Perceptions and the Reality of Africa, Part 4: The Conflict Merchants
This is the fourth in a set of four video lectures I gave a few years ago, and for more details on the original delivery of the project, as well as the first lecture itself, you can go here. The second lecture can be found here and the third here. As I wrote for the brief introduction to the third lecture, some of this material will be quite familiar to my more attentive Ethiopian followers and readers of my book, The Hyena War. But the wider public is likely not aware of how the so-called “humanitarian” agencies can and do distort events for their own purposes.
Part 5 will be an essay with brand new material that ties the ideas of these four lectures together. And it offers a warning about how the West could threaten all of Africa’s history in the near future.
I can barely remember a time when we didn’t have Amnesty International. And then along came Human Rights Watch. And their names come up for practically every news item that has to do with a crisis in Africa or Asia or the Middle East, and these guys are treated with the awe, respect and veneration we’d normally give an operation like say, the Red Cross. Only we are not dealing with saints. Far from it.
Here’s an article from The Guardian in April 2021 about an internal review made by the secretariat for Amnesty International. The organization “has a culture of white privilege with incidents of overt racism including senior staff using the N-word and micro-aggressive behaviour such as the touching of black colleagues’ hair.” Even months before that, its own international board had emailed staff about the Black Lives Matter movement and suggested that racism was essentially baked into the “very organizational model” of Amnesty and shaped by the “colonial power dynamics and borders” that existed when it was founded in 1961.
As Amnesty lectured the world on African dictators and farm protests in India, its own office staff sneered at a fellow staffer’s “urban accent” and referred to her as “the black girl.” Another staffer pointed out how ethnic minority staff were passed over for promotions with pay raises going to the whites in the office.
Human Rights Watch is hardly better. Despite the inherent minefield of controversies for the Arab-Israeli conflict, it’s worth noting that as far back as 2009, its own founder, Robert Bernstein, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times on how the organization had lost its way, especially when investigating Israel: “Reporting often relies on witnesses whose stories cannot be verified and who may testify for political advantage or because they fear retaliation from their own rulers.” It turned out that HRW had tried to bargain with Saudi Arabia for funding by criticizing Israel. The right-wing Washington Examiner has — not without justification — hammered away at HRW, showing in 2020 how then-director Ken Roth agreed “to limit the group’s work on gays in the Middle East in exchange for a cash infusion from a Saudi businessman… The rot at Human Rights Watch has gone so deep that the group has even partnered with and incorporated reporting from a group launched by a designated al Qaeda financier.”
Again, it’s useful here to bring up the recent ongoing conflict in Ethiopia. And you can see how these organizations are shamelessly unethical in how they report on the conflict.
They posted this on Twitter, saying “authorities in Ethiopia are conducting mass arbitrary arrests” of Tigrinya speakers. Now to be fair, some Tigrayans were arrested in Ethiopia’s capital of Addis Ababa. I even met and interviewed a Tigrayan activist in the city who said they should be. And I said, How would you feel if you were one of those who were picked up? And he replied, “I was — twice.” He hates the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). Anyway, you can already see this is a complex issue.
But Amnesty even made it into a meme poster.
And yet this photo has nothing to do with the arrests. They stole it from an AFP photographer who had to publicly shame Amnesty into taking it down.
Here is Gerry Simpson of HRW, who posted a photo about Ethiopia, only this is a UN truck in Syria. He’s also posted on Twitter about supposed outrages in Ethiopia where he uses photos from Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. Here’s another tweet of his. This isn’t Ethiopia, it’s Yemen.
Here is HRW’s Nadia Hardman making an accusation without any evidence at all.
“While news that thousands of Ethiopian migrants are being repatriated and released from horrifying detention centres in Saudi Arabia is welcome, concerns remain re: reports that Tigray migrants are being separated and detained on arrival in Addis.”
