The contemporary attacks on the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church are neither isolated acts of criminal violence nor simple manifestations of regional lawlessness
Introduction
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church (EOTC) is one of the world’s most enduring Christian institutions. Throughout Ethiopia’s history, it has been a vital anchor of social cohesion, literature, architecture, and spiritual life. Today, however, it faces a profound and unprecedented systemic crisis: clergy are violently attacked, followers are massacred and persecuted, sacred spaces are destroyed or forcibly taken over, Church administration is disrupted, and the state apparatus has become increasingly hostile. Understanding this vulnerability requires rejecting simplistic accounts that describe these acts as random local violence, spontaneous criminal lawlessness, or ordinary communal friction. The central argument of this article is explicit and undeniable: the ongoing attacks on the EOTC are politically motivated, state-supported, and directly emboldened by hateful rhetoric and anti-Church political narratives espoused by the current governing elites (Human Rights Watch, 2022; Ethiopian Human Rights Commission [EHRC], 2023).
Dominant factions of the ruling Oromo political class and regional administration systematically misrepresent the EOTC. Instead of recognizing it as a spiritual sanctuary for tens of millions of ethnically diverse believers, they portray it as an ideological and institutional proxy for historic Amhara hegemony and state-sponsored oppression. This political transformation is the direct outcome of an intellectual genealogy spanning nearly a century. It begins with Italian Fascist colonial strategies designed to fragment Ethiopian statehood, passes through the Marxist-Leninist frameworks adopted by the Ethiopian Student Movement in the 1960s and 1970s, becomes institutionalized in the post-1991 ethno-federal structure, and culminates in the contemporary rise of political Oromummaa as a state-backed ideology under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s administration (Clapham, 2018; Tareke, 1996). By translating these hostile narratives into unwritten state policy, administrative directives, and security force complicity, current leaders have created an environment in which systematic hostility toward the Church is normalized and rationalized. Unless there is fundamental structural change at the highest levels of government and a complete dismantling of the political thinking that enables this hostility, the attacks against the EOTC will inevitably continue and escalate.
Part I: The Contemporary Record of Attacks and Insecurity
Over the past several years, independent human rights monitors, Church synod statements, and international press outlets have documented a persistent and escalating pattern of insecurity targeting the EOTC. These attacks are far from sporadic or accidental. Their geographic concentration demonstrates a high degree of political enabling, particularly across the regional state of Oromia particularly in places such as Arsi, Bale, West Shewa, East Wollega, and West Hararghe (EHRC, 2020; Amnesty International, 2021).
A systematic review of documented incidents reveals a chronological progression of state-enabled violence against the EOTC. In October 2019, widespread mob attacks swept across Arsi, Bale, and West Hararghe following inflammatory political statements by elite activists. Dozens of Orthodox believers were murdered, and numerous parish churches were burned (EHRC, 2019). In November 2020, massacres followed in Guliso Woreda, West Wollega, where armed groups executed dozens of Christians on school grounds and targeted local EOTC parish structures. Clergy were forced to flee, and liturgical life stopped across entire woredas (UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs [OCHA], 2020). The violence reached a critical juncture in February 2023 in Shashemene, West Arsi. Regional security forces opened live fire on a peaceful congregation defending St. Michael’s Church against an unauthorized, politically backed takeover by dissident bishops, killing several worshippers and injuring dozens more (EOTC Patriarchate, 2023; Reuters, 2023). From 2023 to the present, Oromia and regional border zones have continued to experience forced diocesan takeovers, land confiscations, and targeted assassinations of clergy (International Crisis Group, 2024).
These documented incidents reveal a consistent, state-sanctioned pattern, not isolated acts of lawlessness. Priests, deacons, and monks face direct physical assaults and targeted assassinations, while rural and historical sacred sites are systematically destroyed and desecrated. Regional municipal authorities have also repeatedly intervened in Church property titles and historical land holdings, forcibly transferring vital assets to municipal offices or state-aligned entities while explicitly bypassing canonical protections and legal norms (EOTC Legal Affairs Bureau, 2023).
