Tamerat Negera reported critically of Ethiopia’s civil war and of Abiy’s leadership, and in December 2021, Abiy’s federal police kidnapped Negera and brought him to a military black site. Accused of ‘humiliating and insulting regional and national leaders,’ of ‘instigating unrest,’ even ‘terrorizing the nation’ through his writing, Negera was never charged and spent four months in detention. After his release, in April 2022, he fled into exile.

“We journalists like narratives. We love to build and we love to destroy. Abiy gets to be labeled a Nobel, and then a war hero. That’s a universal failure: we love to build heroes, and we also like to crush them.”

Read: The Dial Mag