BISHOFTU, Ethiopia: An Ethiopian religious festival transformed on Sunday into a rare moment of open defiance to the government one year after a stampede started by police killed dozens at the gathering.
The Irreecha festival is held annually by the Oromos, Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group, which in late 2015 began months of anti-government protests over claims of marginalization and unfair land seizures.
Parliament declared a nationwide state of emergency aimed at quelling the unrest shortly after the bloodshed at last October’s Irreecha, but the protests at this year’s gathering show that dissatisfaction still runs deep.
“The government is trying to control us and deny our rights, lives and security,” said Sabana Bone, who was among the tens of thousands clad in traditional white clothing who gathered by a lake in a resort town of Bishoftu, about 60 kilometers (37 miles) southeast of the capital Addis Ababa.
“We are remembering what happened last year and it makes us angry. We need freedom,” Bone said.
The Oromo protests were triggered by a government plan to expand Addis Ababa’s boundaries, which community leaders denounced as an attempt to steal their land which surrounds the capital.
They later spread to other ethnic groups like the Amharas who have long felt marginalized by Ethiopia’s ruling party, which controls every seat in Parliament and wields virtually unchecked power.
The months of protest resulted in 22,000 arrests and at least 940 deaths, according to the government-linked human rights commission.
Also known as thanksgiving and meant to mark the end of the months-long rainy season and start of the harvest, last October’s Irreecha became a turning point in the unrest when police shot tear gas at people chanting protest slogans, sparking a panic that left at least 50 people dead, although activists claim a much higher toll.
The state of emergency, which was repealed in August, succeeded in stopping the demonstrations by criminalizing gatherings and allowing police to hold people without trial, provisions that scared off most protesters.
That changed at this year’s Irreecha, as hundreds of people climbed onto a stage, crossed their arms over their head in a gesture of protest and chanted “Down, down, Woyane,” a derogatory term for Ethiopia’s government.
Such actions would normally invite arrest.
Police were nowhere to be seen at the festival grounds, while the elders who traditionally preside over the ceremony stayed away.
The anti-government sentiment at the festival was further amplified by bouts of ethnic fighting in September between Oromo and Somali communities in southern and eastern Ethiopia.
“There is Somali expansionism against the Oromo people, and the government is supporting the Somalis,” said Doyo Wako, from the Borana area where fierce fighting occurred.
After hours of chanting, the crowd dispersed to board buses back home.
Some attendees ran through the streets of Bishoftu yelling protest slogans, as armed police stood by, watching.
Ethiopia’s Oromo protest on stampede anniversary
Ethiopia’s Oromo protest on stampede anniversary
Only 4% women on ballot as Bangladesh prepares for post-Hasina vote
- Women PMs have ruled Bangladesh for over half of its independent history
- For 2026 vote, only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates
DHAKA: As Bangladesh prepares for the first election since the ouster of its long-serving ex-prime minister Sheikh Hasina, only 4 percent of the registered candidates are women, as more than half of the political parties did not field female candidates.
The vote on Feb. 12 will bring in new leadership after an 18-month rule of the caretaker administration that took control following the student-led uprising that ended 15 years in power of Hasina’s Awami League party.
Nearly 128 million Bangladeshis will head to the polls, but while more than 62 million of them are women, the percentage of female candidates in the race is incomparably lower, despite last year’s consensus reached by political parties to have at least 5 percent women on their lists.
According to the Election Commission, among 1,981 candidates only 81 are women, in a country that in its 54 years of independence had for 32 years been led by women prime ministers — Hasina and her late rival Khaleda Zia.
According to Dr. Rasheda Rawnak Khan from the Department of Anthropology at Dhaka University, women’s political participation was neither reflected by the rule of Hasina nor Zia.
“Bangladesh has had women rulers, not women’s rule,” Khan told Arab News. “The structure of party politics in Bangladesh is deeply patriarchal.”
Only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates for the 2026 vote. Percentage-wise, the Bangladesh Socialist Party was leading with nine women, or 34 percent of its candidates.
The election’s main contender, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, whose former leader Zia in 1991 became the second woman prime minister of a predominantly Muslim nation — after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto — was the party that last year put forward the 5 percent quota for women.
For the upcoming vote, however, it ended up nominating only 10 women, or 3.5 percent of its 288 candidates.
The second-largest party, Jamaat-e-Islami, has not nominated a single woman.
The 4 percent participation is lower than in the previous election in 2024, when it was slightly above 5 percent, but there was no decreasing trend. In 2019, the rate was 5.9 percent, and 4 percent in 2014.
“We have not seen any independent women’s political movement or institutional activities earlier, from where women could now participate in the election independently,” Khan said.
“Real political participation is different and difficult as well in this patriarchal society, where we need to establish internal party democracy, protection from political violence, ensure direct election, and cultural shifts around female leadership.”
While the 2024 student-led uprising featured a prominent presence of women activists, Election Commission data shows that this has not translated into their political participation, with very few women contesting the upcoming polls.
“In the student movement, women were recruited because they were useful, presentable for rallies and protests both on campus and in the field of political legitimacy. Women were kept at the forefront for exhibiting some sort of ‘inclusive’ images to the media and the people,” Khan said.
“To become a candidate in the general election, one needs to have a powerful mentor, money, muscle power, control over party people, activists, and locals. Within the male-dominated networks, it’s very difficult for women to get all these things.”
