Old speech of Ethiopian army chief was altered to make false claims about recent conflict

Ethiopia’s prolonged conflict between the army and Fano rebels in the north has caused a humanitarian crisis. It has also spurred the warring parties to use disinformation techniques to spread propaganda, including by altering videos of public figures. A recent Facebook post claimed that a video showed the country’s army chief announcing that the attacks by militants had caused the collapse of his troops. However, this is false: AFP Fact Check found that a user had edited an old speech by the commander, released more than a year ago, to delete key context and add a misleading text overlay.

“As you said, the army has failed. Fano has done this. You must accept this,” reads the Amharic-language post.

The post was published on Facebook on December 1, 2024, and has been shared more than 760 times since.

A text overlay, also in Amharic, says: “Fano is capable. However, you haven’t yet experienced its full power”.

At the start of  the footage, another text overlay appears: “Birhanu’s speech in Metema”.

Birhanu Jula is the commander of the Ethiopian army, and Metema is a town in the northern Gondar zone in the Amhara region.

The video shared in the post contains 13 seconds of footage of the army chief speaking to the camera.

“The capability of the defence force had been weakened,” he begins by saying.

“The defence force was collapsed. It was lost. The readiness of the defence force was weakened,” he adds.

Laughter can be heard in the background during the speech.

Catastrophic conflict 

Fighting broke out between the Ethiopian army and the Fano rebels in the Amhara region in July 2023.

A senior Ethiopian government official recently warned that the unrest had stretched the region’s health system to the limit, putting people’s lives at risk (archived here).

In November 2024, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken also expressed “concern about the increasing violence in Amhara” and emphasised the need for political dialogue to address the situation  (archived here).

However, the footage in which the army chief talks about the collapse of the army is not related to the current conflict.

Altered video 

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

The results established that the clip was originally published on the YouTube channel of the state-owned Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation (EBC) on October 21, 2023 (archived here).

It shows the visit of the army chief to the Defense Engineering Industry Corporation, a state-owned company that develops weapons and ammunition.

The original video lasts four minutes and 45 seconds, and starts with an EBC news presenter talking about Birhanu visiting the corporation as part of commemorations of the 116th National Army Day (archived here).

Fifty seconds into the clip, he starts addressing an assembly about the historical development of the company. He highlighted the fact that it was built under Ethiopia’s Derg military regime, which was overthrown in 1991 after ruling the country for nearly two decades (archived here).

“Unfortunately, in the 27 years of the EPRDF regime, we demolished the facilities and infrastructures built by the Derg regime. We did not develop them further,” Birhanu says at 1’24”.

EPRDF stands for the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, a political party that ruled Ethiopia for 27 years before the current government came to power in April 2018.

The army chief then references the early days of the corporation, which was initially known as the Metals and Engineering Corporation, or METEC (archived here).

“After the formation of METEC, all industries that belonged to the defense forces were merged under it. During this period, the defence industry had collapsed. The capability of the defence force had been weakened. It collapsed. It was lost. The readiness of the defence force was weakened,” he says at 1’49”.

In the altered video, the first two sentences discussing the METEC merger were edited out to falsely give the impression that the army chief was talking about the consequences of the current conflict.

Moreover, the sound of laughter heard in the background in the altered clip does not exist in the original version .

AFP Fact Check has previously debunked altered videos related to the Ethiopian conflict here and here.