Look at the two photos: One is of an Ethiopian Airlines plane, but the second is an old photo of Ethiopians mistreated in Saudi Arabia — giving the impression that these were Tigrayans mistreated after coming home.
Now maybe you think is small beer. I told you in the last lecture how Amnesty International was completely incompetent over the Mai Kadra Massacre. Let’s talk about their work on what’s known as the Axum Massacre. That started when Martin Plaut, once the Africa editor for the BBC, who I mentioned last time, tweeted out on January 9, 2021 that “Maryam Tsion Church in Axum has been attacked. Locals fear the aim is to take the Ark of Covenant to Addis Ababa. As many as 750 hiding in the Church were taken outside and shot in the square.”
And here’s Amnesty’s report, and they make a big deal out of satellite footage, as if blurry pictures aren’t open to interpretation.
And again, there’s no damn common sense. This massacre is supposed to have occurred with the worst of the violence over November 28, 29, 2020 by Eritrean and Ethiopian forces. One big problem:
The leader of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front [during the war], Debretsion Gebremichael, bragged in text messages to Reuters editorial staff that his forces had retaken Axum on November 28. Reuters posted its story based on his texts November 29, and it was time-stamped 12:40 a.m. Now for there to be a massacre, the TPLF had to lose an important skirmish. By 3 to 4 p.m., we’re told, Eritrean trucks entered Axum and their soldiers “went on a rampage.” Yet there were no reports of atrocities in Axum to the media through the final days of November nor through all of December. If they had happened, it’s reasonable to ask: why did the top leader of the TPLF not express outrage in his text messages to Reuters? As I wrote in an article, “So which kind of liar do you choose Debretsion Gebremichael to be?” He either lied over the retaking of Axum, or he lied by omission about the massacre, which would be inconceivable.
According to Amnesty, “the mass killings came just before the annual celebration at Axum Tsion Mariam, a major Ethiopian Orthodox Christian festival on 30 November.” The organization doesn’t say how it bothered to verify accounts or even who its interviewers were talking to. We’ll never know because it withheld all the names of its interview subjects. We’re told: “The killings left Axum’s streets and cobblestone plazas strewn with bodies. One man who had run out of the city returned at night after the shooting stopped. “All we could see on the streets were dead bodies and people crying,” he said.”
Really? Well, that’s interesting because here is footage of religious pilgrims at the festival outside the Tsion Mariam church on November 30.
Fana TV was in Axum for the sake of the religious event, and here they’re talking to folks about how attendance is down thanks to the war. And before you question if someone fiddled with the date, the original footage was uploaded to YouTube December 4, 2020 — that is weeks before any accusation was made about a massacre there. I’m playing you a version that was re-broadcast later with English subtitles.
Amnesty and the TPLF want you to believe that scores of people strolled peacefully in and out of this church where only the day before, local residents were held against their will and then murdered outside. Do you buy that?
And then the story kept changing. And there were other investigations, and I don’t know about you, but I have never heard of an atrocity where the death toll keeps going down.
An investigation by the Ethiopian Attorney General’s office declared that fighting between the TPLF and Eritrean soldiers occurred on November 27 on a mountainous area of the city, with at least five civilians killed by artillery and with other TPLF killed in civilian dress. According to its report, “Forty civilians seem to have been taken out of their homes and killed in home-to-home raids conducted by Eritrean troops.” Ten days later, military prosecutors convicted three soldiers of rape, charged 28 others over the killings, and still more over sexual violence. So, yes, you do have war crimes — but you also have the Ethiopian government taking responsibility for it, trying and convicting soldiers.
Still, it’s a hell of a far cry from the Amnesty version of events, with bodies outside a cathedral.
By the way, not once, ever, has Amnesty International nor Human Rights Watch condemned or investigated the TPLF’s use of child soldiers, even though as I showed you in the last lecture, the clear evidence is staring everyone in the face.
