Addis Abeba — The Afar Regional Police Commission, through a statement released via the Ethiopian Federal Police, has disavowed a controversial statement posted on its official Facebook page, blaming the post on a former communications officer who allegedly defected to an unnamed "enemy."
The commission said on Wednesday evening that the Facebook page was "taken over" by an individual named Haji Jamii Adam Ahmed, a former staff member who has been missing for four years and who they claim "reopened the page using personal credentials" to publish "malicious" content.
The commission also stressed that none of the statements "represent its official stance" and urged the public to disregard any information from the compromised page.
Legal and technical measures are underway to regain full control, it added.
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The statement in questions, which circulated widely on 23 July on the Afar Police Facebook page, and remains active until the publication of this news, accused the ruling Prosperity Party (PP) of conspiring to "handover Afar land to the Issa". It rejected that the "Afar police will not "allow any armed group hostile to Afar to use the region for warfare or military training," and reject the notion of "sacrificing the Afar Police, security forces, or people under the pretext of making the Red Sea part of Ethiopia," and vowed that "regional forces would resist any such moves."
The post further accuses the ruling Prosperity Party of "unscrupulously exploiting public resources" and "orchestrating conflicts between ethnic groups," despite having come to power in the region under the banner of change and leading for the past seven years. It further alleges that, in an effort to prolong its grip on power, the party has "agreed to hand over the sovereign territory of the Afar people to the Isa terrorists," whom it describes as the Afar's "historical enemies." The post also claims that the party has provided military training and strategic footholds within Afar territory to a splinter faction led by Getachew Reda, a group it says defected from the TPLF, which it described as another longstanding adversary of the Afar people.
It is recalled that on 01 July, the armed group, known as the Tigray Peace Force, announced that it had entered Tigray from the neighboring Afar region, raising concerns of militarized escalations in the already war-torn region.
In a late June, address marking Tigray Martyrs' Memorial Day in Asgede, Lt. Gen. Fiseha Kidanu, head of the Tigray Security Bureau, accused the federal government of supporting forces in Afar, Amhara, and western Tigray's Tselemti area to stoke internal conflict. "I call upon the youth and security forces to return to their homeland in peace," he said, promising they would be "honored as fighters" and have their benefits secured.
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The news came in the backdrop of recent news by Africa Intelligence, which reported that Addis Abeba was covertly supporting efforts by allies of former Tigray interim president Getachew Reda to establish an armed opposition group in the Afar region following internal divisions within the Tigrayan leadership in March.
