More efforts to rewrite the TPLF War in Ethiopia: What the MSF doesn’t say in its internal review
Got to hand it to Martin Plaut and his crowd. Despite the Tigray People’s Liberation Front shamelessly throwing in with Abiy Ahmed and demonstrating that its cause was always a lie, Martin and company are determined to push their talking points until the myths become accepted history.
The target audience is not Ethiopians, who know it’s all bullshit. The target isn’t even Tigrayans, who remember when the TPLF used them as human shields, demanded families each submit one member to fight in exchange for food, and which sent child soldiers into battle. Aside from Abiy now relentlessly trying to slaughter Amhara, we have the sideshow of bitter TPLF schisms in the north.
No, the audience is, was, and always has been the West. These efforts are to try to jump-start the dying battery of interest in the debunked “Tigray genocide” narrative. To lend that credibility, Plaut and his fellow propagandists keep returning to incidents that might paint the Ethiopian National Defense Force during the war in a bad light.
The same attention — and the same frequency of reports — is certainly not paid to those child soldiers I mentioned, nor the human shields, nor the terrorized families.
And nope, we certainly don’t get Martin and his ilk putting the same effort or attention into telling the world what’s happening to the Amhara, Gurage or Afar.
There is plenty to investigate and condemn the ENDF over what it’s doing today, but no, instead we regularly get the TPLF Victim Nostalgia Tour.
Funny how that works.
The “soup of the day” this time is the case from June 2021 when Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) accused soldiers of the ENDF of dragging staff members out of vehicles in the aftermath of a skirmish in Tigray and murdering three of them at a spot south of Abi Adi. The news peg here is that Médecins Sans Frontières is making public an internal review into the matter.
By any definition of news, there is no news here. We’re supposed to care that MSF has written down in a fifty-page internal report what it’s already said for years. The New York Times, which brazenly sided with the TPLF from the beginning of the war, conveniently came to similar conclusions in a March 2022 story. Nevertheless, Plaut is pushing the report on his website.
To be clear, my primary aim is not to poke holes in the MSF’s version of the incident. God knows since even before the Pretoria Agreement, we all saw how the ENDF has shamed itself with brutal attacks on innocent people.
But yes, there are some truly dumb, forehead-slapping inclusions in MSF’s report, like this gem, that “reviewers consulted independent forensic and ballistic experts who analyzed photographs of the scene of the incident. These experts were not present in Tigray at the time of the incident.”
No shit. And their analysis of just photographs would be worthless and laughed out of any court, let alone a criminal investigation lab.
What I find far more interesting is the timing of this report’s release and all the things that the MSF leaves out.
Interestingly, the report only wants to consider the incident within an extremely narrow context. Its lens never pulls out to consider the full extent of the war, and its background summary is pretty much the TPLF’s version, that Tigray was the only region suffering. It even casually uses the phrase “conflict in Tigray,” which is to ignore the devastation, the murders, the rapes in other parts of the country. It’s an insult to the hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons forced from their homes by the TPLF.
We’re supposed to forget while MSF claims there was “increasing hostility” towards its staff by the ENDF that the TPLF looted and vandalized hospitals and medical clinics in Wollo, but oh, wait — MSF had nothing to say about that. Not then and not today.
It never mentions what every Ethiopian knows: that when the TPLF started the war in its horrific attack on federal forces on November 3, 2020, its soldiers stole federal army uniforms and subsequently masqueraded as ENDF forces in various operations. There is no consideration that this might have been a factor in the attack on its team near Abi Adi.
And it doesn’t mention an incident I reported on back in October 2021 as part of an investigative article into how the UN and the MSF simply ignored the TPLF assaulting and detaining its Ethiopian staff.
The UN’s own internal documents proved that it did nothing as Ethiopian members of its staff were beaten and held for days.
As I recounted in my book, The Hyena War, when a source complained about TPLF belligerence to a director, the director downplayed the conduct and claimed the measures were “not harassment” and that the incident wouldn’t be officially reported “for the common safety” of UN operations. The UN was quite willing to move staffers to other regions when the TPLF demanded it.
The source also claimed that three Amhara staff from Médecins Sans Frontières were taken in the first week of July in another incident and held for several days.
After long negotiations, they were eventually released but also relocated. UN officials also tried to downplay this episode at one of their internal meetings.
A senior official for the MSF team apparently burst into tears, upset by the obvious gaslighting. “It happened, it happened!”
The episode prompted my source to think, “If something comes, no one will protect me.” Here were clear signs that Ethiopian analysts and staff were working in an environment of fear and intimidation — yet their Western bosses did nothing. Including those with the MSF.
Two days after I put out my article on Medium, an MSF spokesperson finally got back to me with an official comment: “Our staff have faced harassment and detention by various actors in Ethiopia. In the interest of the safety and security of our staff, we generally do not provide any details of such incidents and handle them in bilateral discussions with those responsible. All armed actors should respect the neutrality of our medical mission and allow MSF teams to continue working so that those in need may receive much needed assistance.”
MSF is, of course, perfectly entitled to speak out on the lingering questions of the murder of its three staffers in Tigray.
But I have to wonder — as I’m sure many Ethiopians will — why MSF has absolutely nothing to say, has never offered a report on how its staff and those with UN operations faced regular beatings, intimidation, and threats from Tigrayan forces. Where’s the outrage for that? Where’s that internal review?
Why is the MSF still playing the TPLF’s game long after the Junta’s ruthlessness and cruelty have been exposed?
Where is its condemnation for all those war crimes?
