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.

The so-called “international community” is once again proving itself to be an expert at prolonging war. Its role in the nearly two-year long conflict in Ethiopia has emboldened the armed insurgents – that have taken hostage the entire population of Tigray, the northernmost region of Ethiopia –  in hopes of overthrowing the central Government.

Who is the TPLF?

The insurgents are referred to as the TPLF, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. The TPLF was in power from 1991 to 2018 and acted as a brutal U.S. proxy in the Horn of Africa — violently dividing and suppressing majority voices in Ethiopia, helping demonize Eritrea in the north, and keeping Somalia a fractured, fragile state.

While it’s been ousted out of power in Ethiopia, the TPLF still has a lot of diplomatic leverage on the international stage. The group appears to be using the massive amount of wealth it took from the Ethiopian people to lobby its narrative — that it is fighting for “liberation” of the minority ethnic Tigrayans in the north. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Ethnic Tigrayans which make up roughly 5% of the country’s population of 120 million – are simply collateral in the regime-change plans. There are several reports that many people are escaping Tigray for refuge in other parts of Ethiopia because their lives are threatened if they do not fight in the TPLF’s war.

When it was sidelined from the Government after years of protests, the TPLF took with it a large number of the country’s armaments. It also weaponized the influential relationships it had made in its 27 years in power — to get diplomatic cover even while it pushed child soldiers into war. The Director General of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom is a member of TPLF’s Executive Committee and has no problem using his authority to lobby for the group publicly, under the guise of caring for the people of Tigray.

What is probably most frustrating for many Ethiopians — is not just that they are under attack by a group from within, but that the group gets diplomatic cover from the U.S. and other Western powers who continue to equate the TPLF with the democratically elected Government of Ethiopia.

U.N. Aid Used for War

In a stunning revelation last week, the United Nations World Food Programme announced that TPLF insurgents stole 12 U.N. fuel tankers. The group used that stolen fuel to break a months-long truce – and invaded the neighboring Amhara region, restarting the war against the Ethiopian Government and its people. The Ethiopian Government says the militias even arrested U.N. staff who resisted the fuel looting. This isn’t the first time insurgents in Tigray took U.N. humanitarian supplies and redirected it for war.

Last September,  Ethiopia said hundreds of U.N. aid trucks went into Tigray and were not returned. Instead, they were used to transport the militias of TPLF into the nieghboring Amhara and Afar regions, where there were reports of rapes , indiscriminate killings and total destruction of healthcare facilities. Of course, Dr. Tedros had nothing to say about the healthcare facilities destroyed. The United Nations did not hold the TPLF accountable either, and instead continued to levy pressure solely on the Ethiopian Government to allow unfettered humanitarian aid access to the TPLF-occupied region.

The Ethiopian Government did allow unfettered humanitarian aid access and once again, it was burned as TPLF used it to transport militias for war. The Ethiopian Government held up its end of the bargain after being pushed and assured by the “international community.” U.S. Envoy for the Horn of Africa Ambassador Mike Hammer even went to Tigray in early August and met with TPLF leadership. They looked like old buds, taking selfies for example.. But that trip did not stop the TPLF from restarting the war weeks later. Many Ethiopians suspect that it actually legitimized and emboldened the TPLF to do just that.

Yet again, the US-led  “international community” has proven to be a failed broker for peace in the Horn of Africa.

TPLF’s History of Weaponizing Crisis: Live Aid 1985

You may remember that “We Are the World” Live Aid 1985 concert and fundraiser for famine-stricken Ethiopia. What if I told you 95% of the $100 million raised was used by the TPLF rebels at the time to buy weapons instead of food? A rare 2010 BBC investigation revealed this damning information and it is corroborated by high-ranking former TPLF officials.

The money Americans thought they were raising to help the poor hungry children in Ethiopia was used to buy weapons. Those weapons eventually allowed the TPLF to overthrow the communist Government of Ethiopia at the time.

What can we glean from the Live Aid 1985 fiasco? Sometimes and maybe often, stories of humanitarian crises in other countries are not always what the media tells you they are. Even when there really is some sort of humanitarian crisis – sometimes, the people that caused it are doing it for international attention – usually using that attention to garner diplomatic cover and manufacture consent for intervention. In today’s case and in the case of 1985, it’s TPLF doing just that. Now, there really was a famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s, but reports suggest that most of the money raised in Live Aid was used to buy weapons – not to feed victims.

Mainstream Media as a Tool of War

As an Ethiopian American journalist whose parents are from the Tigray region, it is stunning to me what is left out of the so-called mainstream media narrative. Here are some fundamental facts that everyone should understand about the conflict in Ethiopia.

