The gunmen came for Alemetu when she was sleeping. They marched her out of her home in Ethiopia’s Oromia region and took her to a disused school in the countryside, where she was held hostage for four weeks.
About 40 fighters were living at the school, although hundreds of men passed through. Alemetu, who was pregnant when she was taken, said her captors beat her with a horsewhip. On one occasion, she was tied up and suspended upside down from a tree for several hours, an ordeal that left deep psychological and physical scars.
She was released only after her family paid a ransom of 110,000 birr (£1,530), a huge sum in rural Ethiopia, which they raised by selling livestock and borrowing from friends.
When Alemetu was kidnapped, the family was already struggling to pay a 90,000 birr ransom for her uncle, a farmer, who was held for 15 days in a separate abduction. The family is now destitute.
“It is very rare to find a family in our area who has not been affected by kidnapping,” says Alemetu. “The government has no control.”
Alemetu identified her kidnappers as insurgents from the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), a rebel group that has been fighting Ethiopia’s government since 2018. The OLA styles itself as the champion of the Oromo, Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group, who claim a long history of marginalisation, but it has been accused of massacres and other abuses.
Ethiopia’s federal parliament classifies the OLA as a terrorist organisation.
After Alemetu was released, the fighters burned down her home. She believes she was targeted because her husband took a job at a local government office. “Even if you just pay taxes, the fighters will attack you,” she says.
Kidnapping has been a persistent threat for years in Oromia, a region that runs through the heart of Ethiopia and surrounds the capital, Addis Ababa. Until recently kidnappings were rare outside OLA’s strongholds in western Oromia. When they did occur, they were targeted. The main victims were like Alemetu: police officers, government officials or their relatives, and the aims were generally political rather than financial.
Now, kidnapping for ransom has become commonplace. Abductions take place not far from Addis Ababa, as the OLA’s insurgency spreads to new areas, and target anyone.
On 28 December, gunmen killed eight people and abducted 10 others near the town of Metehara, 100km (60 miles) east of Addis Ababa, as they returned from a religious festival. In October, agricultural researchers were abducted while doing field work near the town of Alem Tena, 60km south of the capital. In July, 63 bus passengers were taken by militants 100km from Addis Ababa.
Foreign-owned companies are also targets: in October, several Chinese citizens working for a cement factory were abducted in Oromia’s North Shewa area, while in January last year gunmen kidnapped 20 workers at another cement factory owned by Nigerian billionaire Aliko Dangote.
The road linking Addis Ababa to Djibouti’s port, Ethiopia’s main trade artery, has become a kidnapping hotspot in the past 18 months.
The manager of a foreign-owned farm in Oromia, who declined to be named, said the surge in kidnappings was putting off international investors. Local business people who had recently sold their crops and were known to have significant amounts of cash in their bank accounts were initially targeted, he says.
“But it has escalated into something much more widespread, affecting a much wider range of individuals, to the point where all our senior staff are targets,” the farm manager says. “We can’t get any of them to our site, it’s too risky.”
He claimed several foreign companies had paid ransoms to free staff.
The British embassy advises UK nationals to “avoid regular patterns of travel or movement” in large parts of Oromia because of the risk of kidnapping, warning that “people engaged in humanitarian aid work, journalism or business sectors are viewed as legitimate targets”.
In November, the Ethiopian Human Rights Council said “abductees often endure torture, cruel treatment, and detainment under inhumane conditions, constituting severe crimes against human dignity”.
Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, rode a wave of anti-authoritarianism protests to power in 2018. He promised a new era of openness and democracy, but his administration has overseen a proliferation of regional conflicts, including the devastating war in Tigray that left hundreds of thousands dead.
The most recent rebellion erupted in Amhara, Ethiopia’s second-largest region, in August, over a plan to disband regional armed forces. As well as hitting the economy, these conflicts have fed into a growing feeling of lawlessness across the country.
“I’m too scared to leave Addis Ababa,” says a lecturer at the city’s university, whose cousin and brother-in-law were recently kidnapped for ransom in separate incidents in Oromia. “I have inherited some land in the countryside, but I have not gone there because you don’t know if anyone will kidnap you. I don’t visit my parents. I don’t even go there for weddings and funerals.”
The Guardian interviewed four people who recently paid ransoms to free relatives. All declined to be named for fear of retaliation by the kidnappers. This fear means most abductions go unreported, but civil society activists believe thousands of people have been kidnapped in recent years.
The interviewees paid ransoms of between 20,000 birr (£280) to 500,000 birr (£7,000) to free their relatives and often managed to negotiate the price. “They ask according to your wealth,” says one man. He paid 125,000 birr to free his father, who was abducted from his home in North Shewa.
Another man says abductors demanded “a staggering 2 million birr” (£28,000) after kidnapping his brother and other passengers from a bus travelling through Oromia’s West Shewa in June. After lengthy negotiations, the family paid 100,000 birr.
“This is a pandemic,” says the man. “Kidnapping is happening everywhere. The rebels have made it a way of life because it’s easy money for them.”
The OLA rebels deny using kidnapping to fund for their insurgency, but the group is loosely organised and local units often act independently of their commanders.
Jonah Wedekind, an independent researcher, said there are strong indications that some OLA factions have turned to kidnapping as a way of raising cash, but bandits motivated simply by financial gain may also be engaging in the practice.
“Some armed actors perceive the OLA to be efficiently raising capital through these attacks and might be copying them,” says Wedekind. “And this is part of the wider problem: the conflict reflects the economy breaking down, and people don’t have jobs, so this is what they turn to.”
Peace talks between the OLA and the government failed in November. A spike in rebel attacks across Oromia followed.
The government’s response to the insurgency has been ham-fisted, characterised by arbitrary arrests and unlawful killings, according to the state-appointed human rights commission.
Alemetu did not go to the police after she was released, fearful they would accuse her of funding terrorists because her family paid a ransom. Instead, she simply packed up her remaining belongings and left her village. “I am afraid of both sides,” she says.
