My Speech to the Save Ethiopia Forum
Ethiopian diaspora organizations should be rushing to learn — to especially learn what’s worked and what hasn’t with the Palestinians and the Ukrainians. But they don’t.
I was invited to speak on Saturday, March 29 to a Zoom conference organized by a group called the Save Ethiopia Forum. I mostly agreed to take part because I was assured that this event would try to reach a wider audience beyond the typical Ethiopian diaspora echo chambers — I guess we’ll see about that. Plus I got the chance to have a nice conversation with the legendary artist and art professor Achamyeleh Debela.
So, here is the original script for my remarks. If you’re new to my work here or you’re not Ethiopian, hopefully the first few paragraphs will be revelatory, and if you need more, there are plenty of articles on the cause among the rest of my Medium posts. For Ethiopians who sadly know the basic facts and have heard me say some of these things many times, I invite you to scroll down to the paragraph that’s marked in bold and starts “And I know why,” where hopefully you’ll consider the material a bit more substantive.
Hello,
Thank you for having me, and my thanks go out especially to Professor Achamyeleh Debela who recruited me for this conference. As usual, I apologize to my Ethiopian friends and allies for mispronouncing names and places and still not being fluent in Amharic.
I was told that this event is largely aimed — or at least it was designed to be aimed — at an audience beyond the normal communities and groups that I and my fellow speakers regularly talk to. If so, and if we actually manage to get people beyond the normal scope, that will be a minor miracle. I have been banging on, shouting at the top of my lungs, for diaspora organizations to do this for two whole years.
It shouldn’t be difficult exposing a genocide. I have discovered, to my horror, that it’s far easier to invent one. I’ll get to that in a bit but first —
Let me tell you about a drama that is practically a microcosm of what’s been going on in Ethiopia for the past few years. I won’t go into all the grisly details because they’re too much. You either have to watch the original report or listen to the victim herself, who in this case is a young woman named Birtukan Temesgen. She was once a pharmacy student at Dembi Dolo University, and she and more than a dozen other young women and a few men were kidnapped by ethnic extremists in the Oromia region. The women were gang-raped and horrifically violated. This happened years ago, back in 2019, but what finally became of them hardly anyone knew, and their fates were soon eclipsed by the war between Ethiopian federal forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the TPLF.
I remember when the story of the kidnappings first broke, the Western media did a perfunctory job of coverage and then quickly moved on. It has the attention span of a fruit fly. I know this because I have worked off and on in journalism for decades.
Birtukan finally got to tell her story on Ethiopia’s EBS network a few days ago. It was harrowing. She cried on camera and was comforted by one of the presenters. I think this was a moment that’s one of the greatest displays of compassion I’ve ever seen in my life. And then in one of the most contemptible displays I’ve ever seen in my life, the Abiy government bullied the EBS network into retracting the story, denouncing the victim, and just for good measure, it arrested the journalist who interviewed Birtukan. I’ve heard she’s now being detained.
It’s not enough of a nightmare what this young woman went through. She has to be subjected to ridicule and libel and imprisonment all over again. And still the Western world doesn’t care. As I wrote on Substack only a few days ago, since the EBS broadcast, there has been nothing in Western media for days, which is an eternity in news time. The BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, AP don’t care.
And I know why. For a few years now, I have looked at ongoing crises in Ethiopia from all angles, and there is no escaping the simple fact that it’s racism. Time and again, white people say oh, that’s an oversimplification, or surely it’s more complicated than that. They’d like it to be so because that’s preferable than the very obvious conclusion. They’d like to be let off the hook. Well, we can’t be let off the hook. None of us are in charge of the media, but time and again, the examples are readily available that if we make a loud enough noise, we can get the media to change its priorities. Only too often, we don’t.
The blunt truth is that Western media only spares so much attention to Africa, and their methods are outdated practices that go back to the 1960s. Most major news operations are not there to cover the perspectives of Africans but to give their point of view — they show up to interpret Africa for white people back in London and Washington and Geneva. It’s a ridiculously archaic approach to newsgathering in an age where the people you cover can naturally go online and see what you write, and these “correspondents” still write as if Africans can’t possibly be paying attention.
