This is an excerpt from the latest extended version of “Getting Ethiopia Dead Wrong” a book by veteran Horn of Africa correspondent Rasmus Sonderris

A quick Google search finds that “Meaza Mohammed is an Ethiopian journalist and human rights activist”. Countless newspaper articles depict her as an advocate for raped women. International organizations dedicated to press freedom portray her as persecuted for speaking truth to power. The website of the US State Department, no less, pays homage to her in this manner:

This honorable mention is because the State Department bestowed upon her the International Women of Courage Award on March 8, 2023, at a ceremony with First Lady Jill Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Following up on this event, a Voice of America video opens with the words: “Meaza Mohamed was arrested three times within the span of one year, all for doing her job.”

Meaza Mohammed is not only the founder, but also the chief editor and voiceover woman of Roha TV, one of the more successful of a plethora of ethnic-based Youtube channels produced by Ethiopians in the West. These can be watched freely in Ethiopia too (although until July 2023, a VPN was required). Most of the worldwide sympathy with Meaza Mohammed predates the Fano insurgency in the Amhara Region, which broke out in April 2023, but she was known in Ethiopia as an ethnonationalist firebrand before that. Certainly, Roha TV today is wholly dedicated to propagandizing for Fano, which is, as of 2024, just like the TPLF was until late 2022, an irregular army with the ambition of toppling the elected federal government. However, in this case, the first obstacle on its warpath is the local Amhara regional government, which also has a democratic mandate dating from 2021. We shall return to how Fano both resembles and differs from the two other major ethnonationalist militias in Ethiopia, the TPLF and OLA.

Roha TV serves up a fare of ethnicity-obsessed hate-, fear- and war-mongering. One claim is that the capital Addis Ababa, whose population is majority Amhara, is now in the hands of Oromo extremists who hate all things Amhara.

Roha TV is not all doom, however, as a triumphalist tone is important for recruitment. Just like the TPLF’s propagandists, Fano’s Meaza Mohammed plays a tune about human rights in English, but beats the drums of war in her own language. For instance, at the Amhara Grand Convention, held by the Confederation of Amharas in North America in Atlanta, USA, on March 9-10, 2024, she delivered a fiery speech in Amharic.^[4] Dressed in a T-shirt with three raised fists in the Ethiopian colors, she denounced the realists within the movement who seek a negotiated settlement: “We’re not talking about politics, in which we engage in compromise,”^[5] she thundered, and ended on this note: “We’re saying that if we don’t achieve victory, the outcome will be our destruction as a people. If this does not bother you, those of us who do care will struggle and we will win, and you better get out of our way!”^[6]

The last part is a thinly veiled threat to fellow Amharas who disagree with her. Many of them have been killed. Apart from attacks on federal soldiers and officers, basically anyone in constitutional authority in the Amhara Region, such as mayors, policemen, journalists for government media, and elected members of the regional parliament live with the risk of assassination. In some cases, bounties have been placed on their heads on social media.

In May 2024, I travelled to Bahir Dar, the beautiful capital of Amhara Region by the shores of Lake Tana. Despite a curfew in force after 8pm, life goes on. Amhara Region is suffering an insurgency, but not, as Tigray during the war with the TPLF, an all-encompassing insurgency regime. Banks and businesses continue to function. The mobile-phone network is up, but not for data. Those who can afford a coffee at a major hotel can get a wifi password for internet access. In general, the mood is depressed. People complain of disinvestment, economic sabotage, absence of tourists and rich people fleeing the city: “If they don’t pay Fano, Fano kills them, and if they do pay, the government arrests them,” the locals explained to me. In the parts of the countryside where Fano is in control, either schools have been closed or parents are afraid of sending their children.

There are no two ways about it. Meaza Mohammed campaigns and raises funds for Ethiopians killing Ethiopians, and particularly for Amharas killing Amharas. Of course, she and her backers genuinely believe that this is for a noble cause. To convince themselves and others that Fano’s killings are just, rather than extremist, they play up how the State Department as well as do-gooders around the world celebrate Meaza Mohammed as a champion of human rights. The international community’s failure to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate violence is depressingly déjà vu from the war with the TPLF.

“Getting Ethiopia Dead Wrong” is now available on Amazon Kindle, paperback, or hardcover

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Even in the event of peace, Ethiopia is not going to achieve a democratic political culture overnight. It may even get worse before it gets better. However, it is wrong and reckless to conclude that violence is now a last resort. During the darkest years of the TPLF/EPRDF, when armed resistance was in every way legitimate, I personally disagreed with that path, not out of pacifism, but from a strategic perspective. Because violence begets violence. Conversely, making the most of a small democratic space can expand democracy. There are plenty of political parties in Ethiopia that have taken this path. Some examples are the National Movement of Amhara (NaMA), Ethiopian Citizens for Social Justice, EZEMA, the Oromo Federalist Congress (OFC), the Enat Party, and the Tigray Democratic Party (TDP). Some of them complain of all manners of harassment. In the name of national unity, others have joined the government and been awarded with places in the cabinet, but they too will be running against the ruling Prosperity Party in the next election in 2026.

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has often promised a peaceful transition of power, if he loses at the polls. It is admittedly hard to find Ethiopians who envisage that, if push comes to shove, he and the powerful people around him will just admit defeat and gracefully swap places with the opposition. But this needs to be tested rather than dismissed out of hand in a call to arms by actors whose democratic credentials are actually more dubious than the government’s.

Many have accused me of “shilling for the regime”, even of being a paid mouthpiece and what not. Of course, I would never take money from a party to a conflict that I am covering as an independent. Apart from giving interviews to Ethiopian state media, I have never even met anyone from the Ethiopian government, which has committed and will undoubtedly continue to commit acts that I disagree with, even condemn. Most international classifications use the term “hybrid regime” about the current system, that is, a mix of authoritarianism and democracy. This is probably fair.

But it is the legitimate government. It may sometimes commit illegitimate acts, but none of the armed alternatives today has a shred of legitimacy, let alone any prospect of making things better. Even if the government sometimes categorizes fair criticism as “incitement” and misuses the judiciary as in the bad old days, constructive opposition is the only way to go. Ethiopians demand solutions to everyday problems like long lines for public transport, bribe-demanding traffic police, power cuts, red tape, pollution, unaffordable healthcare, homelessness, low-quality schools, etc. Fundamentally, ethnic rivalry is not the root cause of war, but ethnic rivalry is an effective mobilizer for war. Unresolved bread-and-butter problems can make people vote for the opposition, but do not usually make them pick up a gun. If the most urgent issue of security gets under control, peaceful political competition should be able to focus on the second- most urgent issues, like growing the economy and fighting corruption. Conversely, if security continues to be the overriding concern, democracy, human rights and even good governance will look increasingly like unaffordable luxuries.

When I first got involved in opining on war in Ethiopia around November 2021, I set myself the goal of getting through it without regret. Notwithstanding some quick- tempered tweets,390 the only thing I would change, if I could go back, would be the headline of my speech for the Danish Society of Engineers in March 2022, in which I characterized Ethiopia as “a fellow democracy”. This was overselling a point in the heat of the propaganda battles. Building an Ethiopian democracy, let alone a democratic culture, remains a daunting project with no guarantee of completion. As we have seen, it backslides under pressure and polarization. Tensions lurk and can erupt into the next big war, in which the security state takes over and rolls back the reforms.

And yet, there is hope. The vast majority of Ethiopians both preach and practice multiethnic cooperation. Although ethnically-exclusive rebel outfits brandishing genocide hashtags still have too much manpower and firepower, their popularity seems to be in decline.

Meanwhile, outside of Ethiopia, despite the endurance of a narrative about a “Tigray genocide”, the Pretoria Peace Agreement has become unanimously endorsed. The TPLF has not been properly disarmed or stopped being a threat, but nearly everyone agrees that it should. The TPLF is unlikely to get much international support for another round of aggression under the cover of resisting a genocide. A retired Western diplomat told me that one lesson had been learned after all: “We should have listened less to the media and more to the African Union.” Indeed, and the African Union issticking firmly to the Pretoria Agreement.

However, there has been no reckoning over the tragic cost of achieving the Pretoria Agreement. Those who got Ethiopia dead wrong are not wondering aloud why the TPLF sent young Tigrayans to kill and die for peace terms that could have been easily obtained without firing a shot. Having learned so little, the world is perfectly capable of getting Ethiopia and other countries dead wrong yet again.

With this in mind, the final word goes to Dr. Steven Were Omamo, the results-oriented humanitarian sabotaged by self-serving, glory-seeking cowboy humanitarians during the war ‘At the Centre of the World in Ethiopia’:

“I also lament how the politics of major powers was allowed to infiltrate and corrupt a fragile but promising science-based process, destroying hard-earned credibility, along with the trust that went with that. Nobody has admitted that ‘the people are dying of hunger in Tigray’ narrative was total fabrication. There were no consequences. There are never any consequences as the ‘international community’ recycles itself from crisis to crisis. Incompetent and unethical people who lie, distort, and mess up can just walk away and do the same thing somewhere else. To me, that is annoying. For the world, it should be unacceptable.”

“Getting Ethiopia Dead Wrong” is now available on Amazon Kindle, paperback, or hardcover

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On November 3, around one thousand senior Ethiopian commanders stationed in Tigray went for a dinner party with regional government officials. The invitation, however, was a ruse to take them prisoner.

That same night, while the world was focused on vote-counting in the US presidential election, a total of five federal military bases in Tigray came under fire. Defenders were killed or captured, though those in the Sero Base, near the border with Eritrea, held out for a grueling ten days. Tigrayan soldiers turned on their comrades of other ethnicities, many of whom had lived in Tigray for decades, working alongside the local communities. Reports about soldiers killed in their pyjamas and arbitrary cruelty shocked the Ethiopian public.

Thankfully, Michael Pompeo, Secretary of State under the outgoing Trump administration, condemned it immediately.

Wisely, Secretary Pompeo left it open to interpretation how to “de-escalate tensions”, but surely “immediate action to restore the peace” meant arresting those responsible for such a ferocious assault on the constitutional order.

For the first year or so, the world press downplayed or omitted this manifest casus bellialtogether, even in longreads on the war, which focused obsessively on the prime minister’s personality and on how the Nobel Peace Prize had gone to his head.

The Economist, for instance, as late as October 2021, while TPLF troops were marching on Addis Ababa, published a shockingly defamatory and inflammatory leader, to which we shall return in Part 3, attributing the cause of the conflict to an “increasingly paranoid and erratic” Abiy Ahmed deciding to attack the regional government of Tigray, “which he accused of rebellion”. This shallow phrasing amounts to speculating that the attack on the Northern Command was made up.

In fact, only ten days into the war, the high-ranking TPLF leader, Sekoture Getachew, speaking on Tigrayan television, confirmed that an elaborate plan had been executed, using soldiers from inside and outside the bases, with the aim of taking over the firepower of the Ethiopian army. Some two weeks later, this was admitted by Getachew Reda, with the excuse that “whatever we did, we did in self-defense”. In January 2021, Kjetil Tronvoll mentioned it in an article, as did, in March 2021, the diehard pro-TPLF magazine Tghat, albeit portraying it as a preemptive strike justifiedby an enemy plan to commit genocide. Accordingly, the world press eventually began to incorporate this event into its timeline.

From the first day of the war, Declan Walsh and co-author Simon Marks, writing in The New York Times, put the war down to the notion that “Mr. Abiy presented a radically different face”, from his Nobel-Peace-Prize face that was. They studiously ignored the crucial dispute over the control of the army, except for stating that “Mr. Abiy said his hand had been forced by Tigrayan leaders who brazenly defied his authority”. Of course, there is no quotation mark around the prime minister saying: they brazenly defied my authority. But this is how The New York Times interprets his denunciation of the attack on the Northern Command, which it does not even bother to mention. What the New York Times would take for granted at home in the US, namely state monopoly on violence under democratic rule of law, is reduced for Ethiopia to the big man exercising “his authority”.

Eleven days into the war, Mr. Walsh and Mr. Marks did report “a purported Tigrayan attack on an Ethiopian army base in Tigray early this month”. This is when Kjetil Tronvoll is introduced in the New York Times as a “a scholar of Ethiopian politics”. Conversations with him might have colored Mr. Walsh’s views, as he continued to overlook not only the foregoing two and a half years of political developments as the source of the tension, but also the attack on the Northern Command as the point of no return. The New York Times explanation would continue to focus on the “messianic” prime minister, who had “plunged Ethiopia into a war”. Finally, by December 2021, Declan Walsh must have felt challenged, as the attack on the five federal bases had become acknowledged as fact and was getting more mention in the media. This accounts for the timing of the “new evidence” that the prime minister “had been planning a military campaign in the northern Tigray region for months before the war (…)”. Mr. Walsh was rationalizing his early choice of virtually ignoring the attack on the Northern Command.

