As reported in August, Tigray has had limited telecom and Internet access for some people in the region at least as far back as early May. Many sources have since confirmed they’ve received regular emails, Whatsapp and Twitter messages from contacts in Tigray for a period of at least the past 10 months.

Now comes evidence from the UN itself that it has been working on providing telecom access for the region for more than a year. And it’s deliberately hiding its efforts.

In a Fact Sheet labeled “Tigray Region of Ethiopia — Conflict,” the Emergency Telecommunications Cluster, under the umbrella of the UN World Food Programme, confirms that it was “activated” more than a year ago to “coordinate and provide critical IT and telecommunications services” ostensibly to “support the humanitarian response to the crisis.”

The Fact Sheet can be traced to the Emergency Telecommunications Cluster’s website, etcluster.org, but it’s hidden from general viewers — and you will search in vain for any visible Fact Sheets on Tigray in its “Operational Updates,” despite a plethora of available Infographics and Situation Reports on Nigeria, Syria, Libya, and other locales.

But according to its own document, the ETC claims it went operational on May 28, 2021, though sources show the region had limited Internet access weeks before this. And of key concern is the fact that the ETC says it has operational and “Security Operation Centres” in Mekelle and Shire, with planned ETC services for Axum, Adigrat, Aby Adi and May Chew. A Security Operation Centre means various scenarios for mobile phone networks, including satellite phone and VHF/UHF networks.

This, despite relentless and false statements from the Director-General of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom and his TPLF allies in international media and within the international system, including the EU’s Joseph Borrell and analysts like Crisis Group’s Will Davison, that Tigray remains “under siege.”

The cluster also has planned ETC services for Dansha, which is not even in Tigray but in Welkait, a region which belonged to Amhara but was forcibly annexed by the TPLF in 1991 and is now under federal protection. The map provided in its document therefore accepts the TPLF’s “Western Tigray narrative” and implies that it would support and work with the insurgency on undermining the territorial integrity of the Ethiopian state.

Given that the Fact Sheet was produced and distributed in June of 2021 and no updates are easily available, it’s difficult to tell how far along the ETC has progressed in providing these services. But critics — and the Ethiopian government — would be within their rights to ask hard questions, especially in light of the pressure the government has come under to repair the very telecom and power infrastructure the TPLF has continuously taken down! For instance:

Why has the U.S., EU and UN itself repeatedly condemned Ethiopia in public for denial of telecom services when a UN cluster has access to the region and is clearly at work on restoring those services?

Why is it hiding the progress of ETC operations from the general public on its website?

How far has the ETC progressed in restoring telecoms? Given that it began its work in May of last year, it is impossible to believe that the ETC would be so incompetent that it hasn’t already restored a substantial portion of services. If so, why is the UN — and Tedros Adhanom in particular — still lying about this?

Given that the WFP has failed to publicly follow up on the TPLF’s blatant theft of more than 570,000 liters of fuel and 12 tanker trucks and the UN refuses to follow up publicly on the assaults and kidnapping of its own staff, as revealed in its own documents, to what extent does the TPLF have access to telecoms intended for “supporting humanitarian efforts?”

Hard questions should be asked as well about how the ETC got into Tigray in the first place. According to its own unfortunately named “UN-Spider” website, the ETC can be activated not only when the “coordination efforts of the international community are strained” but when efforts of the national authority to the crisis do not meet humanitarian standards.”

The implication here seems to be that the UN can decide for itself if a sovereign state is up to the challenge and can move to insert itself. In the case of Ethiopia, this was impossible as the UN needed the authorities’ cooperation to a large extent to gain access, but the wording is disturbing.

Even more cause for potential concern is that “within 48 hours of a disaster, the ETC provides vital security communications services and voice and Internet connectivity to assist the response community in their life-saving operations. These services include: Telephony, Local Broadcaster Support, Establishment of effective two-way Common Feedback Mechanisms, Internet Connectivity, Customer Support, Security Communication Systems, Unmanned Aircraft Systems Coordination.”

If we take the ETC at its word that it was “activated” May 28, 2021 but that it can provide such services within 48 hours of activation, that means that the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) lied to the world in its Flash Update dated July 1 of last year when it claimed, “Throughout Tigray, electricity and mobile networks are cut, and few communications are only possible via satellite phones and VSAT connections in a few agencies’ compounds in Mekelle, Shire and May Tsebri.”

