Tom Gardner’s Africa Alzheimer’s

I am fairly sure I’m at least 20 years older than Tom Gardner, give or take a couple of years, but I’m sorry to report that The Economist’s wonder boy in Nairobi is suffering from an unusual condition I like to call “journalistic amnesia.” You see it in certain former correspondents to East Africa who peddle a new, streamlined version of events they covered with rather dubious approaches, not to mention methods, and who would like to convince the world, “Look, I got it right! All we have to do is jam this fact over here, rearrange that, shove that over here, and ignore a lot of that…”

An opportunistic infection happens in folks with weakened immune systems. And one of the characteristics of journalistic dementia is that the “infected” journalist wants everybody else to be drooling like an idiot, scratching their heads, and declaring, “Ooooh, teach me, teach me!” The collective immune system of Western news readers and viewers has been weakened steadily over the past four years by a narrative of outrageous propagandistic drivel.

Gardner is happy to keep shoveling this party line, even linking it to a now debunked report by a think tank that has shadowy ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. In a twist that you couldn’t make up, China’s propaganda rag, the People’s Daily, outed New Lines while trying to push its “We’re not really slaughtering Uyghurs” fiction, but as it happens, the National Review also figured out years before that New Lines was a shady operation. Even if one wanted to look past all this, the report is unbelievably lazy, as all its distinguished legal experts did was read articles. You know, the ones by Cara Anna, Martin Plaut, Jan Nyssen, Kjetil Tronvoll… not any sympathetic to the Ethiopian perspective.

So, my conclusion is that Gardner must have lost his mind. The only alternative would be that he’s consciously lying about events, and surely he wouldn’t do that, would he? Oh, wait, yes, he would — and even go to great lengths to misrepresent how others depict those events.

Gardner has a new book to sell, and The Guardian newspaper is happy this week to oblige him with a massive promotion in the form of an “edited extract” from that book. So, now Abiy Ahmed must be an “enigma.” Men and women who are simply out for power may be mildly interesting, but if they’re an enigma then it takes a brilliant mind to interpret him for us. How convenient then that Gardner’s book happens to be published by Hurst, the same imprint that brought you Martin Plaut and Sarah Vaughn’s Understanding Ethiopia’s Tigray War After Your Lobotomy, a comedy romp and the first trade paperback effort to rewrite history — written by two individuals who never visited the war zones even once during the conflict.

Well, I did go to the war zones in person, and I did cover the war between Ethiopia’s federal forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), and since I also have a book out this week — a narrative on what really happened during what I call The Hyena War — I feel it’s useful to point out how much hokum Gardner can pack into a test-tube of newspaper extract.

I’m excerpting a few pieces of my own book for an antidote. Let’s take it by the numbers, shall we?

This is in no way an apologia for Abiy, who has clearly boarded the Mugabe-Idi Amin train to megalomania, complete with the African dictator clichés of a new opulent, expensive palace to be built, journalists and critics tossed into prison, and the sponsorship of widespread and ruthless ethnic cleansing, the chief target in this case being the Amhara people. The only thing Gardner gets right, which is easy to do with hindsight, is that a tsunami of support across Ethiopia helped lift Abiy in the early years, and individuals I know who were ordinarily smart, discerning people talked about his charm and his potential the way teenage girls gush over Taylor Swift. It should be almost needless to say, they recognize now they got suckered.

Gardner’s article is intellectually dishonest from the outset. He quotes Oromo activist Jawar Mohammed as complaining that Abiy “was not interested in serious deliberation.” It’s entirely possible Abiy wasn’t interested, but Gardner fails to offer context on just who Abiy was dealing with. Gardner knows better, for he himself once wrote an article quoting how Jawar said, “My village is 99 percent Muslim. If someone speaks against us, we cut his throat with a machete.” Strangely, he links back to his article that includes this quote but doesn’t deem it important enough to put in his main feature. Practically every educated Ethiopian can recite to you how Jawar has adjusted his public views to get closer to power, and his latest performance is to depict himself as a moderate. But our reporter here is counting on white Westerners to not have a clue about the shifting nuances of Ethiopian politics.

The main problem, however, is Gardner’s poison-pill revisionism over the Hyena War. It is yet another entry in a tedious assembly line of offerings to retell the war a certain way, to manufacture consent for a possible return of the TPLF to power and the destabilizing of the regime in Eritrea.

Gardner, for instance, writes that “given what transpired later, it now seems that what Abiy sought by making peace with Eritrea was not simply a peace agreement… but someone to support him in any future confrontation with the TPLF.” He writes later how “Eritrean authorities warned repeatedly that the TPLF planned to invade Eritrea and repeat the horrors of the 1998–2000 war.”

