Another book about African savagery: SELF-PROJECTION
To cries of “white demon”, The Economist’s angelical Tom Gardner was hounded out of war-torn Ethiopia. Or this is how he wants us to see it, not by challenging the grounds for his deportation, but by invoking his moral superiority as a liberal Westerner. Here, a ruthless mirror is held up to him by a peer reviewer, who has, yes, his own book and a very different message to promote.
In the opening lines of “The Abiy Project: God, Power and War in the New Ethiopia”, author Tom Gardner recounts his struggle to obtain close-up testimonies about the Ethiopian prime minister since 2018, Abiy Ahmed, whose eccentric personality is presented as “an enigma” and as key to understanding, in particular, the so-called Tigray War, which raged in the northern half of the country from November 2020 to November 2022. Some such precious first-hand sources had initially agreed to meet, but cancelled on second thoughts. “Even those living far away in safe countries in the West were often too afraid to speak with me”, we learn. Since the book casts Abiy Ahmed in the mould of the megalomaniac African despot, it fits the bill that fear would be at play. Why else would anyone not wish to help out the East Africa correspondent of the respectable highbrow weekly, The Economist?
Well, Tom Gardner ought to know. “I was a war reporter, then I became the enemy”, ran the headline of his article in late June 2022. It chronicles how Ethiopians railed against him online, culminating with his deportation in May 2022. However, it is beneath him to engage with the view that he did something wrong. He picks out the crudest insults and assumes that it was government-directed, since Ethiopia had learned “disturbing lessons from China and other authoritarian states” in order to “become a modern, digital autocracy”. His new book sticks to this script, in which he incarnates the well-intentioned free-speech pro from the civilized world amidst the murderous passions of an African tribal war.
This might have resonated with me too, as a decades-long subscriber to The Economist and to its pro-Western worldview. It is certainly a framing that will raise no eyebrows from Tom Gardner’s editors or mainstream audience, some of whom will give “The Abiy Project” rave reviews. However, since I happen to be familiar with Ethiopian affairs, having lived in the country, immersed myself into its society and reported on it since 2004, what I take away from the work of Tom Gardner is a moral-superiority complex that manifests itself as embarrassingly lazy journalism and, most of all, as vile slander of the second-most populous African nation. But before we get into that, a little context is necessary.
The Trump and the Biden framing of the war
Although the full background to any civil war is complex, in this case, as the first shots are being fired in Ethiopia, simultaneously with vote-counting in the US presidential election on the night between 3 and 4 November 2020, it is straightforward to identify the two main warring parties. One is the internationally recognized government with a short but remarkably liberalizing record, yes, even with a Nobel Peace Prize awarded to its leader, Abiy Ahmed. Its multiethnic armed forces have suffered a surprise attack by the other side, an ethnically-exclusive militia commanded by some of the most powerful people in the country, that is, until two-and-a-half years earlier, when they were kicked out of office thanks to decades of popular protests and painful sacrifices. At this stage, in late 2020, the dictatorial old guard has held on to some of its grip on the military and, as we shall soon learn, has considerable resources abroad, as well as friends in high places like Brussels, Washington DC, and the UN system.
The outgoing Trump administration makes the obvious distinction between legitimate and illegitimate use of force, supporting the constitutional government against the rulers-turned-rebels. Tom Gardner complains (in Chapter 15) that this greenlights Abiy Ahmed’s war effort. He is more in tune with the incoming Biden Administration, whose Africa policy-makers view it more as a case of a third-world strongman with a short fuse who whips the masses into a frenzy. Tom Gardner feels vindicated in this interpretation of the conflict, when he himself ends up as a victim of incitement to hate.
However, when he speculates breezily (in Chapter 17), apropos no particular incident or witness account, that Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers got together to gang-rape women of the Tigrayan ethnicity for the purposes of “male bonding”, he is the one who incites hate. We shall come back to what else Tom Gardner has to say about sexual assault in the Tigray War, the evidence presented for it, and even how he thinks Ethiopians feel about it, because, as we also see in the Israel-Hamas conflict, this issue packs an explosive punch in the propaganda battles.
