Active Genocide Alert for Ethiopia - Update 2

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention remains greatly concerned about the ongoing widespread genocide against the Amhara people in Ethiopia. For the past eight years, the Amhara have been systematically targeted based on their ethnic identity and subjected to killings, abductions, sexual violence, and arbitrary detention. This pattern of violence has led to an estimated tens of thousands of civilian casualties. The tightly knit genocidal structure that the regime of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has created to "exterminate" Amhara identity all over Ethiopia must be dismantled. We renew our call on the international community to exert sustained pressure on the Ethiopian government to ensure the protection of all civilians and dismantle its genocidal apparatus, which it has been using against any population it views as threatening.

Since early 2023, the ruling Oromo Prosperity Party regime led by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has waged a genocidal war on the Amhara people of Ethiopia, perpetrated and supported by the Ethiopia National Defense Force (ENDF) and its allies, including the Oromia Region Special Forces, Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), Tigray Peace Force (TPF), Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) and allied ethnic militias. Notably the atrocities committed against Amhara communities since early 2023 are a continuation of widespread abuses committed both during and prior to the Northern Ethiopia War (November 2020 to November 2022) which devastated the Tigray, Amhara, and Afar regions. This genocidal war also followed on the heels of the genocide committed by government forces against the people of Tigray, which ended in a 2022 peace agreement. Since then, abuses against Amhara have taken place across Ethiopia but have been especially concentrated in Amhara Region, Oromia Region, Benishangul-Gumuz Region, Addis Ababa City, and surrounding areas.

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention first published an Active Genocide Alert (AGA) in this context in September 2023, after sounding the alarm bell with a Red Flag Alert in April 2023, when a new wave of anti-government protests broke out across dozens of towns and cities in the Amhara Region. The protests erupted following Prime Minister Abiy’s plan to dissolve the Amhara Special Forces and disarm the Amhara Fano (a nonstate self-defense group), leaving residents in Amhara Region without protection from attacks by various state and nonstate armed groups. In response, the Amhara Fano National Movement (AFNM), a consolidation of the Amhara Fano National Force (AFNF) and Amhara Fano People’s Organization (AFPO), has emerged as a local resistance force fighting both federal and regional state authorities. The Abiy Ahmed regime has used the presence of the AFNM to justify its ongoing military campaigns and acts of impunity in the region. Over three years later a new wave of protests erupted in April 2026 across dozens of towns in Amhara Region ahead of planned national elections with demonstrators denouncing the lack of peace and calling on foreign states like the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to stop enabling and funding war and genocide in Ethiopia.

The documented patterns of abuse provide evidence that Abiy Ahmed’s regime is actively engaging in genocidal campaigns against the Amhara with the complicity of regional governments and ethnic armed groups. As recorded by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), Ethiopian state forces have since engaged in widespread sexual violence, arbitrary arrests, abductions, enforced disappearances, attacks on civilian property, torture, and the killing of civilians. Together, these violations constitute a tightly knit and systematic attack on Amhara identity that extends far beyond the boundaries of Amhara territory.

Genocidal tactics employed by the armed forces of the Abiy Ahmed regime include daily civilian massacres, summary executions, and extrajudicial killings; indiscriminate aerial bombings (drone strikes and air strikes) and heavy artillery shelling; mass forced evictions and displacement; arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances and torture; identity-based persecution of independent journalists, civil society figures, members of parliament, and opposition figures; official incitement of hatred and violence against Amhara people (Amharaphobia) including through the use of epithets (such as “jawesa,” a term with an approximate translation of “anarchist” but that is also associated with greed, which was popularized as a slur for Amharas by PM Ahmed's close advisor Daniel Kibret and the close regime affiliate Natnael Mekonnen, who has a large social media following); sexual violence primarily targeting girls as young as 8 and women as old as 65; attacks on sites of worship and heritage sites; widespread abductions for ransom (largely target travelers taking public transportation services); significant targeting of private property and public facilities (looting and destruction) leading to substantial property losses; repressive (sometimes deadly) response to unarmed protesters; enforced telecommunications and internet shutdown; disruptions on regional education system including attacks on schools (e.g. drone strikes) and use of schools as military outposts which have left over 4.4 million students out of school and left over 6,000 schools closed; targeted attacks on regional healthcare facilities and health workers (e.g. medical doctors, nurses, etc); restrictions on delivery of humanitarian relief to embattled communities and internally displaced persons; restrictions of water, electricity and banking services; dismissal from employment, inordinate taxes/fines and confiscation of property. Widespread attacks have also been undertaken against followers of the Orthodox Christian faith which are often conflated with the Amhara identity both by state and nonstate actors.

New violations continue to occur every day. In July 2025, Physicians for Human Rights, together with the Organization for Justice and Accountability in the Horn of Africa, published a comprehensive report, illustrating the “ongoing widespread, systematic, and deliberate acts of sexual and reproductive violence” perpetrated by various state and nonstate actors. As the report points out, the lack of accountability mechanisms for sexual and reproductive violence in the Tigray Region has enabled a continuation of atrocities in Amhara. This clearly underlines why accountability mechanisms can actively serve as tools of genocide prevention and, in turn, how their failure can contribute to genocidal violence.