And why do we need them at all? This is how Amnesty bills itself online: “We use our analysis to influence and press governments, companies and decision-makers to do the right thing.” And here’s what Human Rights Watch says about itself: “We meet with governments, the United Nations, rebel groups, corporations, and others to see that policy is changed, laws are enforced, and justice is served.”
Think about the flagrant abuses I just showed you. Now consider how many stories you see and hear each year that quote Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Their primary function seems to be to duplicate that of investigative reporting, but they’re not journalistic outlets. They’re both advocacy groups, and they decide their agenda.
They are accountable to no one. No one but their major donors. Despite all the trouble they’ve caused, they are still at it.
Yes, of course, there are genuine, legitimate human rights abuses and atrocities in the world, but these organizations encourage the laziness of news operations, because, hey, now you don’t have to go to Mali or Chad or Ethiopia or wherever to check the reality on the ground — just phone New York or London. They’ll tell you. They’re the authority.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust an investigator when I don’t know who it is. And I don’t trust an organization that won’t even use proper photos of the country it’s slagging. And I sure as hell don’t trust them when they seem so bent on regime change of a country — because that is too much power for any private organization.
This is why I’ve personally called for Deplatform, Defund, Deport Amnesty and HRW.
Some folks think that’s a radical position. Remember, they are accountable to virtually no one, at least no one in public. Even if one of their big donors complained, they could always find others. It should be painfully clear by now: This is the re-invention of White Man’s Burden. Let’s tell you over and over how uncivilized the Africans are. Let’s lecture them on human rights, and by the way, please give us money. What did the British do after they abolished slavery? They went over to Africa and to places like Benin and said, “Oh, we’re going to stamp out slavery.” Same damn thing.
The warping of African history is useful to validate the warping of current events in Africa now. And it’s big business for that other partner in crime for Western journalism, what I call the conflict merchants. These are the academics and think tank experts and analysis firms out there, who like Amnesty and HRW, answer to virtually no one.
There is International Crisis Group, and its analysts are regularly interviewed on Western TV outlets and by newspapers. And no one at the BBC or elsewhere seems to care that their front man for months on Ethiopia, William Davison, was twice deported from the country and had a clear conflict of interest in making any comment on this war. There’s Sahan Research, founded by Matt Bryden, a Canadian who used to work for the UN and who was convicted of espionage in Somalia. The Somalia Star did an investigative report on him that found Bryden allegedly once extorted a Somali businessman who “paid millions of dollars to Bryden just to stop him from inserting his name in a UN report.” Run out of Nairobi, Sahan also allegedly ducked paying its taxes to Kenya on a mysterious counter-terrorism unit. Why, the Somali Star wanted to know, does a think tank even have a counter-terrorism unit?
You can find plenty of stories where their experts weigh in on the affairs of state in Africa. And I wonder: when will we see the rush to talk to African experts about what’s going on in the United States or Europe? Why is it I can find articles in 2022 where Deutsche Welle, [Vella] for instance, didn’t talk to a single African person about what was happening in Ethiopia?
I am dead serious here. We can’t settle for this being how it is. I have seen so-called experts make provocative comments online, and they are quoted in articles, which of course, are seen by legislators both in the UK and the U.S., who then cite them in Parliament or in Congress, and the experts are brought in to talk to those politicians, and both get to talk to the journos again, and round and around we go.
And then we have the academics. I would argue the most dangerous man today for Africa is Alex de Waal of Tufts University. He’s a plague on the stability of African nations even as he poses as a champion for African human rights.
Eric Reeves, an expert on Sudan, pointed out how de Waal made “slanderously inaccurate” comments about the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement and its leader John Garang. After Sudan, de Waal co-wrote a tome that helped drive the war crimes tribunal on Rwanda, but his book offered a lopsided version of the genocide that was fed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front and ignored their own atrocities.