That this is how the war began is no longer controversial. Yet even as of 2023, The Guardian’s official view frames it as a mere accusation: “Fighting broke out in November 2020 when Ethiopia’s prime minister Abiy Ahmed deployed the army to arrest Tigrayan leaders who had been challenging his authority for months and whom he accused of attacking federal military bases.”

Once again, legitimacy to rule Ethiopia is reduced to the big man exercising “his authority”. And “challenging his authority” is a hell of a euphemism for raiding national armories and usurping the command of the national army.

“Getting Ethiopia Dead Wrong” is now available on Amazon Kindle, paperback, or hardcover

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In the opening lines of “The Abiy Project: God, Power and War in the New Ethiopia”, author Tom Gardner recounts his struggle to obtain close-up testimonies about the Ethiopian prime minister since 2018, Abiy Ahmed, whose eccentric personality is presented as “an enigma” and as key to understanding, in particular, the so-called Tigray War, which raged in the northern half of the country from November 2020 to November 2022. Some such precious first-hand sources had initially agreed to meet, but cancelled on second thoughts. “Even those living far away in safe countries in the West were often too afraid to speak with me”, we learn. Since the book casts Abiy Ahmed in the mould of the megalomaniac African despot, it fits the bill that fear would be at play. Why else would anyone not wish to help out the East Africa correspondent of the respectable highbrow weekly, The Economist?

Well, Tom Gardner ought to know. “I was a war reporter, then I became the enemy”, ran the headline of his article in late June 2022. It chronicles how Ethiopians railed against him online, culminating with his deportation in May 2022. However, it is beneath him to engage with the view that he did something wrong. He picks out the crudest insults and assumes that it was government-directed, since Ethiopia had learned “disturbing lessons from China and other authoritarian states” in order to “become a modern, digital autocracy”. His new book sticks to this script, in which he incarnates the well-intentioned free-speech pro from the civilized world amidst the murderous passions of an African tribal war.

This might have resonated with me too, as a decades-long subscriber to The Economist and to its pro-Western worldview. It is certainly a framing that will raise no eyebrows from Tom Gardner’s editors or mainstream audience, some of whom will give “The Abiy Project” rave reviews. However, since I happen to be familiar with Ethiopian affairs, having lived in the country, immersed myself into its society and reported on it since 2004, what I take away from the work of Tom Gardner is a moral-superiority complex that manifests itself as embarrassingly lazy journalism and, most of all, as vile slander of the second-most populous African nation. But before we get into that, a little context is necessary.

The Trump and the Biden framing of the war

Although the full background to any civil war is complex, in this case, as the first shots are being fired in Ethiopia, simultaneously with vote-counting in the US presidential election on the night between 3 and 4 November 2020, it is straightforward to identify the two main warring parties. One is the internationally recognized government with a short but remarkably liberalizing record, yes, even with a Nobel Peace Prize awarded to its leader, Abiy Ahmed. Its multiethnic armed forces have suffered a surprise attack by the other side, an ethnically-exclusive militia commanded by some of the most powerful people in the country, that is, until two-and-a-half years earlier, when they were kicked out of office thanks to decades of popular protests and painful sacrifices. At this stage, in late 2020, the dictatorial old guard has held on to some of its grip on the military and, as we shall soon learn, has considerable resources abroad, as well as friends in high places like Brussels, Washington DC, and the UN system.

The outgoing Trump administration makes the obvious distinction between legitimate and illegitimate use of force, supporting the constitutional government against the rulers-turned-rebels. Tom Gardner complains (in Chapter 15) that this greenlights Abiy Ahmed’s war effort. He is more in tune with the incoming Biden Administration, whose Africa policy-makers view it more as a case of a third-world strongman with a short fuse who whips the masses into a frenzy. Tom Gardner feels vindicated in this interpretation of the conflict, when he himself ends up as a victim of incitement to hate.

However, when he speculates breezily (in Chapter 17), apropos no particular incident or witness account, that Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers got together to gang-rape women of the Tigrayan ethnicity for the purposes of “male bonding”, he is the one who incites hate. We shall come back to what else Tom Gardner has to say about sexual assault in the Tigray War, the evidence presented for it, and even how Ethiopians feel about it, because, as we also see in the Israel-Hamas conflict, this issue packs an explosive punch in the propaganda battles.

Full disclosure and a sales pitch: I have just written my own book, “Getting Ethiopia Dead Wrong”, whose pantheon of villains features Tom Gardner, winner of the pot-calling-kettle-black award for complaining that ordinary Ethiopians on social media, and not himself in big media, poured fuel on the fire. In those 71,000 words, I tackle every hair-raising accusation, from weaponized rape and starvation to hate speech and genocide. Nothing must be swept under the rug. But, we must never forget, the fine line between championing human rights and inciting hate is the truth, which is the proverbial first casualty of war.

Diverging from the single story about Africa

Now, there is no doubt that the war often became dirty. But so did the propaganda war. In a nutshell, young people from the northern region of Tigray were not minded to fight for the corrupt, cruel and discredited leaders of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) to return to power. But the constant messaging from the world press, amplified by a handful of TPLF-friendly individuals in academia, diplomacy, politics and humanitarian work, and of course pushed relentlessly by the TPLF itself, was that this was essentially an ethnic extermination war. Therefore, the usual legitimacy criteria did not apply. The only choice of Tigrayans was to kill or get killed. As we shall see, Tom Gardner did his part in this fear-, hate- and war-mongering campaign. It was so successful that, when the federal army and its allies finally prevailed in October 2022, having pushed the TPLF rebels all the way from near-victory in the capital to the brink of defeat in their stronghold in Tigray, the world had been primed for the killing of all six million or so Tigrayans in Tigray. As a natural authority on this subject, the US Holocaust Museum put the world on acute genocide alert. The most sought-after Ethiopia pundit, the professor and BBC man, Alex de Waal, who was never coy about his closeness to the TPLF hierarchy, wrote: “The Tigrayans have every motive to fight to the death”.

And then, thank God, they preferred to live! As Ethiopians and friends of Ethiopia had insisted throughout, asserting state monopoly on violence was the path, not to genocide, but to peace. This is what made the TPLF agree to disarm and demobilize, as enshrined in the agreement signed in Pretoria, South Africa, on 2 November, 2022. Implementation has not been smooth, and the TPLF is currently riven with internal divisions on issues of compliance, but for the international community, the Pretoria Agreement is the only game in town. After two years of preaching that “there is no military solution” and mulling punitive measures against Ethiopia, diplomats of liberal democracies have gone through some soul-searching, judging from their keenness to resume aid, trade and good relations with this strategically important partner. The massively traded hashtag #TigrayGenocide has lost its value. Hopefully, outsiders will now be warier of buying into a couple of other Ethiopian genocide hashtags, which are being pushed online, also to dress up the violent pursuit of power as noble human-rights causes, and also with quite a few Western takers, from left to right.

Alas, in “The Abiy Project”, Tom Gardner does not reflect on how peace came about in the very manner that he never considered viable or desirable. He steers strictly clear of the goldmine of lessons to be learned, namely the substance behind the anger that got him expelled from Ethiopia. The Tom Gardner project is to claim the high ground by conforming strictly to the genre of the single story about Africa, which the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has warned against. And in his miscasting of heroes and villains, he stoops low, very low. He even plays the victim by throwing the race card.

White demons and a bloodbath situation

“White demons” should “leave the country”, billboards greeted Tom Gardner in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa in September 2021, or so he writes in Chapter 18, with a footnote berating the government for not censoring this “for several months”.

I was there too for the natives to picture horns atop my cold blue eyes, but I was not pressured to leave, only to listen some frustrated people out. I noticed on television that Tom Gardner’s questions were still answered politely at official press conferences in October 2021, by which time The Economist was demanding an arms embargo and other sanctions against Ethiopia with the caption: “No favours for killers”. Yes, “killers” referred to the government, not to the TPLF, whose  irregular army was, at that time, marching towards the centre of power, sowing death and destruction in the regions of Amhara and Afar, while its triumphalist spokesman, known for a brutal crackdown seven years earlier, when he was the national Minister of Communication, tweeted out threats full of military bravado. So, yes, the city was slightly on edge. Yet Tom Gardner continued to be tolerated into November, when he also engaged with me in a private email correspondence. Oh yeah, it was almost like we could have been buddies, despite our strong disagreement. He rejected my suggestion that liberal democrats like us should support the elected government. He argued that outsiders should rather put pressure on the beleaguered Abiy Ahmed to enter into “negotiations to work out a new configuration of power”.

For the vast majority of Ethiopians, negotiating from that position of weakness was out of the question. And by then, the TPLF and some Westerners, admittedly not Tom Gardner, wanted all-out regime change. The journalistic cliché that month, still November 2021, became “a matter of weeks, if not days”. Western embassies evacuated their staff, and Jeffrey Feltman, the US Special Envoy, candidly called the capital falling to the dreaded enemy “a bloodbath situation”. Back then, the tone of Alex de Waal, the aforementioned superstar pundit, was not yet sombre and bitter. He waxed lyrical with a Rudyard Kipling poem, assuring again and again that the TPLF had already defeated Abiy Ahmed, rubbing it into the face of the vanquished: “Face your day of reckoning.”

Volunteers from all ethnic groups responded to Abiy Ahmed’s call for mobilization. Nobody cared that Facebook censored him for “incitement”. Or that the Western powers condemned both the attack on and the defence of Addis Ababa. A leader in The Economist ran the sensible headline: “Act now to avert a bloodbath in Ethiopia”. But it trained all its verbal firepower on those who were acting then to avert a bloodbath in Ethiopia, and who are, to this day, owed an apology.

Because, if Addis Ababa saw Tom Gardner as a white demon, the reason is that he demonized Addis Ababa relentlessly. In The Economist, it was claimed that “all ethnic Tigrayans” were locked up, going into graphic detail: “Tigrayans were grabbed and shoved in warehouses and old factories. Even doctors and nurses were dragged out of hospitals if they were Tigrayan.” Tom Gardner’s new book tones it down a notch, but insists that “residents [of Addis Ababa] turned on their Tigrayan neighbours”, citing a figure of 15,000 detainees within a few weeks. No motive other than their Tigrayan ethnicity is suggested.

Again, I was there. As per local taste, Tigrayan folk music continued to be played in malls, cafés, even in gyms. Tigrayans, as always, could be found in all walks of life. Still today, they number in the ballpark of half a million in Addis Ababa alone, from the poorest beggars to the wealthiest businesspeople, plus a lot of taxi drivers with whom I would strike up conversation. During those anxious days, I found that their politics varied on the spectrum between supporting and opposing the TPLF’s war effort. But, yes, all of them felt eyed up as potential infiltrators in the city where they had, until recently, felt perfectly at home. Some had experienced bigoted outbursts. There was fear of extremist mobs. Their plight was delicate, undeserved and sad. And, yes, some innocents were apprehended. The Ethiopian justice system is flawed.

However, a Tigrayan identity could not have been the sole reason for arrest, or the internment camps would have been on a much larger scale. With reports of TPLF sleeper cells operating inside nearby towns that had already fallen, these measures were not tribal madness, but, at worst, erring on the side of caution for Ethiopian lives. There are approximately two million Tigrayans in Ethiopia outside of Tigray. A Reuters investigation stated that 18,000 of them were imprisoned, of whom some 9,000 were still so in June 2022. Many were military men reasonably suspected of strong loyalty to the TPLF. All were freed after the war.

Here is a curious side note: In September 2020, less than two months before the fighting began, Abiy Ahmed wrote by invitation in The Economist. Clearly with the TPLF threat foremost on his mind, he denounced those out to derail the transition to democracy by sowing hatred and division. He added: “For those accustomed to undue past privileges, equality feels like oppression.” This was a reference to when the TPLF was in power on the national stage from 1991 to 2018, giving a leg-up to TPLF members, and hence to Tigrayans, in the economy, in the state apparatus, and most blatantly so in the military. Was the prime minister dog-whistling hate against Tigrayans in The Economist? Well, this is how it was read at the time in the TPLF camp. But those 27 years of ethnic favouritism had left a legacy that Ethiopians had to grapple with. Some did it with resentment towards all Tigrayans. A handful of extremists even acted out murderous blood vengeance. However, and keep in mind that this is when an army of Tigrayans was rapidly approaching and raising the spectre of pandemonium, the vast majority of Ethiopian citizens and political leaders did not take it out on their Tigrayan neighbours, friends and colleagues. This was by far the bigger picture, though it did not make it into The Economist.

Respectability journalism

Tom Gardner’s idea of evidence is to invoke what passes for moral authority or to refer to some untrue truism from the war, for instance, that there were “residential bombardments” in Tigray, even though not a single photo was ever presented of these neighbourhoods supposedly reduced to rubble.

Frustratingly, he gets away with his lazy journalism, because the good guys in his storyline, including himself, are respectable in the eyes of his non-specialist mainstream audience. Thus, in Chapter 17, he sticks up for the various do-gooder international organizations, NGOs and foreign embassies by mocking Ethiopian denunciations of TPLF infiltration in their ranks as a paranoid craze, and concludes: “Not even the internationally-respected Tigrayan head of the World Health Organization [WHO], the former TPLF member and Ethiopian foreign minister Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was spared.”

