Ethiopia marked a national day of mourning after four officials were killed in dual attacks in Addis Ababa and Bahir Dar. The dead included Amhara regional president Ambachew Mekonnen and army chief of staff Gen. Seare Mekonnen. State forces later shot Brig. Gen. Asaminew Tsige, whom authorities named as the organiser. An internet blackout and phone limits left many people offline as the country tried to make sense of the violence.
Foreign Policy spoke with Felix Horne, then an Ethiopia researcher at Human Rights Watch. He said Abiy Ahmed’s government had delivered real human rights openings, yet security had broken down across wide parts of the country. At the time Horne cited more than three million internally displaced people. He described the weekend attacks as a sharper form of that breakdown, not only street ethnic clashes.
Horne said Asaminew had been involved in an alleged 2009 coup plot, freed with other prisoners in 2018, then named Amhara regional security chief. Analysts saw the appointment as a bid to calm rising Amhara nationalism while the Amhara Democratic Party stayed tied to Abiy’s coalition. Horne warned that actors hostile to the reform course had shown they could strike high targets.
He framed the moment as a test of whether reform could hold while federal and regional forces competed for control. The interview stressed watching regional politics, the army, and how far insecurity spread beyond Amhara after the killings.
Sources: Foreign Policy