He even boasted to a reporter about shaping the narrative of the genocide, and in an Op-Ed piece for The Guardian in 1996 took a stand that borders on horrific. “The inhabitants of Mugunga camp are not refugees… they are fugitives from justice or migrants.” Claiming “There will be no bloodless political solution and it is naive to think there could be one,” he suggested, “If we are not prepared to go and destroy the Hutu militias, we should not stand in the way of the people who are prepared to do so.” At the time, the Mugunga refugee camp had 175,000 men, women and children.
De Waal was the perfect ally of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the terrorist group fighting federal forces in Ethiopia. He lied by omission and helped perpetuate lies for the TPLF on the BBC and in articles for a wide spectrum of Western publications, everything from Foreign Policy to the Times Literary Supplement. Notice, he’s not writing for Africans, he’s writing for policy makers in the halls of power. The goal is regime change, and he even gave us his playbook in 2020.
These are his words about charges made by humanitarian groups, “Howls of fury and denial from the accused are considered an honor — the louder the better. The standard of proof is well below what is needed for conviction in court — for indictment, even — but the mud sticks.”
With friends like these, who needs enemies? But that’s the point, there will be no end of the need for enemies. Keep the fire stoked, keep the regimes pliable to U.S. and European interests, keep Africa hopeless.
Can we turn to the UN? Let’s go back to the example of Ethiopia. Sources provided me with the UN’s internal email and its Safety and Security updates, which prove that UN workers were looking the other way and ignoring forced recruitment by the TPLF, and they’re even covering up incidents in which their own staff are getting assaulted and kidnapped by the TPLF in Tigray.
Here’s an internal UN Security and Safety update. Note the middle item dated April 17, 2021. It confirms that the TPLF is “detaining several numbers of residents” who aren’t willing to give up their children to join the TF — that means Tigray forces. Why wasn’t this made public?
Here’s another leaked email, this one from the head of the sub-office Shire in the Tigray region at the time for the UN OCHA. This one is chock full of disturbing stuff. She tells the Shire group: “The situation across Shire AoR feels a bit tense as TF military recruitment campaign continues (and intensifies) for over a week now. Unconfirmed reports indicate that mandatory recruitment (at least one person per family) have been ongoing in the past few days, coinciding with the increasing tensions and challenges in/around TF-controlled areas in Amhara region.”
There’s no indication this manager wants to investigate further or if officials ever asked the TPLF to stop forcing Tigrayans to fight.
She writes: “Firearm shooting to celebrate the recruitment is frequently heard and may pose danger to local population and aid workers.”
There is no action suggested here that the UN will take to persuade TPLF soldiers and their officers to stop doing this dangerous practice.
And she writes: “All partners, please, refrain from attending (and taking pictures/videos of) any recruitment-related events.”
Now this is quite revealing. Why must partners and UN staff even need to be told to avoid and not capture any photo/video evidence of recruitment-related events? Why would they attend and be fraternizing with new recruits at all?
This is their mail, these are their reports. You would think this would be huge news, wouldn’t you? Not one Western media outlet ever called me up, sent me a DM, tried to match this story. And what’s more, I know for a fact from my sources that the UN staff knew about my articles. And instead of curbing these practices, they doubled down to increase security to try to stop the leaks.
I interviewed two UN whistle-blowers, and I wrote a story on how the TPLF walked into their offices in Mekelle and demanded the names of sexual assault victims and the locations of safehouses — they wanted to get victims, whether through coercion or force, to help them make a case against Ethiopia in the International Criminal Court. Again, this is a huge story, putting sexual assault victims at risk. No Western media outlet matched it.
Before my flight home to Canada, my digital recorder was stolen at the Addis Ababa airport. One month after my story was published on Medium, the TPLF leaked an edited version of my interview and outed my sources, hoping to embarrass them. Instead, this blew up in their faces, and Ethiopians were shocked at the revelations the two women had to offer. It was so big, it made news around the world. And I’m not going to show you any images of their stories, because yes, I know the names of these people were outed, and it’s a moot point, but I feel even showing the stories breaks my promise that I would never reveal their names.