Indeed, Dr Tedros is internationally respected. In his home country, he was perhaps more feared than respected, when he was a powerful man during the most oppressive years of the TPLF-led regime. But that was in the past. Today he has rebranded himself as a donor darling. Forgotten is also how he started his tenure at the WHO by appointing Robert Mugabe as a goodwill ambassador, and how he picked a fight with Taiwan to ingratiate himself with Beijing. Since the Tigray War began, he has been the epitome of the internationally-respected African with tweets like: “Tolerance. Kindness. Compassion. Peace. Love. Say #NoToHate speech.” Apropos hate speech, he spent the war accusing Ethiopia of things like  “carpet bombing”, “torching an entire town in Tigray” and, most insistently, “genocide”. Meanwhile, he sent out coded messages to egg on the bloodshed.

Cultural meme as a weapon of propaganda

Tom Gardner writes that, in June 2021, “in a closed meeting of the UN Security Council, Mark Lowcock, then the UN humanitarian chief, said that parts of Tigray were now suffering famine – a sharp rebuke to the prime minister (…)”. Indeed, throughout the war, Mark Lowcock would do little else than sharply rebuking Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, on every subject under the sun, including economic policy, and on all sorts of platforms, including a lengthy opinion piece, in which he defended the TPLF’s legacy as rulers of Ethiopia and announced a list of Abiy Ahmed’s war aims: “The first is to starve the population [of Tigray] either into subjugation or out of existence.” This was an appalling abuse of moral authority for hate and incitement, but Tom Gardner must think he is on safe ground here, because, I mean, who can trump the moral authority of a UN humanitarian chief?

Well, let me try Dr Steven Were Omamo, the WFP Country Director for Ethiopia until the end of 2021, having arrived from his native Kenya in 2018 with an accomplished career in agricultural development and food security. He was the top UN relief-aid man in the logistical thick of it all, negotiating humanitarian access with both sides. And this is his reaction to what Mark Lowcock said in the UN Security Council: “To those of us on the ground in Ethiopia, it was an astonishing declaration. Not only was it not his role to declare a famine, we knew that he had no evidence to back such a declaration. There was no expert who could credibly support his claim. On the contrary, experts had just announced that there was no famine in Tigray. But the voice of the ERC [Mark Lowcock] could not be ignored. Every major news outlet carried the story.” The quote is from Dr Omamo’s book “At the Centre of the World in Ethiopia”. It paints a picture of committed UN fieldworkers in dire tension with senior UN political appointees, like Mark Lowcock, who prioritized hogging the limelight to take sides in the war over forging good cooperation to distribute relief supplies. This friction within the UN was confirmed by other incidents, such as the firing, in October 2021, of Dr Omamo’s compatriot, the UN Migration Agency’s Ethiopia chief, Maureen Achieng, after audio was leaked of her complaining that UN high-ups from outside of Ethiopia were aggressively pursuing a pro-TPLF agenda.

Dr Omamo does describe many obstacles to getting relief-aid trucks safely in and out of Tigray and other regions, but the Ethiopian government, notwithstanding its security concerns, acted as a trusted partner to the WFP. The Economist owes Ethiopia and the world a thorough review of this detailed testimony. It drew some attention from a magazine specialized in development issues, but it has been ignored by big media. This could be because it makes for uncomfortable self-questioning in newsrooms, which ran with the huge cultural meme on Ethiopia and man-made famine, evoking the legendary 1985 Live Aid concert, with every good person singing along to “We are the world”.

From early on in the war, Tom Gardner’s Ethiopia coverage in The Economist jumped on that cultural-meme bandwagon too, which is what later motivated the aforementioned caption: “No favours for killers”. In his book, Tom Gardner does make a clear retreat, as he admits that: “In mid-July [2022], an official from the World Food Programme told the BBC that famine had been successfully averted.” So, by then there had been widespread food insecurity but no famine. “But”, Tom Gardner continues, making the case that there was still a “slow strangulation” of Tigray. Part of the obfuscation here is to equate the misery in Tigray with the guilt of the government, though it was the TPLF, not the government, which had imposed an immiserating total-war regime on Tigray. Yes, there was a military blockade but not a humanitarian siege in place. Tom Gardner writes that, since the government “alleged” that fuel was being diverted to the TPLF’s war effort, fuel supplies were “tightly throttled” to the detriment of food distribution within Tigray. Well, what Tom Gardner knows, but chooses to omit, is that the TPLF took 12 WFP fuel tankers at gunpoint to power its last-ditch offensive in late August, 2022.

Also strangely absent from Tom Gardner’s account is how the TPLF war machine systematically confiscated the WFP’s trucks. The first 400-or-so trucks had gone missing by September 2021. By mid-2022, the Ethiopian Disaster Risk Management Commission (EDRMC) said that, out of 3,297 trucks entering Tigray, 1,128 had not been returned. This was UN capital stock being used not to save but to take lives. Again and again, Tom Gardner’s humanitarian concern is predicated on a moral judgement, or rather an immoral judgement, that the Ethiopian government must not care about its people getting killed in war.

Trust me, I am a liberal Westerner

Is it a mitigating circumstance that some of Tom Gardner’s peers were worse? For instance, The Telegraph’s correspondent based in Nairobi, Will Brown, threw everything plus the kitchen sink at Ethiopia during the war, with no follow-up to his mishits, such as his claim of chemical attacks. At the end of that fateful November 2021, this multi-award-winning young Englishman, said to have already “reported from over 30 countries“, wrote that “ethnic Tigrayans [in Ethiopia outside Tigray] are allegedly being rounded up into concentration camps and murdered”. This also went without follow-up.

The same month, an op-ed in The Guardian, penned by a trio of the great and the good, and sponsored by the Gates Foundation, raised the alarm about “a possible mass killing of interned civilians in Addis and elsewhere”, associating the Tigrayans with the Tutsis during the Rwandan genocide.

In February 2021, Associated Press awarded the “best of the week” to journalist Cara Anna for her “determined source work” behind a horror story about 800 Tigrayan church-goers in the holy city of Axum, who were cornered, dragged out into the central square, mowed down and eaten by hyenas. This version of events is still being commemorated by radical Tigrayan ethnonationalists, who will no doubt pass it down as the historical truth to their children and grandchildren. I went undercover online to get Cara Anna to loosen up about it. She fell for my two fake personalities, and it is both shocking and amusing how she squirms and squirms so as to neither own nor disown what she clearly knows was a fabrication. Cara Anna went on to report many more insanely inflammatory atrocity stories from the war, usually based on anonymous witnesses. Libelling Ethiopia is a free-for-all.

I find this to be the jaw-dropping scandal here, that is, how big media became the real hyenas in an African war, howling as a pack, lacking the instinct for individuality to hold one another accountable. Tom Gardner has little interest in taking on his colleagues, except briefly criticizing CNN for its “wildly erroneous claim” (really: its disgusting psychological warfare, also never apologized for), on 5 November 2021, that “Tigrayan troops” stood “just outside Addis Ababa”. At least in book-promoting interviews, Tom Gardner has admitted that some media-driven atrocity stories turned out to be inaccurate.

Alas, this has not sharpened his critical faculties. For instance, when he says the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) “downplayed the scale” of one massacre by Eritrean soldiers, he assumes, without probing into the details, that Amnesty International got the scale right (though he thinks Amnesty did “an unusually rushed report” on another massacre that found the killers to be TPLF-affiliated). The EHRC is the only entity that has worked on the crime scenes, including jointly with UN staff, but Tom Gardner lambasts it as partisan. A footnote mentions that its chief Daniel Bekele once expressed some personal views. And, bonus info, he was indeed a prisoner for his personal views under the TPLF-led regime. Mapping out the political bias of war-crimes investigators is fair game, of course, but Tom Gardner consistently gives short shrift to Ethiopian complaints of political bias. His line of reasoning only works on the tacit assumption that Amnesty, as a Western-based organization, is more credible than the EHRC as an Ethiopian one. This may be so, or it may not. The good journalist finds out by comparing the different investigations, critically assessing their methodology and evidence, their sources and their sources’ possible motives, how their findings either match or fail to match the known facts. However, on all the controversial issues related to the Tigray War, too numerous to mention here, Tom Gardner’s footnotes and links defer (if one knows who is behind the pages and institutions that he refers to) to the individuals exposed in my book as activists, propagandists, some even as blatant liars out to stir the pot.

Presenting this case takes a whole book, but the short answer is: No, it is not a mitigating circumstance that Tom Gardner was less extreme than other war reporters. Because his relative moderation springs not from digging deeper in search of the truth, but rather from trying to make the smear job more believable.

What standards of proof for African rape?

Rape is even more taxing on the human heart than murder. We feel both empathy with the horrified victim and revulsion that a mind could be so sick as to obtain sexual gratification, or whatever it is, from the misdeed. Most gut-wrenching of all is a close-up of a woman in the grip of one or more such scumbags. Tom Gardner provides one too in his Chapter 17. Yes, a Tigrayan woman is the target.

This kind of personal story hits all the buttons of disgust and anger. It is easy to imply that the good-hearted person sits in these emotions, whereas the cold-hearted person demands evidence. Indeed, Tom Gardner writes that Ethiopians demanding evidence were “engaging in a cruel campaign to cast doubt on Tigrayan accusers”. Unsurprisingly, nobody in big media was up for being called apologists for atrocity rape by insisting on evidence, not even in the rare case when the victim was identified, like Mona Lisa Abraha, an 18-year-old Tigrayan, who, in her harrowing story in the New York Times, lost an arm when she fought off a sadistic Ethiopian soldier, though one month earlier, Al Jazeera had published that it happened when a whole gang of Eritrean soldiers had attempted to rape her.

To be clear, there is no denying that sexual violence was committed in the war, and yes, on both sides. The way forward is to support Ethiopian civil society and legal practitioners in investigating cases and bringing more perpetrators to trial than the handful of its own soldiers that Ethiopian courts have thus far convicted. This should be obvious, but apparently it needs to be said: the Ethiopian public wants its armed forces to be disciplined and decent. Almost nobody in Ethiopia wants any citizen of any ethnicity to be raped. Nearly everybody wants the men on their own side to be punished if they are found guilty, that is, not in trial by media or by organizations full of righteous zeal, but through justice based on evidence that holds up in court.

Nothing appeals to a man’s honour like protecting his mother and sisters from degenerate monsters. In some cases, it also appeals, alas, to a man’s dishonour, as when some TPLF fighters invoked “revenge” as a motive for raping women in Amhara and Afar regions. Again, make no mistake, nearly all Tigrayans, including diehard TPLF supporters, do not want their troops to commit rape.

But for the same reason that rape churns good people’s stomachs and provokes a natural urge to kill the rapist, rape accusations are the most powerful demonizing and recruitment tool of all. This created a strong motive for the sophisticated TPLF propaganda team to fabricate. Indeed, a Tigrayan journalist deserting from Radio Dimtse Woyane (‘Voice of the TPLF’) testified on Ethiopian television (incidentally to a famous interviewer who is also Tigrayan) about Tigrayan sex workers being paid to pose as university students and tell rape stories to foreign NGOs. The journalist’s task is to tell the truth from the lies by examining the evidence. Because, again, in a war scenario in which truth is the first casualty, the truth, and sticking to evidence as the standard of truth, is the only way to navigate that fine line between championing human rights and inciting hate. So, in his book, how does Tom Gardner perform this delicate duty?

Well, in his aforementioned theory that rape was used for “male bonding” between Eritrean and Ethiopian soldiers, he throws a grenade. At least as far as I know, this was never even alleged before, which must be why there is no source indicated, other than a piece from the general literature on conflict rape. Hand on heart: would the burden of proof have been so light to make a frivolous suggestion about, say, Scandinavian soldiers strengthening their togetherness at the expense of Afghan women? Of course not, and the theme that rape served as a morale-booster for the common soldier speaks volumes about how Tom Gardner sees people in this part of the world.

Indeed, Tom Gardner’s demonization goes the whole hog by portraying Ethiopians in general as fine with rape. He writes that many of them heard Tigrayan complaints as “special pleading”, because rape is par for the course in Ethiopian wars. To illustrate the backward savage mentality, he quotes an anonymous Ethiopian businessman who is supposed to have told him about Tigrayan rape victims: “It’s karma; they got what they deserve”. Tom Gardner should be careful talking to blabbering psychopaths. And when he uses an anonymous quote without any way to tell if he just made it up, may be it should not be something hateful and incendiary.

