Ethnic discrimination in Ethiopia

Data from the Minorities at Risk (MAR) project were used by Charles E. Riddle to study the degrees of discrimination by the dominant Amharas against the non-dominant ethnic groups in Ethiopia from 1950 to 1992, during the later reign of Emperor Haile Selassie and that of Mengistu Haile Mariam of the Derg. During the Haile Selassie regime, the Harari people were persecuted. The imperial forces ordered the confiscation of Harari property and mass arrests of Harari men, as a result an estimated 10,000 Hararis fled their homeland in 1948. The Derg culturally rejected the Tigrayans, who decreased their usage of Amharic, reverting to Tigrinya, and discrimination against the Tigrayans became strong. Eritreans, treated by MAR and Riddle as an ethnic group, and Somalis were strongly discriminated against throughout the period. The Oromos were initially strongly discriminated against, but adopted Amharic as their official language when the Derg came to power, and discrimination against them dropped. In the aftermath of the Ogaden War during the 70s, Hararis, Somalis and Oromo Muslims were targeted by the Derg Government. ==TPLF/EPRDF==

Meles Zenawi of the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), who replaced the Derg in 1991, introduced a political restructuring of Ethiopia called ethnic federalism. Alemante G. Selassie, writing in The Yale Journal of International Law, argued that the new structure, formalised in the 1995 Constitution of Ethiopia, gave too much formal power to ethnicity. He recommended Nigeria and Switzerland as better examples of multi-lingual, multi-ethnic states in which ethnic diversity is de facto recognised in administrative and territorial structuring, but is overridden by smaller scale territorial divisions and is not given direct political authority. Former house speaker Dawit Yohannes claimed parties were denied membership into EPRDF due to their Muslim religious affiliation. Ethiopians classified as "ethnically Eritrean" were deported from Ethiopia to Eritrea in a program that started in June 1998, during the Eritrean-Ethiopian War. By January 1999, 52,000 "Eritrean" Ethiopians had been deported to Eritrea. The Ethiopian Human Rights Council protested against the deportations. In 2017, the Ethiopian Satellite Television station ESAT was argued by Zeray Wolqait to be a "Voice of Genocide". He stated that ESAT "call[ed] and encourag[ed] massacres of the population of Tigray and listing or threaten to list people who deserved to die and should be exterminated." Zeray stated that ESAT was run by the Ginbot 7. He quoted ESAT journalist Mesay Mekonnen calling for "drying the water so as to catch the fish" as a way of removing Tigrayan dominance in Ethiopia. Zeray interpreted this as a call for genocide against Tigrayans. ==Abiy Ahmed==

In 2020, during the Abiy Ahmed, post-TPLF government of Ethiopia, Terje Skjerdal and Mulatu Alemayehu Moges found that freedom of print, broadcast and journalistic online media had increased greatly, but had also become highly polarised in terms of promoting ethnic nationalism. They found very strong growth in regional media, which tended to avoid or weaken reports on incidents showing "us" (the region and ethnicity with which a news medium is associated) negatively and to strengthen reports showing "them" (another region or ethnicity) as perpetrators of injustice. Online hate speech was found to have increased considerably, mostly originating from the Ethiopian diaspora in Western universities. This action was later reversed by the High Court of Ethiopia; nonetheless, it revealed attempts to undermine affirmative action. ==See also==