He neglects to mention how those warnings turned out to be justified. Or that a major spark for those horrors long ago was a disputed spot near the border called Badme. He neglects to mention that in 2002, an international boundary commission declared that Badme belonged to Eritrea. Ethiopia’s dictator at the time and TPLF strongman Meles Zenawi chose to ignore this ruling and held onto the village. The key concession that Abiy Ahmed made in trying to normalize relations with Eritrea in 2018, in fact, was to at last give up Badme.

Gardner also neglects to mention that the TPLF did fire missiles on the Eritrean capital Asmara, which was public knowledge in the West by at least November 14, 2020.

He quotes Daniel Yamamoto, former ambassador and chargé d’affaires in Ethiopia and Eritrea, without bothering to ever mention that Yamamoto was one of several diplomats who met in secret via Zoom with a TPLF official during the Hyena War and openly discussed how Abiy could be removed from power through a possible coup d’etat. This puts a very different color on his source’s views, and while certain TPLF apologists tried to downplay the Zoom video leak, it was a huge story within Ethiopia that briefly affected events.

You would think a more responsible reporter would note that.

In the same vein, Gardner discusses Abiy’s economic agenda and writes, “The TPLF, led by erstwhile revolutionary Marxists, criticized these plans as ‘temporary solutions’ that would not solve Ethiopia’s problems.” This is cute. The operative modifier in this sentence is erstwhile, and it presents the dispute as if Ethiopian Robert Reichs were debating Ethiopian Milton Friedmans. Again, as everyone in the country knows, the TPLF abandoned Marxism as soon as it figured out that milking billions in Western aid money could keep its leaders in luxury.

It was an open secret for years that with major business licenses or contracts, Tigrayans were picked first. In Afar, locals had no control over their land and made precious little from the crucial salt trade. The regime even kept its own home base poor. Tigray remained one of the poorest regions in Ethiopia. In the year that I first visited the country, 2013, Ethiopia was receiving an annual $3.5 billion in foreign aid, which made up roughly half of the country’s national budget. And yet little of that was ever seen by ordinary citizens, let alone those in Tigray. The TPLF had created a generational kleptocracy, with officials investing their wealth in shopping plazas in the States and sending their sons and daughters to Ivy League schools like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

In 2005 when a diaspora radio station did an exposé on TPLF corruption, government officials filed a libel suit in an American court. But Meles Zenawi soon ordered that it be dropped because the radio station had a brilliant checkmate move: it demanded that TPLF officials “declare all their wealth before and after they came to power in Ethiopia” — right down to the bank account numbers within thirty days — for the court to inspect. It also had a leaked document that apparently gave a detailed breakdown of the officials’ wealth. Meles himself allegedly had $41 million parked in the Bank of Malaysia. Ambassador and later Foreign Affairs Minister Berhane Gebre-Christos had $19 million at an account with Citibank. And on it went.

Is it any wonder then that Ethiopians hit the streets in protests to try to banish the TPLF from power and first treated Abiy as a hero?

But in Gardner-world, the TPLF’s war is reinterpreted as Abiy’s personal vendetta, and that “the TPLF, and by extension Tigrayans, were increasingly singled out as the sole source of Ethiopia’s ills [my italics].”

Whatever Abiy truly feels about Tigrayans, this is textbook TPLF deflection, that the party and the Tigrayan people are one and the same. They’re not, as scores of Tigrayans who fled from the TPLF during the war into Amhara later demonstrated.

Gardner mentions the introduction of new currency notes as if it were a vindictive punishment directed at an ethnicity. Others recognized the truth: that it was to break an oligarchy that had a stranglehold not only over its home region, but a country.

Kassahun Melesse, an assistant professor of applied economics at Oregon State University, wrote a brilliant article in November 2020 for Foreign Policy that detailed the corruption and pointed out that Abiy not only posed a political threat to the TPLF but a financial one. “These include his administration’s plan to privatize the state-owned Ethio Telecom, the Ethiopian Sugar Corporation, and companies in the energy sector with assets of over $7 billion.”

A source, in fact, told a reporter for The East African “that the government’s move to demonetize the currency will enhance attempts to exchange large amounts of illegal notes held by former political leaders and businessmen. The source said corrupt cartels are believed to have ‘illegally obtained over 110 billion in birr notes outside the banking system.’”

Noting the number of recent incidents of ethnic violence, Kassahun Melesse observed in his own piece: “Many of these attacks appear to have been orchestrated and financed by those who lost out from Abiy’s rise to power and the reforms he has been undertaking; they are determined to make the country utterly ungovernable unless they are the ones ruling it. And there is overwhelming consensus that the TPLF’s leaders were the main losers from Abiy’s reforms while also possessing the capacity to plan and carry out such attacks — by employing the financial muscle and security network they built over three decades of political dominance.”

