MINILIK SALSAWI

In the heart of Addis Ababa, the historic, ramshackle neighbourhood of Piassa once teemed with shops and cafes. People would come from across Ethiopia’s capital city to buy anything from jeans to jewellery. Today it lies in ruins. Its distinctive stone houses, with their wooden balconies and slanting metal roofs, are almost all gone. In their place are jagged fields of rubble, picked over by workers with sledgehammers. People stop to stare at the wreckage. Some take pictures. But they do not stay long: the ruins are guarded by police carrying clubs. “I’m angry,” says a former resident. “It’s my heritage that’s been destroyed in front of my eyes, without any consultation at all. We were never told the plan.” The extent of the destruction of buildings in Piassa can be seen from a terrace in the Addis Ababa neighbourhood. Photograph: Michele Spatari/AFP/Getty Images For years there had been vague talk of demolishing Piassa, sweeping away the densely packed shantytowns that ha

 A REUTERS INVESTIGATION In Ethiopia, a secret committee orders killings and arrests to crush rebels    Warning : This story contains disturbing visual content. A secretive committee of senior officials in Ethiopia’s largest and most populous region, Oromiya, has ordered extra-judicial killings and illegal detentions to crush an insurgency there, a Reuters investigation has found. Reuters interviewed more than 30 federal and local officials, judges, lawyers and victims of abuses by authorities. The agency also reviewed documents drafted by local political and judicial authorities. These interviews and documents for the first time shed light on the workings of the Koree Nageenyaa – Security Committee in the Oromo language - which began operating in the months after Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2018. The committee’s existence has

  Fano: Ethiopia's New Dawn of Defense for the Marginalized ( Mengistu Mussie , Phd ) ------------------------------------------------------------------ Over the past few years, a new force has emerged in Ethiopia's complex socio-political landscape and represents the hope and resilience of its marginalized populations. Fano, a burgeoning collective, is positioned as a protector against the turbulent tides of division after stepping onto the stage at a crucial moment. It has emerged as a symbol of resistance against the ethnocentric factions that have for a long time been in control of Ethiopian politics with an iron fist. Fano's beginnings are modest yet profound, having rooted themselves in the hearts and minds of those on the peripheries of society and considered enemies by the ethnocentric elite. The movement grew out of necessity, relying on a shared desire to protect the defenseless and give voice to the voiceless. It wasn't a spontaneous event but the

It has been a bad year for Ethiopia, a country with very low forex reserves, a double-digit inflation, high external debt, and just recovering from a civil war, and economists warn that it could be on the verge of economic crisis after it missed interest payment on its only sovereign bond this week.  Ethiopia formally defaulted on $33 million interest repayment on its $1 billion Eurobond, joining Zambia and Ghana, the other bond defaulters on the continent. The default followed weeks of discussions and on December 15, Eyob Tekalign, State Minister for Finance, held a global investor call, in which he explained that Addis was “seeking to ensure consistency and fairness by requesting other external creditors, including bondholders, to participate in similar debt arrangements”. Read more  here

  ‘Collective punishment’: #Ethiopia drone strikes target civilians in #Amhara Ethiopia’s latest conflict has intensified in recent months with a surge in drone attacks seemingly targeting civilians. https://aje.io/hir5rs via @AJEnglish #AmharaGenocide     Weeks after a deadly drone attack on November 30 killed five civilians in the town of Wegel Tena in Ethiopia’s Amhara region about 570km (350 miles) north of the capital, Addis Ababa, a witness is still reeling from the trauma. “It’s extremely difficult to even describe the scene of the aftermath,” said Gebeyehu, who requested use of his first name only for safety reasons. “Bodies were burned so badly they had turned to dust. I saw the finger bones of one of the victims still shaped as though it was still clutching a mobile phone.” Several witnesses told Al Jazeera that a drone fired on an ambulance as it approached the Delanta Primary Hospital in Wegel Tena and obliterated it. Hospital staff, including a doctor and t