Tom Gardner moves on to the topic of baby-killing rapists who think they “purify bloodlines”. To show where this information comes from, a footnote takes the reader to a celebrated Al Jazeera article “No Tigrayan womb should ever give birth”. This was written by an Addis Ababa resident of Tigrayan origin, Lucy Kassa, who got her big break in international journalism, freelancing for the world’s most prestigious media, by telling tales of spine-chilling inhumanity. For instance, one featured in The New Humanitarian recounts a group of Ethiopian soldiers viciously executing a toddler for some political comment that they overheard the little boy say to his mother. Referred to endlessly as “courageous Lucy” and winning a grand human-rights award, it was as if her being Ethiopian gave her license to go one up on her colleagues in portraying Ethiopians as depraved, fiendish, diabolical. In her depictions, civilians would not only be rounded up and murdered, but also mutilated and dismembered. Women and girls would not only be raped, but gang-raped with a hot metal rod being inserted into their uterus. Lucy Kassa never went to the frontline. Her stories were based on anonymous witness accounts. One simply had to take her word for it, as indeed, all of big media did, The Economist too. The only evidence for her rape stories that she would come up with, on the exceptional occasion when someone in big media mentioned it ever so timidly, was “medical records”. Not that she ever showed any, but also medical records could easily be made up by an insurgency regime that is engaged in a fierce propaganda war.

Not rape, mass rape

To dispel the just-a-few-bad-apples defence, rape statistics became another battleground in the propaganda war almost from day one.

Tom Gardner writes that “plausibly” the real figure is 100,000. The footnote to back this up refers to Tigray’s regional authorities and that this is “a figure later supported by a comprehensive study conducted by the Columbia University biostatistician Kiros Berhane.”

Here, Tom Gardner invokes the moral authority of Columbia University, but refrains from throwing the additional respectability card that the survey-based study was published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), oh yes, very respectable (except if you are an anti-vaxxer or something). But what ought to be more respectable, if truth-seeking is the goal, is to actually read the study, subject it to critical scrutiny, and yes, look at the politics of the team behind it. I did that, finding it inconceivable that it could have reached any other conclusion, and that the BMJ might as well have published a survey conducted in North Korea by North Koreans to document North Koreans’ love for their leader. But don’t take my word for it. Start with my article, but then also read the study report in the BMJ, especially the small print, google the team listed in the study report, learn about the political climate in Tigray in which these interviews took place.

Tom Gardner’s book does touch upon a more nuanced view of the rape issue, but only obliquely, not apropos rape, but to make the point that the UN was largely biased in favour, and not against, Ethiopia: “In reality, the top leadership of several of the largest UN agencies in Addis Ababa were broadly supportive of Abiy’s government. The leaked audio of an internal meeting in March 2021 on the subject of sexual violence in Tigray, to take one example, demonstrated just how instinctively sympathetic many UN officials were to the arguments of their Ethiopian counterparts. Yet such was the force of official propaganda—and its narrative of Ethiopia alone against the world—that inconvenient facts like these were easily obscured.”

This is a new level of condescending. Does Tom Gardner take Ethiopians for such simpletons that they see the UN as a single sentient being? It also showcases Tom Gardner’s steely determination not to listen to Ethiopians. Of course, they always distinguished between the different individuals who compose the UN, and paid attention to how power is distributed throughout this vast organization. Yes, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and Mark Lowcock became national villains, but Steven Were Omamo and Maureen Achieng became national heroes. The leaked audio from March 2021 was of seven UN professionals serving in Ethiopia, who privately discussed the difficulty of sorting rape facts from rape fabrications, feeling under pressure to feed the media sensationalism and thus fuel the war with more hate. One of the seven was Letty Chiwara, representative of UN Women to Ethiopia and to the AU, who pronounced the taboo words: “You take it with a pinch of salt”. While some vilified her for that, Ethiopians thanked her for her integrity.

Between pacifism and warlordism

So now it should be clear why Tom Gardner made Ethiopians angry and disinclined to cooperate with his book project. Given that he trots out so many TPLF talking points, all the way down to using the term “Western Tigray” about a territory that is disputed with Amhara Region, he often gets accused of being pro-TPLF. He shrugs this off, and in good conscience, because, actually, he is not. Nor does he side with Fano militia in its ongoing insurgency in Amhara Region, or with the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), still waging armed struggle in Oromia Region. Indeed, to my pleasant surprise, there were some good parts early on in his book describing the chauvinism of these ethnonationalist militias. But again, he suggests that it is up to Abiy Ahmed to solve these conflicts too. He clearly does not mean by spending more on arms and prevailing militarily, so it must be by making concessions. A negotiated settlement could be preferable to war, but for now, both the OLA and Fano aim to take the capital. Meanwhile, both are bleeding men and popular support, as they descend into banditry and infighting. As in the Tigray War, but not in the Ukraine War, the Western mantra here is that there is no military solution. More accurate is that any solution will have to have a major military component.

This aversion to legitimizing legitimate use of force is illustrated in Chapter 18. Tom Gardner revisits December 2021, when the TPLF offensive is beaten back through the unity of Ethiopians of different ethnicities and faiths. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, a protestant Christian, thanks his Creator for being with him. Tom Gardner seizes on this to harp on his pop-psychological theme that Abiy Ahmed believes himself to be some kind of Messias. In the final sentence of the chapter, Tom Gardner then laments Abiy Ahmed’s success in repelling TPLF’s attack on Addis Ababa: “Now, it seemed, he might never need to compromise.”

This reflects a philosophy which, as I learned to my indignation during the Tigray War, is prevalent among liberal Westerners out to ‘help’ the developing world: That patriotism and peace through strength is a luxury for rich countries with superior morality, whereas poor ones with inferior morality, like Ethiopia, must make do with pacifist sermons and deals between its strongest warlords.

To be fair, the liberal Western moral-superiority complex made more of a fool of itself than it decided the war in Ethiopia. But it did exacerbate the rancour and the suffering. In the attempt to look good doing bad, some infuriatingly smug careerists resorted and continue to resort to shocking dishonesty. Tom Gardner’s book about Ethiopia says more about Tom Gardner than it does about Ethiopia.

Go here to read my book instead. And, given how the mass media will ignore this perspective, please, encourage others to read this article and to subscribe to my Substack (no payment needed).

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Before I explain this, a caveat is in place. Fano is a movement rather than an organization. Notwithstanding repeated and ongoing attempts to unify the various Fano factions, there is still no Fano central command, let alone an official Fano platform. Incidentally, this is why it is harder to negotiate with Fano than with the TPLF, as the most extremist Fano groups, who tend to become empowered under a state of war, will disavow concessions made by compromise-minded ones. It also makes it harder to pin down the Fano philosophy, so this is but a rough generalization based on reading and listening to pro-Fano individuals.

Their claim that Amharas have been persecuted ever since the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 is an exaggeration. But there is a kernel of truth in that the scapegoating of Amharas has been the staple of various ethnonationalist discourses for decades in Ethiopia. This has even seeped into the world press. For instance, a recent BBC article describes the Amharas as “historic rulers of Ethiopia”. The characterization of Amharas as oppressors is inaccurate and incendiary. However, as already mentioned, it is fair to say that Amharas generally identify with and are identified with Ethiopia. Fano used to be the term for the patriotic guerrilla soldiers who resisted the fascist Italian occupation from 1935 to 1941 (which is why the militia’s adversaries today will often call it something else). Stressing how the Ethiopian and the Amhara identity are interwoven, Fano uses the basic version of the Ethiopian flag, just green, yellow and red, that is, without the blue disk with the golden pentagram, which was put there by the EPRDF in 1996. While secession is the lodestar of the OLA and a fallback option for the TPLF, only coming to power on the national stage makes any sense for Fano. If anything, people in the Fano camp wish to abolish the Amhara Region, which is a brainchild of the hated ethnic federalism.

Another Fano talking point is that the federal government, elected though it is, has lost its legitimacy through acts of oppression, such as arrests of opposition leaders, journalists etc. The government likes to refute this by comparing to the darkest years of the TPLF/EPRDF. But it is hard to deny that the liberalization and democratization agenda has backslid to give way to the security state. We saw how the soft touch of Abiymania in 2018-2020 enabled violent ethnonationalism to bubble up across the country. The response to all this bloodshed has been a hardening of minds and policies. The Ethiopian judiciary has no history of being independent. Still today, it is safe to assume that both the jailing and the freeing of politicians, and probably of journalists too, takes place on orders from the executive. Thus, without examining the details, I will not vouch for the fairness of detentions and trials of politicians and journalists. Some of them may well be innocent by normal democratic legal standards. However, whenever I have cast a glance at their cases, there is direct or indirect advocacy for violence. Learning from the TPLF’s propagandists, Fano supporters will portray the motive of the government and judiciary as ethnic-based persecution. In reality, not necessarily the justification, but the root cause, is the fact that people are getting killed, which is making everyone involved, bar the diaspora activists, live in fear. It is simply unrealistic to have the same rules apply in peace and in war.

Another justification held up by the Fano camp is all manners of cruelty against Amharas en masse. Exhibit A for this accusation is, as mentioned in Part 3, the massacres in Wollega in western Oromia, which have cost the lives of thousands of unarmed Amharas, with whole families being slaughtered. A particularly nasty episode took place in August 2022, just as the war with the TPLF entered its final phase. These and similar crimes against Amharas in Oromia, including mass kidnappings of Amhara university students, have caused public outrage. The federal government has been rightly criticized for not providing security, and the prime minister for failing to strike the right empathetic note. But the perpetrators have been Oromo extremists, not least the TPLF’s old ally, the OLA, which remains, as of mid-2024, at war with the federal government.

And quite a dirty war at that, it seems. According to a Reuters investigation from February 2024, when Abiy Ahmed rose to power in 2018, senior government officials in Oromia set up a secretive Korree Nageenyaa (Security Committee in the Oromo language), aimed at crushing the OLA with extrajudicial killings. Fano supporters have used this to paint a picture of a government that operates with callous disregard for due process. This is a fair point, but it shatters a core tenet of Fano’s case for war, namely that the leading Oromos in the governing Prosperity Party are on the same side as the OLA. If this does not hold true, it is in fact the Fano insurgents who are helping the OLA by keeping the federal army overstretched on two fronts.

Were it not for the federal army, the OLA and Fano would probably conquer their own regions, and then clash in a cataclysmic showdown. Thus far, there have only been occasional skirmishes between the two, but their hatred of one another helps fuel both regional wars. You never know in Ethiopian politics, but formal collaboration between the OLA and Fano is an absurd suggestion. And yet, they are both fighting the federal government. They are enemies in theory, but they are allies in practice.

As for the accusations of civilians being killed by federal troops in Amhara Region, trust in the reports of international human-rights organizations ought to be rock bottom after their partisanship during the war with the TPLF. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the war in Amhara, like the one in Oromia, can be dirty. Extrajudicial revenge killings of mere suspects and other counterinsurgency measures outside the law must be condemned.

Again, this is no different from the war with the TPLF. There are the closeups of individual war crimes on both sides that call for justice. And there is the zoom-out of a political scenario that calls for respecting state monopoly on violence. The minimum requirements for taking up arms is that the established government is illegitimate, that the rebellion has broad popular support, that a sound context analysis is in place, and that a better alternative is within realistic reach. The Fano insurgency meets none of these conditions. In particular, those who paint Fano as fighting under the banner of democracy and human rights should notice how assiduously Fano politicians are courting the dictator of Eritrea, Isaias Afeworki, seeking his sponsorship, albeit apparently with limited success.

Getting Ethiopia Dead Wrong is now available on Amazon Kindle, paperback, or hardcover

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Journalism is the first draft of history. This applies to what is commonly referred to as the Tigray War, raging across northern Ethiopia from November 3, 2020 to November 2, 2022. Alas, in this case, big media became actors of history as well, when their early sketches, weirdly slanted and upside-down, contributed to also misshaping the international community’s response.

Getting Ethiopia Dead Wrong aspires to be a first rewrite of this history. Although the truth in such matters is always nuanced, it should be straightforward to identify the two main warring parties at the outset. One is the internationally recognized government with a short but remarkably liberalizing record. Its multiethnic armed forces have suffered a massive surprise attack by the other side, an ethnically-exclusive militia commanded by the country’s old guard, kicked out of office just two and a half years ago, deeply unloved after oppressing the people for 27 years, but holding on to some of its grip on the military.

Such boring basics, however, had no place within the dominant framing of the conflict as tribal savagery on the darkcontinent. Playing on this ‘single story about Africa’ enabled a well-connected clique to pass off its violent quest to return to power as a persecuted minority facing a choice between killing and getting killed. Skillful propagandists laid it on thick. Activist university professors gave intellectual cover. Sensation-hungry correspondents lapped it up. News directors and editors made no retractions when proved wrong.

For example, important news outlets have yet to own up to spreading the fake news that, in the foremost church of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, 800 worshippers were cornered, dragged out, gunned down and eaten by hyenas. One section in this book looks at who invented this incendiary lie, and at the various investigations into what really took place in the holy city ofAxum. This is followed up in the annex “Going undercover to interview Cara Anna from Associated Press”, a jaw-dropping and not unamusing piece in the genre of swindling the swindler, which can be read as a dessert at the end or as an appetizer at the beginning.

