Altered video used to falsely claim Ethiopian PM commented on conflict in Amhara region

“Only a desperate man would speak like this. He has committed wrongdoings but is still complaining. Fano is more organised than any force seen during the Italian war and cannot simply be ignored," reads the caption of a TikTok video published in Amharic on October 7, 2023.

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Screenshot of the altered post, taken on October 9, 2023. 

The caption refers to an 1896 battle between Ethiopia and Italy that saw Ethiopia defeat its former occupier (archived here).

Viewed more than 880,000 times, the three-minute clip shows Abiy giving a televised speech.

“The desperate and traitorous Fano launched an unexpected attack against the Ethiopian Defense Force,” Abiy purportedly says in the video.

The logo for Fana, a state-affiliated broadcaster, is visible in the top-left corner.

Fano, a militia group in Ethiopia’s northern Amhara region, has been locked in an armed conflict with government forces since July 2023.

The violence in the region has recently spread to other parts of the country, posing a significant threat to the security of the wider Horn of Africa region, according to a UN report (archived here).

Ethiopia's human rights body has accused government forces of carrying out extra-judicial killings and mass arbitrary detentions in the restive Amhara region (archived here).

However, the video clip does not show Abiy commenting on the current conflict.

Altered video

In the first 10 seconds of the clip, there is an obvious skip in the audio when Abiy’s mouth movements are out of sync with what he is saying.

AFP Fact Check used the video verification tool InVID-WeVerify to conduct reverse image searches on keyframes from the footage.

We found the original footage on YouTube published by the state-owned Fana Broadcasting Corporation (FBC) on November 4, 2020, long before the current conflict in the Amhara region began (archived here).

AFP Fact Check then verified several elements to confirm this is the same footage seen in the TikTok clip.

In both videos, the Fana logo is visible while large text at the bottom of the screen reads “Breaking News” in Amharic. Abiy is also wearing the same attire.

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Screenshot of the original video (top) and the altered video, taken on October 10, 2023

In the original clip, Abiy speaks about the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) a day after war broke out in the Tigray region in November 2020.

“The desperate and traitorous TPLF group launched an unexpected attack against the Ethiopian National Defense Force,” Abiy says in the first 10 seconds.

This line was edited in the altered version; the words “TPLF group” were replaced with audio of Abiy saying “Fano” which -- we found using a keyword search -- was taken from another speech he made in parliament on June 14, 2022 (archived here)

The manipulation went further. At about 02’55” into the altered video, Abiy’s mouth movements once again do not align with the audio.

He appears to say that “there was an attempt to divide the national defense force, and then Fano would be attacked by special forces”.

However, in the original television interview, Abiy says that “there was an attempt to divide the national defense forces across ethnic lines, and then they would be attacked by militia and special forces”.

Human rights probe

The International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia (ICHREE) was established in December 2021 to investigate alleged atrocities committed during the Tigray war, which ended in November 2022 (archived here).

Although human rights organisations advocated (archived here) for an additional extension of ICHREE’s term in part because of the violence in the Amhara region, the request has so far been disregarded.

Amnesty International condemned the end of the UN-backed human rights inquiry mandate as a “gross betrayal” of the victims by the international community (archived here).

This decision comes even as the UN’s 2023 report says that “there is an overwhelming risk that human rights atrocities will continue”.