Gedu Andargachew, then Ethiopia's foreign minister, speaks at a joint press availability with then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Addis Ababa on February 18, 2020. (Photo: Ron Przysucha, U.S. Department of State, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain) [file photo]
Former Ethiopian foreign minister Gedu Andargachew told BBC Amharic that security agents surrounded his car, took away his guard and seized phones after he met U.S. envoy Mike Hammer in 2023.
Gedu, who led the Amhara region and later served as foreign minister and as the prime minister's security adviser, now lives in exile in the United States. In the interview, which BBC Amharic said it conducted on Meskerem 17, 2019 in the Ethiopian calendar (September 27, 2026) and published on Saturday, he described the months after his last speech in parliament, the way he left Ethiopia and his life abroad.
He was president of the Amhara region for five years, from 2006 in the Ethiopian calendar until Yekatit 2011 (February 2019), BBC Amharic said. He served as foreign minister from Miyazia 2011 (April 2019) until Tikimt 24, 2013 (November 3, 2020), and became the prime minister's security adviser with ministerial rank after the war in northern Ethiopia broke out. His relations with the government later soured, and he left the country after speaking forcefully in the House of Peoples' Representatives against a state of emergency in the Amhara region. He has since completed a doctorate.
Gedu said he went to parliament that day determined to speak, or at least to raise his hand in protest, because he saw the emergency decree as "declaring mass death on the people." His demand, he said, was that the army leave the region or return to its camps and that the conflict be settled through talks. "You can torment and kill that angry people for some time, but you cannot bring them to their knees by force," he said he told colleagues who asked whether he wanted the region to collapse.
After the speech, he said, security officers never left him. Some people who visited his home were detained for eight days, and his sister's son, who drove for him, was taken away with the car for nine days without anyone knowing where he was, Gedu said.
He said the decisive incident came on Pagume 6, 2015 in the Ethiopian calendar (September 11, 2023), after he met Hammer, then the U.S. special envoy, at the Hyatt Regency in Addis Ababa. As he left, he said, security officers in five or six cars surrounded him on the highway near the Bulgaria area. "They took my guard, they seized the weapon, they took our phones, they forced the driver out, they searched me and took my mobile phone," he said. They let him go when traffic built up and people began shouting, he said, but took his staff and belongings with them.
For five or six months after that, Gedu said, he lived under what amounted to house arrest. Two cars were always parked on either side of his house, he said, and agents followed his wife when she went to church. Once, he said, he set out to keep an appointment with the European Union's ambassador but turned back when he saw the cars that were trailing him take up what looked like positions to box him in. He said he dismissed his own guards so that nothing would happen to them because of him. Mereja could not independently verify his account.
Mereja has asked the Government Communication Service to respond to Gedu's account and will update this story with any response.
He said he left Ethiopia at night with the help of people he would not describe. "Exile is exile," he said. "Especially as age advances, it is something I would not wish on anyone."
BBC Amharic asked him about a video, shared widely online, that showed him working at a parking job. Gedu said he arrived in the United States "empty-handed" and took the work he could find, and that it is how he now supports himself. He said he had been a salaried official, never thought he would become a refugee and never sought to improve his life with public money. He said he applies for openings at various organizations but has not yet been called.
Asked about the "Team Lemma" group credited with the 2018 political change, Gedu said the change came from public demand and from the ruling party at the time, not from a few individuals. He said he and Lemma Megersa speak by phone only occasionally and exchange greetings without discussing politics.
On Oromia, Gedu said that in his view the killings and displacement of civilians are mainly orchestrated by the government and by informal groups it supports, and that Oromia security forces recently burned villages in Wollega. Mereja could not independently verify those allegations. In the Amhara region, he said, about 6 million students were enrolled when he left and as many as 8 million had been expected, but only about 3.5 million are now in school, intermittently and mostly in towns.
Gedu said he regretted taking part in the earlier war in northern Ethiopia, which he called destructive, but that he could not stand by when Tigrayan forces entered the Amhara region. He called the alliance that Amhara forces organized as Fano have formed with forces they once fought, aiming to remove the government, "a big leap" in Ethiopian politics.
He repeated that he is ashamed of having worked with Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. "It shames me that I worked, even for a short time, with a prime minister who is not fit to lead the country," he said.
The interview drew criticism on X. Solomon Dessalegn Sule, who describes himself as an activist, wrote in Amharic that it was strange to see Gedu "struggling to insert himself into our country's politics," and added, "Ethiopianness is not a coat you put on when it is warm and take off when it is cold."
Gedu said he would keep sharing his political views but that, for now, he has no plan to form a political party or to join one.