By Dawit Endeshaw
ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) – Ethiopian forces and Amhara militiamen have both in recent months killed dozens of civilians, caught in a conflict plaguing the country’s second-largest region since mid-2023, a state-appointed rights body said on Friday.
Fighting between the military and local Fano militiamen, which erupted after the end of civil war in neighbouring Tigray region, has been Ethiopia’s biggest security crisis since.
Verifiable information is limited due to restrictions on communication networks in Amhara.
The U.N.’s latest update said in June that at least 740 civilians were killed in 2023.
But a further 115 civilians at least were killed between September and December last year, according to a new report by the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC). It cautioned that this was only a partial accounting of rights abuses over that period because of difficult working conditions.
In one case, government forces arrested 11 civilians in Amhara’s Eastern Gojjam Zone during house-to-house searches, accusing them of being relatives of Fano members or supporters, and then killed them at a military camp, the report said.
In another, Fano fighters arrested 80 people in October who they said were local officials and government informants and then killed 38 of them in December, it said.
Spokespeople for the federal government and Amhara regional administration did not respond to requests for comment. Fano is a decentralised militia with no publicly-known command structure and does not have a spokesperson who could be contacted.
Fano fighters, many of whom fought alongside government forces during the Tigray war, accuse the federal government of marginalising and conspiring against Amhara.
The authorities reject these accusations.
The region, known for its ancient rock-hewn Orthodox churches, has more than 30 million people across a territory roughly the size of Sweden.
The conflict has forced tens of thousands of people from their homes, and more than 2 million people in Amhara rely on food aid to survive.
(Reporting by Dawit Endeshaw; Editing by Aaron Ross and Andrew Cawthorne)
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