Why Abdi Iley’s Attempted Public Comeback Is Morally Indefensible

Opinion: Ethiopia’s impunity test — why Abdi Iley’s return to public life imperils reconciliation

In Ethiopia’s Somali Region and far beyond it, reconciliation is not a slogan but a test measured in the dignity afforded to victims. The reemergence of Abdi Mohamed Omar — widely known as Abdi Iley, the former Somali Region president — after a March 2024 pardon has turned that test into a crisis. Rights groups have long documented grave abuses by the region’s Liyu Police during his tenure, including torture, extrajudicial killings and mass displacement. His recent attempts to recast himself as a statesman, punctuated by taunts aimed at political rivals and survivors, risk normalizing impunity rather than healing the country’s wounds.

The record cannot be wished away

Abdi Iley’s years in power were marked by aggressive counterinsurgency operations and allegations of systematic abuses that drew scrutiny from Human Rights Watch and other organizations. The violence that tore through Jigjiga and other towns on Aug. 4, 2018 — including reported church burnings and killings — remains one of the ugliest chapters in the region’s recent history. Courts later pursued cases against Abdi Iley; his 2024 clemency, noted by rights monitors, was cast as part of a broader and fragile reconciliation effort under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.

Forgiveness, however, is not a blank slate. In contexts riven by atrocity, clemency carries implicit conditions: restraint, remorse and a credible commitment to truth. None of those obligations are compatible with a public posture that antagonizes survivors or relitigates old feuds under the guise of patriotic commentary.

From contrition to provocation, in posts and barbs

Rather than retreating from the spotlight, Abdi Iley has embraced it. On Dec. 12, 2025, he used X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, to urge Ethiopians in Somali-language remarks to set aside grievances and show full support for Abiy and the ruling Prosperity Party. For a constituency still grieving losses linked to the Liyu Police and political violence, the line between civic exhortation and gaslighting is thin.

On Feb. 9, 2026, he escalated further, posting a jab that conflated a legal, nationally registered political party — the Freedom and Equality Party (FEP) — with al-Shabab while targeting Ibrahim Dheere, a veteran Somali Region opposition figure and former leader within the United Western Somali Liberation Front (UWSLF). The UWSLF laid down arms and signed a peace deal with the federal government in 2011. To smear a figure associated with that demobilization by invoking terror, even obliquely, carries real risk in the current security climate. It is not debate. It is a provocation.

In subsequent messages, he dismissed victims’ associations and former fighters who chose peace as mere “propaganda megaphones” attacking him for subsistence. That language does more than insult; it signals contempt for the very communities reconciliation is supposed to dignify.

Why the rhetoric matters

Words from figures of power land with force. Survivors of detention, displacement and communal bloodshed still carry trauma. Public speech that belittles their pain or tags rivals with the stain of terrorism can chill participation, incite online harassment, and validate a narrative in which the state’s critics — not its past conduct — are the problem. It also discourages former armed actors from choosing dialogue over violence, by signaling that laying down weapons yields derision rather than respect.

This is not an abstract concern. The Somali and Oromo communities both retain searing memories of mass arrests, expulsions and lethal crackdowns that defined the worst moments of the 2010s. Academic work, including from institutions such as the London School of Economics, has cataloged parts of this history. To wave it away as the noise of “opponents” is to pretend that collective memory can be overwritten by a handful of posts and platitudes.

A misread pardon — and a policy failure

Defenders of the 2024 pardon argue it was granted to stabilize a brittle political order, not to absolve. That logic stands only if the clemency framework includes enforceable expectations: no incitement, no intimidation of victims, no deliberate misinformation about lawful political actors, and visible engagement with processes that center truth and repair. Ethiopia’s leaders should be clearer that reconciliation is a process — and that those benefiting from its mercy must demonstrate both respect and restraint.

Allowing a formerly powerful figure to use a public platform to demean survivors or to blur lines between legal parties and designated terrorists undermines that process. It suggests the state values the optics of inclusion over the substance of justice, and that pardons can be leveraged into political capital without consequence.

What accountability should look like now

If reconciliation is to mean more than selective amnesia, Ethiopia needs an approach that protects the rights of all while centering survivors. That requires concrete steps:

• Establish clear, public conditions for clemency recipients that prohibit harassment, intimidation and disinformation about lawful political actors, with proportional, lawful penalties for violations.
• Support an independent, survivor-centered truth process to document abuses in the Somali Region, including August 2018, with protected testimony and publicly accessible findings.
• Expand witness protection and legal aid for survivors and civil society groups facing retaliation or defamation.
• Direct social media and communications protocols for current and former officials to reduce incendiary rhetoric that can endanger individuals or communities.
• Memorialize victims through official recognition and local initiatives — museums, archives, commemorations — so history cannot be minimized or erased.
• Reaffirm the legitimacy of demobilized movements that entered politics in good faith, upholding their right to compete peacefully without stigma.

Justice before unity rhetoric

The impulse to “move on” is understandable in a nation with multiple, overlapping crises. But unity talk that dismisses documented grievances is not reconciliation; it is pressure to forget. Ethiopians do not need lectures about statehood from those whom rights groups accuse of despoiling it. They need institutions that say, and show, that public life no longer belongs to those who treat suffering as an obstacle to personal rehabilitation.

There is a straightforward, defensible line: Former officials with unresolved atrocity records should meet accountability in court or fully and visibly submit to truth processes. Until that occurs, the privilege of setting the terms of public debate — especially when it demeans survivors or imperils lawful rivals — should not be theirs.

The cost of looking away

Permitting Abdi Iley to dominate discourse while disparaging those still seeking redress does more than injure the people of the Somali Region. It teaches a broader lesson: that Ethiopia’s political market rewards audacity over atonement, performance over principle. That lesson will not be lost on the next official contemplating a strongman’s path — or on the next survivor weighing the risk of speaking up.

Reconciliation that defers justice is simply a pause. Reconciliation that protects the dignity and safety of victims while imposing guardrails on those who benefited from clemency is the beginning of a durable peace. Ethiopia must choose the latter — before the country’s most painful memories are compounded by the fresh injury of being told, again, to keep quiet.

By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.