Mr Feyisa has also expressed fears for his own life.
"If I go back to Ethiopia, maybe they will kill me, or put me in prison," the athlete said, during a news conference in which he discussed the significance of his very public protest just hours earlier.
From the section
Image copyrightAFPImage captionThe "x" sign is used as a symbol of protest in Ethiopia
When Ethiopian marathon runner Feyisa Lilesa crossed the line to take a silver medal in Rio, it should have been the defining moment of his career.
His previous best moment had come when winning bronze at the 2011 World Athletics Championships in South Korea.
In Brazil on Sunday, he became the first Ethiopian to finish in the top two of a men's Olympics marathon since 2000.
But the greatest sporting achievement of his life will forever be overshadowed by the political protest he made just yards before the finish line, and which Mr Feyisa carried on into his post-race celebrations and press conference.
Given that Rule 50 of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) bans political statements of any kind, there was the possibility that the 26-year-old would lose his medal.
Image copyrightREUTERSImage captionFeyisa Lilesa's family is still in Ethiopia
Fortunately for Mr Feyisa, the IOC has decided to give him only a slap on the wrist.
"We spoke to the athlete and reminded him of the Olympic Charter," its media office said in an email to the BBC.
When he raised his hands in an x-shaped fashion over his head, he was showing solidarity with the Oromo people, who have suffered a crackdown at the hands of the Ethiopian government.
Rights group Amnesty International says that 67 people died when "security forces fired live bullets at peaceful protesters" in different towns and cities in the Oromo region earlier this month.
The government blamed "foreign enemies and social media activists" for the unrest, saying protesters destroyed property and were responsible for the deaths of innocent people.
Mr Feyisa was born in Ambo in Oromia, the largest region in Ethiopia, and a flashpoint for protests for the last 26 months.
Iftu Mulisa, Mr Feyisa's wife:
Image copyright
"I was very scared at the time but I wasn't surprised because I know him... he had a lot of anger inside."
The town is some 125km (80 miles) west of the capital, Addis Ababa, where his wife and two children are currently located, prompting Mr Feyisa to reveal fears for their safety.
Speaking several days after the marathon protest, his wife, Iftu Mulisa, admitted she was now concerned for her family's security.
"I was very scared at the time but I wasn't surprised because I know him," she told the Reuters news agency.
"He was burning inside when he saw on social media all these dead bodies; people being beaten and people being arrested. So I was not surprised because I know he had a lot of anger inside."
'On the run'
Mr Feyisa has also expressed fears for his own life.
"If I go back to Ethiopia, maybe they will kill me, or put me in prison," the athlete said, during a news conference in which he discussed the significance of his very public protest just hours earlier.
Despite the government saying the runner would be welcomed home from Rio de Janeiro as a hero, he was conspicuous by his absence when the Ethiopian Airlines flight landed in Addis Ababa with Almaz Ayana, Tirunesh Dibaba and the country's other medallists on Tuesday night.
His mother, Biritu Fulasa, told Reuters she did not want him to come home.
"Do you really believe what the government is saying?
"I was crying too much the other day but now I am feeling better. I want him to stay there. I wish him well," she said.
Image captionFeyisa Lilesa's mother has warned him not to come home
Now the athlete is effectively on the run - holed up in Rio as a team of lawyers help out with his asylum bid.
Legal fees are notoriously expensive but Mr Feyisa can be soothed by knowing that he has at least $125,000 (£95,000) to call upon after a funding page raised in his honour raised that amount in its first two days (the original target was just $10,000).
His relatives have suggested that the runner will seek political asylum in the US, but whichever country he ends up in may well find they have a top-level marathoner competing for them in the years to come.
It is a discipline which athletes often turn to towards the end of their careers as they do not have to be young to excel in it, unlike some other events.
This year's Olympic champion, Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya, is 31 while his compatriot Dennis Kimetto was 30 when he set the world record in Berlin two years ago.
Feyisa first burst into the limelight when winning the 2009 Dublin Marathon on his race debut, aged just 19.
Image copyrightAFPImage captionThe Oromo make up Ethiopia's largest ethnic group
A year later, he became the youngest man to run a marathon in under two hours and six minutes as he flew round Rotterdam.
At just 26, he already has a wealth of experience behind him - with 17 international marathons under his belt, including a second place in the prestigious Chicago Marathon in 2012 and a triumph in Tokyo earlier this year which qualified him for the Olympics.
Although he came nowhere near it in Brazil, Feyisa's personal best of 2:04:52 is better than the world record held by Kenya's Paul Tergat between 2003 and 2007.
