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Comment by sillystuff | Hacker News Reader

I visited a little before the pandemic locked things down. At that time, we were required to have an armed guard on our visit to Dallol. There had been some shootings and abductions in the area, but it wasn't common (I believe these violent incidents had been attributed to Eritrean cross-border excursions). The Afar region (where Dallol is) was the only area of Ethiopia we encountered such issues at that time. Violence was still extremely rare. We never felt threatened.

I especially loved the Tigray region. The people were amazing. There was an innocence similar to that I encountered in Türkiye, decades ago. It is hard to reconcile the recent violence, and the universally kind and generous people we met there. We regularly saw young women and girls walking down dark alleyways alone after dark--the place felt safer than any place I've ever been.

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The armed guard was actually the mafia you paid to visit. Some tourists got shot a few weeks before I went because they tagged along and hadn't paid the steep protection racket fee. Went a few years before you for something like 5 weeks, and violence was rife in the countryside. I saw dozens of refugee camps (people fleeing ethnic violence), a large number of torched cars or buses, got surrounded by hundreds of armed Tigrayan militia at one point, arrested by the Oromo militia, intimated or racketed more times than I can count, and even witnessed a village being emptied out by armed militias after a few hours notice in the midst of harvest season before being razed for the purposes of civil construction works (and razed it was…). Anything but a peaceful society. Safe at night… Yes, somewhat, but my father (who lived there) still got knocked unconscious and stripped to his knickers one night.

That is interesting. We traveled by minibus throughout our trip, so traveled through rural areas, and only in Afar encountered lots of men with guns (one group of whom wanted to hang out, and shared their Khat [a stimulant plant]). Even with lots of men with guns, I never felt threatened (nor was a threat ever made nor implied).

The people we met in Tigray were amazing. The folks we encountered there were probably not affiliated with militias. I imagine (possibly wrongly) that militia members would make up a small fraction of the population? And that an ethnic militia would probably be more likely to contain folks who subscribe to ethnic hatreds etc. than the general population. Similar to white supremacist militias in the US-- they exist, but they are a marginal group who's viewpoint does not represent the majority of society (even among ethnic groups identifying as "white").

I've met people like you describe, just not in Ethiopia. I'm glad my path somehow avoided that. My memories of Ethiopia are 100% good/happy ones.

Per wikivoyage, the guards in Afar are guards. The wikivoyage article attributes the attacks on tourists to Afari rebels in the talk section, but not in the main text (I remember reading in a travel wiki that the attackers were Eritrean; but that could have been un-sourced BS). There are no references listed for any claims made in wikivoyage about the attacks.

Refusing guards and getting shot sounds like it supports it being a mafia protection racket, but rephrased, "the people shot were tagging along a bit behind, but not within the group ahead with the guard," just makes them sound more vulnerable to attack. Both descriptions are consistent with what you described. Seems like attacks would be greater in number, and more frequent than two attacks, 5 years apart (2012 and 2017), if it were a protection racket. Perhaps the wikivoyage list of tourist attacks is incomplete, but if attacks were common, it seems there would be more than two in over 10 years recorded.

https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Danakil_Depression

> That is interesting.

The word is "horrible".

We mostly chose to travel by car to cover more ground. Some places were very peaceful (Dire Dawa, Bale…), but it only took us one day out of Addis before deciding to play "spot an AK-47" (a franchise based on our "spot a bunker" game in Albania). The only place outside the capital were we counted only one total was Lalibela, despite staying two and half days. We would easily see a dozen AK-47s every single day, plus an uncountable number of rifles from the 1930s and 1940s. Afar was not an outlier in that regard, despite pretty chill overall. Tigray I also liked and we had only positive interactions there, especially in and around Axum. I also wanted to mention that I hold nothing against Tigrayan militias, especially given what unfolded a few months later. Militias did not marginal by any means in Tigray, though we may simply have chanced upon some kind of operation to see as many as we did. They didn't seem particularly hateful or prejudiced against us in any case and we never got to talk with any due to the language barrier. Even the Oromo militias that arrested us were okay to be honest. Bigotry and supremacist thinking was something that I found mostly among Amharas from the capital capable of expressing themselves in English and the profound spite and mob-like violence was mostly an Oromia thing. We got our cheap and battered 4x4 stoned four times in Oromia villages for instance. It was so weird going from a place where we would get thrown rocks at to the very next where kids would be curious and nice, play football with them or letting them play with our camera, drinking tella or sharing qat with adults, etc.

Returning to the Afar, the story about tourists being gunned down was told to me by an embassy source, but it may have been unrelated, older than stated, or even plain false (the seeds of doubt are now sown in my mind!). The whole thing being at least in part a mafia protection racket was something I was told by the folk who set it up for us, however, and something that felt realistic at the time given that we were targeted for random things like trying to cross a government bridge without also paying for the barge that it replaced. I actually tend to believe that there would be more attacks if insecurity were the cause. Clearly, few travellers would go up to Dallol and then cheap out by refusing to pay 50 or 100 bucks for protection, especially seeing all those weapons around them.

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