Awra Amba, Ethiopia – Aregash Nuru pointed at the rolling green landscape in Ethiopia’s central Amhara region. “We used to watch sunset from the hills,” she said with a sigh. “But no more.”
These days, it is too dangerous to risk leaving the safety of the village, according to Nuru, a 30-year-old accountant and local tour guide. Gunshots can sometimes be heard from afar. Locals have been kidnapped. Schools have been forced to shut.
“The political situation has changed everything,” added Nuru, staring down at the ground in sadness.
For decades, violent insecurity and conflict have struck many parts of Ethiopia – none more so than during the Tigray conflict between 2020 and 2022, which led to the deaths of some 600,000 people in the East African nation, estimates have found.
But one place that had remained relatively untouched was the village of Awra Amba, set in the highlands of Amhara. The community, which was founded in the 1970s, is a pioneering utopian project home to about 600 people who live by strictly egalitarian rules, including the equal division of work by gender.
Over the years, Awra Amba has gained recognition for its efforts, winning awards for its approach to conflict resolution – which includes special dispute meetings and democratically-elected committees – as well as its emphasis on peace. Officials from the Ethiopian government and international bodies such as the United Nations, the Red Cross and Oxfam have come to observe the community’s famed example.
However, during the past two years, a deadly conflict has taken hold in Amhara – a region home to the UNESCO-protected rock-hewn churches of Lalibela and the historic fortress of Gondar – as the armed group Fano has violently clashed with federal government soldiers of the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF).
Since the conflict began in April 2023, after Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed attempted to dissolve regional forces into police or federal military, there have been reports of mass gender-based violence and thousands of murders perpetrated by both the ENDF and Fano, who are demanding full control of territory they claim is theirs.
The nonprofit International Crisis Group has called the development an “ominous new war”. Amnesty International has called for global attention to this “human rights crisis” while Human Rights Watch has condemned “war crimes” committed by the ENDF.
“There is a trauma now in the region, there has been devastation,” said Bantayehu Shiferaw Chanie, a research associate at the Centre for International Policy Studies in Ottawa, Canada, who is from Amhara and worked in Ethiopia until July 2023.
In turn, the pacifist community of Awra Amba has been caught up in the crossfire of the spiralling conflict.
Economy upturned
Nuru is a member of the community’s cooperative, which pools all of its income and resources together. They use the funds for projects, including a care home for the elderly, support for orphans and a welfare charity to help people in need. But the once-thriving, self-sufficient economy has been turned on its head, Nuru said.
Awra Amba once welcomed thousands of visitors a year – domestic and international tourists alike, as well as classes of schoolchildren – who could stay at an on-site lodge and buy the community’s products, such as handwoven garments and textiles.
But overnight, that income has evaporated.
“There used to be many foreigners who came to visit,” said Worksew Mohammed, 25, another former tour guide in Awra Amba. “We were so happy to share our story of peace with them. But now there are none. It is too dangerous for them to come here.”
Community members are even fearful of travelling to markets to sell their agricultural produce, such as maize and teff, a popular grain in Ethiopia, since robberies by gangs along the highway are now common due to the prevailing state of lawlessness.
“Trade has been impacted,” said Ayalsew Zumra, a 39-year-old community member. “Going to other towns is difficult, sometimes it is not safe. That means we can’t transport the produce. But that’s how we make most [of our] income.”
Community members, who live in humble adobe homes and plough the fields with oxen, are also being affected by the ongoing conflict in other ways. In attempts to hinder rebels, the Ethiopian government routinely blocks the internet across the Amhara region, the second most populous in the country.
Alamu Nuruhak, a 24-year-old studying IT at university, was back in Awra Amba, where he was born and raised, to visit his family. However, due to the blackout, he could not study.
“It’s difficult here to get anything done,” said Nuruhak.
The community has also been forced to shut down a school, for which it provided half the funds during its construction in 2019 and then donated to the state, due to the complexities of the conflict and this perceived association with the government. Last year, Fano fighters descended on Awra Amba and demanded that teaching stop immediately.
“The government wanted the school to continue operating, but the other forces [Fano] didn’t want to continue the learning process,” said Zumra. “The conflict … it affects everyone.”
Devastation will cause ‘larger crisis’
Then terror rippled across Awra Amba last year when a villager was kidnapped by unidentified armed men who demanded 1 million Ethiopian birr ($7,900) for his return – a huge sum that the community has been unable to pay in full.
In the meantime, the community’s founder, Zumra Nuru, and his son have fled to Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa. Locals say his son was also the target of an attempted abduction as armed men came searching for him one day – but he was out of town.
Chanie, the researcher, says the Amhara conflict will persist unless there is a significant turnaround in Abiy’s policy towards Fano and that they are given – as promised by the prime minister – genuine political representation.
Fano fought beside federal troops during the two-year conflict in Tigray, but in the aftermath, Amhara people from outside Abiy’s party, including Fano, were not included in negotiations that resulted in the Pretoria peace deal in November 2022.
The roots of Fano – an Amharic term meaning “freedom fighter” – date back to the grassroots forces that rose up against the Italian fascist occupiers of Ethiopia in the 1930s, but today it is a largely informal coalition of several volunteer militias in the region that has gained widespread popular support in its fight for Amhara interests.
“There is a lack of political representation of Amharas in Abiy’s ethnic federalism,” said Chanie.
“The prime minister and his government didn’t keep their promises. He has just conserved his power. He consolidated his power, so it’s just a one-man show.”
For now, the conflict rages on in Amhara.
A June 2024 report by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights found that federal forces carried out torture, rape, extrajudicial executions and murders of civilians, and that Fano militias were responsible for killings of civilians, attacks on civilian objects and unlawful arrests. Some four million children are reportedly out of school due to the violence in the region.
“As we see in the Amhara, nothing has been resolved through military action. So we need a clear, serious conversation between political groups,” said Chanie. “If the conflict continues, the devastation will result in a larger crisis. State collapse could lead to a bigger risk of regional insecurity.”
In the meantime, the people of Awra Amba in the remote highlands of Ethiopia are dreaming of a peaceful resolution.
“We just want peace,” founder Zumra Nuru, now 76, told Al Jazeera at his current home in Addis Ababa. “We believe that all conflicts can be resolved with reasonable discussion and debate.”
It is not the first time that the community of Awra Amba has been caught up in political strife, he added.
In 1988, during the Derg regime, a communist military government that ruled Ethiopia for nearly two decades, they were accused of supporting the opposition and were forced to flee their land.
The villagers were able to return only in 1993, two years after the regime’s authoritarian time in power came to an end.
“We have survived struggles in the past,” said Nuru. “By working together, by seeing what joins us, not what divides us, we can put an end to this suffering and bring peace to Ethiopia.”