Feyisa Lilesa held his arms over his head, wrists crossed, as he finished second at the Olympic marathon on Sunday in a gesture of support for members of his Oromo tribe who have been protesting at government plans to reallocate farmland.
Plans to allocate land surrounding the capital for development prompted fierce demonstrations in November and spread for months, in the country's worst unrest in more than a decade.
Ethiopia has long been one of the world's poorest nations but has industrialised rapidly in the past decade. However, reallocating land is a thorny issue for Ethiopians, many of whom are subsistence farmers.
Authorities scrapped the scheme in January, but protests flared again this month over the continued detention of opposition demonstrators.
Rights groups say hundreds have been killed. The government disputes the figures and says illegal protests by "anti-peace forces" have been brought under control.
"Oromo is my tribe ... Oromo people now protest what is right, for peace, for a place," Lilesa explained after his silver-medal performance, adding that he feared he would face consequences for the gesture when he returned home.
"Maybe I move to another country ... you get the freedom if you support only the government. You cannot work without that."
Any sign of unrest is closely watched in Ethiopia, a Western ally against Islamist militants in neighbouring Somalia and an economic power seen as a centre of relative stability in a fragile region.
"Oromo people now protest what is right, for peace, for a place," Lilesa said.
Since November 2015, Ethiopia has been experiencing a wave of anti-government protests unleashed by fears by the Oromo people that the government was planning to seize their land. Hundreds of people have been killed.
Stop Killing Oromo People!!!
In early August, anti-government demonstrations rocked the Oromia and Amhara regional states of Ethiopia. Thousands of demonstrators went on to the streets calling on the government to stop killing protesters, release those arrested, implement political reform, and respect justice and the rule of law. However, the response from government security forces, which used live ammunition against protesters, led to the death of about 100 unarmed people.
Although the government security apparatus reported that the demonstrations had been contained, "the current political situation has become volatile. Things are fast changing and developments have become increasingly unpredictable," according to analyst Tsegaye R. Ararssa. Activists are said to be busy devising alternative methods of protest that range from weakening government institutions through staying at home and not operating businesses to organizing a Diaspora-based "grand solidarity rally."
Change of tactics
In the town of Gondar in the state of Amhara, where the first demonstration took place, residents resorted to a new mode of protest - staying at home. A resident of the town, talking on condition of anonymity, told Deutsche Welle that from last Sunday to Tuesday the streets were deserted. Workers stayed at home and stores remained closed.
Asked why the public had opted for this type of protest, the man said "it is clear that society has demanded an answer from the government, but the response was one of bullets in return, so the public decided to launch a stay-at-home strike."
For Tsegaye, this peaceful method of protest demonstrates "a complete rejection of the regime by the people. It also blunts the regime's false claims that the protests were violent. The stay-at-home protest is an indication of the increasing maturity of civil disobedience in Ethiopia."
Internet restrictions
Residents in both the Oromia and Amhara regions say that it is becoming increasingly difficult to get an internet connection and access to social media tools has been blocked. "The only way to get through is by using proxy servers," one resident of Gondar told DW.
In a recent interview with Al Jazeera, Ethiopia's Communications Affairs Minister Getachew Reda claimed that that social media had been used "to churn out false information after false information, mostly seditious remarks, trying to agitate people against security forces and also against fellow brothers and sisters." The administration therefore decided to gag "the kind of vitriol running over social media," he said.
However, political pundits argue that the state move to censor the internet places a strain on political discourse and the sharing of information. Despite the fact that the country has less than three percent of internet access, there are growing numbers of news and opposition websites which the regime is notorious for blocking.
Aid from the West
The Ethiopian government receives some 3.5 billion dollars (3 billion euros) annually from international donors and has remained a key strategic partner of the West, particularly the US and the EU, in the 'war against terror.' However, analysts argue this financial support has been toughening the regime's resolve to silence dissenting voices. The western approach of tiptoeing around human right violations in the country and its continued support for the regime has been stirring up anger among sections of the public.
Tsegaye says that US and EU "support of the regime - which they know is clearly undemocratic - is the very cause of the state terrorism we observe in the region."
A recent editorial in The Washington Post argues that the Obama administration, beyond releasing their "deeply concerned” statements, should put pressure on the regime to allow for “credible investigation into the killings." Following the demonstrations in the two regions, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, urged the Ethiopian government to "give access to international observers in the affected areas to establish what really happened."
In an interview with DW, Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the commissioner, said restrictions on internet access, the blocking of social media and lack of civil society organizations in the country have made it difficult to verify reports of deaths and casualties.
Oromo activists took to the streets of Berlin in November 2015
Mohammed Said, public relations officer with Ethiopia's Communications Affairs Office, told DW that the government had its own system of checks and balances and the country's own Human Rights Commission was doing its job in investigating and publicizing the human rights situation in the country.