False reports and sloppy analysis soon translated into open support for the rulers-turned-rebels, infecting Western governments. This was infuriating, but also heartbreaking, because most Ethiopians, and certainly myself as a long-time friend of Ethiopia, think of these prosperous democracies as the model of society to strive for. How could the liberal world order betray us so badly in our hour of need? Answering this became my obsession, and eventually turned into this book.

Though most of the readership will have a special interest in Ethiopian affairs, the target audience is much wider. This is why no particular foreknowledge is required. The context will be provided. This is for anyone concerned with international relations, diplomacy, development, media dynamics, the misuse of academia, career opportunism, the misrepresentation of Africa, and much more to do with contemporary society.

This had to be a whole book. For sure, a short article has greater reach. But persuading the neutrals, let alone the skeptics, that Ethiopia was gotten dead wrong was only possible by addressing every half-truth and falsehood repeated enough times to become truisms: ethnic animosity, hate speech, mass arrests, shutdown of public services as collective punishment, weaponized rape, humanitarian siege, deliberate starvation, even genocide. Complicating matters further, I was up against sources so authoritative that, as much as a year into the war, I would believe them myself on pure instinct. Gradually, however, I found myself scrutinizing their footnotes and methodological appendices, appalled at their anonymous witnesses and righteous verbiage substituting for forensics and standards of proof.

Throughout the war, these multiple renowned voices amplified the key justification for an irregular army, namely that, if the official army were to prevail, the Tigrayan people would be exterminated. Instead, Ethiopian military victory was what enabled peace. This ought to provoke some soul-searching. There seems to have been a bit of that in the realm of diplomacy. But in the media landscape, the narrative has barely changed. Meanwhile, international organizations, for all their do-gooder mission statements, still contribute to cementing enmities and hindering reconciliation among Ethiopians. This refusal to learn follows a pattern of fatal mispredictions being instantly forgotten and accurate predictions (or timely warnings) being afforded no recognition. It is high time to dig into who said what would happen, and then compare it to what did happen, so as to revise our model of reality accordingly.

This goes for my own mispredictions too, which were not about the actual war, but about global reactions to it. It sent me on a personal journey of questioning my worldview, as will be portrayed along the way. Spoiler alert: it has not pushed me into the arms of the regimes of China and Russia, but it has taught me some profound lessons about the nastiness and pervasiveness of the Western moral-superiority complex.

A preliminary version of Getting Ethiopia Dead Wrong was uploaded to my Substack account on September 3, 2023. You may find it at rsonderriis.substack.com. It is about two thirds the length of this book, and will remain available for free. It was well received, including by some Western diplomats who wrote to me that it had changed their perspective. By then, however, something loomed larger than rewriting recent history: a new war.

The central topic here is the 2020-2022 insurgency of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). This covers the TPLF’s alliance with the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA). It also goes into the support for the federal government coming from Eritrea and from the volunteer Amhara militia known as Fano. However, while Ethiopian-Eritrean relations soured during 2023, Fano launched a full-scale insurgency in Amhara Region in April 2023, which rages till this day, deep into 2024.

My first online publication barely mentioned this. I was dismayed that blood was being shed between sides who had just pulled together to save Ethiopia from the onslaught of the TPLF. Whatever stand I took would draw the ire of a major share of my readers, adding to the disunity. Pressed on this issue in an interview, I cravenly responded that I was “not comfortable talking about it at this point”. Well, it is time to put aside my discomfort and speak out. And it is highly relevant as follow-up to the TPLF’s war, because Fano is borrowing leaf after leaf from the TPLF’s playbook. Therefore, the hostilities between the government and Fano shall be addressed throughout the various sections, and especially in the new ending titled “Part 5: Do not get the next war wrong too”.

Each ethnonationalist rebel group in Ethiopia is unique in its history and ideology, but all of them rile up their base and appeal to outsiders with an overblown sense of victimhood, including the obligatory social-media genocide hashtag. They make it all about ethnicity, so as to distract from the real issue of legitimacy to rule a diverse country. The TPLF has played this game better than anyone, thanks to its extensive government experience and network in places like Washington DC, Brussels and the UN system. But the Fano camp has also notched up some notorious wins, not on the battlefield, but in the fight for the sympathy of those international arbiters of right and wrong.

Smooth-talking to wannabe humanitarians from rich countries has long been big business in Africa. It should come as no surprise that this art form has been perfected in Ethiopia too. Thus, in English, they speak of human rights and freedom of expression. But in their own language they monger fear, hate and war, as they recruit and fundraise for the violent pursuit of power, with media-savvy diaspora activists leading the propaganda war and drawing in Westerners on their side. As the death toll mounts, extremists are empowered and moderates are cowed, if not killed. It is high time we see through this and stand in solidarity with the majority of peace-loving Ethiopians.

Getting it wrong on Ethiopian affairs ranges from prejudice and honest mistake to reckless incompetence and elaborate deception. The pantheon of villains featured here have yet to be held to account. May this book be a step towards that. At the very least, it will help set the historical record straight.

Rasmus Sonderriis, August 2024.

The post Preface to Getting Ethiopia Dead Wrong appeared first on Abren.

Cara Anna is the Associated Press reporter who spread, all across the world in numerous respectable newspapers, the fake news that some 800 church-goers in the holiest place of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity had been cornered, dragged into the central city square, gunned down and eaten by hyena.

This background information is provided just in case you missed the section “Do we know what happened in Axum?” within my 50,000-word piece “Getting Ethiopia Dead Wrong”, soon to come out in book form.

Also rather shockingly, she got away with it without any mea culpa or stain on her reputation that we know of.

Whether she initially believed in her own Axum massacre story, there is no way to tell, but it is clear that, no less than eight days later, she knew that her key witness account, which she had validated in no uncertain terms, was made up.

Instead of eating humble pie, she went on to write many more atrocity stories based on anonymous sources. The Pulitzer Center website presents her thus: “Cara Anna is the East Africa correspondent with The Associated Press. Her team’s Pulitzer Center-funded coverage of Ethiopia’s Tigray conflict was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and Ethiopia’s government barred her from the country. The team also won the AP’s top journalism award in 2021.” 

She probably thinks she can continue to escape scrutiny, as long as she avoids nosy journalists like me. It would be a waste of my time to request an interview with her, so I went undercover with nothing but a gmail account and an AI-generated portrait.

From: Fernando Silva
Sent: Thursday, February 15, 2024, 15:53 (Ethiopian time)
To: Anna, Cara
Subject: Film script based on your reporting

Dear Cara Anna.

Thank you so much for your amazing work, which has inspired my dramatized student film project. I am referring to your groundbreaking reporting from Ethiopia for Associated Press on February 18, 2021, when you revealed in shocking detail that some 800 church-goers in Axum, Tigray, Ethiopia, had been cornered, dragged outside, gunned down and eaten by hyenas. My reaction to reading it was: “How come nobody made a movie about this before?”

I have been searching for some original documentary footage of the dead bodies, the burials or the like, but have yet to come across any. Could you perhaps point me the way? Otherwise, given your prestige with many prizes to your name, naming you as my source for this true-story script must be enough, don’t you think?

Thanks once again, and hoping for your reply.

Yours sincerely
Fernando Silva, film student from Chile

From: Anna, Cara 
Sent: February 15, 2024, 16:34 
To:  Fernando Silva
Subject: Re: Film script based on your reporting

Hi Fernando, thank you for asking and for being interested. It was very hard to get any images from a region where telecoms were cut. We often relied on people who physically left Tigray. Have you tried Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, who also published reports based on their own interviews?

Cara

AP

From: Fernando Silva
Sent: February 15, 2024, 17:41 
To: Anna, Cara
Subject: Re: Film script based on your reporting

Dear Cara Anna.

Thank you very much for your prompt response! I will go carefully through all the documentation of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, and only come back to you if I have any questions after that.

Yours sincerely
Fernando

From: Fernando Silva
Sent: February 21, 2024, 19:47 
To: Anna, Cara
Subject: Re: Film script based on your reporting

Dear Cara Anna.

I have now carefully studied the Amnesty International and the Human Rights Watch reports on the Axum massacre. Your and the human-rights organizations’ reports coincide on the dates and the perpetrators, but not on the location, also not on the description of what happened, certainly not in any of what I was going to use for my film script, that is, the 800 church-goers getting cornered, dragged out, gunned down and eaten by hyena, as told in your first article on February 18, 2021, and subsequently retold in The New York Post, The Sun, The Independent, The Times, etc. 

Sorry, but can you clear up my confusion? Were there two separate events? Should I give up my script along the lines of your report from February 18, 2021?

Yours sincerely
Fernando Silva.

From: Anna, Cara 
Sent: February 21, 2024, 19:51 
To:  Fernando Silva
Subject: Re: Film script based on your reporting

Hi Fernando, that’s very much up to you, especially since you’re looking for footage from a time when basic communications and other services like electricity were cut in parts of Tigray and many people had difficulty just keeping their phones charged. Having enough for a film sounds challenging, but perhaps contacts in the Tigray diaspora can help now that the war is over and it’s easier to reach people and share information.

Cara

From: Fernando Silva
Sent: February 21, 2024, 20:22 
To: Anna, Cara
Subject: Re: Film script based on your reporting

Hi Cara Anna.

Okay, thanks, but I don’t want it to be up to me, but up to the evidence. If I present it as a true story and it turns out not to be so, I will be accused of slandering an African nation.

You did your report by talking to people in Axum over the phone, and so did the Amnesty researchers. From my own little research, I know that Axum is a fairly big, modern city with tens of thousands of smartphones and also many generators, powerbanks and what not. Yet even the Amnesty and Human Rights Watch reports have no footage revealing anything noteworthy, nor has anybody come up with anything since, at least not online. Moreover, Amnesty says the festival on November 30 was called off, which makes sense if up to ten dead bodies were being stacked on each cart for mass burials on November 30, 2020, as the Amnesty report says. But then I found an Ethiopian television report from the festival , and it is definitely that exact festival from November 30, 2020.

Never mind, it is YOUR story and not Amnesty’s that I care about. And after February 2021, there seems to be nothing about the 800 church-goers any more. Long question short: do you today have any doubt that your dramatic version of the Axum massacre is true or not?

Yours sincerely
Fernando Silva

From: Anna, Cara 
Sent:  February 21, 2024, 20:33 
To:  Fernando Silva
Subject: Re: Film script based on your reporting

Hi, you reached out by looking for original documentary footage of what happened in Axum, and I encourage you to find what might exist. You’ll see that for months, media coverage and humanitarian reports along with some government reports noted a long and wide cutoff of basic services in Tigray that affected communications, utilities and the supply of basic items like food and medicine. Even land lines weren’t working in many cases. I do hope that with such conditions having eased, you’ll have much more success reaching people and accessing any footage captured in Axum.

Cara

From: Fernando Silva
Sent: February 21, 2024, 23:27 
To: Anna, Cara
Subject: Re: Film script based on your reporting

Hi Cara Anna.

Okay, thank you for your prompt reply. But I can only take that as a “YES”, you do have doubts if your shocking report that made it into headlines across the world is actually what happened.

Indeed, none of the factors you mention can explain a complete lack of photographic evidence, but I can and I will look more into it. And shouldn’t you be doing that too? This is a big deal! Your report on February 18, 2021, made a huge impact on public opinion in the West and in Tigray too, stirring fear, hate, all the emotions of war. If those graphic details of insane savagery turn out to be a lie made up to justify revenge killings, and if you lent the trustworthiness of Associated Press to spread such dangerous disinformation, surely, your conscience would want to know and, if necessary, make you issue an apology, am I right? 

Yours sincerely
Fernando Silva

Let me interrupt with some commentary:

Rather than answering the questions, Cara Anna trots out the half-truth about Tigray being cut off, which I have addressed at length in Part 3 of “Getting Ethiopia Dead Wrong”. All her focus is on not incriminating herself. This is why she neither defends the veracity of her story nor admits that it was a lie. Now she is being confronted with the common-sense observation that, surely, having a conscience requires her to care one way or the other.

So this is when she ends the exchange, which must have rattled her. Can anything lure her out of her shell again? Well, two weeks later, she gets this email from someone using the “Tigray genocide” hashtag as his avatar.

From: Gabriel Teklehaymanot
Sent: Mar 6, 2024, 19:23 
To: Anna, Cara
Subject: Can I ask for some advice?

Dear Anna Cara.

I am Gabriel Teklehaymanot, I work in real estate in the UK, where I have also been involved in activism against the Tigray genocide. You know all about that, because you have covered it and your journalistic brilliance and integrity have been widely recognised, including by the Pulitzer people, I just saw online.

I was contacted some days ago by someone interested in informing the world about what our people went through. He said he had been in contact with you a little while ago. He is the one who gave me this email. Is it okay if I ask you for some advice here? Because I know your work, your time is precious to me too.

Regards

Gabriel Teklehaymanot
Mekete Tigray UK

From: Anna, Cara 
Sent: Mar 6, 2024, 19:27 
To:  Gabriel Teklehaymanot
Subject: Re: Can I ask for some advice?

