Part II
(Historian, Novelist, career surrealist)
More than ever, Ethiopia doesn’t need human rights groups who do long-distance phone calls or interviews at refugee camps with unverified sources — it needs experienced forensics experts who can measure rate of body decomposition, who know how to study buildings strafed by machine gunfire, and who can interview genuine, traumatized witnesses and more questionable ones with a professional’s equal measure of compassion and detachment.
Because Mai Kadra demonstrates all too well the bias going on. By December, the Western media changed its tune after the initial shocking reports. The blame was shifted, and “more than a dozen Tigrayan refugees told the AP it was the other way around: In strikingly similar stories, they said they and others were targeted by federal forces and allied Amhara regional troops.” This story has multiple bylines but one of them is Ana Cara. Remember that name.
Oh, and by then Amnesty also waffled, suggesting it’s “possible that civilians from both ethnicities were targeted in Mai Kadra.” But there are more than a couple of reasons for why the stories might be so “strikingly similar.”
Consider the experience of Tilahun Baye, 35, who had stayed on the outskirts of town in the farmlands and fled with other laborers for Sudan on November 10. Along the way, his group ran into about 20 to 30 members of the TPLF youth wing, Samri, and TPLF soldiers heading towards Mai Kadra. “They started shooting towards us, killing some of us dead and wounding others. I was among the wounded, but I pretended to be dead.”
With the help of other survivors, he managed to finish the 40 kilometers distance to reach Sudan, but he was in for a horrible shock. At the camp were a few of the youths who had attacked them on the road — now they claimed to be civilian refugees.
“When they recognized me, they even accused me of being a killer,” says Tilahun, and they tried to prevent him getting medical treatment. “On November 15, a Sudanese general took me to a medical center, and I returned back to Ethiopia with the help of the Ethiopian Embassy.”
It hasn’t occurred to certain Western reporters they could be interviewing the very perpetrators who hacked and beat people to death, now pretending to be victims. But now they are blaming the ENDF; blaming Amhara militia or Fano.
Jemal Countess questioned a regional official showing him around the town and asked the man again when he did follow-up, “Did any Amhara kill anybody? Were there Fano here?’” The answer was an unequivocal no.
But if that seems too easy to accept, Countess argues that a Fano attack simply wouldn’t make sense from a military perspective. “Fano is not going to be with ENDF. And the first people into Mai Kadra were ENDF. So you’ve got three big, major military bases ‘down the street.’ You got a tank platoon at least ‘down the street.’ And so first off if you drive into Mai Kadra, how the hell is Fano getting here? Mai Kadra is kind of remote… Where would Fano come from? What, are they getting buses to come?”
Amhara survivors also point out how some Tigrayans left the town in advance of the massacre. I wondered if some perhaps wanted to get ahead of any EDNF offensive or if they didn’t want to be part of what would happen.
“I think there are two sides to that. I think there are decent people, and then there are just people who left because they were just, like, ‘Yeah, we know, we’re leaving…” Countess reminded me that in the early reports on refugees streaming into the Sudan camps, it was hard not to notice that many were young, healthy men. “And those were the Samri, and actually the Amhara regional government person who was travelling with me, he said it was Samri and adult men who just left after the slaughter. So Samri, which were the youth, and then it was either regional, local police or local militia.”
Of course, the TPLF have infiltrated more than just the refugee camps. 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 regional 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.
In the process of all this gas lighting, real victims are being eclipsed. Abrehuley Fontahun, 48, found himself rounded up with 50 other prominent Amhara business leaders and tossed into jail the morning of November 9. He was scheduled to be executed in the afternoon of the next day, and in fact, others among the 50 had already been murdered. But the ENDF was closing in on the town, and his jailers fled.
Reporters for big outlets such as The Guardian and analysts for operations such as Human Rights Watch and Crisis Group have blamed the federal government’s restrictions on access. But even when access was granted, these observers don’t revise their narratives.
Any of the major media outlets in New York, London, Frankfurt or Toronto could be using these stories. These horrific details, distilled in captions, along with Countess’ photos of witnesses and survivors, have been available for about a month. His Mai Kadra shots are dated March 5, and you can see them for yourself here.
There is not a major paper or TV network in the West that does not have a Getty Images subscription. But Countess says a casual search tells him only a pitiful three outlets — Der Spiegel, Sowetan and SüddeutscheZeitung— have availed themselves of using his material. All the news that’s fit for the gullible.
Instead, the Western media has let itself become the errand boy for a sophisticated propaganda machine. The examples are close to farce, but Ethiopians are not laughing. Not in Addis Ababa and not in many diaspora communities across North America and Europe.
Take the case of the mass killings that allegedly took place at Mahibere Dego and were supposedly caught on video by a repentant federal soldier turned whistle-blower. BBC News teamed up with Belling cat and Newsy, while CNN worked with Amnesty for separate investigations. It sure is interesting how major media operations on both sides of the Atlantic just happened to release their coverage on the very same day.
Unless you are covering something huge, like 9/11 or the U.S. Capitol attack, you simply don’t see international coverage synched up like a chorus. And these weren’t just ordinary story filings, they were both investigative reports. Hmm…
Both teams made huge deals out of their satellite image analysis and geolocation, as if wow, we’re all supposed to be impressed with their toys. Pity, that common sense wasn’t part of their arsenal. Because of their evidence consists of an arm badge that appears on one uniform (but not on those of the others), the “cut and style of the pockets,” and the fact that these soldiers speak Amharic — ignoring the fact that many Tigrayans in the region are bilingual.
As an Ethiopian diaspora friend emailed me to ask: why would a federal soldier phone-cam a massacre when it would be so clearly incriminating? An analyst pointed out to me something even more obvious: Federal soldiers aren’t allowed to use their cell phones while out in the field on operations. There are several good reasons for this, but how about duh, your phone can act as a handy GPS tracker.
Forgotten, too, is the fact that many Tigrayans from the ENDF who defected wear their old uniforms, while Tigrayans who were in key positions to handle logistics at the Northern Command had easy access to the uniforms. And during the surprise attacks in the night on outposts of Northern Command back in early November, TPLF soldiers made their ENDF counterparts remove their clothing. Even dead bodies were stripped and found naked.
Neither the BBC nor CNN seem to care that the video was supplied by Stalin Gebreselassie, a reporter from Tigrai Media House. This is a guy who once claimed in a broadcast — and he was serious — that a TPLF single bullet took out three tanks and a pickup truck. The clip of this has made the rounds more than once on social media.
BY JEFF PEARCE
The Ethiopian Herald April 29/2021