At a minimum, the OCHA is guilty of a lie of omission by not disclosing that ETC was working to restore and provide services. And everyone remembers when a photo circulated online on July 2, 2021 of WFP’s emergency coordinator Tommy Thompson casually standing next to Getachew Reda as he talked on a satellite phone. Thompson quietly disappeared, and weeks later WFP confirmed that he had “moved to another country.”

And given that UN and U.S. authorities have not bothered at all to mention the cluster’s ongoing work to restore and provide “telephony, Internet connectivity,” etc., we ask again: what is the extent of the services restored and provided as of today? How many thousands have such services restored? Or is it merely the TPLF elite, who somehow manage to get their tweets out and communicate to their supporters in the West despite a “siege?”

Proudly listed among the ETC partners as of July 2021 is the U.S. Department of State. In light of Samantha Power’s crusade to “weaponize” American aid initiatives as a foreign policy club for the Biden administration, people should wonder: How much do American interests direct the activation of ETC operations?

The post More Evidence that TPLF’s “Under Siege” Narrative is a lie appeared first on Abren.

A Snapshot of Tigray Under TPLF Rule Over Spring and Summer, According to Confidential UN Documents

Leaked reports marked Confidential from the UN’s Department of Safety and Security offer a picture of the TPLF’s lawless and despotic rule in Tigray over the spring and summer.

For instance, according to the UN’s own documents, the TPLF rounded up several Tigrayans on April 17 ‘who [were] not willing to send their children to join TF [Tigray Forces]. The authorities also [conducted] a house-to-house search after 18:00 hours escorted by TF members. It was also reported that TF members who deserted from TF without permission were forced for recruitment.”

And only the day before, April 16, at about 4:30 in the afternoon, “a UN staff member was arrested…in Mekelle city. The staff member was reportedly released on 17 April.” Which means that UN worker was clearly imprisoned for at least a whole evening.

What’s interesting is that while these events were going on in April, Professor Ann Fitz-Gerald of the Balsillie School of International Affairs of Canada was busy interviewing scores of Tigrayans at two IDP camps in Amhara and Afar region who told horror stories of forced recruitment, child soldiers, brutal detentions and attempts to create fake atrocity videos. Fitz-Gerald was vilified online by TPLF apologists, and Tom Gardner, The Economist’s correspondent at the time, wrote an intimidating letter to a Balsillie official, claiming her work was “far below acceptable academic standards.”

When he was exposed, Ethiopian authorities kicked Gardner out, and he then claimed he was the target of a campaign of online harassment. Well, since I’m the one who outed his antics by writing an open letter to The Economist, I don’t think I qualify as a “campaign.”

As for Fitz-Gerald’s findings, they were later confirmed by a Reuters report which didn’t even bother to acknowledge her work and relied on a far fewer number of Tigrayan interview subjects.

Now, once again, the UN is confirming what the professor told us at the end of April.

And as you may recall, leaked documents last year proved that the UN ignored and covered up incidents in which their own Ethiopian staff were kidnapped and assaulted, as well as instances where they knew the TPLF was using forced recruitment, along with cases of looting.

According to these new leaked documents, on April 24, a UN staff member was attacked and robbed by three men near the Gebar Shire hotel in Shire. One suspect “hung the staff member’s neck from behind [sic] and the other two suspects took some amount of ETB and important documents. Police have reportedly arrested two suspects, and they were under police investigation. No further details known.”

Well, why not? The report poses more questions than it answers. What were these important documents? Were they retrieved? And again, why is the UN not going public when a member of staff is violently attacked in the street and vital papers are stolen?

The Department of Safety and Security also knows that at about 2 in the morning on July 17, the house of a UN staff member in Shire town was burglarized. While the “staff member and his family members were unharmed in the incident,” several items were taken, including his “official laptop.”

Yes, crime happens in cities around the world, but such attacks can be interpreted as another sign of social breakdown in a region where terrorists are in charge — those who set the tone by forcing Tigrayans to give up family members to fight and keeping food reserves for the elite.

The WFP’s David Beasley earned a lot of attention this week by venting his rage at the TPLF fuel heist, and it’s been condemned by not only the UN but the U.S. Bureau of African Affairs and the head of USAID Samantha Power. Now Ethiopians hold their breath and wait to see if the U.S. and its EU/UN partners will finally, finally part company with a terrorist group.

But why, we might all ask, didn’t the UN go public earlier with the crimes their staff witnessed?

Why does it take leaked documents to prove how much the UN knows about what the TPLF are doing to Tigrayans in the region?

The post Land of the Lawless appeared first on Abren.

Tedros Adhanom must feel pretty untouchable these days. From his infamous “Pride” tweet last June to his shameless abandonment of impartiality for his office by making public comments on the Tigray conflict, it’s been painfully clear for a while whose side he’s on.

