Ethiopia has launched a national dialogue process aimed at resolving issues that threaten the survival of the state, including armed conflict. A Facebook user shared a photo allegedly showing Ethiopian soldiers arriving in the restive Amhara region to attack locals, contrasting it with the launch of dialogue in the capital Addis Ababa. However, the claim is misleading: although the photo is from Amhara, it dates back to the 2021 Tigray War, when federal forces and regional forces were allies.
“These two photos were taken today,” read part of the post published in Amharic on Facebook on May 29, 2024.
While one photo shows people sitting in what appears to be a conference room, the other shows soldiers boarding a long line of buses.
“He [Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed] has deployed a murderous army to exterminate a people of an ethnic group and on the other hand falsely claimed to be conducting a national dialogue,” the post adds.
The same claim also appeared elsewhere on Facebook, including here and here.
And this post, also from May 29, 2024, shared the image of the soldiers and buses, claiming it showed “the Ethiopian army was sent to the Amhara region earlier today.”
National Dialogue
The National Dialogue Process was officially launched on June 1, 2024, in an effort to overcome the instability that threatens to tear Africa’s second most populous country apart (archived here).
Supporters of the initiative say it is the only way to address the fundamental problems facing the fragile country, including deep-seated political tensions and armed conflict. However, the opposition has largely rejected the process.
The Ethiopian government is currently fighting armed groups in Oromia and Amhara – the country’s two most populous regions. The Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) rebel force took up arms against the government in 2018. Peace talks held between the warring parties last year were unsuccessful (archived here).
Fano, meanwhile, is a militia group active in Amhara and was an ally of the government during the two-year Tigray war (archived here). But Fano turned against the government in July 2023 following a national decision to disarm all regional forces.
However, the photo does not show that the Ethiopian army was deployed in the Amhara region in May 2024.
Old photo
AFP Fact Check conducted reverse image searches and found that the image shows Ethiopian troops and regional soldiers tasked with fighting back Tigray rebels in July 2021.
The two-year war in the Amhara region was fought between the Ethiopian federal government and rebels in the Tigray region and claimed more than half a million lives before ending with a peace deal in Pretoria in November 2022 (archived here).
The first photo, originally taken by Addis Media Network, a broadcaster owned by the Addis Ababa city government, shows the opening day of the National Dialogue on May 29, 2024 – three days before the official launch (archived here).
The second image was first published (archived here) on July 20, 2021 by AFMEER TV, a Facebook page that regularly shares stories about Ethiopian politics in the Somali language.
The accompanying text in Somali indicates that the photo shows forces consisting of both regional and federal troops arriving in Amhara to fight back against Tigrayan fighters who entered the region earlier in the same month (archived here).
AFP reported on July 15, 2021 that several Ethiopian regions had sent troops to support the army’s fight against Tigray rebels in northern Ethiopia (archived here).
