PLEASE be careful speaking Tigrinya in public in Addis right now
I just spent a whole night in fucking custody for no reason.
Disclaimer I'm not even from Tigray, I was born in Eritrea and I'm Eritrean by origin, and have never been to Tigray. on Saturday night, I was out with my friends on the outside chairs of a coffee shop and we were talking to each other (in Tigrinya), and there were three police officers staring at us a few meters away, then they suddenly walked up to us and started harassing us demanding our identification, then told us we were being detained. We asked for what reason and they said that because we were in a group it was 'suspicious activity'. I spent the night in custody and they interrogated me non-stop, searched my entire clothes, phone, wallet, even opened up my fucking shoes to see if I was hiding shit in there, asked me if I was with Shabia/Tibibir (I haven't been back to Eritrea in over 2 decades), and the next day I couldn't stay longer as I could risk losing my job, I paid them 10,000 birr and they let me go but not until they investigated me again for another 5 hours.
I'm not the only one that this happened to, I even had to pay to bail out my cousin last week who they arrested for the same stupid reason, this reminds me when they were mass arresting Tigrayans here during the war, it's fucking ludicrous, the government has an intelligence system, I understand there's a war going on but they can't be that paranoid to just mass arrest people they see on the streets for no reason. Complete bullshit, fuck this government.
Is this a sign of discrimination? Or the government is using police corruption to build up their funds for this stupid war?
