Amharas? What Amharas? Western Media shrugs and keeps pretending an entire people aren’t getting ethnically cleansed

One paragraph. Two lines. That is all Fred Harter decided that the Amhara were worth for his latest article appearing Thursday in The Guardian on Ethiopia.

Oh, but you can supposedly learn a lot about what’s happened in Tigray (yes, past tense). Harter devotes a fair amount of space to the so-called Axum massacre and does a perfunctory “both-side-ism” with an Ethiopian army denial. Never mind the fact that the narrative on the massacre is riddled with inconsistencies, including the fact that the TPLF initially claimed to have control of the area and didn’t speak a word about killings until it was useful for media attention.

Never mind the fact that the Ethiopian regime put on trial and convicted several soldiers of war crimes in this instance — a rare show of justice that the TPLF has yet to match over its own atrocities.

Harter has nothing at all to say in his article about the devastation and the scores of IDPs in the Wollo area during the war, the vandalizing and looting of Dessie’s hospital, administration building and other facilities, nor what the TPLF did in Afar, desecrating at least one mosque and attacking a people who had nothing to do with its grudge against the federal government.

And of course, Harter lazily repeats the fiction that “aid was blocked to Tigray,” even though we have VIDEO FOOTAGE MULTIPLE TIMES of that aid getting through, that it was acknowledged to be getting through by USAID and World Food Programme officials and lest we forget, that a former director of the WFP in Ethiopia, Steve Were Omamo, has written a whole book making the case that there was no famine in Tigray.

Harter even has the paint-by-numbers insert-quote-here comment from Laetitia Bader, Human Rights Watch’s Africa director, who spent two whole years fanatically peddling the TPLF version of events to the point where HRW, along with Amnesty International, invented whole populations of victims in Welkait, even though the OCHA gave a substantially lower figure for all the ethnic groups in the region (for more details on this bone-headed mistake and others, consult my book, The Hyena War).

What does Harter have to say about what’s happening to the Amharas? People who were targeted for massacres even well before the war got underway in late 2020? One paragraph, with two lines of direct relevance.

“There is still fighting in Amhara and Oromia, Ethiopia’s biggest regions, where security forces face accusations of abuses. This includes a massacre of dozens of civilians early this year, which the government is yet to investigate.”

This is how lazy Fred Harter is. The massacre he’s referring to goes all the way back to January and February, and his link is to a Human Rights Watch report from April. In other words, he accepts at simple face value how HRW reports on Ethiopia and doesn’t even bother to cite a journalistic source.

But more to the point, there was a damn massacre only two days ago! Borkena is a diaspora website written and edited in my own home city of Toronto, a tiny operation, which despite any quibbles I may have over its less-than-professional editing, consistently gets the latest news on what’s happening on the ground in the Amhara and Oromia regions. Why can’t you, Harter?

There are multiple examples of attacks on Amhara civilians, including drone strikes, that happened in recent weeks and months. But no, this unprincipled hack won’t report them. Why not, Harter?

And don’t give me the regular crap. Yes, it’s true, journalists are bottled up in Addis and can’t easily travel to these regions. But boy, isn’t it amazing how you can easily jump on a plane and fly up to Mekelle? Almost as if it’s by design, isn’t it?

But this is the “let’s pretend” game right now of the Western media: Let’s pretend Amharas don’t exist. Let’s pretend the rest of Ethiopia doesn’t exist. Tigray, Tigray, Tigray — that’s all major English language outlets are interested in.

In mid-October, as social media reported and was verified by the Amhara Association of America, coordinated attacks by Oromo Security Forces (OSF) and Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) targeted residential areas inhabited by Amharas in Dera Woreda.

Did you read about it on your chosen Western news website? No. Don’t be surprised.

It can be no accident that powerful lobby forces are desperate to keep attention on Tigray even though the various rebel groups fighting to save Amharas — collectively known as Fano — are giving the Abiy Ahmed regime the fight of its life (Fano did, after all, take the lead in many engagements against the TPLF during the last war).

So, like a self-absorbed narcissistic child, the Tigray lobby can’t stand the focus wandering elsewhere. Time then to recycle the “greatest hits.” Instead of covering what’s happening now, the urgent crisis killing untold numbers of Ethiopians now, we get yesterday’s news. Giulia Paravicini of Reuters chose to co-author a major piece recycling lies and half-truths about food aid getting stolen years ago.

Not once does Paravicini and her colleague Steve Stecklow mention WFP chief David Beasley’s furious charge that Tigrayan authorities stole 570,000 liters of fuel and fuel trucks.

Not once do they mention the findings and conclusions of Steve Were Omamo, formerly of the WFP, that I cited above.

And of course, they don’t mention the TPLF’s own looting of aid in Wollo, proven by leaked UN documents, nor the devastating revelations uncovered by Canadian academic Ann Fitz-Gerald proving that the TPLF took control of aid in Tigray and prioritized its distribution to its own leadership.