Moreover, these news organizations are often parroting the geopolitical interests of the U.S. State Department or the UK’s Foreign Office or what the UN thinks. Most of the time foreign reporters hardly leave the safety and comfort of their apartments in a capital unless they have to, which is why you see them so often quote Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. They’re only a phone call away, always available. But Amnesty and HRW are parasites. They are not there for the Africans either. They are in the business of keeping the pot boiling and raising funds from big donors. Without conflict, there’s no money coming in.
International Crisis Group — which relies on multiple countries and foundations for its funding — doesn’t get money from Africa either. No one in Africa invited them. And yet they infiltrate African countries like intelligence agents and are constantly on the news giving their perspective on Africa.
What does this have to do with what we’re talking about? A lot actually. Before the very first shots were even fired by the TPLF when it attacked Ethiopia’s Northern Command in late 2020, social media posts went out, declaring “Tigray Genocide.” But there was no genocide. I can prove it. Others can prove it. What was plastered all over news sites about an Axum Massacre didn’t happen the way its witnesses said it did. It couldn’t have because there’s video on YouTube that clearly shows the church, peaceful and on a sunny afternoon, right when TPLF spokespersons say blood was spilling out on its courtyard.
There was no famine. A top official for the World Food Programme wrote a short book cataloguing the lies that were peddled and how there was food insecurity, but no famine. The New York Times was stupid enough — and racist enough — that its photographer in Tigray shot photos of TPLF child soldiers but didn’t even clue in until a social media backlash over what he revealed. And then the Western media collectively tried to pretend there were no child soldiers. A correspondent for The Economist, Tom Gardner, went out of his way to try to smear a respected academic and then essentially whined like a little girl when he got caught and kicked out of Ethiopia. He claimed it was a coordinated campaign. There was no campaign. I was the one who got him kicked out because I exposed what he did online in an article, and the Ethiopian government took notice and now had the justification to give him the boot.
But the Western media settled on its chosen victim. With breathtaking arrogance and cynicism, it usually decides in Africa there can be only one victim at a time. Forget nuance for those simpletons at home in Manchester or Chicago or Winnipeg, they can’t handle the fine details. Plus, to say out loud, “Oh, God, we got it wrong” — can’t have that. And while a couple of so-called veteran reporters have had to grudgingly acknowledge what is happening to the Amhara lately, all this still works for them because the overall message is that Africa is hopeless. The Africans can’t get along. See how they can’t get on without us?
What has been effective so far is to wait out the situation. Don’t pay attention to those folks dying over there at all.
This was the tactic of Western news organizations over Israel’s appalling slaughter of Palestinians, until it became so obvious that they had to adjust their methods. But only so far. A high-profile BBC reporter quit in protest after these games of “X number of people were killed in air strikes” — conveniently leaving out who was doing the bombing. That sort of thing.
But it took decades for Palestinians to learn how to handle the media properly and how to build a grass roots infrastructure of activism among students, American liberals, and sympathetic Jews in the U.S. and Israelis. And even with that, 50,000 Palestinians have been murdered.
How many Amhara will be lost? Because frankly — and I’m not betraying any secrets here — Ethiopian diaspora organizations have been conflicted. Even worse, they’re laughably, tragically, hopelessly incompetent at media relations.
Their leadership doesn’t listen, and I know this, because when I make these accusations, about two hours later, important folks tell me in private, Thank you for saying what I’ve been saying all along. But nothing changes. I tell people, Like it or not, you need to translate everything — everything — into English so that outside people can understand. For better or worse, English is the lingua franca of international media, and you need to put your message in English. Nothing changes. I asked days ago for a full translation of the EBS retraction. I still don’t have one.
We can talk about Amhara victims here, the numbers, and I have written several articles on how Western media also distorts Ethiopian history, trying to portray Amhara people as if they were once the powerful elite in the land and so basically it’s “they had it coming.” This is another lie. The truth is that different ethnic groups ruled the country over the centuries. But more importantly, if this cause is to be effective and find traction and get the story out, it has to come grips with a media that is standing in our way.