Full disclosure and a sales pitch: I have just written my own book, “Getting Ethiopia Dead Wrong”, whose pantheon of villains features Tom Gardner, winner of the pot-calling-kettle-black award for complaining that ordinary Ethiopians on social media, and not himself in big media, poured fuel on the fire. In those 71,000 words, I tackle every hair-raising accusation, from weaponized rape and starvation to hate speech and genocide. Nothing must be swept under the rug. But, we must never forget, the fine line between championing human rights and inciting hate is the truth, which is the proverbial first casualty of war.
Diverging from the single story about Africa
Now, there is no doubt that the war often became dirty. But so did the propaganda war. In a nutshell, young people from the northern region of Tigray were not minded to fight for the corrupt, cruel and discredited leaders of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) to return to power. But the constant messaging from the world press, amplified by a handful of TPLF-friendly individuals in academia, diplomacy, politics and humanitarian work, and of course pushed relentlessly by the TPLF itself, was that this was essentially an ethnic extermination war. Therefore, the usual legitimacy criteria did not apply. The only choice of Tigrayans was to kill or get killed. As we shall see, Tom Gardner did his part in this fear-, hate- and war-mongering campaign. It was so successful that, when the federal army and its allies finally prevailed in October 2022, having pushed the TPLF rebels all the way from near-victory in the capital to the brink of defeat in their stronghold in Tigray, the world had been primed for the killing of all six million or so Tigrayans in Tigray. As a natural authority on this subject, the US Holocaust Museum put the world on acute genocide alert. The most sought-after Ethiopia pundit, the professor and BBC man, Alex de Waal, who was never coy about his closeness to the TPLF hierarchy, wrote: “The Tigrayans have every motive to fight to the death”.
And then, thank God, they preferred to live! As Ethiopians and friends of Ethiopia had insisted throughout, asserting state monopoly on violence was the path, not to genocide, but to peace. This is what made the TPLF agree to disarm and demobilize, as enshrined in the agreement signed in Pretoria, South Africa, on 2 November, 2022. Implementation has not been smooth, and the TPLF is currently riven with internal divisions on issues of compliance, but for the international community, the Pretoria Agreement is the only game in town. After two years of preaching that “there is no military solution” and mulling punitive measures against Ethiopia, diplomats of liberal democracies have gone through some soul-searching, judging from their keenness to resume aid, trade and good relations with this strategically important partner. The massively traded hashtag #TigrayGenocide has lost its value. Hopefully, outsiders will now be warier of buying into a couple of other Ethiopian genocide hashtags, which are being pushed online, also to dress up the violent pursuit of power as noble human-rights causes, and also with quite a few Western takers, from left to right.
Alas, in “The Abiy Project”, Tom Gardner does not reflect on how peace came about in the very manner that he never considered viable or desirable. He steers strictly clear of the goldmine of lessons to be learned, namely the substance behind the anger that got him expelled from Ethiopia. The Tom Gardner project is to claim the high ground by conforming strictly to the genre of the single story about Africa, which the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has warned against. And in his miscasting of heroes and villains, he stoops low, very low. He even plays the victim by throwing the race card.
White demons and a bloodbath situation
“White demons” should “leave the country”, billboards greeted Tom Gardner in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa in September 2021, or so he writes in Chapter 18, with a footnote berating the government for not censoring this “for several months”.