The Western proxy TPLF started this war by attacking mostly non-ethnic Tigrayan members of the Ethiopian National Army Defense Forces, during the early morning hours of November 4th, 2020. While the United States was preoccupied with elections, the TPLF was preoccupied with its regime-change plans in Ethiopia. The soldiers killed had been serving the country for decades, were intermarried with women and men from Tigray and were an active part of the community there. It is, arguably, the most treasonous attack in modern Ethiopian history.

While people like Delaware Senator Chris Coons have in passing admitted that the TPLF started the war, Coons and much of the mainstream media often talk about the Ethiopian Government’s “offensive” in Tigray, as if the Government was not responding and defending the country after such a treasonous attack on its soldiers. Mainstream media continues to demonize the Ethiopian Government for fighting back – saying it was going after all ethnic Tigrayans in Tigray, when in fact it was responding to the ethnofacist TPLF’s treasonous attack.

Not an Ethnic or Civil War

This conflict is not about people of different ethnicities in Ethiopia hating each other. It’s not as simplistic and reductionist as the media would have you believe. It’s so much more than that. But that is the narrative the Western media wants people to desperately believe, because then it would make it just another African problem, when in fact — Western powers and external forces have been working around the clock for decades – to divide the Horn of Africa – and are still very much involved in fueling the conflict.

This is about power and control. A minority U.S. proxy which got used to dominating for 27 years told itself, if it couldn’t run the whole of Ethiopia, then it would instead destroy the country. They are trying very hard to make that happen. It has been heartbreakingly costly for the region, which includes Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia – and the struggle continues.

The Horn of Africa has said “No More ” to war. No More to the international disinformation infrastructure that is dividing the people and fueling conflict. The primary obstacle to peace in the Horn of Africa is the TPLF and its Western-backed enablers.

The post The “International Community” is an unreliable Broker in Ethiopia appeared first on Abren.

Once again, a fragile peace agreement in northern Ethiopia’s Tigray region broke as rebels loyal to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) went on the offensive. Fighting emerged again near the end of August, as rebel forces sought to drive west and south, capturing the small town of Kobo in the Amhara region. At the start of this third round of conflict, Tigray’s insurgent forces had a strong showing, capturing Kobo as Ethiopia’s National Defense Forces exited, citing the risk to civilians posed by urban fighting. Nonetheless, the tide seems to have turned in favor of Ethiopia’s army.

Observers had warned of increasing tensions in this volatile region, despite optimism just weeks earlier that talks to establish a lasting peace agreement were set to get under way. However, seemingly insurmountable challenges remained. For one, TPLF leaders continued insistence on preconditions involving the resumption of basic services, such as telecom, and banking. The government of Ethiopia maintains these can only be part of a larger comprehensive peace deal. According to the office of the prime minister, “there is no magic on/off button to restart telecom and banking in the Tigray region”. Authorities maintain this would require hundreds, if not thousands of technical experts to repair damaged infrastructure.

Since the outbreak of recent fighting, government forces have had a relatively easier fight in maintaining an upper hand. Unlike last year this time, when TPLF fighters overran cities and towns in the Amhara and Afar regions, this time around the insurgents’ offensive has stymied, with thousands of their recruits captured or even killed in the first few weeks. Among the captured are soldier under the age of 15. Government forces are now back in Kobo and last vestiges of TPLF fighters have been pushed back out of Amhara.

The mass human wave tactics used successfully by the rebels last year have been largely ineffective, partly due to better prepared defenses as well as recently surprising twists in the fight, as Ethiopian forces opened other assaults flanking the rebel stronghold region. TPLF’s leaders have accused the government of launching an attack from the north, from neighboring Eritrea, which is allied with Ethiopia. These reports have not been officially confirmed by Ethiopian officials

Still more reports suggest forces loyal to the TPLF have been operating along the border with neighboring Sudan, where they’re engaged in fighting to gain the critical corridor of Humera and Welkait. According to a recent report by CBS News tensions in the area could potentially draw Sudan into what is already a complicated regional conflict. In August Ethiopia’s air force said it shot down an Antonov 26 type cargo airplane carrying arms supplies to the rebels in the Tigray region.  Moreover, Ethiopian authorities have complained about insurgents using UN administered refugee camps in eastern Sudan as launch pads for military missions.  

The tacitly agreed humanitarian truce between the TPLF and the Ethiopian government on March 24, 2022 was to get much needed humanitarian supplies into the Tigray region, which had been severely hampered by intense fighting before that. The trickle of aid had improved before the most recent flare up. It was hoped that the ceasefire would lay the groundwork for a more permanent peace deal under the auspices of the African Union, and chief mediator and former president of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo.    

