friend; the friend had been shot to death. “There are a lot of people in this town who are day laborers. They only have money for food if they worked that day. If the protests continue, they’ll start to be desperately hungry; most of them would rather die in a protest than be consumed by hunger. The majority of Ethiopians have not enjoyed the fruits of the country’s economic growth, and anger at the EPRDF government is fueled by the undeniable linkage between economic opportunity and loyalty to the regime. The blend of capitalism and autocratic favoritism is a rich stew nourishing poverty and fury.
It appears that the woman at the funeral was at least partly right: the regime went too –far. The shootings have produced a critical mass of anger and desperation. Since that day in Bahir Dar, in cities and towns across the Amhara region, the population has chased the local administration out of town and installed their own mayors and councils. The homes of officials associated with the government have been set on fire. Flower farms run by foreigners from Holland, Israel, Belgium, Italy and India have been overrun by mobs, their greenhouses ransacked. Thousands of soldiers have been deployed to the Amhara region, but it’s unclear which side the local police will take. The Amhara and the Oromo, where hundreds have also been killed in demonstrations, comprise 60 percent of Ethiopia’s population; the Tigrayans are only six percent. Film of the latest demonstrations, broadcast by opposition groups, show men with rifles shooting into the air — this is a sea-change from Bahir Dar, where the demonstrators were unarmed. Now, six weeks or so later, with dozens more dead and reports of soldiers killed and captured, protestors and the regime seem to be at an eerie stalemate, with the next outbreak of violence sure to come soon. Meanwhile, in Israel last week hundreds of Ethiopian-Israelis demonstrated in front of the US embassy in Tel Aviv, asking for US intervention against the Ethiopian regime’s killing of protestors in the Amhara and Oromo region. Similar demonstrations in front of Ethiopian embassies took place in Washington and Ottowa.
There was an ecstatic element in the protests I witnessed in Bahir Dar, and an ecstasy as well in the anguish of mourning, and a feeling of purpose that at a certain moment becomes contagious. Only two weeks before we arrived in Bahir Dar, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had returned from a triumphant visit to four African countries, including Ethiopia, where he had been lionized with the pomp usually reserved for leaders of superpowers. Israeli businessmen are bullish on Africa: Netanyahu spoke of investments in agriculture as well as cooperation on security. Ethiopia has been a partner in containing the spread of Islamic militants in East Africa, But “security” means training and sometimes arming police and soldiers whose primary function is keeping autocratic regimes in power.
In May 1991 I was in Addis Ababa after the Tigrayan rebels had surrounded the city but before they had entered. The soldiers of the Mengistu regime had raided the army storehouses and were selling everything from rifles to army boots on the street. I had just finished my basic training as an immigrant with the Israeli army, and saw some ex-soldiers selling army boots that looked strikingly similar to the boots we were issued in the IDF. For two dollars, I had a new pair of boots. Only much later did I turn the boots around and see the Hebrew insignia stamped in rubber on the sole: “Israel Defense Forces” — evidence of at least the most basic level of military aid that Israel had provided the reviled Mengistu regime.
If Israel wishes to have boots on the ground in Africa, the protests in Ethiopia should give pause. Security cooperation with dictatorial regimes must be considered carefully, even from a real-politic, if not an ethical, perspective. Without democratization, without policies that put the poorest people first, Africa will continue to slowly, inexorably, explode.
Israel issues travel warning for restive areas of Ethiopia
In second such advisory in weeks, Foreign Ministry urges nationals to stay away from Amhara and Oromia regions
People march during an annual religious festival in Bishoftu, a town southeast of Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, Sunday, Oct. 2, 2016. (AP Photo)
Israel’s Foreign Ministry advised its nationals to stay away from regions of Ethiopia at the center of protests against the Addis Ababa government, in the second such warning since the start of September.
As with the previous travel warning, Jerusalem advised Israeli travelers to avoid the Amhara and Oromia districts, which include the cities of Gondar, Bahir Dar and Debre Tabor.
The ministry also repeated its warning to refrain from traveling within 10 kilometers of the Ethiopian borders with Eritrea, Sudan, South Sudan and Kenya.
On Sunday, dozens of people were crushed to death in a stampede in Oromia, after police fired tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse an anti-government protest that grew out of a massive religious festival, witnesses said. The Oromia regional government confirmed the death toll at 52.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the Ethiopian parliament in Addis Ababa, on July 7, 2016. (Kobi Gideon/GPO)Oromia is one of the East African country’s most politically sensitive regions, and has seen months of sometimes deadly demonstrations demanding wider freedoms.
Ethiopia’s government, a close security ally of the West, has been accused often of silencing dissent, at times blocking internet access.
The months of anti-government protests and the sometimes harsh government response have raised international concern. The US recently spoke out against what it called the excessive use of force against protesters, describing the situation in Ethiopia as “extremely serious.”
Israel’s population includes some 135,000 Jews of Ethiopian descent. Tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews were airlifted to Israel in 1984 and 1992. Since then, another 50,000 Ethiopian Jews have moved to Israel.
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