Part II: The Character and Reach of the EOTC
To understand why portraying the Church as a monolithic ethnic organ is historically inaccurate and politically malicious, one must look at the EOTC’s actual demographic and structural character. The Church is not an ethnic institution. It is a universalist Christian communion whose members include people from nearly every major linguistic and ethnic group in Ethiopia: millions of Oromos; Southern nations such as the Gurage, Wolayta, and Gamo; and Tigrayans and Agaws (Taddesse Tamrat, 1972; Kaplan, 1984).
In both its structure and membership, the EOTC is a multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic body, with faithful and clergy drawn from diverse communities. Amhara believers and clergy make up a significant portion of its historical core, but millions of Oromo believers also sustain indigenous parishes that use Afaan Oromoo in liturgy, religious education, and traditional spiritual music. Tigrayan believers and clergy likewise have deep historical roots within the canonical structure, alongside a diverse range of southern and other ethno-linguistic communities, including the Gurage, Wolayta, and Gamo (Merid Wolde Aregay, 1996).
The EOTC was the official state religion during the Solomonic dynasty before the 1974 revolution, but its relationship with state authority was complex, multi-layered, and often conflictual. The Church frequently served as an institutional check on royal power, rebuking emperors who violated canonical law or treated their subjects abusively (Crummey, 2000). In southern and western territories, Christianity often spread not simply as an arm of imperial conquest, but through organic spiritual expansion, local conversions, and centuries of monastic trade networks that long preceded nineteenth-century state expansion (Hassen, 1990). By reducing this complex history to a simple story of imperial subjugation, contemporary political leaders deliberately ignore the millions of non-Amhara believers for whom the EOTC is an indigenous spiritual foundation. They weaponize these historical misrepresentations to justify present-day massacres and persecution.
Part III: The Intellectual Genealogy from Fascist Propaganda to Student Radicalism
The portrayal of the EOTC as an engine of ethnic domination did not emerge spontaneously in contemporary regional politics. It was built on an intellectual genealogy that borrowed colonial strategies and adapted radical student-era Marxism to serve state-backed ethno-nationalist objectives (Clapham, 1988; Bahru Zewde, 2002).
The foundational narrative portraying the EOTC as a colonial instrument of Amhara imperial oppression first emerged during the Italian Fascist occupation of Ethiopia from 1935 to 1941. Under Marshal Pietro Badoglio and Rodolfo Graziani, Fascist strategists recognized the EOTC as a primary ideological and organizational force behind Ethiopian national resistance. To break that resistance, the administration adopted a deliberate divide-and-rule strategy known as the ‘politica indigena’ (Sbacchi, 1985). Italian publications, including La Nuova Italia, and propaganda tracts produced by the Ministry of Italian Africa portrayed the EOTC as an alien and oppressive instrument used by highlanders to subjugate southern populations, including the Oromo (Perham, 1948). Physical violence accompanied this campaign. It culminated in the 1937 massacre of hundreds of monks, deacons, and pilgrims at the ancient monastery of Debre Libanos, as well as the promotion of regional and religious fragmentation to dismantle the Church’s unified canonical structure (Mockler, 1984).
During the 1960s and 1970s, the Ethiopian Student Movement (ESM) adopted Marxist-Leninist theories to analyze the country’s socio-economic and political challenges, significantly changing the intellectual trajectory concerning the Church. Influenced by Stalinist formulations on nationality, student radicals—most notably through Walelign Mekonnen’s influential 1969 essay ‘On the Question of Nationalities in Ethiopia’—portrayed the country not as a historical polity, but as a ‘prison of nationalities’ (Markakis, 1987). This theoretical model flattened the EOTC’s complex spiritual history, placing the institution alongside the feudal landlord class as a mechanism of economic extraction and cultural chauvinism (Gebru Tareke, 1991). When early ethno-nationalist movements, including the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), formed in the 1970s, they adopted this student-era framework. They combined the Marxist concept of national oppression with earlier colonial narratives to portray the Church as an external colonial institution operating on Oromo soil (Bach, 2011).
