42 Middle East & Africa The EconomistMarch 21st 2020
21In January, as the security forces inten-
sified their operations, the government
switched off the internet across much of
western Oromia. Outside big towns in Wol-
lega, which is under curfew, even landlines
and mobile networks are disconnected. Re-
ports of killings and arrests travel by word
of mouth. “We’re back to the pre-telephone
age,” says Asebe Regassa, a local academic.
Aid workers can barely enter the very far
west, where the war is most intense. In
parts of Guji, transport is banned. “Farmers
are punished from both sides,” says Mulatu
Jergafa, who lives in Nekemte. “If they go to
their coffee farms the guerrillas suspect
they might be government informants and
beat them; but the military also suspects
they might be informants for the guerrillas
and does the same.”
Geresu Tufa, an Oromo activist, de-
scribes it as a war in which “you cannot tell
who is friend and who is foe.” Nobody
knows, for example, exactly how many
fighters the olahas, though it is thought to
number in the low thousands. It is also un-
clear which armed groups are actually
linked to the ola, since anyone can pick up
a gun and claim to be fighting for it. In most
places the insurgency may be a potpourri
of loosely connected militias rather than a
full-fledged rebellion.
Uncertainty also surrounds the coun-
ter-insurgency. By December the Oromia
Support Group, an ngo, had documented
64 extra-judicial killings and at least 1,400
cases of arbitrary detention over the previ-
ous six months. Since then many more
abuses have been reported, including the
burning of homes. In January activists
claimed the army had massacred 59 civil-
ians in Wollega. The olfalleged another 21
had been killed nearby. The government
has denied all allegations. This is uncon-
vincing, but it is possible atrocities reflect a
breakdown in the chain of command rath-
er than orders from the top. “Senior federal
officials may not know the full extent or
nature of the military’s operations in Wol-
lega,” says William Davison of the Interna-
tional Crisis Group, an ngoin Brussels.
What is not in doubt is that there has
also been political repression. “The oppo-
sition movement in Oromia has totally
stopped,” says the olf’s chief, Dawud Ibsa.
In recent months thousands of its suppor-
ters have been arrested, including nine of
its leaders. In Nekemte, security forces
have repeatedly closed offices belonging to
the olfand its more moderate ally, the
Oromo Federalist Congress (ofc). Public
gatherings have been banned, though the
ruling Prosperity Party recently staged a
rally. The ofc’s representative in Nekemte
spent four months in a cell in the town’s
historic palace, which has been turned into
a detention facility.
All this comes months before what is
supposed to be Ethiopia’s first free and fairelection(unlessitisderailedbycovid-19).
InWollegaandGujithevotewillprobably
bepostponedonsecurity grounds. This
willhelpthegovernment,whichisunpop-
ularintheseplaces.
Thegovernmentinsistsit remainsopen
tonegotiationwiththerebels.“Itisgood
forpeopletosolvetheirissuesthroughdis-
cussion, meetings and conversations,”
Abiy toldlawmakers last month. Butit
seemsuninterestedinfurtherpeacetalks
andactsasiftheconflictcanberesolved
throughforce.Therebels,meanwhile,con-
tinuetodenouncetheEthiopianstateasa
colonial oppressor which can never be
trusted.Andsothecarnagecontinues. 7N
omasomi limako, who lives in South
Africa, was often told that she could
not get hiv because she is wheelchair-
bound. She had never met a disabled per-
son with the disease, as far as she knew, so
she believed the rumour. Then came her
own diagnosis. Today the 48-year-old
pharmacy assistant knows that her disabil-
ity actually made her more vulnerable to
the disease. Even as covid-19 creates a new
public-health crisis, Africa is continuing to
grapple with an old one. Studies show that
Africans with disabilities are at least twice
as likely to get hivas those without.
One reason is that disability com-pounds hiv’s other risk factors. Disabled
children are often excluded from school, so
many receive no sex education. Even for
those in school, a widespread assumption
that disabled people do not have sex means
that teachers think they do not need to
learn about it. In Ethiopia more than three-
quarters of 10- to 24-year-olds with disabil-
ities had never discussed sex with their
parents. Social status matters, too. Even in
places where disabled people know more
about condoms than everyone else, such as
Uganda, they still have higher rates of sexu-
ally transmitted diseases. Researchers
think this is because the disabled have a
tougher time negotiating with their part-
ners about having safe sex.
“When you are disabled and you have
hiv, you get double discrimination,” says
Miiro Michael, a social worker in southern
Uganda. “When you are a woman, you get
triple discrimination.” This is because
women in much of sub-Saharan Africa, dis-
abled or not, are at higher risk of getting
hivthan men. In Burundi women with dis-
abilities are three times more likely to have
hiv than those without, and ten times
more likely than able-bodied men. In Bur-
kina Faso disabled women have the same
hivprevalence (5.4%) as sex workers.
Trading sex for money is something dis-
abled women are more than three times as
likely to do as able-bodied women, accord-
ing to a study in Cameroon. This is often
because they are poor. Across Africa dis-
abled women tend to suffer high levels of
sexual abuse, too. In Burundi they are
about twice as likely to have endured it as
the non-disabled. Some are victims of “vir-
gin rape”—a crime reflecting the belief that
an hiv-positive man can be cured if he has
sex with a virgin and transfers the disease
to her. Since disabled women are often
baselessly assumed to be virgins, they are
particularly at risk.
Once the disabled get hiv, treatment is
difficult. Travel costs are a big reason. Dis-
abled people also report being turned away
by clinics because health workers don’t be-
lieve the disabled can get hiv. Moreover,
many clinics do not have wheelchair ramps
and the like to provide access to people
who cannot walk. One study in Uganda
found that disabled people were less likely
to receive their test results than others.
This may have been because they found it
difficult to return to a clinic.
Some are trying to improve the situa-
tion. A project in Kenya led by Humanity &
Inclusion, an international ngo, provides
hivinformation to the blind using Braille
and radio shows. Community health work-
ers in South Africa offer in-home hivtreat-
ment to the immobile. In Rwanda they are
taught to communicate the basics about
the virus in sign language. Senegal con-
ducted a prevalence survey of disability
and hiv—a good step in the “disability dataAfricans with disabilities are at higher
risk of getting hivHIV and the disabledDouble trouble