I was there too for the natives to picture horns atop my cold blue eyes, but I was not pressured to leave, only to listen some frustrated people out. I noticed on television that Tom Gardner’s questions were still answered politely at official press conferences in October 2021, by which time The Economist was demanding an arms embargo and other sanctions against Ethiopia with the caption: “No favours for killers”. Yes, “killers” referred to the government, not to the TPLF, whose irregular army was, at that time, marching towards the centre of power, sowing death and destruction in the regions of Amhara and Afar, while its triumphalist spokesman, known for a brutal crackdown seven years earlier, when he was the national Minister of Communication, tweeted out threats full of military bravado. So, yes, the city was slightly on edge. Yet Tom Gardner continued to be tolerated into November, when he also engaged with me in a private email correspondence. Oh yeah, it was almost like we could have been buddies, despite our strong disagreement. He rejected my suggestion that liberal democrats like us should support the elected government. He argued that outsiders should rather put pressure on the beleaguered Abiy Ahmed to enter into “negotiations to work out a new configuration of power”.
For the vast majority of Ethiopians, negotiating from that position of weakness was out of the question. And by then, the TPLF and some Westerners, admittedly not Tom Gardner, wanted all-out regime change. The journalistic cliché that month, still November 2021, became “a matter of weeks, if not days”. Western embassies evacuated their staff, and Jeffrey Feltman, the US Special Envoy, candidly called the capital falling to the dreaded enemy “a bloodbath situation”. Back then, the tone of Alex de Waal, the aforementioned superstar pundit, was not yet sombre and bitter. He waxed lyrical with a Rudyard Kipling poem, assuring again and again that the TPLF had already defeated Abiy Ahmed, rubbing it into the face of the vanquished: “Face your day of reckoning.”
Volunteers from all ethnic groups responded to Abiy Ahmed’s call for mobilization. Nobody cared that Facebook censored him for “incitement”. Or that the Western powers condemned both the attack on and the defence of Addis Ababa. A leader in The Economist ran the sensible headline: “Act now to avert a bloodbath in Ethiopia”. But it trained all its verbal firepower on those who were acting then to avert a bloodbath in Ethiopia, and who are, to this day, owed an apology.
Because, if Addis Ababa saw Tom Gardner as a white demon, the reason is that he demonized Addis Ababa relentlessly. In The Economist, it was claimed that “all ethnic Tigrayans” were locked up, going into graphic detail: “Tigrayans were grabbed and shoved in warehouses and old factories. Even doctors and nurses were dragged out of hospitals if they were Tigrayan.” Tom Gardner’s new book tones it down a notch, but insists that “residents [of Addis Ababa] turned on their Tigrayan neighbours”, citing a figure of 15,000 detainees within a few weeks. No motive other than their Tigrayan ethnicity is suggested.
Again, I was there. As per local taste, Tigrayan folk music continued to be played in malls, cafés, even in gyms. Tigrayans, as always, could be found in all walks of life. Still today, they number in the ballpark of half a million in Addis Ababa alone, from the poorest beggars to the wealthiest businesspeople, plus a lot of taxi drivers with whom I would strike up conversation. During those anxious days, I found that their politics varied on the spectrum between supporting and opposing the TPLF’s war effort. But, yes, all of them felt eyed up as potential infiltrators in the city where they had, until recently, felt perfectly at home. Some had experienced bigoted outbursts. There was fear of extremist mobs. Their plight was delicate, undeserved and sad. And, yes, some innocents were apprehended. The Ethiopian justice system is flawed.
However, a Tigrayan identity could not have been the sole reason for arrest, or the internment camps would have been on a much larger scale. With reports of TPLF sleeper cells operating inside nearby towns that had already fallen, these measures were not tribal madness, but, at worst, erring on the side of caution for Ethiopian lives. There are approximately two million Tigrayans in Ethiopia outside of Tigray. A Reuters investigation stated that 18,000 of them were imprisoned, of whom some 9,000 were still so in June 2022. Many were military men reasonably suspected of strong loyalty to the TPLF. All were freed after the war.