After the Derg regime collapsed in 1991, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) restructured the state into an ethno-federal system based on linguistic boundaries under the 1995 Constitution. This shift legally and institutionally divided public life along ethnic lines, empowering regional elites while leaving local religious minorities vulnerable to administrative marginalization (Assefa Fiseha, 2007). Under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s administration, this intellectual evolution has culminated in the rise of political Oromummaa as a state-sponsored identity project. In this contemporary phase, state-backed institutional hegemony is used to systematically marginalize the EOTC, treating it as an ideological obstacle to regional ethno-nationalist consolidation (Tronvoll, 2021).
Part IV: Oromo Nationalism, Ethno-Federalism, and Political Oromummaa
The political landscape changed dramatically after 1991, when the EPRDF reconstituted the state as an ethno-federal system based on linguistic boundaries. This shift laid the groundwork for the modern political project of Oromummaa (Merera Gudina, 2003). Oromummaa initially developed as an expression of Oromo cultural identity, shared values, and historical consciousness, celebrating language, indigenous governance systems such as the Gadaa system, and community resilience (Baxter, Hultin, & Triulzi, 1996).
Over the past three decades, however, political elites and governing actors have developed a specific political formulation of Oromummaa. In this framework, Oromummaa is presented as more than an ethnic identity: it is a comprehensive political ideology intended to reorder state institutions, land ownership, and public spaces in Oromia and beyond (Jalata, 2010). In political Oromummaa discourse, the term Neftegna—historically used for imperial-era militarized settlers—has been repurposed as a racialized political slur. Party communications, regional media broadcasts, and public speeches by current political leaders routinely characterize the EOTC as the spiritual engine of the Neftegna system. Orthodox Christian practice is therefore frequently presented as incompatible with authentic Oromo national identity, forcing believers into a false choice between ethnic belonging and religious faith (Gnamo, 2014).
Since the 2018 political transition, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and senior regional leaders have increasingly aligned state institutions with this ideology. Governing officials have publicly committed to advancing political Oromummaa as the guiding doctrine of regional governance and state expansion. They have deployed state resources to project it onto urban spaces, public school curricula, and civil service administration, while systematically excluding historical institutions such as the EOTC from public civic life (International Crisis Group, 2020).
Part V: Translation into Governance, Policy, and Institutional Interference
Current leaders’ hostile ideological framing of the EOTC translates directly into state practice through administrative decisions, security arrangements, and political interference. In major urban centers across Oromia, including the areas surrounding Addis Ababa under the Sheger City development project, municipal authorities have revoked land titles historically owned by EOTC parishes, demolished church structures, and denied permits for new church construction (Ethiopian Human Rights Council, 2023). State resources and land grants are readily available for regional cultural projects and political monuments, while EOTC applications for public gathering spaces during major religious holidays face bureaucratic delays, extortion, or flat denials (EOTC Archdiocese of Addis Ababa, 2023).
The response of regional and local security forces to attacks on EOTC facilities also reveals a clear pattern of state complicity and selective enforcement. Security forces frequently arrive hours after violent mobs attack rural parishes, or fail to intervene while assaults are underway. When clergy and local youth try to protect church grounds, state authorities frequently detain them under public order or anti-terrorism statutes, effectively criminalizing the victims of violence (Amnesty International, 2022). In the most severe cases, such as the February 2023 incident in Shashemene, state security forces fired live ammunition directly at peaceful Orthodox crowds defending canonical administration (EHRC, 2023).
The clearest manifestation of state policy came during the early 2023 church schism, when a group of dissident clergy declared an independent regional synod in Oromia. Senior regional officials and security leaders provided the breakaway faction with state transportation, armed security escorts, and public administrative support. This enabled the faction to forcibly seize cathedral buildings and lock out canonically recognized bishops (EOTC Holy Synod Statement, 2023). Senior federal officials later publicly pressured the EOTC Holy Synod to accommodate the politically backed dissident group, effectively using state power to force canonical changes that aligned with regional political goals (International Crisis Group, 2023).