I’ll tell you though that it sure was damn peculiar that in all the coverage, AFP and BBC and others never felt like picking up a phone and calling the guy who originally interviewed those sources. The Western media knew that if they talked to me, I would undermine its narrative. And what did the UN do? Antonio Guterres threw the two whistleblowers under the bus. They were both fired.
What about regular diplomacy? Well, be careful who you want to have doing that. Here is Susan Rice — former U.S. ambassador to the UN, former national security adviser — and good close friend of Ethiopian dictator Meles Zenawi.
This is from the Obama years. She’s talking to reporters about an election under Meles where the TPLF claimed it was elected with 100 percent of the vote. And she can’t keep a straight face.
Ha, ha, ha, very funny. I promise you that no Ethiopian ever wants to see her in their country again. And who else was around back when Meles and the TPLF were in power? Let me give you a couple of names: for the U.S., Daniel Yamamoto and Vicki Huddleston. Now why do I mention them?
Well, a source gave me the Zoom video of a secret meeting between a TPLF official, Berhane Gebre-Kristos, and a group of retired diplomats, all scheming for how to help the TPLF get into power.
Here are some quick highlights, and you see Tim Clarke, former Ambassador of the European Union, Daniel Yamamoto, who was recently the U.S. ambassador to Somalia, France’s Stéphane Gompertz, and Vicki Huddleston, former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for African Affairs and US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa.
By the way, they didn’t even have their facts right, because Yamamoto talks about the TPLF supposedly being right outside Addis Ababa — he got that from CNN — when it was miles and miles away. Ethiopians thought that was hysterically funny — and pathetic. But they are clearly discussing the idea of Abiy being removed by a coup d’état and of the TPLF winning the conflict.
Now online, you had TPLF apologists such as Jason Mosley — who is disturbingly enough, as I’m sure many of you know, the managing editor of the Journal of Eastern African Studies. And he tried to claim oh, the video’s nothing. They’re retired diplomats. But unless you’ve been under a rock for decades, you know retired diplomats are often enlisted for back-channel wheeling and dealing. And besides, we got hold of an additional clip that shows Yamamoto connecting with Huddleston, working on something current for Defence, so that’s a crock.
Former EU ambassador to Ethiopia Tim Clarke admitted on the video that all of the attendants “maintain contacts with our former employees. Just the other day I was talking to the existing EU ambassador to Ethiopia.”
The video went viral. It got more than 220,000 views on my channel alone. People have a way of deciding for themselves sometimes what news is, and Ethiopians knew what they saw: American and EU diplomats conspiring with a terrorist leader. Did the Western media pick this story up? No. They did not.
When some of us managed to blow up the façade, the media tried to portray us all as crackpot conspiracy theorists. You’ll recall in the last lecture how I showed Tom Gardner of The Economist did his best to smear a respected academic. When they say “conspiracy,” they forget that a basic part of a conspiracy — and if you’re a Law & Order fan, you get this — is that one hand doesn’t have to know what the other hand is doing as long as they have a common goal.
This is how far the disconnect is between the West and Africa. In November 2021, the same TPLF official, Berhane Gebre-Kristos, who briefed those diplomats was in Washington DC. And as amazing as it sounds, he led a news conference. How it got arranged is anyone’s guess, but reporters sat calmly listening to a bunch of nobodies who claimed to be a coalition of different major ethnic groups who planned to take over the Ethiopian government — and this is a direct quote — “by force or negotiation, whatever they wish.”
And the media took them seriously! They wrote up a story on them. Meanwhile, back in Ethiopia, people went online and said, “Who are these guys? We’ve never heard of them.” And it took only a couple of hours for a few folks to recognize a couple of them. It turned out that two of them at least were identified as limo drivers in Toronto and Calgary. Word leaked out that they even had to go get new suits for the press conference. They became a laughingstock. Here’s one of the favourite jokes of how Ethiopians mocked them on Twitter.