Over the period of the last years, the Amhara Association of America (AAA) has recorded a pattern of deliberate and identity-based violence, persecution, and abuses against civilian populations throughout the country, causing tens of thousands of civilian casualties. This targeted violence, occurring in various towns of the Amhara and Oromia Regions and surrounding areas, includes extrajudicial killings, physical assaults, enforced disappearances, and destruction of private property. In numerous instances, young Amhara people were subjected to mass arrests and transferred to undisclosed detention centers under accusation of being Fano sympathizers. In addition to this widespread violence, Abiy Ahmed’s administration has restricted aid to civilian populations, water, electricity, and banking services, and has enforced internet blackouts in affected areas, effectively cutting off Amhara from the rest of the country sporadically since 2023. This calculated mass targeting, not in isolated places but throughout the country, not on single occasions but over the course of years, demonstrates the systematic persecution and intended destruction of the Amhara people as a group.

In recent months, these human rights abuses have continued with unabated intensity. In February of 2026, the AAA 60 human rights violations involving Amhara victims, causing the death of 157 civilians (including drone strikes on urban centers like Debre-Tabor City) and subjecting many more to injuries, sexual and gender-based violence, abductions or arrests. Health workers have been specifically targeted. On 13 February 2026, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), posted on the social media platform X about the abduction and killing of Dr. Tsegahun Sime from Amhara by security forces. On 8 April he reported that three health workers in Amhara had been shot and killed, reminding the world that “[h]ealth workers must always be protected and enabled to perform their life-saving duties for anyone needing care.”

These atrocities occurred during and after the signing of a Peace Agreement, which was reportedly signed by the Amhara Regional State and the AFPO on 4 December 2025 in the presence of mediators from the African Union (AU) and the Ethiopian Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD). Selma Malika Haddadi, Deputy Chairperson of the African Union Commission (AUC), later hailed the agreement as an “important milestone.” However, as the AAA reported, mere hours after the Agreement was signed, the AFPO categorically denied any involvement in the negotiations and denounced the agreement as “unequivocally false.” The group declared that it had not signed any agreement, nor had it had direct contact with regional authorities, “even for a microsecond.” The portrayal of this document as a “peace agreement” when one side rejects ever having negotiated or signed it seems to be an effort to provide the Abiy Ahmed regime with diplomatic cover.

The deliberate mischaracterization of the instrument to the public not only disregards the ongoing humanitarian crisis on the ground, but also reflects the institutional bias in favor of the Abiy Ahmed regime, a bias already evident in the IGAD’s staffing composition. Its current Executive Secretary, Dr. Workneh Gebeyehu, himself an Oromo nationalist party (OPP) member who previously served as Foreign Minister under the Abiy Ahmed regime. In a society as violently divided as current Ethiopia, a partisan official cannot possibly act as a neutral mediator. Especially when Oromia Region Forces are responsible for some of the worst atrocities against Amhara families living in Oromia Region and surroundings. To speak of neutral mediators under these circumstances borders on fiction rather than fact and obscures the institutional alignment and partisanship of the government negotiators.

From the urban and rural centers of the Amhara and Oromia Regions to Addis Ababa City and surroundings, the Amhara are being silenced, terrorized, and killed on the grounds of their identity. Many of the methods employed to this end are clearly genocidal. The killings, the targeting of the youth, the systematic sexual and gender-based violence, the enforced disappearances, and the deliberate destruction of private property showcase a coordinated campaign against the Amhara, intended to destroy their communities and threaten their survival as a people.

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention urges Ethiopians to come together and push for justice for the various communities affected by decades of persecution, especially under current Prime Minister and Nobel Laureate Abiy Ahmed since his coming to power in 2018. Abiy has committed serial genocide against civilians across multiple regions. We encourage Ethiopians to critically examine the narratives of division and hate that were intentionally introduced into Ethiopia’s political discourse during the WWII era occupation by fascist Italy. In an effort to undermine Ethiopia’s ability to resist fascist domination, the Italians sought to undermine the basis of Ethiopia’s nationhood through a policy of divide and conquer. They began to characterize the Ethiopian state, which had resisted colonial domination up to that point, as “‘an empire’ created by Amhara elites through colonial practices” and to scapegoat the Amhara for atrocities perpetrated by fascist soldiers, stoking the anger of non-Amhara ethnicities. This went as far as Fascist General Emilio De Bono characterizing Italian colonial domination as an effort to “liberate [Ethiopians] from the Amharas.”

We call on all parties to the war in Amhara to immediately cease attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure. We reiterate our call on the international community to refer the case of Ethiopia to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and to initiate an investigation into the crimes of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and his allies throughout Ethiopia. We call on the international community to exert sustained pressure on the Ethiopian government to declare a ceasefire and actively move towards negotiating a genuine peace agreement. The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention demands that an independent fact-finding mission be allowed into the Amhara and Oromia Regions and that Ethiopian institutions cooperate with international justice mechanisms to ensure the safe repatriation of displaced persons and establish a transparent system of accountability and transitional justice.