I’ve never fought a war, I’ve never seen a battle, but I’ve seen the aftermath of war. I’ve seen great seas of people, internally displaced persons, lose their dignity and have to sleep on mattresses dumped on the ground in makeshift shelters. I’ve seen Afar driven from their homes and stuck in the useless tents of the UN that are boiling in the heat of the day and that leave them to freeze at night.
I’ve seen the people of Lalibela and Dessie stare with stoical resignation at their government offices, their hotels, their universities, their museums, their mosques and churches all vandalized, looted, desecrated by the TPLF. I’ve heard the stories of Amhara refugees who had to flee homicidal zealots who follow what’s called Oromuma, a toxic ideology that thinks Oromo are somehow Ethiopia’s master race. I went to Mai Kadra myself to report there on the massacre committed by the TPLF.
It is racism that drives the Western news coverage on conflict but doesn’t dare to explain what’s really behind the conflict. It is racism that keeps in-depth stories and properly investigated material from finding a wider audience. It’s the racism that decides we will tell you how to value African lives. We know better. We’re the BBC. We’re Reuters. It doesn’t matter what you say, it matters what this spokesperson for Human Rights Watch says. And of course, he’s in New York. Or London. Nowhere near what’s going on.
I’m sure critics will argue, How easy for you to say it’s racism — you get to claim that you stand apart. But they would miss the point. It’s appalling, it’s downright criminally shameful that the only two white people who have been consistently speaking out on this issue as far as I can see are participating today, and that’s Graham Peebles and myself. and our participation doesn’t make us saints, it doesn’t make us heroes. The Ethiopians saved us — by showing us what real compassion and what real civilization is in the face of barbarism, and for allowing us to try to help them. It is a great privilege, and I feel I owe them many times over.
But the fact that there’s only two of us here…? That makes us failures in my book. We’ve failed to persuade others in North America and Europe about what is happening. And so have many of you. Come on! If we were successful, you’d have more diverse folks here. You’d see more white faces, more Asian people, more people of Middle East descent marching in solidarity at your protests. But you don’t. And that’s on us. And it’s on you in the diaspora organizations who are complacent and won’t learn and refuse to adapt.
I will concede the challenge is great. We are living in a cynical age, one in which we have the ludicrous term “compassion fatigue,” which is another way of saying you stop giving a damn. But I know I can still care about the Burmese and care about the Iranians and still care about the Amhara even as I care about the Afar.
And the reality is that the way a story is told is designed to erode that compassion, to wear down sympathy. Again, the Africans are presented as hopeless. In the case of the manufactured narrative for the TPLF, we were told by the BBC and Associated Press that these rebels were fighting for a new country, that they were persecuted for their regional ambitions and faced extermination. Funny how the media stopped talking about an independent Tigray the minute Getachew Reda bowed like a sycophantic waiter at a televised ceremony and accepted a framed plaque from Abiy Ahmed, the man he and his colleagues wanted to haul before a war crimes tribunal.
Why this matters is because the Western media realizes it was conned, but it can’t admit it was conned. So, it now abdicates its responsibility to cover genuine victims facing real ethnic cleansing.
It’s an ugly fact, but we won’t win the day by sharing Bertukan’s story by itself, or the horror stories of countless Amhara. The media regularly sells tales of woe from Ukraine, Sudan, Armenia and when it feels in the mood, Palestine. It’s in the disaster business. It sells chaos.
The only way through is to tell about all the Bertukans, yes, but to also share the reality of the struggle by the grass roots militia units collectively known as Fano. Fano, who isn’t fighting for just Amhara but for a new constitution and a reformed Ethiopia where all ethnicities are safe.
Fano contradicts the sanctimonious white wisdom that you need Americans or Europeans to help Africans save themselves. Fano didn’t set out to defy the racist stereotypes, but it does, in the same way that the No More movement once defied Western media bias during the TPLF war and got smeared as a government put-up job.
Ethiopians know better. They know that it’s racism that Fano keeps getting depicted as just another ethnic force when over and over they’ve stated clearly that their goal is to fight for everyone. It is the only force that has any hope of leading the country out of its ethnic nightmare. To build awareness, we need to give people a narrative that includes hope, not just suffering.