Two months into his term, Abiy had cleaned house. He fired the army’s chief of staff and a TPLF insider, Samora Yunis. One of the others to lose his job was Getachew Assefa, the sinister director general of the National Intelligence and Security Services. While yes, Abiy was clearly consolidating power, many Ethiopians outside Tigray wouldn’t have been sorry to see Getachew go. It was he who presided over a network that saw dissenters and journalists tortured and that conducted mass surveillance on the country’s citizens.

Stripped of his power base, Getachew moved to Mekelle and holed up inside one of the city’s hotels. He had done such a good job of staying out of sight that news operations had to use dated, grainy black and white photos of him. Then an Ethiopian court issued an arrest warrant for Getachew over his litany of torture and political murders, and he allegedly fled to Sudan. But journalist Zecharias Zelalem also reported in a tweet that around this time, federal security forces were “deployed to Tigray to arrest a number of former NISS and TPLF affiliates accused of various crimes. Tigrayan security forces reportedly surrounded the airport in Mekelle and detained the federal troops.”

In October of 2018, to the shock of many Ethiopians, the TPLF re-elected him as one of the nine members of its executive committee and as a member of its central committee membership.

And when Major General Tekleberhan Woldearegay was forced out of his position with the Information Network Security Agency, he made a radio broadcast that “appeared to call for a coup, calling the new government ‘an enemy force,’ ‘a threat to the federalist system,’ and ‘not of the people.’” Anyone paying attention could see three obvious things: the TPLF would not give up power easily. It would not discard its own, even when they were in disgrace. And it did not care if Ethiopia wanted to move on — it wouldn’t let it.

Funny how Tom Gardner leaves all this out, his finger on the scales to suggest that when it comes to the Hyena War, Abiy is “arguably more to blame than anybody else.” Well, journalistic dementia’s a bitch.

And of course, it helps if you lie by omission.

Gardner writes, “Support for the region’s efforts to fight the locusts then decimating Tigrayan agriculture was slashed.” He then writes, “Civil war erupted on 3 November 2020.” Notice that he gives the impression that the “slash” to support came before hostilities broke out, but in fact, as his own linked article proves, the support stopped because the war started.

I will even save you the trouble of clicking; he wrote in 2020: “A UN internal document seen by Reuters last week said efforts to combat the locust swarms were believed to have stopped in Tigray because of the conflict.”

As it happens, I interviewed soldiers who were there as war began, one of them telling my TV crew and me how his unit of federal troops had been busy helping the local populace in Tigray deal with locust infestations and the Covid pandemic.

“Civil war erupted,” wrote Gardner — a neat end-run around the issue of who started firing first. Except we know it from the horse’s big fat mouth. On Tigrayan television, TPLF mouthpiece Sekuture Getachew bluntly came out and admitted that the TPLF attacked the Ethiopian army first. “Should we be waiting for them to make the first strike?” demanded Sekuture. “Or take preemptive action to avert the looming war? Israel made surprise attacks against [Arab] forces and demobilized the enemy troops to successfully defend itself.” You can see a clip of him confessing this in my report.

What really happened on the night of November 3 and November 4?

There were attacks on multiple military bases, at least five, of the Ethiopian National Defense Force’s Northern Command. Some were direct attacks by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, while others involved soldiers committing treason on its behalf. Soldiers crept out of their beds and abandoned their posts after dark — turning on their comrades-in-arms, stabbing some to death or slitting their throats as they slept. In the general confusion and open skirmishes at some barracks, loyal soldiers were prevented from getting their weapons. Federal army uniforms, arms, and equipment were all stolen during the attack; some supplies had already gone missing days before, demonstrating that the operation was planned well in advance.

The Ethiopian government still has not formally declared the losses, but a rough estimate by informed academics is between 4,500 and 6,000 killed. Many of those who were captured suffered cruel humiliations; both men and women were forced to strip naked, with some being sexually violated by foreign objects, including weapons. Some female soldiers had their breasts cut off.

When I interviewed soldiers at a veterans’ hospital in the city of Gondar (who were treated for wounds inflicted in other operations), I confirmed that the November attack came as a complete shock to the troops on the bases. Yirga Muluye Mekuriyaw told me that sleeping soldiers were disturbed at around two in the morning, and the enemy “came and started shooting. We lost a lot of men. We lost our brothers, we were hit.”

Sergeant Adamneh Alula, serving with a different unit, said his fellow soldiers had no idea who was firing on them as there was the much-heralded recent peace deal with Eritrea; he and his comrades-in-arms fought for three days, running out of food and water, and they escaped through the Humera forests and desert to the Amhara region but were eventually taken prisoner. Adamneh estimated that about 10,000 soldiers were captured, kept in Shire and Tigray with no provisions until they were moved briefly to Axum University; “If they did give us food, they would give us bread that was too old, not for consumption.” At one point, they were paraded through the town of Abiy Addi, where residents shouted abuse: “They told us we would die, they shook bullets. I was hit by a rock — I don’t know if you can see this scar.” He was later freed when Ethiopian federal forces retook the area.

