Part III
CNN went ahead with its story, informing its website readers: “Without the raw footage and associated metadata, CNN cannot confirm the original device the five videos were filmed on, who filmed them, the date they were filmed or whether they were selectively edited.”
I can assure you there was a time where if you tried a stunt like this with such a sorry excuse for lack of factual background — and a lame-ass disclaimer to boot — you would be laughed out of a news bullpen and wouldn’t work for very long.
And on Tuesday, the AP ran another story by Ana Cara, who seems intent on indicting the federal forces with her coverage. This one proclaims that “an ethnicity is erased,” and arguably vies for the CNN investigation for the dumbest accusation so far. In laying out the woes of Tigrayan refugees, Cara writes:
“Now, for the first time, they also bring proof of an official attempt at what is being called ethnic cleansing in the form of a new identity card that eliminates all traces of Tigray, as confirmed to The Associated Press by nine refugees from different communities. Written in a language not their own, issued by authorities from another ethnic group, the ID cards are the latest evidence of a systematic drive by the Ethiopian government and its allies to destroy the Tigrayan people.”
Well, first of all, Amharic is the national language of Ethiopia. It has been since a Tigrayan, Emperor Yohannes IV, relied on it in his communication with regional leaders in the 1800s.
And while Ana Cara’s sources, Human Rights Watch’s Kenneth Roth and others may bleat about “erasing” an ethnicity, there are millions of Ethiopians who deeply resent an ID card system – one the TPLF introduced during their 27 years in power – that amounts to apartheid.
Given that millions and we do mean millions of Ethiopians are of mixed heritage, it’s asinine to suggest that any federal officials issuing a new ID card could all be of one monolithic bloc of a different ethnic group, especially if the cards are getting printed up in Addis.
So I’m curious: how does this work? You’re supposedly committing genocide of Tigrayans, according to TPLF lobbyists, trolls, and those who sincerely care but may not have thought it through, but you remove the very thing on the ID card that identifies them as Tigrayan?
Survivors of Mai Kadra, by the way, easily remember how Tigrayan officials used their ID cards to identify them as Amhara. Turns out what really erases an ethnicity is hacking their members to death and shooting them.
As for the Ana Cara story, the Ethiopian Twitter-verse got on the case, and many noticed that the ‘A’ on examples of the “new” cards is written in a style common among Tigrayans. This, to them, is a tip-off that these are forgeries. The way it was explained to me was with this helpful graphic:
I was told, “The 2nd A is the one more commonly used by Tigrinyna speakers and is closer to the original Ge’ez language. Try to imagine two people from the same country or land mass and speaking the same language but with dialects and linguistics to match.”
While the most ludicrous of accusations by the TPLF get big headlines and top billing on networks, verifiable crimes against other groups are being quickly filed and forgotten… and even when they were first reported, the full horrors have been sanitized.
I recall Twitter blowing up with grotesque photos and outrage over cannibalism allegedly perpetrated in the Metekel massacre against Amhara and Agaw people by Gumuz militia in late December of 2020. I didn’t want to believe it. Ethiopians couldn’t do anything like that, I told myself, they wouldn’t. I waited for “real” news to tell me what was happening.
Only it didn’t. You won’t find it in the brief story by the AP for December 23, 2020. You won’t find it in the New York Times story of January 13. You won’t find it in a France 24 story of early February.
This was strange. Journalism is where “if it bleeds, it leads,” so if anything, reporters should have pounced on the more sickening details. But then Metekel is not Tigray. And the BBC even obliged its website readers by answering the question, “Is the violence linked to the conflict in Tigray?”
Lately, nobody seems to give a damn anymore about what happened in the Benishangul-Gumuz attack except maybe the survivors and witnesses. And a Getty Images correspondent-, who is withholding their identity for security reasons-who traveled days after the slaughter to a displaced persons camp in Chagni to talk to those who saw and endured what happened.
“In Gilgel Belese, we saw a human body cut up like a cabbage that had been eaten by other human beings,” recalled a woman in Chagni who didn’t want to give her name. “How could this be in the 21st-century? This is how three of our husbands were killed. They were killed barbarically. The attackers ate their bodies, and we found only parts of their bodies. Their organs, like their liver and stomach were not found with their bodies. It is terrifying, and we never want to see that again.”
“We want to go back and collect our properties from Mandura,” Sintayehu Assefa, 41, told the correspondent. “It is difficult to return there permanently. We have seen our neighbors eating our flesh, our bodies, and our livers. They slaughtered us and took our bodies and our families’ bodies. I have seen them with my naked eyes eating human flesh. So how can it be possible to live with them? How can we become friends and come again together with them after this?”
And like the Mai Kadra witness statements and photos, the stories and pictures testifying to what happened in the Benishangul-Gumuz region have been available to major media for quite a while. In this case, for months.
Western media should care. One survivor says that soldiers for the Gumuz militia have been regularly shuttling back and forth to Sudan, where they get medical care, rest up and re-supply. They would be unable to do this without Sudanese authorities looking the other way.
The irony is that the crisis merchants, human rights organizations and pundits claimed last year until they bored us silly that the Tigray crisis would engulf the Horn. Now here is one more tip that another nation might be helping to destabilize Ethiopia, but the Chicken Littles are ignoring it.
But then, it’s never really been about keeping Ethiopia stable, has it? “They prey upon Western ignorance of Africa”
As we talked, Jemal Countess was clearly frustrated. I asked him what was behind that, whether it was the lack of complete detail in Western coverage or maybe the slant and bias…? He took a breath and considered.
Then: “It’s just piss-poor journalism.”
He told me that he’s deeply disappointed with CNN and noted how their reporter, NimaElbagir, characterized the war as a “conflict for power” and actually used the term, “Amhara-zation.” I had noticed this myself, since it’s straight out of the propaganda manual for the TPLF and for Oromo extremist groups.
“And I’m sitting there,” recalled Countess, “and I’m looking at that document, the TPLF Manifesto that states that the Amhara are your number one enemy, and that came out in 1976, long before any of this even started, and none of that comes into play. They play these games, because they prey upon Western ignorance of Africa, the Western ignorance of the deep history and the complex history of Ethiopia. And they just take it like ‘We got the big guns, people listen to us, we can just throw anything at the wall, and people will eat it up.’…
“People are either very ignorant or paid off. I hate to be crass about it, but I just can’t explain how bad the journalism is, and how one-sided and how lopsided it’s been.”
I had asked him earlier about my drawing a connection between the TPLF’s surprise attack on the Northern Defense Force on November 4 and the first known killings in Mai Kadra on November 6. Even if you ignore the survivors who spoke with him and stubbornly cling to the chronology of believing the violence began on November 9, the dates are too close to ignore. And yet so far, I haven’t found any stories by major Western news operations picking up on this.
“I think that’s what made people not want to touch it,” remarked Countess. “Seriously?” I asked, because yes, I’m really that naïve.
“Yeah,” he replied. “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.››BY JEFF PEARCE
(Historian, Novelist, career surrealist
The Ethiopian Herald 30 April 2021
