When anti-government protests rocked Gondar city in northern Ethiopia in July, ethnic Tigrayans living in the Amhara region started fleeing. For a quarter of a century, the Tigrayans, who make up only 6% of the country’s over 100 million population, have enjoyed disproportionate influence and representation in government.

But as the latest wave of protests intensified, ordinary Tigrayans in the Amhara region were now reportedly saying that their homes and businesses were being attacked because of their perceived affiliation with the government. The protests, which started in Nov. 2015, were largely fronted by the Oromo and Amhara communities, and the ruling party was yet to budge on both communities’ demands for expanded political, economic and human rights.

The violence against the Tigrayans because of their ethnic association, however, marked a turning point for the Horn of Africa nation. Ethiopia, a bastion of stability in a tumultuous region, had for years proved to be resilient and achieved impressive economic growth. But the attacks highlighted how historically, the struggle for political space in Ethiopia has always folded into a battle over land, religion, language, demography, and yes, ethnicity.

For smallholder farmers in Ethiopia, land is a marker of identity, the main source of income and an asset for transfer in the form of wealth to future generations. But for centuries, elites and state machinery have used land as an instrument of social and political control. In the late 1880s, Emperor Menelik II annexed Oromo territories in search of arable lands. His successor, Emperor Haile Selassie, also gave out land to members of the nobility in exchange for loyalty, and his reforms of the system of land tenure later were criticized as slow. When he was overthrown in 1974, the Communist Derg government led by Mengistu Haile Mariam nationalized land, and as the sole landlord gave people in rural areas access to farming land.

In 1975, under the leadership of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, Tigrayans started a protracted rebellion against the military government. In 1991, they helped topple the Amhara-dominated government of Mengistu Haile Mariam, replaced it with one filled with Tigray. The new constitution, which came into effect in 1995, vested the right to overall land ownership in the government on the pretext that it protected farmers against capitalist land-grabbers

In 2005, a new law transferred the power of land authority from the various regional states to the federal government, and inadvertently broadened the rights of smallholder farmers. This coincided with the Ethiopian government’s push to lease large swaths of land to foreign investors and private interests in exchange for jobs and infrastructure development–a move that was described as heralding agro-imperialism. The rush also fueled unbridled corruption, displaced thousands of people, and millions of acres of Ethiopia’s most fertile land was made available to investors without the consent of the indigenous groups that lived on the land.

Ethiopia's GDP has more than quintupled in a decade

The suspicion and anger over the land grab were brewing when in 2014, the Tigrayan-dominated ruling coalition designated a plan to increase the size of the capital Addis Ababa twenty-fold. The Oromo community said the development plan extended into their region, violated the principles of federalism under Ethiopia’s constitution, and had the potential of displacing millions of people. The expansion would have required closing schools, and for the Oromo, this triggered memories of pre-1991, when their language was banned and the state oversaw a project of forced cultural assimilation. After 140 students and farmers were killed in anti-government protests, the government scrapped the plans in early January.

The Oromos nonetheless continued the protests–joined in by ethnic Amharas–and the expanded crackdown led to the death of more than 500 people–a figure the government recently admitted. To pressure the government into change, the protesters attacked foreign agribusiness investments, much of which are concentrated in Oromia, Ethiopia’s most fertile region. In a move to quell the protests, prime minister Hailemariam Desalegn announced electoral reforms and promised greater ethnic representation in the military and a reduction of corruption in regional administrations.

“His proposed reforms are unlikely to fully satisfy protesters,” Emma Gordon, the senior Africa analyst with global risk consultancy Verisk Maplecroft, said. The protesters she said, “have called for more sweeping concessions to reduce the dominance of the ethnic Tigrayan minority and to lessen the power of the security forces.”