Part VI: Evaluating Counterarguments and Complexities
Analytical rigor requires examining alternative explanations for the insecurity facing the EOTC and showing why they fail to account for the political reality. Critics and government apologists often argue that violence against the Church is simply a symptom of a broader breakdown in law and order, insurgency such as the Oromo Liberation Army conflict, and weak state capacity across rural Ethiopia (Vaughan, 2011). General insecurity undoubtedly increases vulnerability. Yet state security forces have repeatedly demonstrated considerable operational capability when responding to political challenges to government authority. When EOTC facilities are besieged, by contrast, security interventions are frequently delayed or withheld. This proves that broader lawlessness is exacerbated by a political disinclination at the top to protect the Church (Human Rights Watch, 2021).
Another common argument holds that attacks on churches are driven by local disputes over land access, municipal boundaries, and resource allocation, rather than high-level ideological agendas (Clapham, 2020). Local socio-economic friction exists in any developing society, but such disputes escalate into violent seizures precisely because regional political rhetoric portrays the Church as an illegitimate landholder linked to historic oppression. Ideology acts as a force multiplier, turning local administrative disagreements into politically sanctioned violence (Medhane Tadesse, 2002). Federal officials also occasionally call for tolerance and pursue local prosecutions. Yet these actions occur alongside regional policy decisions, security practices, and elite rhetoric that continue to target the institution. They function purely as diplomatic damage control, leaving intact the underlying political architecture that drives hostility toward the Church (Tronvoll, 2023).
Part VII: Human Consequences and the Marginalization of Oromo Orthodox Believers
The human cost of this politically driven campaign falls heavily on ordinary citizens, parish clergy, and rural communities who depend on the Church for spiritual, social, and material support. The Oromo Orthodox Christian community itself is another victim of Oromummaa’s anti-Church discourse. Governing elites’ narratives equating Orthodoxy with Amhara domination deny the lived experience of millions of Oromo believers. They force these citizens to navigate an environment in which practicing their faith is treated as a betrayal of their ethnic identity (Hassen, 2015). In rural Oromia, local Oromo Orthodox believers are often the first to be targeted when violence erupts. Their churches are burned, their priests—who preach in Afaan Oromoo—are threatened, and their communities are fractured (EHRC, 2022).
Thousands of priests and deacons have been forced to flee rural parishes, leaving congregations without access to sacraments, baptisms, or funeral rites (EOTC Development and Inter-Church Aid Commission, 2023). Church burnings have also destroyed manuscripts, centuries-old icons, and irreplaceable historical artifacts, eroding Ethiopia’s collective cultural heritage (UNESCO, 2021). By weaponizing religious identity for political ends, elite rhetoric threatens the historical culture of religious co-existence that has long characterized daily life among Ethiopia’s diverse communities. It creates deep institutional trauma and fractures social cohesion across the nation (Markakis, 2011).
Conclusion: Structural Imperative for State Transformation
The contemporary attacks on the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church are neither isolated acts of criminal violence nor simple manifestations of regional lawlessness. They are the direct, practical outcome of an intellectual genealogy and state-sponsored political ideology that systematically misrepresents a multi-ethnic religious institution as a proxy for ethnic state domination. Tracing this line of thought—from Italian colonial strategies intended to fragment Ethiopian statehood, through Marxist student radicalism, to the modern institutionalization of political Oromummaa under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed—makes it undeniable that these attacks are politically motivated, state-supported, and directly emboldened by hateful rhetoric espoused by current governing leaders.
The central and imperative takeaway for anyone observing Ethiopian politics is clear: violence, land seizures, and administrative harassment targeting the EOTC will inevitably persist and escalate as long as the current political architecture remains in place. Temporary legal patchworks, public relations statements, and superficial reconciliations cannot resolve a crisis rooted in official state ideology. Stopping the persecution of the EOTC requires structural change at the very top of government, beginning with the total rejection and dismantling of the political thinking, narrative, and elite rhetoric that enable anti-Church hostility. Until the Ethiopian state decouples its governance from ethno-nationalist ideologies of domination and restores genuine rule of law, the Church and its millions of diverse believers will remain under constant threat (Clapham, 2018; International Crisis Group, 2024; EOTC Patriarchate, 2023).
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Editor’s Note: Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
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