ADDIS ABABA – Big Western media corporates refusal to report the Mai-Kadra Massacre, despite the availability of concrete evidences, witnesses and survivors and
unrestricted access to the area is aimed to protect the TPLF clique and their narratives on the incident, a renowned novelist said.
The novelist Jeff Pearce, who have a profound knowledge about the West’s relations with Africa published an article
recently titled Ethiopia: Mai-kadra, Metekel, and the Media Shame That Won’t Be Forgotten. Pearce quoted Jemal Countess, a freelance photographer and former regional correspondent for Getty Images who traveled to Maikadra in early
March and spoke to witnesses and survivors of the horrors there that took place late last year.
As to him, reporters for big media outlets and analysts for operations such as Human Rights Watch and Crisis Group, which blamed the federal government’s restriction on access, have not shown desire to revise their narratives to protect the criminal faction.
Pearce indicated the Western media including Associated Press have tried to shift the blame from TPLF forces and its outlawed youth group Samri and attempt to present the massacre against ethnic Amharas was committed by federal forces and allied Amhara regional troops. “It has not occurred to certain Western reporters they could be interviewing the very perpetrators who hacked and beat people to death, now pretending to be victims. Now blaming the ENDF. Blaming Amhara militia or Fano.”
The Western media relied on members of Samri who just left after the slaughter and sheltered in refugee camps in Sudan to their reports and present killers as victims. The TPLF have infiltrated more than just the refugee camps and as they lose more territory in the real world, capturing the high ground in international opinion has become essential.
“Countess says that when he first arrived in Mai Kadra, a female reporter and a male photographer for Reuters were already on site. As he walked into a church courtyard with the Amhara State official, the man casually informed him, “Yeah, you see those guys, we had to switch out their translator because he was feeding them propaganda He was a TPLF guy.”
Even the witnesses and survivors talking to the Reuters reporter apparently realized that something was off, noticing how the translator began spinning tales of Fano coming along and committing war crimes, Pearce added.
Evidences Western media presented to substantiate their claim about the involvement of the ENDF in atrocities in Tigray are easily refutable. Evidences consists of an arm badge that appears on one uniform the “cut and style of the pockets.” TPLF sympathizers who defected from ENDF wear their old uniforms, and others in key positions had easy access to the uniforms.
About soldiers in the filmed incidents speak Amharic, the Western are ignoring the fact that many people in Tigray are bilingual. Also, the Federal soldiers are not allowed to use their cell phones while out in the field on operations.
Noting that Western’s ignorance about Africa and paid-off writers are the main reason for the one-sided and lopsided reporting, he called on the corporate medina outlets to use the horrific details, distilled in captions, along with Countess’s photos of witnesses and survivors.
“Social media ran with it, the government of Ethiopia ran with it, the Ethiopian Embassy ran with it, but in terms of big media outlets, no, because that completely destroys some of their narratives, and if they’re busy protecting the TPLF, then it just kind of puts them on the wrong side of history,” quoted as saying.
BY BILAL DERSO
The Ethiopian Herald April 28/2021
