Ethiopia: Ethnic Violence Erupts After Civil War Resolution

Ethiopia’s Addis Standard on Wednesday reported that dozens of civilians have been killed in clashes in the Oromo Special Zone of the Amhara region.

Local officials blamed “anti-peace forces” for attacking regional and federal security troops, while residents of a devastated town called Senbete blamed the armed forces for indiscriminately attacking civilians. Federal troops have been dispatched to restore order.

Ethiopia is composed of numerous tribes and political organizations, many of which have armed militias. When Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed waged a two-year civil war against the once-dominant Tigrayan region and its own political party/Marxist militia, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), he rallied several ethnic militias to his cause, in addition to troops from neighboring Eritrea.

Eyewitnesses told the Addis Standard and the BBC that the new violence in Amhara was the work of the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), which was aligned with the Tigrayans during the civil war.

Other sources said shots were fired by the Fano, an Amhara youth militia accused of extreme brutality during the civil war. 

The Amhara and the Oromo are the two largest ethnic groups in Ethiopia. The Tigrayans are less numerous, but they occupied most positions of power in the Ethiopian government from the 1990s through the election of Abiy in 2018.

Abiy, who is an Oromo, implemented aggressive government reforms that booted many Tigrayans out of federal office, fostering resentments and allegations of corruption that boiled over into the civil war of 2020.

The Addis Standard quoted local sources who said a “disagreement between local youth and members of the special forces” escalated into violence on Saturday, leaving at least seven young Oromo civilians dead. Clashes between special forces and local residents then flared up across the region, with an as-yet uncounted number of casualties.

As of Wednesday, OLA representatives blamed Fano youths and Amhara militia for the violence, while the regional government blamed unspecified “anti-peace forces.” Frightened civilians scrambled to get out of the crossfire without knowing exactly who was shooting at whom.

“Currently, we’re hiding in the bush. We hoped that government forces would come to rescue us. However, that wasn’t possible. It has been three days now and we have nothing to eat. We couldn’t travel to a safer place as there hasn’t been means of transportation and the security is highly volatile,” a local resident told the Addis Standard.

The Ethiopian federal government has criticized Amhara officials for allegedly failing to keep the peace, noting in a report last year that hundreds of people have been killed and thousands more displaced, even after the Tigray war concluded with an uneasy cease-fire in November.

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OHCA) warned in early January that the situation in the Oromo region was “fast deteriorating” as OLA rebels took advantage of the unstable security situation following the Tigray war. The OLA is reportedly recruiting aggressively and conducting more sophisticated operations, including the capture or destruction of entire villages.

The central government’s counterinsurgency response was, in turn, criticized by the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission for perpetrating extrajudicial murders. Oromo representatives from Abiy’s own party called for the prime minister to offer the OLA a peace deal brokered by the African Union, similar to the arrangement reached with Tigray.

For their part, the Tigrayans complain that Amhara militias and Eritrean troops still occupy a good deal of their territory, and are deliberately obstructing humanitarian aid. The Tigrayans claim over 3,000 civilians have been killed since the cease-fire agreement was signed, and fuel, food, and medicine remain scarce in rural areas.