“Believe it or not, we did not torture a single person.” These were the words spoken by Ethiopia’s Prime Minister just days ago. A bold statement. A lie so audacious, so detached from reality, that it serves as the mother of all lies.
The truth is written in blood and suffering.
The Oromia region alone bears witness to a systematic reign of terror. Arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances, brutal incarcerations, and unspeakable methods of torture—well documented by organizations like the UK-based Oromia Support Group (OSG). The Tigray war from 2020 to 2022 saw an estimated one million lives lost, not merely as collateral damage in combat (mind you, not against external enemies but own citizens!) but through deliberate starvation, denied medical aid, and war crimes of the most grotesque nature.
In Oromia and elsewhere, burning people alive in their homes, extrajudicial executions, and videotaped beheadings—acts not just of murder but psychological warfare designed to crush entire communities into submission.
To prove our claim, it would suffice to open the notorious torture centers of Maikelawii and Galaan to public inspection—without even mentioning the hundreds of hidden prisons in Shaggar city. These exist beyond the well-known prisons such as Qilinxoo and Awash Arbaa, where, in the latter, even the near-total lack of facilities alone qualifies as human torture. Really, no torture?
Drone technology, designed for human advancement in fields like aerial videography, environmental monitoring, search and rescue, and public safety, has been weaponized in Ethiopia to unleash destruction. Instead of serving progress, drones are used to drop bombs on residential areas, markets, and public spaces—killing and maiming innocent civilians.
It is worth noting that Ethiopia, a country struggling with widespread poverty, can ill afford both this advanced technology and the lethal payloads it delivers. Yet, the regime spares no expense in acquiring and deploying these weapons against its own people.
Countless lives have been lost to drone strikes in Oromia, Amhara, and Tigray. Those who survive the attacks are left to endure lifelong trauma—so profound that even the sight of a routine civilian flight can trigger fear and distress.
Yet, according to the Ethiopian government, these countless victims—hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children—equal zero.
- Zero accountability.
- Zero acknowledgment.
- Zero justice.
But the number that truly matters is not the government’s version of events—it is the human toll, the suffering of real people whose voices are silenced, whose stories are buried under layers of state-sponsored denial.
Torture is not just the act of physical abuse behind prison walls. It is the suffocation of an entire people, the mental and emotional incarceration of those who dare to dream of freedom. It is the weaponization of hunger, the blocking of medical aid, the enforced silence that turns a nation into an open-air prison.
In an age of AI and technological breakthroughs, where humanity should be advancing, Ethiopia remains locked in medieval brutality, held hostage by a regime determined to rule with fear and suppression. And yet, the world looks away. We wish we don’t have to write this and engage in other pleasant pursuits, but when injustice is so loud, silence is complicity.
And so, we strive to expose these gruesome tragedies, made even worse by the denial of lives lost—for the voiceless, for the forgotten, for the hundreds of thousands whose lives are erased and counted as zero.
And the world must know!
