Addis Abeba, July 14/2017: It was not an ordinary day for five of six university students who were shuttling between the court room and their prison cells for nearly twenty months prior to that sunny morning. The university students were part of hundreds of Oromo university students rounded up by police during the April-May 2014 students’ protest in several universities within the National Regional State of Oromia, the largest of Ethiopia’s nine regional states. That morning on Dec. 02, a federal court in Addis Abeba found the five students “guilty” of violating various sections of Ethiopia’s infamous Anti-Terrorism Proclamation (ATP) and the 2004 Criminal Code.
But theirs was only the beginning. The beginning of a long overdue, but essential step testing the shaky relationship between the Federal Government of Ethiopia and the State of Oromia over the fate of the nation’s capital, Addis Abeba (a city known to its native Oromos as Finfinne).
It was also the first sign of what would eventually lead the federal government to declare a harsh State of Emergency, a slightly improved version of which is still in effect. It is a decree preceded by a yearlong anti-government protests that went from the modest demand of the protesting Oromo students in April-May 2014 to the more potent ones that saw, as time went by, firms owned by foreign as well as domestic companies seen as having cozy relations with the government reduced to ashes.
A city everyone wants
Front and center
Although a host of several public grievances have since been articulated as the reason why hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets in Oromia, and later on in Amhara regional states, throughout the protests in the former, Addis Abeba and its relationship with the Oromo remained front and center....................
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Berhane
