For two weeks university students in Ethiopia’s largest regional state, Oromia, has clashed with anti-riot police as they protest against a government plan to expand the area of Addis Ababa, the country’s capital city, into Oromia.

An Aljazeera report cited activists claims that at least seven people have been killed by police shooting live bullets into crowds of demonstrating students. Oromia police have however placed the number of fatalities at three.

Reports suggest security forces used violence including live ammunition to disperse crowds of peaceful demonstrators in the compounds of universities in the state.

Although protesters are primarily university students, in some instances, high school and primary school children were also reportedly involved in intense confrontations with government forces.

Images of severely injured students have been posted on social media, and hundreds of other protesters have reportedly been rounded up in a crackdown on those demonstrating against several state-led development projects.

The Students are protesting a “Master Plan” by the Ethiopian government to expand Addis into Oromia, displacing farmers mostly from the Oromo ethnic group.

“The Oromo have long been humiliated with their still marginal status in Ethiopia’s power arrangement,” Ethiopian-born university professor in Minnesota, Hassen Hussein, told Aljazeera.

“These almost annual student protests give voice to these long-simmering grievance and perhaps a harbinger of what is to come. The authorities cannot forever count on an aggrieved nation remaining docile.”

This is not the first time the Ethiopian government has evicted members of an ethnic group from their ancestral land or killed people during a student protest over the same issue.

Thousands of ethnic Amharas in western Ethiopia were expelled from the country’s Benishangul Gumuz region in 2013 in what critics termed as “ethnic cleansing”.

At least nine students were killed by government forces in May 2014 while protesting over the same issue. Hundreds of students were arrested and charged under Ethiopia’s sweeping anti-terrorism law, and many remain incarcerated.

There has been limited media coverage of the ongoing protests. There are strong restrictions on the free press in Ethiopia, one of the most censored countries in the world, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.