They are knocking on doors in the middle of the night. Not in the mansions of Bole, but in the rented rooms of Kolfe and Shiromeda. They want to send you to the frontlines to fight for an "Ethiopia" in which — like every other Ethiopian, rich or poor — you are constitutionally barred from ever owning the ground beneath your feet. Let's talk about why the youth aren't fighting for a country. They're being harvested by a class that has never once sent its own sons.
The word zemecha used to mean a campaign of collective uplift — the Derg-era mobilization drives that sent students into the countryside to teach literacy and dig irrigation canals. Half a century later, the word has curdled. Today it more often describes something closer to a manhunt: young men picked off the street, out of minibuses, off the floor of a bar, and driven to a camp before their families even learn where they've gone.
This is not a metaphor. It is a documented pattern, and it is happening across the political map, not just in one region or against one ethnic group.
The Roundups Are Real, and They Are Class-Coded
In Adama, a 17-year-old street vendor named Tedla Hirigo was picked up by police; his mother was told he would be sent to a military training camp unless the family paid 30,000 birr for his release — money the family, which depended on the boy's income, did not have, according to reporting in Africa Defense Forum, the U.S. military's own Africa publication, which sourced the account from The Addis Standard. In Shashemene, a day laborer described watching militiamen shove two young people into a police car on their way home from dinner — and running before he could be next.
This isn't confined to Oromia, and it isn't confined to the government side of the current conflicts. In Tigray, a draft proclamation reportedly being prepared by the hardline faction now running the regional administration would establish a legal basis for compulsory military service, a measure that, if adopted, would put thousands more young Tigrayans in the same position as their Oromo and Amhara peers. In the Amhara war, soldiers who have surrendered to Fano fighters have told reporters they were detained from their workplaces or homes and sent to the front with minimal training — and that forcibly drafted conscripts frequently surrender en masse or fire into the air rather than at the people they are told are their enemies, according to accounts relayed by Fano commanders.
Even Ethiopia's own state-appointed human rights body has had to respond. The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission opened an investigation into complaints of forced conscription, including of minors, after videos of long lines of visibly underage recruits circulated online. The military's public line — delivered by ENDF spokesperson Col. Getnet Adane, who insists recruitment follows strict age and health criteria and that critics are "misinformed" — sits uneasily next to the Commission's own decision to investigate in the first place, and next to a defense budget and force posture built for exactly this kind of surge mobilization.
Who ends up in these queues is not random. It is the boy selling phone cards, the day laborer, the minibus tout, the unemployed diploma-holder with no connections — not the child of a minister, a construction magnate, or a diaspora-funded NGO director. That asymmetry is the actual subject of this article. Call it what a materialist would call it: conscription is a tax, and like most taxes in Ethiopia, it is regressive.
The Land You're Dying For Isn't Yours — And It Isn't Meant to Be Anyone's
Here the picture needs to be precise, because the temptation is to oversimplify it into a slogan. Article 40 of the Ethiopian constitution does not deny land to the poor specifically — it denies private land ownership to everyone. Land, the constitution states, "is a common property of the Nations, Nationalities and Peoples of Ethiopia and shall not be subject to sale or other means of exchange"; ownership is vested exclusively in the state and in the peoples of Ethiopia, not in individuals, rich or poor, Amhara or Oromo or Tigrayan. In principle it is one of the more egalitarian clauses in the constitution.
But constitutional principle and lived reality have diverged, and that divergence is the real class story. Ethiopians only ever hold use rights — rights that can be inherited, but not sold outright — while ownership of the buildings and improvements built on that land belongs to the person who built them. In practice, that means the people who can afford to build, lease prime urban plots, and navigate a notoriously opaque land-administration bureaucracy — which legal scholars have described as increasingly market-based and favorable to investors and "model peasants" — capture the value of land access, while a renter in Kolfe or a peasant farmer holds a use-right he can never leverage into capital. The condominium towers rising in Bole and CMC were not built by the state redistributing common land to the landless. They were built by developers with lease access, financing, and political proximity that a conscripted 19-year-old from Shiromeda will never have.
