Early in the morning in the northern Ethiopian town of Woldiya, about an hour from the border with Tigray, hundreds of men and women march in near darkness toward a large stadium.
“Someone who has no courage is a national burden,” they chant in Amharic against the backdrop of morning prayers. “Tell him to fight.”
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These are new recruits training for FANO, a volunteer Amhara ethnic militia that has been assisting the federal government in fighting against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).
“They [TPLF] did a lot of inhumane things —raping our women, destroying things.”
“They [TPLF] did a lot of inhumane things —raping our women, destroying things,” said Moges Kebede, a former soldier who has organized this training.
“We don’t want this to happen again,” he said, noting that the purpose of FANO is to protect ethnic Amharas, the region and its borders from enemies.
In February, Amnesty International published a report accusing Tigrayan fighters affiliated with the TPLF of deliberately killing and raping civilians in parts of the Amhara region, which they briefly controlled last year.
It joins an exhaustive list of gruesome atrocities recorded in the yearlong conflict between Ethiopia’s federal government, and the TPLF, which ruled the country for 20 years before Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came into power.
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Fighting has exacerbated tensions between the Amhara and Tigray communities, with both accusing the other of ethnic-based violence. All parties in the conflict, including FANO, have been implicated in human rights abuses.
But FANO isn’t simply reactionary in this conflict. Ethiopia’s federal government has mobilized them since the fighting broke out in November 2020 in Tigray.
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“They facilitated the entry of not just the Amhara formal security forces, but also the militia into the war to take over that western part of Tigray, creating therefore, a very useful buffer zone between Tigray and the Sudan border,” William Davison, senior analyst for Ethiopia at the International Crisis Group, said.
In December, FANO played a crucial role in helping federal troops and Amhara special forces push Tigrayan forces out of Amhara and fend off their march to the capital Addis Ababa.
But concerns have also been raised over the proliferation of small arms among civilians and informal armed forces.
“Understandably, for the federal government and also, to some degree, the regional government, they want to formalize these militia.”
“Understandably, for the federal government and also, to some degree, the regional government, they want to formalize these militia,” Davison said.
“They want to have control of them. The more of them that could be brought into state structures, the better.”
But militias like FANO haven’t always been on the same page with the government, both national and regional.
“The government has their priorities, and we have ours,” Kebede, the general, said. “Our most important thing is to protect Amhara from any threats.”
At Kobo Robit, a town 30 minutes from the border with Tigray, FANO trainees and locals prepared a huge feast to celebrate the graduation of 2,000 new recruits.
They’ve set up at a school, which locals say was occupied by TPLF soldiers last year.
Behind the school are mass graves covered by rocks.
“The TPLF killed many people here and in surrounding villages,” said Mola Mengesha, a trader who will be graduating as a FANO recruit.
Mengesha said Tigrayan forces also killed his brother.
While the fighting has since stopped, much of this area remains without electricity or running water.
This means that people like Mengesha’s wife and others must walk up to five hours to fetch water from the nearest river.
“We can’t farm, we can’t do business. So, our mentality now is to fight,” he said, adding, “We need to sacrifice ourselves for the next generation.”
Firew Ayele contributed to this report.