Issue No. 201

In early August, intense fighting erupted between the Ethiopian National Defence Force (ENDF) and Amhara nationalist forces labelled as ‘Fano.’ While the nationalist forces have since been pushed from the region’s major cities, clashes are ongoing in much of the region. Historically, Fano has referred to the free peasants who joined Ethiopia’s royal armies during military campaigns, with their own weapons to fight and plunder. The term has a strong nationalistic undertone, as ‘patriots’ (arbegnoch) who fought against foreign invaders are remembered to include Fano.
 
In the 1960s, radicals from the Ethiopian Student Movement used ‘Fano’ as almost a synonym for ‘activist.’ Later, however, the term fell into near disuse. It was revived by urban youth activists who participated in the August 2016 protest movement against the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) government. These groups, who also took to social media, christened themselves Fano. They articulated diverse claims– a job, better sharing of resources, social justice, and the end of repression. Some denounced the ethno-federal 1995 Constitution they blamed for not realising sufficient representation for the Amharas. Some youth activists were jailed, and many switched to online activism.
 
Decisive in the protests’ escalation in 2016 was the repression faced by the Wolkait Committee (WC). An organisation launched a year earlier, it was made of investors, civil servants, and merchants from western Tigray who advocated for the annexation of their zone by the Amhara region. Youth groups organised demonstrations in Gondar when their leaders violently resisted their arrests.
 
These activists soon gained support from diaspora-based groups advocating against what they called a ‘genocide’ of the Amharas. These groups campaigned on land grievances, including Wolkait and Raya, land tensions in Ethiopia’s western and southern lowlands where violence had targeted several ethnic groups, including the Amhara, and anything that could fuel the ever-increasing anti-Tigrayan rhetoric. Family planning policies were seen as conspiracies to weaken Amharas demographically.
 
In August 2016, armed men clashed with the ENDF in Northern Gondar. Among them was Mesafint Tesfu, later to be involved in military campaigns against the Tigray Defence Forces (TDF) during the Tigray War, as well as other armed leaders, including Sefer Mellesse and Aregga Alebachew, who were locally known for having spent years military opposing the EPRDF.
 
Many youth activists and WC members were freed as part of the early 2018 amnesties. Asaminew Tsige, a rogue general imprisoned for a tentative coup attempt against the EPRDF, was released at the same time.
 
Once freed, these tendencies began to coalesce. They shared the view that pan-Ethiopianism had failed, and it was time to accept ethnicity as an organisational principle. All were socially conservative, launching campaigns against khat consumption, arranging retreats in monasteries, circulating prophecies about the rebirth of Ethiopia, and providing secretive military training for small groups.
 
As links between urban activists and more bellicose armed leaders strengthened, Asaminew Tsige, whose views on the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) remained unchanged, tried to unify these militants in the Amhara Special Forces (ASF). For some time in late 2019 and early 2020, ‘Fano’ was also used colloquially to refer to the ASF.
 
The federal government crafted an ambiguous relationship with these informal Fano groups. It let them fight against Qemant militias and relied on them to secure some public events like the religious ceremony of Timqat in Gondar. It also allowed Asaminew to recruit until his ambitions threatened the regional government, which he tried to overthrow in June 2019. Asaminew’s subsequent death slowed ASF enrollment. However, when war in Tigray began in November 2020, ASF fought alongside the ENDF to seize control of western Tigray, supervising the ethnic cleansing of Tigrayan inhabitants.
 
Early in the fighting, militiamen from Northern Amhara were involved as Fano, coordinated under the authority of the regional Bureau for Peace and Security. Throughout 2021, many armed men called ‘Fano’ joined the front, as calls for kebele militiamen to participate in the campaigns multiplied. After the November 2021 state of emergency, all civil servants and many civilians were called to the front. Armed men who joined were, once again, called Fano. Today’s Fano can hardly be described as “informal groups”, as Temesgen Tiruneh, tasked with leading state of emergency structures in Amhara, has called them.
 
Many of the Fano now fighting against the ENDF are men who enrolled for the war in Tigray. Many claim to fight for ‘the Respect of the Amharas,’ but this is hardly a political programme. Although they are not yet militarily united, a semblance of common claims brings them together. The most radical do not accept the Pretoria agreement and want to ‘finish’ the Tigray war, i.e. unleashing their genocidal designs on the people of Tigray. Many are concerned about the status of lands the Amhara region annexed during the war. Some mobilise on the question of Addis Ababa, denouncing a purported Oromo stranglehold on the capital. More prosaically, others are fighting to perpetuate a war economy that brought wealth for some men who annexed land in western Tigray and Metekel, or ransomed travellers on Armach’ho’s roads.
 
The popular support the current Fano receives comes from select social groups– most notably urban young men. Peasants who recently demonstrated against insufficient fertiliser supply might also well support those rebelling against the Prosperity government.
 
Out of the cities, however, most Amhara peasants are fed up with war, mobilisation, and massive inflation. While radicals may have largely taken control of the regional state apparatus, many in this still predominantly rural society focus on local, everyday problems, keeping a critical distance from the extremists.
 
The origins of today’s ‘Fano’ are myriad, and complex. Conflating those with legitimate grievances with issues such as underinvestment in the Amhara region and the fascistic elements that still seek the destruction of Tigray would be a grave mistake. The federal government must be careful that its prosecution of its state of emergency in the region does not swell ‘Fano’ ranks, and coalesce these assorted factions.

By the Ethiopian Cable team