So the hook isn't hyperbole so much as it needs an honest footnote: no Ethiopian owns land outright. But some Ethiopians extract enormous value from land they don't own, and others are marched to a trench to defend the borders of a state that will never let them do the same.
"Sons of the Nation" Is a Selectively Applied Phrase
The claim that Ethiopia's political and business elite insulate their own children from war while conscripting other people's sons is, by its nature, difficult to document with the same paper trail as a police extortion case — nobody publishes a list. It is, however, one of the most persistent grievances voiced by families of conscripts and by opposition commentary, and it tracks with a pattern that is easier to verify: joblessness and conscription fall on the same population. Reporting on the current mobilization has repeatedly noted that displaced and unemployed youth — the same young people locked out of Ethiopia's stalled formal economy — are disproportionately the ones swept up in roundups, while children with passports, tuition fees, and family networks abroad simply are not standing in those queues. You are free to doubt the specific arithmetic of who is where. You cannot credibly doubt that the burden of this war has been distributed with class logic, not lottery logic.
Not "Refuse to Fight for Your Ethnic Group." Refuse to Fight Each Other's Wars.
It would be easy, and cheap, to tell an Amhara reader to stop caring about Amhara land, or an Oromo reader to stop caring about Oromo self-determination, or a Tigrayan reader to forget Tigray. That is not the argument here, and it is not a serious one. Ethnic and national identity are not the disease.
The argument is narrower and, I'd suggest, harder to dismiss: an Amhara farmer's son marched into a trench and an Oromo laborer's son marched into the trench opposite him have more in common with each other — precarious income, no land title, no way to buy an exemption, no ministry job waiting for a cousin — than either has with the men, of any ethnicity, who order the offensives and never appear on a casualty list. When an ENDF spokesperson says the "only language" an armed opposition understands is force and that fighters must be "targeted, hit" — as Col. Getnet Adane put it in describing the campaign against Fano — it is not the spokesperson's son who will do the hitting or the dying.
That is the actual meaning of class solidarity in this context. It isn't pacifism, and it isn't ethnic nihilism. It's refusing to let a fight over resources, land administration, and political power at the top be laundered into a story about ancient hatred between people at the bottom who have never met each other and have, materially, almost nothing to fight over. Do not die defending a billionaire's right to build another villa on land you'll never own, against a stranger who was dragged from his own rented room by the same kind of militia that came for you.
The Honest Counter-Argument
A fair reading of the other side deserves space here, because pretending it doesn't exist would make this a weaker, not a stronger, argument. Ethiopian and regional officials would say — and have said — that in a country facing multiple active insurgencies, an existential-feeling war, and contested borders, some form of rapid mobilization is what any state under comparable pressure would do, and that framing self-defense as elite predation lets armed non-state actors off the hook for the violence they also inflict on conscripts and civilians. They would also note, correctly, that the "elite exemption" charge, however widely believed, is asserted more often than it is documented, and that not every wealthy or connected family is untouched by this war — Ethiopia's conflicts have killed and displaced people across class lines, even if unevenly. Readers should weigh that counter-case rather than take this piece's framing on faith; the empirical record on selective enlistment is thinner than the record on the roundups themselves.
What isn't in serious dispute — confirmed by Ethiopia's own human rights commission, by military reporting from three different regions, and even by the government's own defensive statements — is that forced recruitment of unemployed, underage, and economically powerless young people has become a documented, recurring feature of this war. Whatever conclusion a reader draws from that fact, it is the fact the recruiters would rather you not look at closely.
Sidoc Haytu is an Ethiopian writer and researcher focused on political economy, class dynamics, and anti-imperialist movements in the Horn of Africa. If you are ready to build, not just read, contact the author at pfle-dialogue@proton.me or follow on Facebook Sidoc Haytu on Facebook or telegram https://t.me/SiraPress
