Issue No. 279

Ethiopia’s Cycle of Violence Spins On
 

In October 2023, in its final report, the UN's International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia (ICHREE) urged the international community to redouble its efforts to protect civilians and hold perpetrators "accountable" for the "staggering" human rights abuses that had been carried out in Ethiopia. Eighteen months later, these calls have gone entirely unheeded, while the Commission's warning that there is "no deterrence for future atrocity crimes" has borne fruit in a number of conflict-riddled regions of the country. It was a severe error to bow to pressure for the ICHREE to close prematurely-- leaving it unable to form a determination on the question of genocide in Tigray-- and one that has let down past and future victims of breaches of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) in Ethiopia. 

Today, 'protection of civilians' remains all but cast aside, particularly in Oromia and Amhara, where large-scale insurgencies persist. But a broader contraction of the state has allowed targeting of civilians with impunity to creep into nearly all corners of the country, with Addis unable to exercise the Weberian 'monopoly of power.' Instead, on an almost weekly basis, reports emerge of dozens of civilians being killed across Ethiopia by a range of armed actors, not least those acting under the orders of the federal government. Prosecution for the overwhelming majority of these murders and attacks is a pipe dream.

Since the closure of ICHREE in 2023, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and others have documented egregious human rights violations being carried out by Ethiopia's security forces against civilians. Retribution for the guerrilla warfare being waged by the Fano and the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) insurgencies has become all too common in the form of summary executions or arbitrary detentions. In one particular instance, in the town of Merawi in January 2024, at least 45 people were killed by government troops who went door-to-door in the aftermath of a Fano attack. Tens of thousands have been detained without charge in Oromia and Amhara, justified under the years-long 'state of emergencies' that have suspended the constitutional rights of millions. Further, the launching of 'Operation Unity' by an increasingly cohesive set of Fano militias in late March has triggered a fresh wave of government drone strikes, resulting in the reported killing of dozens in East Gojjam just last week.

Civilians are also facing violence from a fractious array of non-state armed groups. With the Amhara-Oromo base of the government having disintegrated in the aftermath of the Tigray war, retaliatory attacks against civilians between rival ethnic-based armed groups have further risen, including those carried out by government-aligned militias. One paramilitary group known as 'Fano in Wollega,' trained by the federal government to fight the OLA, has been reported to have killed dozens of Oromo civilians with impunity. Also in Oromia, the recent killing of a senior OLA official known as 'Shode,' who participated in two rounds of peace talks with the government in 2023, has reportedly initiated a series of retributive attacks by the insurgents in East Wollega that have left at least 29 civilians dead. Elsewhere in Ethiopia, tit-for-tat violence within the diverse Benishangul-Gumuz region and on the contested kebele boundaries between the Afar and Somali regions has also fluctuated, resulting in further widespread displacement and economic disruption. The breakdown of relationships between a host of Ethiopia's diverse ethnic groups has further stoked the deliberate targeting of civilians, aided by the flooding of weapons into the country.

Such is the scale of the fighting in parts of Oromia and Amhara that there has been a near-total breakdown of government services and security, further fuelling a rise in general instability in Ethiopia. Travel by road has become increasingly dangerous, with a surge in kidnappings and checkpoints operated by both government and non-government actors in the past two years in Oromia and Amhara. In one of the more infamous incidents, over 100 students were abducted in July 2024, allegedly by the OLA, while over 50 people were recently seized by armed individuals on 19 March 2025. On several occasions, those kidnapped have been executed if families have been unable to pay the often extortionate ransoms that can run to millions of Ethiopian Birr. Addis has repeatedly attempted to frame the OLA as the sole perpetrators of abductions in Oromia to fund their operations, but there is a broader array of armed groups that profit from the trade, including corrupt police. 

Leaving aside Oromia and Amhara, the instability of Ethiopia's neighbours and vice versa continues to seep into one another, posing another set of dangers to the country's civilian population. An early February cross-border drone strike by Djibouti killed an unspecified number of civilians, while the sporadic Murle raids from South Sudan into Gambella have accentuated the host-refugee cleavages within the western region. Most significant, though, is the continued occupation and violence being meted out against Tigrayans by the Eritrean army in the region's northeast. Again, the ICHREE, at its closure, warned both against the Eritrean military's blatant violation of fundamental human rights and IHL during the war, as well as the dangers posed by their continued occupation in Tigray. Though the threatened war between Asmara and Addis has cooled in recent weeks, the possibility of large-scale conflict erupting once more in northern Ethiopia or Eritrea remains significant and would plunge a deeply traumatised population back into a destructive and unnecessary war.

With the ICHREE having been abandoned and the international arbiters of the Pretoria agreement disinterested in holding the signatories to account, Ethiopia's domestic mechanisms of justice and accountability have been allowed to remain woefully inadequate. It was no surprise that the destruction of Tigray has been glossed over by the federal government, with no serious attempts at prosecuting those responsible for the systematic starvation of the civilian population or the massacres carried out in Axum, Adigrat and elsewhere. Instead, Addis's transitional justice mechanism, as well as the National Dialogue Commission, remain heavily compromised bodies, widely regarded as vehicles of federal interest used to tick boxes under minimal international pressure. Neither has any significant enforcement mechanisms, while the judiciary in Ethiopia, too, has been undermined by the meddling of the federal government. In turn, the impunity with which the Ethiopian military carried out a litany of human rights violations in Tigray, including weaponised sexual violence, massacres, and torture, continues to this day in Oromia and Amhara, among other regions. No soldier or militia commander needs to look over their shoulder with international and regional attention and pressure so absent.

At the closure of the ICHREE, one Commissioner stated that "the regional and international community... should not forget the victims of the brutal conflict and should strengthen its monitoring of the situation against set regional and international benchmarks". Yet the amnesia of the international community to the crimes in Tigray and those being committed now against civilians across Ethiopia represents both a profound moral failure and ensures that the cycle of violence and impunity will continue unabated.