Hi Gabriel, thank you for reaching out. What advice are you looking for?

Cara

AP

From: Gabriel Teklehaymanot
Sent: Mar 6, 2024, 20:25 
To: Anna, Cara
Subject: Re: Can I ask for some advice?

Dear Cara.

Thank you for this opportunity to borrow some of your precious time.

Well, a young man from Chile, Fernando Silva, wrote me and we talked on the phone too, at length and on numerous occasions. He said you had suggested he reach out to someone like me in the diaspora for guidance. He was very confused and frankly a bit annoying, going into tiresome detail that I am not going to bother you with, but it came from a good place, as he cared about the Axum massacre, which he has scripted a whole film project around. This will be a great opportunity to raise conscience about what happened to our people. It may be an amateur production, but he is putting all his savings into it, and he has many volunteer actors lined up for this true-story drama, which might do well on Youtube. He even showed me how he plans to do the hyenas with blurry imagery of Chilean street dogs shot at night and some horrifying sound effects. 

However, now he is having doubts about what actually occurred in Axum. He said you had suggested that we might have some original photographic material, to which I replied: “Hey, we do not always get to film it when we get killed! So YOU film it, Fernando!”

He objected that you had somehow not affirmed the deacon’s story in his email exchange with you. I am sure he has misunderstood something. The testimony of the deacon was accepted by many, many important newspapers and even corroborated by the honourable Lord David Alton speaking in the UK House of Lords as late as November 2022.

I have more arguments on the ready when he calls me, I think tomorrow, for why his script should stick to your first report on the Axum massacre. Yes, the perpetrators and their supporters have denied everything, of course, this is their evil nature and the reason we had to fight them. But nobody independent or important in the media has ever questioned your story.

I hope you can attest that I am in the right here, thank you. And please, let me once more express my utmost admiration for your professionalism and also thank you for your solidarity.

Regards
Gabriel

From: Anna, Cara 
Sent: Mar 6, 2024, 20:30 
To:  Gabriel Teklehaymanot
Subject: Re: Can I ask for some advice?

Hi Gabriel, thank you for explaining. We didn’t discuss the deacon, and I did encourage Fernando to see whether footage might be available now that communications and services in Tigray have resumed.

Cara

AP

From: Gabriel Teklehaymanot
Sent: Mar 6, 2024, 20:50 
To: Anna, Cara
Subject: Re: Can I ask for some advice?

Dear Cara.
Ah, I see, well, with me he discussed the deacon and every little clue like he was Sherlock Holmes!  As for footage, I found some from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, but it is very different from what the deacon said, and none of it would persuade the sceptics that there was any massacre at all. Anyway, the deacon’s testimony was at the heart of your story and it is what we have been telling our children and grandchildren within our community as a reminder to know who we are and who are enemies are. So I can understand he cares about verifying it, even if he is a little bothersome.

Should I advise him to make adjustment to his script? I made another argument, a completely different one, that seemed to work much better with him, but the best option for me would be to insist on there being enough evidence for the deacon’s testimony for him to follow his script, so do you think I can do that?

Regards
Gabriel

From: Anna, Cara
Sent: Mar 6, 2024, 20:59 
To:  Gabriel Teklehaymanot
Subject: Re: Can I ask for some advice?

That’s your conversation with him, and I have no advice to pass along for that.

From: Gabriel Teklehaymanot
Sent: Mar 7, 2024, 14:55 
To: Anna, Cara
Subject: Wonderful news!

Dear Cara.

Thanks for your time, yesterday, and I will not bother you anymore except to tell you this wonderful news:

I talked at length to Fernando Silva this morning, and he agreed to go ahead with his script as it is, except making it clearer that you are the one we can thank for knowing about it. I am going to raise more funds for the production, and I will personally go to Chile for a full week and be on set as his advisor, isn’t that great?

The argument that I had hinted at before is that Western media are free to shine a light on the truth, as you did throughout the war, but also to debunk whatever is found to be inaccurate. We are a society of free speech. And of checks and balances, because anyone can go to libel court, but nobody has done so in this case. What you reported from Axum was not trivia about, say a celebrity sleeping around. It was about, let’s remember, 800 people being ruthlessly mowed down in an affront both to humanity and to our Christian faith. Your revelation of a crime so unforgivable shaped the worldwide perception of the war. I can tell you that in my community, it showed us the evil of our enemy and strengthened our will to fight at whatever the cost. Glory to our martyrs!

So what I said to Fernando which finally convinced him is that, if a news organisation as reputable as Associated Press were to get it that wrong about something that serious, there would be big consequences. But there has been no retraction, and you are still working for Associated Press and considered a highly respectable journalist.

Which means your story stands and is perfectly fit for being dramatised, crediting the original author, you, the incredible Anna Cara, who will be mentioned repeatedly in gratitude for your investigatory work. Your name will live forever in the annals of spreading knowledge of the Axum massacre.

Once the film is out, and provided it is as good as it promises, can we count on your help to promote it? Most of all, we would love to interview you, is that okay? Must we submit a formal request for this to your employer?

I hope this happy news makes your day, like it did mine, and that our interview can be scheduled soon.

Happy regards
Gabriel

Notice how both my fictional undercover personalities put an ordinary, very reasonable-sounding trust in the “respectable” institutions of the liberal world order, from our free-speech society to our human-rights bodies. This was myself until recently, and it would still be me today, had it not been my lot to realize how low they stooped in their insistence on getting Ethiopia dead wrong.

UPDATE on April 10: Two days later, a final message from Cara Anna did arrive, though I only discovered this a month later.

From: Anna, Cara 
Sent: Mar 9, 2024, 16:21 
To:  Gabriel Teklehaymanot
Subject: Re: Wonderful news!

Hi Gabriel, thank you for asking, but there’s no need for me to take part. Now that it’s easier for most people to travel to Tigray, one can go and speak to people there who lived through it.

Cara

AP

Cara Anna seems to believe the authenticity of the undercover personalities to the end!

And yes, as she says, one can go to Axum to ask around and investigate. Plenty of people and institutions have done that. Not a single finding remotely resembles Cara Anna’s story of February 18, 2021. I refer once again to my own work on what we know about what happened in Axum.

I left it here, as I published the exchange on March 30, 2024, having demonstrated sufficiently that Cara Anna is utterly shameless, and that Ethiopians were right to ban her from entering their country. If she had had the slightest conscience, she would have said: “Such a film wouldn’t be a true story, so now I am going to retract my article and apologize in public for the profound harm that I caused. I shall also come clean about my sources throughout the war, and about the extent to which I knew beforehand or only found out later that I was spreading incendiary falsehoods.”

Dream on, she will not say that of her own accord, because she and her employer have proved themselves indifferent to the truth and disdainful of African lives. We cannot expect these people to repent. We must work to hold them to account. And take solace from the fact that history will judge them harshly.

The post Going undercover to interview Cara Anna from Associated Press appeared first on Abren.

By Rasmus Sonderriis, from Addis Ababa

Harrowing tales of sadistic rape were recounted in The Washington Post and The Boston Globe by Katharine Houreld on November 26, 2023. This Nairobi-based East Africa correspondent touches every nerve of revulsion and anger in her retelling of tearful interviews with a dozen female rape survivors. These are not mere denunciations of bad apples, such as the three men who were recently sentenced by Ethiopian military courts. The sexual violence against women of the Tigrayan ethnicity is categorized as “sustained and organized”. Particularly the prevalence of gang rape suggests a whole culture of depraved cruelty. Indeed, the article puts the individual horrors into perspective: “More than 100,000 women may have been raped during the two-year civil war in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, according to the most comprehensive study so far of these attacks in research conducted by the Columbia University biostatistician Kiros Berhane.”

The alleged perpetrators are: “Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers and […] militiamen from Ethiopia’s Amhara region”. This is the totality of allies who put down the insurgency of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the TPLF. However, there is no mention of this group at all in The Washington Post article, which is packed with closeups and devoid of zoom-outs. This follows a pattern in Western coverage of African affairs, which is meant to evoke commiseration and indignation, and not to generate insight. Going into the politics is typically seen as a distraction, even considered in bad taste. This lets the clueless reader fill in the context with the stereotypical “single story about Africa”, which the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has warned against. It features a continent of gut-wrenching savagery, leaving us primed to believe the worst without question.

I have written in detail about how this particular conflict was essentially a power struggle, challenging the clichés in big media about Africans yet again being in the grip of tribal rage. I refer to my freely available 50,000-word paper “GETTING ETHIOPIA DEAD WRONG”, which will be released in a slightly extended book version in early 2024. It tackles all the issues stressed and ignored by the world press, without shying away from the most delicate subjects. For instance, there is a section titled “Was rape used as a weapon?”

For sure, the focus here is not on Ethiopian politics, but on the rape described in The Washington Post. Yet what we assume about the context influences our standard of proof. By way of example, let us imagine a study concluding that American troops gang-raped a major percentage of women in Afghanistan. How would that be read? Even the most dangerous criminals in US prisons consider rapists to be the scummiest of scum, so we Westerners would need extremely compelling evidence to believe this about our patriotic young men.

It ought not surprise us that Eritreans and Ethiopians feel the same way about their young men, and also about a high number of young women, doing armed service for their country. Again, this is not just a tribal instinct. Their reading of claims about the truth is also influenced by the political context. The difference is that they have firsthand knowledge of it.

We need to talk about the TPLF

So very, very briefly, the TPLF is not just some plucky guerilla force, as one would think from the David-and-Goliath-themed scripts of many an Africa reporter. From 1991 to 2018, this highly disciplined party with Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist roots had a firm grip on the helm of the Ethiopian state. Its characteristic obsession with ethnicity included putting “ethnicity” on ID cards, never mind that millions of citizens are mixed or see themselves simply as Ethiopian. Moreover, the TPLF expanded the Tigray region, renaming the lush territories west of Tigray as “Western Tigray”, which then became a laboratory for extremist Tigrayan ethnonationalism, driving out non-Tigrayans and moving in Tigrayan settlers. TPLF leaders occupied key positions in the monopolistic economy and ran the national army. Still today, the TPLF holds vast wealth in foreign currency, and has an extensive international network of friends in high places. Despite its militaristic ethos, it has, over the years, acquired fluency in the ‘donor-darling’ language that Westerners fall for. Its battalion of Wikipedia-editing activists, for instance, know which rhetorical buttons to push on women’s rights, never mind that the TPLF’s only-ever prominent woman was Azeb Mesfin, wife of the late dictator Meles Zenawi. And she was purged and exiled in 2017.

One world-famous TPLF luminary is Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization. Today, he talks like a pacifist humanitarian, as he spends Martin Luther King Day “reflecting on the interconnections between love, trust, peace and justice”. But as Ethiopia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2012 to 2016, he took a tough line when it came to jailing pro-democracy protesters. Ultimately, this oppression failed, enabling Abiy Ahmed to become prime minister in 2018, incidentally placing women in powerful positions for the first time in the country’s history. The TPLF retreated to its stronghold as the regional government of Tigray, sheltering its men prosecuted for corruption and torture. It also refused to let go of its control over the military.

War broke out when the TPLF attacked five Ethiopian army bases in Tigray on November 3, 2020, killing thousands of soldiers. One year and many bloody battles later, the rulers-turned-rebels were closing in on the national capital Addis Ababa, being widely hailed as the imminent victors by prominent Western pundits and think tanks. The special US representative, Jeffrey Feltmann, described the fall of the capital as a “bloodbath situation”, yet urged the Ethiopians to do nothing to prevent it. They turned a deaf ear and mobilized in defense. Yet another year and even more bloody battles later, the fighting had returned to Tigray. Staring at defeat, the TPLF leaders agreed to hand over their heavy weapons in exchange for staying in control of regional governance in Tigray, as per the peace agreement entered into on November 2, 2022, in Pretoria, South Africa. Oddly, Katharine Houreld’s article refers in passing to the Pretoria Agreement as a mere “cease-fire”. This happens to be the term preferred by the most extreme TPLF supporters, who refuse to admit defeat.

No need for due diligence on African rape?

Surely, in assessing the credibility of a hypothetical study showing rampant gang-rape of Afghani women by American soldiers, the first step of due diligence would be to google the authors to check for any pro-Taliban bias. Accordingly, a self-proclaimed anti-racist newspaper, such as The Washington Post, should be expected to do the same before publishing a highly incendiary story about mass rape by African soldiers. However, politely probed in an email by Ethiopian-American student, Samuel Kassa, Katharine Houreld volunteers this information: “Regarding the political leanings of Dr. Kiros, I haven’t looked into it.”

She may or may not realize that the Columbia University professor’s first name “Kiros” is typically Tigrayan. Anyway, this is definitely no smoking gun. After all the Ethiopian Minister of Defense since 2021, Abraham Belay, that is, the man in charge of the allegedly rapist army, is also a Tigrayan. And yet, though not every Tigrayan is a TPLF member, every TPLF member is a Tigrayan, so the minimum would be a rudimentary check of his Twitter account. This reveals total dedication to the TPLF’s storyline that the war was a one-way street of violence against the Tigrayans as a people.