But TPLF officials have said the AU appointed Obasanjo is not an honest broker and is too close to Ethiopia’s prime minister, preferring instead former Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta as replacement for Obasanjo. Ethiopian officials prefer to maintain AU stewardship as well and have indicated willingness to negotiate anywhere and at any time without pre-conditions. Ethiopian government officials insist there can only be a comprehensive peace deal.

As fighting rages, Ethiopian joint forces, which includes regional Amhara forces have fought well. The US has once again stated its desire to see an end to hostilities, albeit not as vociferously as it once did. Special Envoy to the Horn of Africa, Mike Hammer is again headed to the region, reportedly to try and broker an end to hostilities. Rightly or wrongly, many in Ethiopia view the US desire to end conflict at this juncture as implicitly giving the beleaguered rebels a fighting chance. Last year, as TPLF rebels advanced the threat of sanctions were used by the US to hand tie Ethiopia’s federal government according to statements by officials.

Indeed, Ethiopia – US relations have been fraught of late. There also seems to be some policy disconnect among American foreign policy circles regarding Ethiopia, a once international aid darling held up as a success story. Ambassador Mike Hammer is the fourth Special Envoy appointed specifically to deal with the conflict in northern Ethiopia. The last several envoys were viewed by the Ethiopians as pandering to TPLF’s whims. This is perhaps a reflection of the once close relationship held between the TPLF-led regime in Addis Ababa before the advent of the current ruling Prosperity Party. Recent conflict seems to be closing the door on the Tigray rebel’s chances. The situation on the ground is significantly different now, particularly after the last round of atrocities committed by the rebels against civilians in the Amhara and Afar regions. The rebels are a much more despised group now than at any point in the past. More importantly, Ethiopia’s army and regional forces are much more capable fighting force than before 2020.

The hope is that Mike Hammer will find success whereas others have failed to convince the TPLF leadership to end their warlike stance. Perhaps under some sort of security guarantee or transfer to a third country, rebel leaders can exit their current predicament and let a new generation of leaders in Tigray hammer home a lasting peace deal that sees an end to the suffering in northern Ethiopia. This seemingly far fetched plan may be the path of least resistance to end a festering conflict. The bigger picture in the Horn of Africa requires a stable and peaceful Ethiopia that is friendly to the United States. Achieving this task is the primary interest the special envoys are keenly aware of.

The post Another Envoy to the Horn of Africa appeared first on Abren.

It is obvious the TPLF is once again leading a human wave strategy in its most recent offensive. Poorly trained Tigray youths, many of them children below the age of 15 are being made to run towards guns to control territory, which leaders hope to use as bargaining chip in an imagined future negotiation with the government of Ethiopia.

Based on last year, they are likely drugged up and not in uniforms, which makes things even more difficult or defending soldiers of the Ethiopian army. Think about the phycological stresses of shooting at drugged and bewildered youths sent to attack positions. Behind them is of course TPLF’s more experienced fighters who are using these youths as human shields and who will not even recover their bodies when they fall. Yet again, another column is behind them to clean up the mess, as some witnesses testify.

For its part, the Western mainstream media is presently so outraged at Dr. Tedros Adhanom’s alleged video of atrocities in Mekelle, which is most likely a PR concoction, that they are ignoring a monumental crime which is now being committed again. Nobody has a clear idea how many Tigray youths died in the human wave attacks orchestrated by TPLF generals last year. But it is likely to be in the tens of thousands. Locals in the Amhara and Afar regions have reported trucks were observed loading up the slain and taking them back to Tigray, some of these bodies were likely same ones found on the banks of the Blue Nile in Sudan. In Twisted TPLF fashion, the dead have a dual use, one as cannon fodder and another as propaganda dummies.

In the buildup to this current new phase of TPLF’s secessionist war, the leadership expressed a desire to build a million-person army. By their logic the reason that they failed to take Addis Ababa in 2021 was because they did not have enough unarmed children for cannon fodder. Even the New York Times’ great white reporter, Declan Walsh of course can’t report on any of this because he was so braindead that when he saw legions of marching child soldiers during operation Alula he saw motivated young soldier, and not a war crime, as did Dr. Tedros of the World Health Organization who expressed his “Pride” on Twitter.

No doubt there are a lot of Western editors and media managers who do not like the northern Ethiopia war, too savage, too ghastly, too difficult to get at the facts. But that is an abdication of responsibility and to justice. Reliance on poorly sourced and concocted stories is perpetuating the conflict further.

In the end, the reason the TPLF is so popular in the West is because it is so connected. It spent 27 years at the helm in Ethiopia siphoning off great health and using the loot to build a network. Its former leaders held great parties and were articulate and charming. Its supporters are well known figures. But they were also monsters who built an organization which prefers to kill its own children than give up its quest for power.

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