If anyone had paid attention, they would have noticed with alarm how leading TPLF officials were casually spoiling for a fight in public statements days before the attack. On November 1, former Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin had promised, “If Eritrea intervenes, other countries will invade Ethiopia, and Ethiopia will become another Libya, Syria, or Yemen. I guarantee it.” The next day, TPLF’s top dog Debretsion Gebremichael had vowed, “Tigray will be the burial place of our enemies.”

It was literally more than a year before a single Western media outlet offered any kind of deeper and more balanced attention to the Ethiopian government’s case — and then only because the government took some initiative. A Reuters “special report” by Stephen Grey tells how federal prosecutors made a presentation to Reuters journalists, which included 16 sworn statements from Ethiopian soldiers who were there, witnessing events and fighting the rebels. “Ethiopian prosecutors said they have collected 20,000 pages of documents and interviewed 510 witnesses as part of their investigation into the November 3 assault. They said the investigation has found that Tigrayan forces simultaneously attacked or seized over 174 locations, including army bases, police stations, banks, petrol stations, airports and communication offices.”

Grey quoted from one of the statements, that of a twenty-year-old soldier named Shewaseb Kagnew who operated an anti-aircraft gun in the camp of Agula, near Mekelle. At twenty to midnight, gunfire interrupted Shewaseb’s sleep. He quickly got dressed, stepped outside and had barely gone ten feet “when Tigrayan forces attacked… ‘My friend was shot in his head and chest by people who wore the uniform’ of a Tigray regional force, Shewaseb testified.” The problem was that by the time such compelling details were offered to Western media — more than a year after all this happened — it was far too late in the game to affect international opinion.

Let’s consider Gardner’s line again: “Later, the fighting would spread to other regions…” But no, the fighting was not a spilled glass of wine that stained a tablecloth. This passive-voice BS doesn’t cut it, and a lie of omission is still a lie. It remains an incontrovertible fact that the TPLF, without any provocation, chose to attack Afar — its soldiers did it because that’s where the groceries from the aid agencies were coming from, and they wanted to control the route, control the region, and choke off a crucial supply line to the rest of the country.

It remains an incontrovertible fact that the TPLF invaded deep into parts of Amhara, and no one with eyes or a brain could still claim it was merely defending the borders of its home region. I have written in article after article, video report after video report and countless more X tweets, that I and others saw for ourselves the spiteful waves of destruction the TPLF inflicted on schools, museums, universities, administration buildings, houses of worship, not to mention its creation of countless internally displaced persons.

If the reader picks up on my tone of loathing for Tom Gardner, I make no apology for it. It is not simply that he smeared a friend or that I found him personally condescending when I had to deal with him, mine is a contempt for the smug betrayer. The Ethiopian people were betrayed, a people who let him be a guest in their nation. Journalistic principles were betrayed, those of fairness, balance, even simple curiosity for the truth.

Gardner is intelligent, which is why his lies and his “Alzheimer’s” over inconvenient facts are hard to fathom. He writes reasonably well (in comparison, say, to his fellow TPLF promoter, Geoffrey York for the Globe and Mail, who has a style for dispatches that I can only charitably describe as “creative typing”). Having made it into the pages of The Economist and The Guardian, Gardner is in a position where he could do real good by telling the truth. He doesn’t. And as his personal conduct has shown when he’s caught at his lies, he behaves exactly like the very organization he’s helped airbrush — he strikes the victim pose. Woe is me, I was harassed, journalism is not a crime, rinse and repeat.

What is beyond despicable is that he is willingly supporting a narrative that insists millions of Ethiopians are wrong about their own lived and shared experiences; that their perspectives are not even worth recording in print.

This white man who writes for a British newspaper and a British magazine, who writes for Western audiences, must be right while all of these Black African people were wrong about their own country. And if we repeat the lies and keep presenting them as if they are new revelations or at the very least as established facts, well, the white Westerners will buy it, and they’re the only ones that count, right?

I find this a disgusting rationale, and I wrote my own book to fight it. So, you have a choice now. You can either lose yourself in the fog of forgetting that Tom Gardner chooses to spew, or you can check the account that I have offered. I can at least say that when I covered the war, I was sent by Ethiopians to report on Ethiopians for Ethiopians. And I’ll be damned if Gardner’s or Martin Plaut’s fairy tales get to be the last word.

You can download The Hyena War by becoming a paid subscriber and clicking on this link.