Martin Adler Prize – Finalist
Zecharias Zelalem
Based in: Ethiopia/Canada
“Since its breakout in August 2023, Ethiopia’s ongoing conflict in its northern Amhara region has been woefully underreported. What began as skirmishes and clashes in April 2023, became all out war four months later.
I feel my work has contributed to a growing awareness of the humanitarian crisis and human suffering in Ethiopia’s Amhara region.
Reporting on the conflict has been extremely difficult. There have been deadly drone strikes, large scale massacres of civilians and efforts by the Ethiopian government to block all coverage of the war, including shutting down communications to much of the war torn region, denying access to it for journalists and aid workers, and mass arrests of local journalists on the ground.
With over 200 journalists arrested in Ethiopia since 2019, we are increasingly forced to cover the country’s numerous wars from abroad. As such, I’ve been able to extensively document human rights abuses including torture, mass killings, drone massacres to state a few. My work over the past ten months has been cited widely by human rights organisations, policy makers, activists, and media organizations. I do this while working as a freelancer for major international media outlets, on a shoestring budget, and while accomodating death threats and harassment on social media, which has become the norm for me since 2020. As a result of my work, I remain defacto exiled and unable to visit family and friends back home, a minor inconvenience when compared to the endless death and bloodshed on the ground.
I continue to cover the conflict in Amhara. It remains underreported and inaccessible.”
See some of Zecharias’ work:
“Zecharias works hard against a backdrop of despair in the Amhara region of Ethiopia, highlighting a conflict that is underreported and rarely touched on in the international press. He uses open source intelligence and in-depth research for his stories, fighting a constant battle to share the conflict and the atrocities occurring in the wider world.”
Martin Adler Prize Jury
Bio
Zecharias Zelalem is an Ethiopian-Canadian freelance journalist with a focus on migration and human rights in the Horn of Africa. He previously worked as a staffer with the Ethiopia based Addis Standard news magazine. From 2020, he has freelanced for the likes of Al Jazeera, The Globe and Mail, The Continent and other outlets.
He spent the 2020-2022 period documenting the atrocities of Ethiopia’s brutal war on its Tigray region, which left half a million dead. Rendered persona non grata in Ethiopia, where over 200 journalists have been detained since 2019, he has since worked remotely from Canada using open-source intelligence and sources on the ground to document massacres, ethnic cleansing, man-made famine and other atrocities which garnered him death threats and endless online harassment from government officials and supporters alike. His coverage of the Tigray war earned him finalist nominations at the Amnesty International Media Awards in 2021 and the British Journalism Awards in 2022.
His coverage of the suffering of Ethiopian migrants in Saudi Arabia detention centers for The Daily Telegraph, was among the winners at the 2021 Fetisov Journalism Awards in the Investigative journalism category. The series resulted in an EU parliament resolution condemning Saudi abuses of migrants, and an agreement by Saudi Arabia to repatriate 1000 detained suffering migrants each week from its prisons, resulting in some 30,000 Ethiopians returning home by July 2021. Later that year, a long-form investigation on disappeared migrant domestic workers in Lebanon earned him a finalist citation at the 2021 ILO Global Media Awards.