It is beyond the scope of the present article to make the case that these accusations were, at least in the bigger picture, a ploy to justify an irregular army waging war against an elected government. My painstaking review of all these narratives in “GETTING ETHIOPIA DEAD WRONG” maps out how the TPLF, assisted by a handful of unscrupulous foreigners, managed to instill into Western minds the essentially false notion that this war was driven by pathological hatred rather than ordinary politics. But even if one shares Kiros Berhane’s view of the conflict, his partiality in conducting such a study should be obvious.

Kiros Berhane has also frequently endorsed and retweeted messages by the aforementioned Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who spent the war blaming the Ethiopian government for the hardship that the war caused to ordinary Tigrayans, while never uttering a word of sympathy for the victims in Afar and Amhara, the two regions that were ravaged by the TPLF during its march on the capital.

Responding to Ethiopian-American student Samuel Kassa, Katharine Houreld makes this defense of Kiros Berhane’s research paper and its publisher: “I know the BMJ is a very respected peer-reviewed journal and there were multiple scholars involved in the study, which I have sent to you”.

Indeed, 17 other names are listed at the top of the paper, all Tigrayan-sounding. It is stated that most of them live and work in Tigray, where the TPLF exerts control over every aspect of life, and would have a massive stake in a study about rape by enemy soldiers for worldwide publication.

The authoritative ring of the term “peer review” is being increasingly challenged after scandalous retractions by, for instance, The Lancet. And indeed, what could the peers possibly have reviewed for this study to go into the prestigious BMJ Global Health? They must have validated the statistical method, which is Kiros Berhane’s specialty. But did they cross-examine the witnesses? Did they check the translations from Tigrinya into English? Did they look for evidence of whether or not the interviewees were coached or even coerced? Whatever these mysterious peer reviewers did, they failed to point out the fundamentally absurd assumption of a free-speech climate in Tigray. It is inconceivable that this study could have reached any other conclusion, because that would have amounted to TPLF subjects disproving the TPLF’s war propaganda on TPLF soil. The BMJ might as well have published a survey by North Koreans conducted in North Korea documenting North Koreans’ love for their leader. 

The ugliest of crimes

Rape is more taxing on the human heart than murder. There is something uniquely sickening about deriving sexual gratification, or whatever it is, from inflicting horror on a vulnerable person. The dilemma is this: We know that sick bastards take advantage of armed conflict to commit sexual violence, but also that this is the staple of fake atrocity propaganda. Thus, in a scenario where many young Tigrayan men were reluctant to kill and die for the old guard of cruel and corrupt men, the TPLF needed an argument as strong as this: “If you run away from rebel-army conscription, you are failing to protect your mothers and sisters!” In some cases, this appeal to Tigrayan men’s honor also appealed, alas, to their dishonor, as when some TPLF fighters invoked “revenge” as a motive for raping women in Amhara and Afar regions.

Mr. Mulueberhan Haile was one of many Tigrayans who risked their lives by serving as interim administrators during the seven months, from November 28, 2020, to June 28, 2021, when the Ethiopian army tried, but largely failed, to take charge of security in Tigray. Talking to Voice of America a few months into the war, he said: “When we started investigating, we found out there were women instructed to make false claims of rape and to engender a feeling of anger and resentment in the Tigrayan youth.”

In June 2022, a Tigrayan journalist deserting from Radio Dimtse Woyane (‘Voice of the TPLF’) talked on Ethiopian television (incidentally to a famous interviewer who is also Tigrayan) about Tigrayan sex workers being paid to pose as university students and to tell rape stories to foreign NGOs. Nobody in the Western media or human-rights circles would touch his testimony with a bargepole.

There were, however, seven African UN professionals serving in Ethiopia who privately discussed the difficulty of sorting facts from fabrication, feeling under pressure to feed the media sensationalism and thus fuel the war. The audio of their meeting was leaked by a pro-TPLF website, indignant that Letty Chiwara, representative of UN Women to Ethiopia and to the African Union, had used language such as “take it with a pinch of salt”. Though most of the press ignored it, it nevertheless caused a bit of a stir, with an emphasis on shaming the African women on the ground who dared question the TPLF narrative.

This matches the extensive testimony of the Kenyan national, Doctor Steven Were Omamo, who served in Ethiopia during the war as the Country Director for the UN World Food Programme. In his highly recommended book “At the Centre of the World in Ethiopia”, he describes how Ethiopia-based UN staff, mostly Africans, had their life-saving work on the ground sabotaged by senior political UN figures, mostly Westerners, who made little secret of their nearness to the TPLF hierarchy, and who would rather hog the limelight with outright lies than engage with a largely cooperative Ethiopian government.


From accused to accuser: Tony Magaña

Katharine Houreld’s article stops short of using the ubiquitous expression “rape as a weapon of war”, but quotes a nurse from a rape crisis center lamenting the lack of HIV drugs, as “some of these women were deliberately infected with HIV.” Once again, this rhymes with what Westerners think they know about Africa being a hotbed of HIV/AIDS, never mind that Ethiopia has the same HIV prevalence rate as Ukraine, at 1.1%, while Eritrea at only 0.6% does better than some developed countries.

Another voice leveling the charge of rape-mediated “biological warfare” has been neurosurgeon Dr. Tony Magaña, whose American citizenship gives him a shine of neutrality.

Living in the capital of Tigray, Mekelle, when the war broke out, Dr. Tony Magaña was to be frequently rolled out as a truth witness, including to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. Yet it is no secret that his full real name is Ignacio Antonio Magana. In Florida, he was arrested back in 2002 due to a series of sexual-assault accusations from his female patients. He was also hung out to dry in, of all places, The Washington Post, after he was suspended from practicing medicine in order to protect the public. In 2004, he pleaded guilty to battery and was sentenced to one year in the county jail (see image below). In 2005, he went on trial again for no less than ten women saying he forced himself on them across three counties in Florida, though he was cleared of the rape charges.

The backstory of Dr. Magana has long been discussed among Ethiopians on social media. He says he came to Ethiopia in 2012, and was recruited to work at Ayder Hospital in Mekelle “by leaders of the university, who were also members of the TPLF”.  While the war was raging, he said: “I know the leaders of the TPLF.”

So how well did they know him? Given the sophistication of the TPLF intelligence apparatus, it is unthinkable that his googleable sex-offender record could have been overlooked. His TPLF protectors must have decided they could make him grateful, loyal and useful by taking him in. Indeed, Tony Magaña has testified widely about sadistic treatment of Tigrayans in graphic  and horrific detail, hyenas and all, featuring as a medical authority on this subject in a newspaper as prestigious as the Spanish El País. He has also provided input to the Belgian geographer Jan Nyssen’s ‘estimate’ of the death toll in Tigray, which became quoted by countless media as a serious study from the University of Ghent, even though Jan Nyssen gives speeches at TPLF rallies and events, and writes passionately about how “Western Tigray” belongs to Tigray.

And this is just one more example of how the TPLF has covered its propaganda in a veneer of academia, which the media lap up uncritically, because it fits so neatly with the “single story about Africa”.

The fine line between justice-seeking and hate-mongering

In her email reply to Samuel Kassa, Katharine Houreld declines to say who put her in touch with the women testifying for her article, having promised not to reveal anything that might identify them. Thus, the only objective conclusion that can be drawn about the individual horror stories is that they are impossible to prove or disprove. For outsiders wishing to stand up for abused women, yet mindful of sinister agendas, the only way forward is to support Ethiopian civil society and legal practitioners in investigating cases and bringing them to trial.

Katharine Houreld also sent Samuel Kassa a study published in The Lancet in August 2023, authored by the New York-based NGO Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), based on field research conducted by its Ethiopian (and undoubtedly Tigrayan) partner: “Organization for Justice and Accountability in the Horn of Africa” (OJAH). This outfit has been completely anonymized, as its staff “cannot be named for their own safety”. So in this case, there is no way to check for political leanings on Twitter, although a google search reveals that OJAH is exclusively dedicated to denouncing human-rights violations in Tigray, and only by actors other than the TPLF.

The full version of the study in The Lancet refers to the aforementioned BMJ-published quantitative survey by Kiros Berhane. Its own research is more qualitative in nature, looking at 305 medical records from “multiple health facilities in Tigray known to provide clinical services to survivors of sexual violence”.

It is ironic that the authors describe justice-seeking “relying on potentially biased national mechanisms” as “ill-conceived”, yet put their trust in the record-keeping of the TPLF-controlled healthcare system. But at least the 305 files were selected for scrutiny by the research team, and not by the regional government of Tigray. And it is, of course, fully plausible that 305 people and many more were raped in Tigray during three years with widespread lawlessness. Where the study is weak is in the identification of perpetrators. The dubious assumption is that victims, even genuine victims, would face no pressure to blame enemy soldiers given the political climate in the region. And according to the study, the supposed end of the conflict did not lower the rate of conflict-related sexual violence. It even says that “95 percent of conflict-related sexual violence experienced by children and adolescents under 18 years old occurred following the signing of the [Pretoria Peace Agreement]”. No explanation of this is attempted. In this period, the TPLF-controlled Tigray regional government has been in charge of law and order. It has indeed been criticized by other Tigrayans for heavy-handed policing of opposition rallies, and for arresting the victim’s friend rather than seek justice for the recent murder and attempted rape of 32-year-old Zewdu Haftu in Mekelle. Where the TPLF is no longer in charge, however, is in the territory consistently referred to in The Lancet as “Western Tigray” (notice the capital W). This also reveals a Tigrayan ethnonationalist bias.

Thus, The Lancet substitutes medical records for criminal investigations, and concludes that: “What is documented in PHR’s analysis points to the use of sexual violence by the military as a tactic to terrorize civilian populations.” It is hard to make sense of this now when the war is over. Surely, sexual violence against Tigrayans by outsiders is more likely to reignite the insurgency than to cow anyone.

Just a little sympathy with Ms. Houreld

I regret quoting emails in which Katharine Houreld did not know she was on the record. Samuel Kassa is not myself, but nor is he exactly who he pretended to be. This was not an honest method to fish for information. However, the public-interest defense is compelling, given the defamatory and inflammatory nature of her article. If Katharine Houreld has managed to read this thus far, she must be aghast. What looked like slam-dunk virtue-signaling as a champion of African women has come to seem more like reckless incompetence with a stench of racism in cahoots with forces out to sow division and frustrate reconciliation in Ethiopia.

Even so, I do sympathize with how she puts her trust in authority, as her email refers to: “…the Lancet and BMJ (both globally respected peer-reviewed medical journals that have published on the subject), and rights groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and UN investigators – all of whom have documented extensive rape during the conflict by all actors”. 

Until recently, I myself would have needed no more convincing than that. Today, however, my faith in such esteemed institutions has been replaced by scrutiny of their fine print and methodological notes. To understand what changed me, read my 50,000-word exposé of how so many of the great and the good of our media, academia, humanitarian work, politics and diplomacy demonized a friendly people and fueled a big war with dire mispredictions and shocking lies.

I never imagined myself writing such a fiery anti-establishment piece. Like Katharine Houreld, I am a run-of-the-mill centrist. However, unlike Katharine Houreld, I had the good fortune to live in Ethiopia, following its affairs closely since 2004. I was able to immerse myself into the society, familiarize myself with the mentality, learn to speak colloquially in the national language, observe day-to-day interethnic relations. Had I been sent to cover the recent war in northern Ethiopia without this background, I might have sullied myself as badly as Katharine Houreld. After all, a year into the war, I still struggled with denial about the scale of so many self-professed do-gooders doing bad, all retold in “GETTING ETHIOPIA DEAD WRONG”.

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On the third of November 2020, around one thousand senior Ethiopian commanders stationed in Tigray went for a dinner party with regional government officials. The invitation, however, was a ruse to take them prisoner.

That same night, while the world was focused on vote-counting in the US presidential election, a total of five federal military bases in Tigray came under fire. Defenders were killed or captured, though those in the Sero Base, near the border with Eritrea, held out for a grueling ten days. Tigrayan soldiers turned on their comrades of other ethnicities, many of whom had lived in Tigray for decades, working alongside the local communities. Reports about soldiers killed in their pyjamas and arbitrary cruelty shocked the Ethiopian public.

Thankfully, Michael Pompeo, Secretary of State under the outgoing Trump administration, condemned it immediately.

Wisely, Secretary Pompeo left it open to interpretation how to “de-escalate tensions”, but surely “immediate action to restore the peace” meant arresting those responsible for such a ferocious assault on the constitutional order.

For the first year or so, the world press downplayed or omitted this manifest casus belli altogether, even in longreads on the war, which focused obsessively on the prime minister’s personality and on how the Nobel Peace Prize had gone to his head.