And any true friend of the Amhara, indeed all the Ethiopian people, would stop this cowardly game of praising Fano when the phone cams aren’t recording and then dares not breathe its name in public. If white Ukrainians are entitled to publicly support those who defend their homeland and citizens, so are you, and you should raise your voices for Fano.
I am telling you: There is a way out of this fog of indifference and media neglect.
It will mean using a simultaneous carrot and stick approach. And I guarantee that even if you are adversarial to the media, many of them will keep coming back. Some will try going around you, or ignoring you, or subverting you by choosing morons who like to be on TV or quoted in the papers instead of your designated spokesperson. These are old tricks. If anyone bothered to ask, I could teach you how to deal with them. But so far, no one has asked. No one has hired me beyond writing the occasional news release or protest letter. Back during the TPLF war, a couple of lobbyists were hired for a while who simply took the diaspora’s money and did nothing to change Washington’s mind. Instead of investing in a smart media relations and grass roots activism strategy. And it’s still like this. A shrug of the shoulders and let’s march again on Saturday.
This is the apathy and incompetence of the diaspora organizations. They should be rushing to learn — to especially learn what’s worked and what hasn’t with the Palestinians and the Ukrainians. But they don’t.
And that’s too bad because they’re running out of time. In the greater scheme of things, Western media will be forced to cover the story because no actual genocide can be ignored forever. It will be the callous greed for ratings and views online, but the motivation doesn’t matter. The conflict merchants will still come. I can’t hide my contempt for those in this profession I sometimes share. But I do recognize their usefulness. Unlike some, however, I see no upside to the plight of Amhara being validated by stupid white people.
I want us to get the spotlight on these horrors, but again offer a narrative with hope. That’s because I fully expect Western governments to try to do again what they did with the Pretoria Agreement, and that is to manipulate the political outcome. They can get away with this better if it’s done with little attention. That is unacceptable to me, and it should be unacceptable to every person in Gondar, Harar, Dessie, Lalibela, Mekelle, every village, every hamlet. It’s not enough to say this is genocide, it’s barbarism. We have to reject the racism that helped create the conditions for it. We have to reject the neocolonialism that could perpetuate it.
If you are not Ethiopian, and you are watching this, I am telling you there is a place for you to come join and act in what should be one of the most important campaigns of conscience in the 21st century. If you’re an Ethiopian listening to my words, we need you.
We need you to stop doing stupid marches outside the White House that get no coverage, to stop thinking a post on X is enough work for the day, and for you to call up the leadership of your preferred organization and say, STOP! It’s time to quit doing the same pointless thing over and over again and adjust your thinking, adjust your tactics.
Get smarter about media and your activism. Go scold them. Go shame them into being smarter. You don’t want to camp on the lawn at a university and get thrown out of school or even thrown out of the country — yes, I certainly get it. But we all have to be smarter and think up something else besides a march in London or Toronto across the street from the U.S. consulate. Big deal.
Earlier speakers referenced Martin Luther King and quoted, “We shall overcome.” Well, the titans of the American civil rights movement took risks. You don’t have to take stupid risks, but at least expand your thinking!
You need smart, insightful communications strategy. You don’t want to hire me for the job? Fine. Hire a person equally or better qualified but hire someone who knows what the hell they’re doing in terms of international media relations. Give them a proper fat full-time salary for at least six months so you can get what you pay for, and even more importantly a generous and healthy budget to operate, which includes travel expenses, and a full-time assistant who’s fluent in Amharic.
Think that’s too steep? Well, let me ask you: what dollar value do you want to put on the lives of your friends, your family members and your fellow citizens of the homeland? Six months of actual committed effort could turn things around. Please get it done.
Amhara are dying. They’re being hunted and jailed. The very least we owe them is intellectual courage and tireless ingenuity. For the love of Christ or Allah or whomever you choose to worship, people are going to prison right now back in Addis because of a TV broadcast. They are being raped in villages in Oromia.
They die and suffer in the darkness of global apathy. So you are damn right we need to do better.
Thank you.