And when Ethiopia acted within its rights and complained, the chair of the WHO cut off its envoy’s speech and moved in record time to block an investigation request.

The West, of course, has been happy to keep backing Tedros and throw Ethiopia under the bus for its own foreign policies.

And yet the evidence has been out in the open all this time that Tedros will even sacrifice the safety of the world in terms of pandemics for the political agenda of the TPLF.

Let’s wind the clock back. Back when the TPLF were running Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi was keen to encourage closer ties with China, and things got so cozy that according to one scholarly journal article, by 2005, “China’s embassy in Addis Ababa hosted more high-level visits than any Western mission and Chinese companies had become a dominant force building highways and bridges, dams and power stations, cell phone networks, schools, and pharmaceutical factories. Ethiopia’s trade minister said that ‘China has become our most reliable partner.’”

Now let’s jump to the start of 2020. Tedros, the director-general of the World Health Organization, rushed to defend China even as 151 cases of Covid and one death were confirmed in 23 other countries. Nope, as far as Tedros was concerned, other countries shouldn’t close their borders to Beijing.

By February of 2020, the WHO’s responses to China under Tedros were so bizarrely inappropriate that even a major mainstream Western media outlet questioned what the hell was going on.

“Even as evidence mounted that Chinese officials had silenced whistleblowers and undercounted cases,” wrote Emily Rauhala, “Tedros took a moment to extol the leadership of Chinese President Xi Jinping.”

As Rauhala pointed out, in the aftermath of the SARS epidemic of 2002–2004, “updated rules required the WHO to report emerging diseases and gave it broader power to investigate threats using nonstate sources of information such as civil society groups. One of the goals: preventing coverups.”

But instead of acting within the world’s best interests, Tedros was content to celebrate China’s handling of Covid and give them a pass.

In fact, the WHO refused to even declare a pandemic until March 11, 2020 — after Covid had spread to 114 countries.

It was around this time that Tedros and his allies in the WHO began to sing a completely different tune over China.

Why? What changed?

The Tigray situation changed. Militarily, the TPLF were getting their asses kicked with only isolated fighting incidents reported and Mekelle occupied. Only a week before the WHO finally declared a pandemic, the UN Security Council met over Tigray, but Russia and China put up road blocks over a drafted joint statement.

Suddenly, China was no longer Tedros’s bosom buddy. Months after praising China’s handling of Covid, Tedros chose to give a public tongue-lashing over lack of access for the WHO’s investigative team in Wuhan. And once again — because most of the mainstream media suffers from goldfish memory — it was left to the Washington Post’s Emily Rauhala, who knows China well, to notice something was seriously off.

She wrote that Tedros made “the most pointed comments to date from an agency that has been solicitous toward China through most of the pandemic.” She also noted that the WHO’s report “appears to take assurances from staff members at the [Wuhan] lab at face value.”

Even Geoffrey York — who has since evolved into the TPLF’s best Canadian propagandist at the Globe and Mail — saw fit to write a critical if lazy profile of Tedros a month later. York, the Globe’s Africa Bureau Chief, didn’t notice either what’s been staring all of us in the face for months.

Tedros was playing a game of “proportional response.” You won’t support the TPLF publicly, okay, we’ll rap your knuckles publicly.

For those who want to jeer and say, “conspiracy theory,” again, this is a guy who has made his sympathies for the TPLF public and for all to see while holding one of the most important jobs at the United Nations.

And how many millions died because this man put the political and military goals of his cronies ahead of global health concerns? How many could have been saved had he done his job properly instead of acted out of self-interest?

Something else to consider: the strategic leadership of the World Health Organization essentially supports the use of child soldiers. Think about that for a moment.

None of this is yesterday’s news. It’s still of vital concern to many medical professionals in different countries. In an open letter dated January 25 to the WHO’s board of executive officers and the director-general for Kenya’s Ministry of Health, a collection of academic and medical associations called for the removal of Tedros.

“Dr. Tedros’s partisan press releases, his media interviews, and social media posts all go against the regulations of the WHO and constitute a violation of the WHO’s ethics guidelines,” reads the letter in part. “His social media posts, for example, are so blatantly one-sided that the line between his private view and WHO’s position is blurred. A cursory look at his official Twitter account reveals the extent to which he would go to highlight the harm and destruction in Tigray region while completely ignoring the destruction in the Afar and Amhara regions. He has abused his position as head of WHO to advance a political agenda.”

