Addis Abeba — Recently, reports of forced conscription have resurfaced across several districts of Oromia, notably within the Sheger City zone that encircles the capital, Addis Abeba. Affected families have come forward to allege that young individuals are being taken involuntarily; in numerous cases, they further claim, monetary payments have subsequently been demanded as a condition for their kin's release--compounding the trauma of enforced disappearance with the indignity of outright extortion.
Discover moreMagazinesNews subscription servicepolitics The reported incidents are happening during a time of increasing security issues in Ethiopia, highlighted by renewed confrontation between the federal government and the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), continuing military conflict between government forces and Fano fighters in the Amhara region, and persistent insecurity in parts of Benishangul-Gumuz Regional State.
Red Sea trade Reports of similar practices have been documented across Ethiopia's complex political landscape, extending beyond any single region or ethnic community. Rather than being limited to a particular conflict zone or population group, the allegations suggest a broader pattern of coercive recruitment and arbitrary detention that demands urgent national attention and international scrutiny.
Discover moreTigray humanitarian aidHistoryMedia analysis reports Forced roundups, class-coded conscription
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In Adama, a 17-year-old street vendor named Tedla Hirigo was picked up by police; his mother was told he would be sent to a military training camp unless the family paid 30,000 birr for his release -- money the family, which depended on the boy's income, did not have, according to reporting in Africa Defence Forum, the U.S. military's own Africa publication, which sourced the account from Addis Standard. In Shashemene, a day labourer described watching militiamen shove two young people into a police car on their way home from dinner -- and running before he could be next.
Addis Ababa real estate This isn't confined to Oromia, nor to the government side of the current conflicts. In Tigray, a draft proclamation reportedly being prepared by the hardline faction now running the regional administration would establish a legal basis for compulsory military service, a measure that, if adopted, would put thousands more young Tigrayans in the same position as their Oromo and Amhara peers. In the Amhara war, soldiers who have surrendered to Fano fighters have told reporters they were detained from their workplaces or homes and sent to the front with minimal training -- and that forcibly drafted conscripts frequently surrender en masse or fire into the air rather than at the people they are told are their enemies, according to accounts relayed by Fano commanders.
Tigray region newsDiscover moreNewspaper advertising spaceMedia consulting servicesWar & Conflict Even Ethiopia's own state-appointed human rights body has had to respond. The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission opened an investigation into complaints of forced conscription, including of minors, after videos of long lines of visibly underage recruits circulated online. The military's public line -- delivered by ENDF spokesperson Col. Getnet Adane, who insists recruitment follows strict age and health criteria and that critics are "misinformed" -- sits uneasily next to the Commission's own decision to investigate in the first place and next to a defence budget and force posture built for exactly this kind of surge mobilisation.
Red Sea trade Who ends up in these queues is not random. It is the boy selling phone cards, the day labourer, the minibus tout, the unemployed diploma-holder with no connections -- not the child of a minister, a construction magnate, or a diaspora-funded NGO director. That asymmetry is the actual subject of this article. Call it what a materialist would call it: conscription is a tax, and like most taxes in Ethiopia, it is regressive.
Here the picture needs to be precise, because the temptation is to oversimplify it into a slogan. Article 40 of the Ethiopian constitution does not deny land to the poor specifically -- it denies private land ownership to everyone. Land, the constitution states, "is a common property of the Nations, Nationalities and Peoples of Ethiopia and shall not be subject to sale or other means of exchange"; ownership is vested exclusively in the state and in the peoples of Ethiopia, not in individuals, rich or poor, Amhara or Oromo or Tigrayan. In principle, it is one of the more egalitarian clauses in the constitution.
The forced recruitment of unemployed, underage, and economically marginalised young people has become a documented and recurring feature."
But constitutional principle and lived reality have diverged, and that divergence is the real class story. Ethiopians only ever hold use rights -- rights that can be inherited but not sold outright -- while ownership of the buildings and improvements built on that land belongs to the person who built them. In practice, that means the people who can afford to build, lease prime urban plots, and navigate a notoriously opaque land-administration bureaucracy -- which legal scholars have described as increasingly market-based and favourable to investors and "model peasants" -- capture the value of land access, while a renter in Kolfe or a peasant farmer holds a use-right he can never leverage into capital. The condominium towers rising in Bole and CMC were not built by the state redistributing common land to the landless. They were built by developers with lease access, financing, and political proximity that a conscripted 19-year-old from Shiromeda will never have.
