Ethiopian Lawyer in Limbo: One Amhara Exile’s Story
Today, I “met” a criminal over a WhatsApp call. And when I type criminal, I actually mean someone who has been forced to be a human rights activist against the Ethiopian government. This is how the Abiy regime sees anyone who defies it, and now a young lawyer has been added to its enemies list.
He is now in exile, and it’s uncertain whether he’ll ever see his homeland again, but for now, he needs safe haven and help.
Let’s call him Samuel. In his twenties, Samuel is from the Gondar area, the successful son of an accomplished teacher, with five siblings. Thanks to Abiy Ahmed’s war of brutal ethnic cleansing and drone strikes on the Amhara people, his parents are displaced. It is fair to say that only thanks to the Amhara militias, collectively known as Fano, that they are more or less safe for now.
Samuel is in Geneva, having earned a scholarship at its prestigious Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. He gained it through his high marks and own initiative. I could say more about his impressive accomplishments, but for his own safety, I must honor his decision not to disclose his name for now.
You could say he’s already brought real-life experience to the discipline. As a young prosecutor for the federal Ministry of Justice, he saw first-hand how the regime goes after innocent Ethiopians on the flimsiest of pretexts. Cases ended up on his desk in which people were being arrested and charged just for carrying the signature green, yellow, and red that are the colors of the nation or for having pro-Fano music. But he wouldn’t proceed with them to trial. When his boss kicked back the files and told him to reconsider, “I refused, I said no.”
He told me the horrifying story of how one time he visited a detention facility in the middle of the “Mexico” area of Addis Ababa. He walked in on a police officer beating a man close to death. “I was shocked,” he tells me.
Samuel told the officer to stop. The officer refused, and Samuel appealed to the cop’s supervisor, demanding that the helpless victim be taken to a hospital. “I was told ‘Oh, he’s a criminal, he’ll be fine.’” The man’s crime? Simply carrying pro-Fano music on his person.
It’s experiences like these that prompted the young lawyer to leave his position and study abroad. His degree topic is “accountability for serious breaches of international human rights and humanitarian law committed in the Amhara regional states of Ethiopia.”
But with his studies over for now, the lawyer is trapped in a legal limbo. His student visa will soon expire, and he obviously can’t go home. He applied for and successfully obtained an FI visa to study in New York, but “I don’t have any means to pay for my living expenses and tuition fees there in New York, because I got only 80 percent scholarship.”
It’s my own personal opinion — which I’ve shared with him — that he will definitely not be safe trying to enter the U.S. Sure, he has a legal student’s visa, but as we’ve seen over the past few months, ICE authorities think nothing of what’s legal and will swoop down and grab whoever they like. Samuel could easily find himself stuck in an El Salvador gulag or Florida’s new “Alligator Auschwitz.”
He would prefer to seek asylum in Canada or the U.S. as opposed to Europe, but the West is making it increasingly tricky. As applicants have discovered to their dismay, trying to get into Canada from the U.S. buys them nothing — Ottawa considers the U.S. a “safe” country under the Safe Third Country Agreement, so asylum seekers must usually come directly to Canada from Ethiopia, or if they’re in the U.S., make their application there.
The stupidity of this system doesn’t recognize at all the new political reality, one in which the U.S. is definitely not a safe place anymore for its citizens, let alone new arrivals. For confirmation, all you need do is check Donald Trump’s blathering thoughts on possibly deporting the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Whatever Samuel chooses for his new home, he needs legal and financial help, so I am asking yet again for Ethiopian diaspora groups to please step up and come to his aid, as well as to the aid of other brothers and sisters forced to seek asylum in the West.
While I have focused on book projects lately (which has meant I’m not posting as much or writing as much about the sad lack of progress against the regime), I am very aware that people are still in trouble. With alarming frequency, I get direct messages, emails, sometimes calls from and about Amhara who need immigration lawyers, advocates, community organizations to rally around them. And gawd only knows how much help Afar and Gurage need, both in exile and in their regions.
I shared Samuel’s story with a friend, and she said words to the effect of “It’s ironic, because he’s actually the exact kind of person Canada needs instead of these MAGA idiots who come up north.” I couldn’t agree more.