This is, of course, all deliberate. I can only shake my head over how some are shocked by the Western media relentlessly ignoring and burying the facts that implicate Netanyahu and the IDF in the wholesale slaughter of Palestinians. I know better, but I still lose my patience with it all virtually every day.

Because I and others saw the same damn playbook used in Ethiopia. Same old bullshit methods employed by Reuters, CNN, BBC, The Economist, The Guardian, AFP, The Globe and Mail, Al Jazeera and others.

Just as with Palestine, these major brands reinforce each other’s narratives and then sanctimoniously declare who is a “reliable” and “legitimate” source to quote. And they’re lying to you. Consistently. Repeatedly. They refuse to report what some of us have uncovered, even though we have the UN documents to prove it, we visited the areas of the country they didn’t, and most disgustingly, they assert that if the reporting doesn’t come from someone in their club, it doesn’t matter.

Let’s pretend Ethiopian journalists don’t count — unless they work for the BBC or the New York Times and are willing to bend the truth to fit the agenda of their editors in London and Manhattan. The Globe and Mail’s favorite little protégé for Ethiopia coverage is a known suck-up to TPLF officials in Addis — something everyone knows as he’s been photographed socializing with them — but hey, let’s overlook that and pretend he’s a legitimate journalist. Except he’s not and never had anything published beyond a community newspaper until then.

I expect these articles to increase over the next few months because the Biden administration is on its way out the door, which will make many diaspora folks cheer, waving goodbye to the oblivious, condescending jerks who went out of their way to aid the TPLF time and again (and not only during Biden’s tenure but during Obama’s and Bill Clinton’s). But we have to remember that Trump is a moron who likely can’t find Ethiopia on a map and who once publicly suggested Egypt bomb the GERD. Don’t expect much help there.

On the other hand, Republicans, as loathsome as I personally find them, have at least shown a willingness to hear other Ethiopians out instead of swallowing the TPLF and OLA narratives without a moment’s thought.

But mainstream media will be panicking. The Tigray-hysteria articles will continue because if Western reporters stop for one second to properly examine what’s going on in Amhara and Oromia, they will have to confront the hard truth that they got the past four years wrong — disastrously wrong. And they’ll have to admit it.

Western media can still get away with its games for now because Ethiopian activists are stuck in the loop that Palestinians once were in decades ago, that Rashid Khalidi shrewdly identified in his book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.

Put bluntly, Amhara and Ethiopian diaspora activists can’t get their shit together. Their different political factions keep squabbling with each other and don’t have a clue how to run a professional media campaign. As followers of my Substack know, I ranted about this in not one but two columns, pointing out how ridiculous it is to keep having the same old tired protest marches outside the White House or the U.S. embassy in Toronto when no one’s paying attention.

As I write this, I just got invited down to participate in another protest march in DC, the same futile ritual. Sigh. Remember the definition of insanity…?

Someone passed along to me this ridiculous video of activists hitting the UAE booth at the Global Peace and Unity Festival in London. I watched it and clapped my forehead so hard, I think the shockwave scared the pet dogs up the street.

Amateur hour from beginning to end. First, who’s the idiot who thought it was a good idea to plaster the photo over the footage, so that we can’t even see what’s going on?

But more to the point. what were these activists thinking?

Get it through your head because it’s Communications Theory 101. Protest is spectacle. What audience are you trying to reach? Who were you trying to get on your side?

Do you honestly think that confronting the UAE representatives in London is suddenly going to prompt its government — which is not democratic anyway and so immune to such pressures — to reconsider its policy?

What did you accomplish in a tangible way? Were any major UK media outlets there to see your antics? Did they do a story on you? Interview you? I highly doubt it.

If you were honest with yourselves, you went down there to feel like a hero, making a grand gesture with your ambush. But you made it all about you, not the cause. “They did it again!” goes the self-congratulatory crowing of the tweet. “They condemned him…”

Who the fuck cares what “they” — as in you — did? WHO DID YOU PERSUADE? Who did you reach? Besides the usual echo chambers.

Because you know who’s beating you? The ones pretending it’s business as usual, and that Amharas aren’t getting murdered. They can get away with it because you haven’t learned how to do media properly and shame these news organizations in the same way that pro-Palestinian activists are gaining ground right now.

Did you even give some thought to media efforts and a campaign that explained to outsiders who the Amharas are?

Did you give any thought to correcting the stupid claim repeated again and again in Western media articles that “the Amhara once dominated Ethiopia’s government and society,” which was never historically true, and which should be high up on the list of things to fix?

Because how can we can get sympathy for a people under siege when the vast majority of Westerners don’t even know who these people are? Everyone knows today what a Palestinian is, where he comes from, what’s at stake. Great meticulous efforts have finally gone into educating the target audiences and then empathy can be won.

Palestine has momentum. What’s happening in the Middle East is finally shaking the conscience of the world.

Where is the moment of conscience for the Amharas and the concern over the repeated attacks on Ethiopian culture, religion and heritage?

Hurry up and properly learn how to wake the world! Your people are counting on you.