Political analysis subscription So the hook isn't hyperbole so much as it needs an honest footnote: no Ethiopian owns land outright. But some Ethiopians extract enormous value from land they don't own, and others are marched to a trench to defend the borders of a state that will never let them do the same.
Our sons, their wars
The claim that Ethiopia's political and business elite insulate their own children from war while conscripting other people's sons is, by its nature, difficult to document with the same paper trail as a police extortion case -- nobody publishes a list. It is, however, one of the most persistent grievances voiced by families of conscripts and by opposition commentary, and it tracks with a pattern that is easier to verify: joblessness and conscription fall on the same population. Reporting on the current mobilisation has repeatedly noted that displaced and unemployed youth--the same young people locked out of Ethiopia's stalled formal economy--are disproportionately the ones swept up in roundups, while children with passports, tuition fees, and family networks abroad simply are not standing in those queues. You are free to doubt the specific arithmetic of who is where. You cannot credibly doubt that the burden of this war has been distributed with class logic, not lottery logic.
Digital news archive It would be easy and cheap to tell an Amhara reader to stop caring about Amhara land, or an Oromo reader to stop caring about Oromo self-determination, or a Tigrayan reader to forget Tigray. That is not the argument here, and it is not a serious one. Ethnic and national identity are not the disease.
The argument is narrower and, I'd suggest, harder to dismiss: an Amhara farmer's son marched into a trench, and an Oromo labourer's son marched into the trench opposite him have more in common with each other -- precarious income, no land title, no way to buy an exemption, no ministry job waiting for a cousin -- than either has with the men, of any ethnicity, who order the offensives and never appear on a casualty list. When an ENDF spokesperson says the "only language" an armed opposition understands is force and that fighters must be "targeted, hit" -- as Col. Getnet Adane put it in describing the campaign against Fano -- it is not the spokesperson's son who will do the hitting or the dying.
That is the actual meaning of class solidarity in this context. It isn't pacifism, and it isn't ethnic nihilism. It's refusing to let a fight over resources, land administration, and political power at the top be laundered into a story about ancient hatred between people at the bottom who have never met each other and have, materially, almost nothing to fight over. Do not die defending a billionaire's right to build another villa on land you'll never own against a stranger who was dragged from his own rented room by the same kind of militia that came for you.
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Red Sea trade Between national defence and forced recruitment
A fair assessment of the opposing view merits inclusion, because its omission would weaken, rather than strengthen, the present argument. Officials would contend--and indeed have contended--that, in a nation grappling with multiple active insurgencies, a conflict widely perceived as existential and contested borders, any state under comparable duress would resort to rapid mobilisation. They would further argue that framing such self-defence measures as elite predation unfairly absolves armed non-state actors of the violence they also inflict on conscripts and civilians. They would also note, with some justification, that the widely circulated charge of an "elite exemption"--however fervently believed--is asserted far more often than it is substantiated; nor is every wealthy or connected family untouched by this war, as Ethiopia's conflicts have exacted a toll of death and displacement across class lines, even if unevenly. Readers would do well to weigh this counter-case rather than accept the preceding framing uncritically, for the empirical record regarding selective enlistment is notably thinner than that documenting the roundups themselves.
What remains beyond serious dispute--and is corroborated by Ethiopia's own human rights commission, by military reporting from three distinct regions, and even by the government's defensive statements--is that the forced recruitment of unemployed, underage, and economically marginalised young people has become a documented and recurrent feature of this war. Whatever conclusions readers ultimately draw from this reality, it is a truth that recruiters would prefer to keep from scrutiny. AS
Editor's Note: Sidoc Haytu is an Ethiopian diaspora writer and researcher focused on political economy, class dynamics, and anti-imperialist movements in the Horn of Africa. The author can be reached at pfle-dialogue@proton.me/@SidocHaytu/Facebook.com/Telegram
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