For analyst Tsegaye, this shows that the regime "is still in denial of the injustice its policies have resulted in." The Ethiopian government now has the opportunity to change its
here are reports of dozens of deaths and thousands of arrests as protesters took to the streets today in unprecedented numbers and with unprecedented demands.
Large numbers gather in Holota as part of the Oromo protests. Credit: abenezer_a.
Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group, the Oromo, have staged nationwide rallies today to protest their continued marginalisation and persecution by the government. These are a culmination of ongoing protests by the Oromo people since November 2015 and mark by far the most significant political development in the country since the death of the country’s long-time authoritarian leader, Meles Zenawi, in 2012.
At least hundreds of thousands of protestors took to the streets in more than 200 towns and cities across Oromia, Ethiopia’s largest regional state, to demonstrate against widespread and systematic persecution. According to local media reports, over 50 individuals have been killed and thousands arrested as police and security forces opened fire on peaceful protestors, though these details are likely to change as more information comes in.
What are now widely referred to as the #Oromoprotests began in November 2015 when the government introduced the Addis Ababa City Integrated Master Plan, effectively expanding the territorial limits of capital Addis Ababa into neighboring Oromo towns and villages. Oromo political leaders and activists argued that the plan, as designed, would displace millions of Oromo farmers from their ancestral lands and would threaten to eventually cleanse Oromo culture and identity from the area.
The protests were triggered by the announcement of the Master Plan and menacing land-grab policies that have already displaced more than 150, 000 Oromo farmers from the area, but they were also manifestations of a much deeper crisis of massive ethnic-based inequalities and discontentment that have been boiling underground, waiting to erupt.
Since the protests have begun, the government has arrested and jailed many of its vital and outspoken activists and organisers. A recent report by the Human Rights Watch puts the death toll from the first seven months of the protest at over 400 while the figure tallied by activists is significantly higher.
Historic grievances
The Oromo are the largest ethnic group both in Ethiopia and East Africa, consisting of more than a third of Ethiopia’s 100 million people. However, the group has beenmarginalised and discriminated against by subsequent Ethiopian governments. Oromo culture and identity have been stigmatised and pushed into the periphery of country’s national life, while Oromo history has been filtered out of public memory.
Since assuming state power in 1991, the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF) has sought to exploit historic disagreements between the Oromos and Amharas, the second largest ethnic group, to sustain the hegemony of ethnic Tigrayan elites. The TPLF framed longstanding Oromo demands for equality and justice as the greatest threat to Ethiopia’s unity and regional stability, and it used historic antagonisms between Oromo and Amhara as a political instrument to legitimise, justify, and consolidate its political and economic hegemony. The “Oromo question” became the quintessential Ethiopian problem.
Within this frame, Oromos are presented as narrow-minded, extremist, and exclusionary, while the Amharas are presented as chauvinist and violent. By producing crisis between the two groups, the current TPLF-led system presented itself both locally and internationally as the only moderate centrist force that can secure Ethiopia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity from the secessionist threat of the Oromos and the perceived far-right extremism of the Amharas.
The Oromo question and the War on Terror
In the decade since 9/11, Ethiopia refashioned itself as an anchor of stability in an increasingly restless region and began to build a reputation as a regional policing and intelligence powerhouse. As part of this West-facing strategy, it announced its 2006 invasion of Somalia as a war against terrorism, conning the US into sponsoring its proxy war with Eritrea. As the crisis in Somalia deepened, Ethiopia cemented its reputation further, emerging as America’s most reliable partner in the Horn of Africa.
This is not a partnership based on shared values of freedom, liberty, and commitment to democracy, but one based purely on security considerations. Ethiopia served as America’slocal ally, and America, in turn, provided enormous financial, technical and diplomatic support. This brought in much-needed resources for the government to build the political and security infrastructure that has as its main aim the policing, control, and surveillance of internal dissent and opposition.
As the US began to define its foreign and human rights policy through the lens of fighting terror − entering a period of post-truth and post-moral politics in which sacrificing people in distant places in return for security became fair game − this emerged as the paradigmatic threat upon which the West’s fears and anxieties were projected. This made its ally Ethiopia completely impervious to criticism, even as the government used its grotesque anti-terrorism law to crush dissent, decimate the opposition, muzzle the media, and shrink civic space to extinction – all the while holding periodic elections.
Just as terrorism in the West is entangled with religion, terrorism in Ethiopia is entangled with ethnicity. And Oromos have been the primary victims of Ethiopia’s cynical appropriation of the cultural referents and resonances of the War on Terror.
AFP
REUTERS
AFP
