A response to Graham Peebles’ essay on “the Amhara genocide”. And to his praise for the Fano militia.
By Rasmus Sonderriis, Ethiopia correspondent for media in Chile and Denmark since 2004 and author of “Getting Ethiopia Dead Wrong”, writing from Addis Ababa.
Genre conventions help the audience orientate themselves. Graham Peebles uses that to full effect in his essay: “We’re still breathing: Amhara genocide in Ethiopia”, published in Counterpunch on November 7, 2025, as well as in his award-winning documentary with the same title. The context analysis does not go much beyond this short sentence: “The Amhara people have been persecuted for generations”. However, since the category is the African genocide, the narrative is implicitly set in a dark continent led by big men who whip up tribal frenzies for their savage killing sprees. The author also adheres strictly to another rule that is characteristic of this genre, which is not to consider any other side of the story, not even to debunk it. Because that would seem like trying to nuance all manners of atrocities.
Well, let me break the genre conventions and shatter the distorted picture painted by Graham Peebles of the Amhara ethnic group being marginalized and hunted down: If anything, Amharas are represented in the Ethiopian elite well above their making up about a quarter of the population. This is to their credit. There is nothing wrong with that, but it does make you wonder what kind of persecution is being referred to, does it not? One high-society Amhara is the First Lady, married to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. As Graham Peebles mentions, this most powerful man in the land is from the other large ethnic group, the Oromos. But his bloodline is mixed, he speaks fully three Ethiopian languages, and most importantly, both his government and military are multiethnic, including plenty of Amharas. When he talks in parliament, it is always in Amharic, the language of the Amharas. Because this is also the national language that dominates the media and urban life, even in the Oromo heartlands. Amhara culture is central to Ethiopian identity for various reasons rooted in the past.
Nonetheless, with this missing piece of context in place, here is where Graham Peebles has a point. A crude perception of historical Amhara hegemony has turned Amharas into a target of extremist scapegoating. Amharas have been, yes, for generations, portrayed as an oppressor people who conquered lands during the Abyssinian Empire, who continue living as settler colonialists away from the Amhara Region, and hence are fair game for slaughter and ethnic cleansing. The most horrific case in point, named by Graham Peebles in his essay, is the Oromo Liberation Army, OLA. He is right that they have repeatedly massacred Amhara farmers in Oromia Region. But he is wrong to associate the OLA with the federal government. The two are at war with one another, and quite a dirty one at that. Graham Peebles maintains a studied ambiguity about this. Back in 2023, he tweeted his condemnation of yet another OLA bloodbath, and added that ENDF (federal) soldiers had also been killed. He blamed Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed for not fighting the OLA hard enough.
This could be a fair criticism. Does Graham Peebles then demand weapons and training to strengthen the Ethiopian military? No, he advocates for an opposite extremism that also kills federal soldiers! This is the Amhara militia that calls itself Fano. He describes it as a popular defense force. It is not. It is an Amhara supremacist movement. Fano’s base is full of chauvinists who use slurs and genocidal language. Thus, radicalized Fano supporters will call Oromos “Gallas” who must “go home to Madagascar”. However, in contrast to the OLA, Fano’s grand ideological vision is not separatist. They want to rule and Make Ethiopia Great Again. And yet, they are unconcerned about alienating non-Amharas, such as the Oromos, who number around a third of the population.
Take this irony: The grand ideologue of radical Oromo ethnonationalism, Asafa Jalata, professor at University of Tennessee, complained that the ruling Prosperity Party and the Abiy government are somehow in cahoots with Fano. And then he admitted something “very dangerous” to his people: “The emergence of an Oromo collaborator class of Ethiopianized Oromos”. Indeed, this is basically every Oromo one ever meets around the country! The mainstream Oromo identity is proudly Ethiopian. That includes bilingualism, often speaking Amharic better than Oromo, and singing along to pop songs in Amharic in every Oromo town and village. A large minority of Oromos profess Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity. A vast majority of Oromos hate the OLA, which kidnaps them for ransom and keeps their region from achieving its potential. Because, despite the OLA, Oromia is a tremendously welcoming region where many minorities have land, especially Amharas, who, in turn, overwhelmingly respect Oromo culture and often have their children learn the Oromo language. Extremist politics aside, Oromos, Amharas and other ethnicities in Ethiopia are good neighbors, colleagues, friends, relatives and spouses.
Just as the OLA does not represent Oromos, Fano does not represent Amharas. In fact, the main victims of Fano’s assassination campaign are fellow Amharas. Since Fano’s insurgency began in 2023, its chief enemy has been the Amhara Regional Government, incidentally elected by the Amhara people in the very polls that Graham Peebles praised to the sky in Counterpunch at the time!
Fano’s popularity and recruitment culminated with its key role in repelling, in 2021 and again in 2022, the brutal invasion into Amhara Region of yet another irregular ethnic army, the Tigray Peoples’s Liberation Front (TPLF), commanded by Ethiopia’s disgraced old guard. But by now most Amharas are fed up with Fano, because Fano kills left and right, Fano threatens teachers to keep schools closed, and Fano sabotages the economy by closing roads, destroying production facilities and extorting businesses. In Wollo Province, Fano has even imposed a wedding ban, arguing that this is a time for fighting and sacrifice, not for festivity and starting a family. In one village, elders asking for negotiations to avoid bloodshed were forced by Fano to walk on their knees through the mud with machine guns to their heads. Fano creates a climate of terror, which, and this must be admitted, has led to the excesses of the Ethiopian security state, including civilian casualties as collateral damage and credible accusations of extrajudicial executions. We outsiders must not condone this, neither in Oromia Region nor in Amhara Region, but we should understand that the root cause is violent ethnonationalism. The solution is multiethnic coalitions that expand the democratic space peacefully. While the OLA demonizes the past, Fano romanticizes the past. And the moderate majority focus on the future. They want development with equality, not divisive identity politics, not any kind of ethnically exclusive militia.
Does Graham Peebles, like some TPLF, OLA and Fano supporters, now consider me pro-genocide? I would happily meet with him to discuss this online or face to face, off or on the record. Actually, he was quite a hero of mine during the civil war in the northern half of Ethiopia from 2020 to 2022. Unlike so many other progressive commentators at the time, he saw through the hashtag #TigrayGenocide, which served to justify the violent pursuit of power by the TPLF, the main issue of my book. Nor is there any chance that he would buy into #OromoGenocide, which is the battle cry of the OLA’s keyboard warriors. It is disappointing that he nevertheless insists on working within the hackneyed genre of the African genocide, plumping for #AmharaGenocide, which only represents the most reactionary of Ethiopia’s competing propaganda victimologies.