While the signatures of various Ethiopian medical groups might be deemed biased, not all the signatories can be so easily dismissed — they include the South African Medical Association and the Lesotho Medical Association.

Aside from the fact that Tedros has no medical degree yet runs the WHO, virologist Tilahun Yilma — who does have impeccable credentials as a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of California — told Daniel Belayneh on Arts TV’s Horn of Africa Digest, “To me, he’s totally unfit. Ethically, professionally and competency-wise as well.”

Alan Whiteside, an expert in global health policy, argued on the same program, “The problem is that Tedros is an authoritarian politician and a bureaucrat. He wasn’t great in the non-pandemic period of leading the WHO, and I’m afraid he’s terrible with regards to Covid.”

Whiteside pointed out that Tedros has kept his focus on Tigray while he might have shown interest in other conflicts such as the political situation in Myanmar or the rising tensions in Ukraine.

But he hasn’t. And he won’t. Because for Tedros, only one part of the world matters.

None of this — the blatant partisanship, the incompetence, the lack of transparency — has made a dent on the thinking of the WHO’s own board, and as Al Jazeera put it, “nearly all of the board’s 34 members, representing countries from around the world, threw their weight behind him.”

If only they knew Tedros the way Ethiopians do…

Ethiopia’s Mengele

Anyone looking hard into Tedros’ record as a former Minister of Health for Ethiopia and as a public health official will encounter a chamber of horrors. Not that he ever did gruesome experiments like Josef Mengele, but he was a high-ranking member of the TPLF, an organization that gets about as close as you can think of to an African version of Nazis — those who declared Amhara as their enemy right in their founding manifesto and who ludicrously believe (like Nazis) that their ethnicity created a bunch of supermen who inspired other cultures. And there are enough scandals in his past that yes, Tedros can justifiably be called Ethiopia’s Mengele.

The really scary thing is that critics tried to warn the world back in 2017. Here are just a few highlights:

Accusations persist — with zero effort by Western media or political bodies to investigate — that on Tedros’s watch, scores of Amhara women and girls were given injected contraceptives and sterilization without their knowledge, let alone informed consent. In fact, the decline in the Amhara population for those years — with millions disappearing from census rolls — is one of the worst kept secrets in Ethiopia. At the same time, while Tigray excelled in getting quality neonatal care, the Amhara region led in perinatal, neonatal, infant and toddler mortality rates over a course of 16 years.

It’s virtually impossible for all of that to medically happen except through design.

As for Tedros, no one in the West, it seems, ever heeded the call that this incompetent and corrupt official should not be handed so vital a position as director general of the World Health Organization.

They might have examined how he served as chair of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria from 2009 to 2011. According to an audit report by the fund’s Office of the Inspector General, Tedros and his pals misused more than $7 million, and it would have liked very much please to get its money back. If we translate the polite language of the report, the auditors found lousy accounting, slipshod budgeting and monitoring, and barely anyone keeping track of where the money went.

Just as money could suddenly disappear, Tedros could make entire diseases disappear. In 2006 while he was in charge, the federal Ministry of Health preferred to call cholera “Acute Watery Diarrhea” when it hit the Amhara region and killed about 200 people. The next year, Tedros’s health ministry refused to declare a state of emergency despite the UN warning there was a cholera epidemic, which had already taken more than 680 lives. In 2009, the death toll was even higher from cholera at more than 700 people in five regions.

Failing to respond properly to epidemics. Doing the politically convenient thing instead of the medically urgent thing… Cholera… Covid. Notice a pattern?

And yet Tedros is still backed as the guy who should be minding global health under the UN’s mandate.

It’s no accident either that the creepy rag run by the Fungus on Ethiopian Current Affairs, William Davison — who’s made little effort to disguise his conflict of interest as a senior analyst for Crisis Group while playing publisher, and while supporting the “Tigray genocide” narrative — ran a less than convincing defense of Tedros when the criticisms intensified in the summer of 2020.

We haven’t even discussed Tedros’s tenure as Minister of Foreign Affairs, serving a regime that placed centers for torturing political dissidents right in the heart of Ethiopia’s capital.

But his career in public health is frightening enough.

Tedros is not a doctor. Yet surely one of the Hippocratic maxims — “Do No Harm” — must be a guideline for the crucial job of leading the WHO.

The harm that Tedros continues to inflict not only on Ethiopia but on an unsuspecting world needs to stop, while Tedros himself should move from his office in Geneva to a jail cell outside Addis Ababa.

The post Wolf in the Fold: How the WHO’s Director Will Even Betray the World’s Health for the TPLF appeared first on Abren.