Everyone in Ethiopia knows them as the “Uber Drivers.” And it’s bizarre but I genuinely believe their massive scorn for these idiots is what saved the country that month. Whoever cooked up this little scheme realized that their stooges would never be taken seriously. This is also why fascists hate being laughed at.
In the previous lectures, I demonstrated for you that in many cases, we are dealing with wilful ignorance of African history — a lot of marginalization and sometimes brazen suppression of it. While there are multiple causes behind lazy, ignorant journalism over Africa, I personally believe that we can point a finger at this ignorance. And arrogance. Because the so-called “seasoned” reporter will come back to you and say, “Oh, we don’t have time for a history lesson.” Which is the excuse to go on pushing conflict because it makes good copy and good drama.
I’ve laid out the evidence for you that too many journalists today are shamelessly abandoning their ethics to become marketers for a geopolitical agenda. They’ll brazenly take a side, and it’s easy, because they have Amnesty or HRW in their corner, posturing as moral authorities. And it’s a big sham. And if those groups aren’t enough, well, you can always shop around for a professor or a think tank to back up your story. Who does all this serve?
It sure as hell doesn’t serve Africans. And I find it very interesting that we have multiple examples — Rwanda, Sudan, Syria, the Gaza situation, the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo — in which Western reporters come back later and say in books or even their own memoirs, “Oh, the situation was more complex than we thought.” How nice of you to figure that out… after the powers that be got the traction they needed on this or that narrative.
Almost twenty years ago, you saw a media establishment act in perfect lockstep over the phantom of WMDs. The New York Times led the way, that same New York Times that lied about the Ukrainian famine in the 1930s, that same newspaper that downplayed the persecution of Jews in the 1940s, that same newspaper that tried to sell a terrorist group, the TPLF, as the victims instead of the perpetrators.
And the West is very good at making its reporters into heroes. All the President’s Men. They even did a movie over one newspaper fighting the good fight all alone over WMDs. It’s called Shock and Awe. Not a terrible movie, but not a great one either. I watched it, and I realized, You will never see a Hollywood film where they take the big, noble American journalist to the woodshed over lousy coverage of Africa. It’s too big for the Western ego.
And because you’d have to go after so many sacred cows. Like these thinks. Like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Like the way diplomats talk about African countries as if they’re children behaving badly and embarrassing them.
I want to play for you here a clip of the Ethiopian writer, Asfa-Wossen Asserate, who is profiled in my book, The Gifts of Africa. This is from an interview for another project, but I think he makes a crucial point here.
Why? Why should an entire continent put up with these attitudes? I think one of the ways to make it all stop is to get not one, but three African countries as permanent members of the UN Security Council.
Maybe then we can get other discussions going. Because if you are a doctor, an IT professional, even a diplomat, you are subject to the most humiliating and insulting procedures and hurdles to get a visa to come into Britain just to attend a conference. As a white Canadian, I can travel to almost anywhere on the globe. What about you?
Why is Europe and America treating African legal migrants like criminals before they even board a plan? Where are the think tanks and human rights organizations on this issue? Why is there not more investigation into the unfair trade practices imposed on Africa? Where is the advocacy for that?
I’ve talked before in other venues about the idea of turning the lens of Critical Race Theory on the global institutions affecting Africa, and we need this now, and we need it urgently. This is one way that African history can return to being a vital force for helping the continent develop.
And the truth is that given the state of affairs, especially given the political situation in the U.S., recalling African history, the genuine history, has become a subversive act. Which is why I think we also have to consider these reform ideas — a Pan-African broadcast network, seats on the Security Council, better treatment for migrants — all as goals to pursue in a new civil rights movement. We associate the civil rights movement with American history and the African American struggle. Well, Africa itself needs its own civil rights movement.
Now we need to remember its history and to make history. And I’m hoping that all of you out there will be interested in acting as accomplices in what John Lewis rightly called “good trouble.”
Thank you.