The Economist, for instance, as late as October 2021, while TPLF troops were marching on Addis Ababa, published a shockingly defamatory and inflammatory leader, to which we shall return in Part 3, attributing the cause of the conflict to an “increasingly paranoid and erratic” Abiy Ahmed deciding to attack the regional government of Tigray, “which he accused of rebellion”. This shallow phrasing amounts to speculating that the attack on the Northern Command was made up.

In fact, only ten days into the war, the high-ranking TPLF leader, Sekoture Getachew, speaking on Tigrayan television, confirmed that an elaborate plan had been executed, using soldiers from inside and outside the bases, with the aim of taking over the firepower of the Ethiopian army. Some two weeks later, this was admitted by Getachew Reda, with the excuse that “whatever we did, we did in self-defense”. In January 2021, Kjetil Tronvoll mentioned it in an article, as did, in March 2021, the diehard pro-TPLF magazine Tghat, albeit portraying it as a preemptive strike justified by an enemy plan to commit genocide. Accordingly, the world press eventually began to incorporate this event into its timeline.

From the first day of the war, Declan Walsh and co-author Simon Marks, writing in The New York Times, put the war down to the notion that “Mr. Abiy presented a radically different face”, from his Nobel-Peace-Prize face that was. They studiously ignored the crucial dispute over the control of the army, except for stating that “Mr. Abiy said his hand had been forced by Tigrayan leaders who brazenly defied his authority”. Of course, there is no quotation mark around the prime minister saying: they brazenly defied my authority. But this is how The New York Times interprets his denunciation of the attack on the Northern Command, which it does not even bother to mention. What the New York Times would take for granted at home in the US, namely state monopoly on violence under democratic rule of law, is reduced for Ethiopia to the big man exercising “his authority”.

Eleven days into the war, Mr. Walsh and Mr. Marks did report “a purported Tigrayan attack on an Ethiopian army base in Tigray early this month”. This is when Kjetil Tronvoll is introduced in the New York Times as a “a scholar of Ethiopian politics”. Conversations with him might have colored Mr. Walsh’s views, as he continued to overlook not only the foregoing two and a half years of political developments as the source of the tension, but also the attack on the Northern Command as the point of no return. The New York Times explanation would continue to focus on the “messianic” prime minister, who had “plunged Ethiopia into a war”. Finally, by December 2021, Declan Walsh must have felt challenged, as the attack on the five federal bases had become acknowledged as fact and was getting more mention in the media. This accounts for the timing of the “new evidence” that the prime minister “had been planning a military campaign in the northern Tigray region for months before the war (…)”. Mr. Walsh was rationalizing his early choice of virtually ignoring the attack on the Northern Command.

That this is how the war began is no longer controversial. Yet even as of 2023, The Guardian’s official view frames it as a mere accusation: “Fighting broke out in November 2020 when Ethiopia’s prime minister Abiy Ahmed deployed the army to arrest Tigrayan leaders who had been challenging his authority for months and whom he accused of attacking federal military bases.”

Once again, legitimacy to rule Ethiopia is reduced to the big man exercising “his authority”. And “challenging his authority” is a hell of a euphemism for raiding national armories and usurping the command of the national army.

To read the full story of Getting Ethiopia Dead Wrong: Click Here

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Notwithstanding criticism over his handling of the Covid pandemic, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has recently built an image in the West as a donor darling. His initial hiccup of appointing Robert Mugabe as a WHO Goodwill Ambassador is long forgotten, as is how he picked a fight with Taiwan to ingratiate himself with Beijing. Since the war began in Ethiopia in November 2020, he has blended in among liberal democrats and accrued a shining halo, as he professes that “peace is the only solution”, flashes Greta Thunberg’s book, and spends MLK Day “reflecting on the interconnections between love, trust, peace and justice”. He is showered with accolades, from an honorary degree in Scotland to a $50,000 prize in the US. Dr. Tedros is not a medical doctor, but holds a PhD in Community Health, so The New York Times calls him “the world’s doctor”, portraying him as a stoic victim who towers above the dysfunctional politics of his country of origin.

But there he is seen as a chief instigator of the war, whose own children go to Western universities, while he sends the young in Tigray to kill and die for him and his clique. His job description of caring for global health is considered a mere smokescreen for his real vocation as a local warlord. Even his most innocent-sounding platitudes are read as coded messages to egg on the bloodshed.

These contrasting views of the same man illustrate the theme of this paper, which is the even wider gap in the understanding of the war. The fact that Ethiopians have known Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus much longer and better than Westerners also foreshadows a broader point.

Dr. Tedros hails from the inner circle of Ethiopia’s dictatorial old guard, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, TPLF. From 1991 to 2018, this highly disciplined party, with Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist roots, ran the country’s military, dominated its governance and held sway in its economy, despite Tigrayans making up only about 6% of the population. Many an Africa reporter has wrongly jumped to the conclusion that those 27 years of authoritarian rule by Tigrayan elites drove Ethiopians into genocidal rage against the entire Tigrayan people.

Identity politics is a big deal in Ethiopia, as it is in many countries. A picture-perfect of interethnic and inter-religious harmony presents itself in the day-to-day of neighborliness, business, friendship, even in marriage and kinship. But chauvinism is a powerful political tool. Anti-Tigrayan revanchism is one of many extremist minority currents, but it was far from the driving force, let alone the root cause, of this war.

To read the full story of Getting Ethiopia Dead Wrong: Click Here

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On November 9 and 10, 2020, less than a week after the attack on the Northern Command, the first big massacre of unarmed civilians took place in the small town of Mai-Kadra, near the border with Sudan. The various investigations range in their estimates between 600 and 1,100 deaths. The killings were perpetrated by TPLF-loyal militia members with rudimentary arms, accompanied by gun-carrying policemen, who were formally under the command of Tigray’s regional government, and who spent the morning of November 9 locating those to be killed. These were all or nearly all Amharas.

The Mai-Kadra massacre ended when various forces loyal to the Ethiopian constitution arrived. Reuters did a fairly thorough journalistic report, although it has been criticized for the testimonies about revenge killings coming from refugee camps in Sudan, full of escaped militia members and under TPLF control. Like countless other media throughout the war, Reuters also used a source exclusively interested in Tigrayan casualties, who is located in Belgium, though he used to reside in Tigray. His name is Jan Nyssen, a geography professor from Ghent University, who gives speeches at TPLF rallies and events, yet passes off his ‘research’ as neutral. We shall look more at his incredibly successful propaganda role in Part 3.

In general, TPLF-friendly analysts have glossed over their mis-prediction that Ethiopian military victory would lead to genocide, by going for a more expansive definition. Thus, in an interview eight days after the peace deal, Kjetil Tronvoll said: “Definition of genocide does not rely on numbers killed, but the intent behind why they were killed.”

If this is so, the Mai-Kadra massacre qualifies as genocide. Ethnonationalist extremists went from door to door to kill men and boys solely for being Amhara. The use of knives, machetes and rope is indeed reminiscent of the Rwandan genocide. So are the many incidents of Tigrayans who risked their lives by hiding their Amhara neighbors. This paper presents enough outrages to emotionally drain the reader without the need for personal closeups. War crimes, it cannot be repeated enough, occurred on both sides, having been widely reported in graphic detail, albeit mainly to attract audiences and score partisan points rather than to present evidence that can hold up in court. Suffice to note that, although Martin Plaut tried to obscure the culpability for some days, the atrocity in Mai-Kadra was thoroughly investigated on the ground, including by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, OHCHR. There is also abundant photographic and forensic evidence.

The Mai-Kadra massacre may have sought to turn the war into an ethnic one, sowing terror and provoking acts of revenge. Sadly, it had some success in the north-western corner of Ethiopia where Mai-Kadra is located, compounded by a brutal history in the pre-war years and a still-lingering territorial dispute, which will also be addressed in Part 3.

On November 13 and again on November 20, 2020, the TPLF fired missiles against two airports in Amhara Region, arguing that this was retaliation for air raids in Tigray, which the federal government, in turn, said were intended to blow up arms depots. Getachew Reda also threatened cross-border strikes into Eritrea, which were carried out on November 14 and 27, when multiple rockets hit the capital, Asmara. This internationalization of the conflict was condemned by Secretary Pompeo.

To read the full story of Getting Ethiopia Dead Wrong: Click Here

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The International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia (ICHREE) is a group of three experts. It was established in September 2022 with its mandate recently extended until December 2023. The ICHREE’s first report, presented in September 2022, found that all armed actors in the conflict in northern Ethiopia had committed war crimes, even drawing up equivalence between the armed rebel movements and the government of Ethiopia, with constitutional mandate to reign-in insurrections.

The ICHREE continues to emphasize the importance of its work for victims of international crimes. It is true that an honest and transparent investigation of violations in merited. But the absence of fairness and nuance in its reports leaves you wondering if the group of experts is viewing things through a politicized lens. A report by Abren criticized the ICHREE’s botched process in its findings published last year. The newest and latest publication seems to continue along similar trends.  

The current members of the ICHREE are: 

• Mohamed Chande Othman (Chair)
• Steven Ratner
• Radhika Coomaraswamy

Former members include: 

• Kaari Betty Murungi (now resigned former Chair)
• Fatou Bensouda

Latest Report of September 2023

The ICHREE’s second and latest report on human-rights violations during the conflict in northern Ethiopia was published today (September 18, 2023). Based on the previous report from last year, it would be naïve to expect impartiality now. The report from last year came out after the Ethiopian state had withdrawn from the Tigray region, leaving it in the hands of armed rebels for 15 months, yet the ICHREE held Ethiopia responsible for not providing schooling in Tigray, even while schoolchildren were being conscripted into the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) rebel army.

This year’s report also relies on remotely sourced anonymous witnesses, “documenting” the most diabolical acts, and it sticks to the “starvation-used-as-a-weapon of war” accusation, despite the WFP’s declaration on July 15, 2022 that it had averted a famine. The report also omits former WFP country director Steven Omamo’s detailed testimony about full Ethiopian cooperation with relief aid operations, with nothing about how emergency food and fuel were repeatedly diverted and repurposed for the TPLF’s war efforts.

However, I shall focus on one detail in the report. It will probably be overlooked in all the noise, though it reveals how little its authors care for critical investigation of what they are told by their preferred sources. It is a minor claim in Paragraph 33, aimed at backing up the big-media-inspired context analysis foregrounding primitive tribal rage. It originates from an an accusatory article by Martin Plaut, published on January 21, 2022, and subsequently copied by other media, alleging that Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s social affairs adviser, Daniel Kibret, delivered a speech calling for “genocide of Tigrayans”. This conclusion was arrived at by Martin Plaut simply by misconstruing the word “woyane” into “Tigray”, and the ICHREE clearly accepted that, having just established, in the preceding Paragraph 32, that “Woyane” is a pejorative term used against Tigrayan civilians, even though it is actually a part of TPLF’s name in Tigrinya, ህዝባዊ ወያነ ሓርነት ትግራይ. No one at the ICHREE bothered to investigate such simple details.

The ICHREE also copy-pastes Martin Plaut’s interpretation of Daniel Kibret mentions the genocide of the Tasmanians at the hand of the British as a call for doing the same to Tigrayans. But if the ICHREE had bothered to check the speech by Daniel Kibret, he likens the British brutality in Tasmania to the marauding TPLF army’s conduct in Shewa Robit, a small town in the Amhara region of Ethiopia.  One may learn this simply by reading the full Google-translated speech on Martin Plaut’s page, see here.

Thus, after one more year of well-funded work, this UN-sponsored human-rights entity submits what once again resembles a rough-patching of the most sensationalist pop journalism and partisan fabrications, a trend that we have repeatedly seen when it comes to reporting on Ethiopia these days. Getting Ethiopia Dead wrong is a natural outcome of basing one’s findings on the plethora of unsubstantiated media reports. Nonetheless, it is remarkably naive to assume the ICHREE lacks knowledge, given the available resources. It begs the question if inconvenient facts are being deliberately omitted and circumvented to reach an intended conclusion.

The question is: what will happen now? Will the West try to have the ICHREE’s mandate extended again? This would ensure that, in one more year, there will be yet another report stating, “reasonable grounds to believe” (the standard applied, which only persuades fellow believers) that Ethiopians and Eritreans are essentially subhuman beasts, thereby souring relations and pushing indignant Ethiopians more into the anti-Western camp. Or does the West finally have the sense to accept the end of the ICHREE? And yes, I say the West, because those are the countries which largely fund the UN human rights commission and by extension the ICHREE’s mission.

It may not even have the votes to extend its mandate but given that there is indeed a lot to investigate, Ethiopia, perhaps under the aegis of the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC), could instead be offered true forensics and other useful expertise with the aim of proving “guilt beyond reasonable doubt” (a standard that everyone could accept). We will find out in the coming days. But I remain cautious on this possibility, as ICHREE’s press statement was highly critical of the Ethiopia’s own transitional justice mechanism, mauling Ethiopia’s ability and credibility, while offering little in the way of support for capacity building.

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