Here is a curious side note: In September 2020, less than two months before the fighting began, Abiy Ahmed wrote by invitation in The Economist. Clearly with the TPLF threat foremost on his mind, he denounced those out to derail the transition to democracy by sowing hatred and division. He added: “For those accustomed to undue past privileges, equality feels like oppression.” This was a reference to when the TPLF was in power on the national stage from 1991 to 2018, giving a leg-up to TPLF members, and hence to Tigrayans, in the economy, in the state apparatus, and most blatantly so in the military. Was the prime minister dog-whistling hate against Tigrayans in The Economist? Well, this is how it was read at the time in the TPLF camp. But those 27 years of ethnic favouritism had left a legacy that Ethiopians had to grapple with. Some did it with resentment towards all Tigrayans. A handful of extremists even acted out murderous blood vengeance. However, and keep in mind that this is when an army of Tigrayans was rapidly approaching and raising the spectre of pandemonium, the vast majority of Ethiopian citizens and political leaders did not take it out on their Tigrayan neighbours, friends and colleagues. This was by far the bigger picture, though it did not make it into The Economist.
Respectability journalism
Tom Gardner’s idea of evidence is to invoke what passes for moral authority or to refer to some untrue truism from the war, for instance, that there were “residential bombardments” in Tigray, even though not a single photo was ever presented of these neighbourhoods supposedly reduced to rubble.
Frustratingly, he gets away with his lazy journalism, because the good guys in his storyline, including himself, are respectable in the eyes of his non-specialist mainstream audience. Thus, in Chapter 17, he sticks up for the various do-gooder international organizations, NGOs and foreign embassies by mocking Ethiopian denunciations of TPLF infiltration in their ranks as a paranoid craze, and concludes: “Not even the internationally-respected Tigrayan head of the World Health Organization [WHO], the former TPLF member and Ethiopian foreign minister Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was spared.”
Indeed, Dr Tedros is internationally respected. In his home country, he was perhaps more feared than respected, when he was a powerful man during the most oppressive years of the TPLF-led regime. But that was in the past. Today he has rebranded himself as a donor darling. Forgotten is also how he started his tenure at the WHO by appointing Robert Mugabe as a goodwill ambassador, and how he picked a fight with Taiwan to ingratiate himself with Beijing. Since the Tigray War began, he has been the epitome of the internationally-respected African with tweets like: “Tolerance. Kindness. Compassion. Peace. Love. Say #NoToHate speech.” Apropos hate speech, he spent the war accusing Ethiopia of things like “carpet bombing”, “torching an entire town in Tigray” and, most insistently, “genocide”. Meanwhile, he sent out coded messages to egg on the bloodshed.
Cultural meme as a weapon of propaganda
Tom Gardner writes that, in June 2021, “in a closed meeting of the UN Security Council, Mark Lowcock, then the UN humanitarian chief, said that parts of Tigray were now suffering famine – a sharp rebuke to the prime minister (…)”. Indeed, throughout the war, Mark Lowcock would do little else than sharply rebuking Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, on every subject under the sun, including economic policy, and on all sorts of platforms, including a lengthy opinion piece, in which he defended the TPLF’s legacy as rulers of Ethiopia and announced a list of Abiy Ahmed’s war aims: “The first is to starve the population [of Tigray] either into subjugation or out of existence.” This was an appalling abuse of moral authority for hate and incitement, but Tom Gardner must think he is on safe ground here, because, I mean, who can trump the moral authority of a UN humanitarian chief?
Well, let me try Dr Steven Were Omamo, the WFP Country Director for Ethiopia until the end of 2021, having arrived from his native Kenya in 2018 with an accomplished career in agricultural development and food security. He was the top UN relief-aid man in the logistical thick of it all, negotiating humanitarian access with both sides. And this is his reaction to what Mark Lowcock said in the UN Security Council: “To those of us on the ground in Ethiopia, it was an astonishing declaration. Not only was it not his role to declare a famine, we knew that he had no evidence to back such a declaration. There was no expert who could credibly support his claim. On the contrary, experts had just announced that there was no famine in Tigray. But the voice of the ERC [Mark Lowcock] could not be ignored. Every major news outlet carried the story.” The quote is from Dr Omamo’s book “At the Centre of the World in Ethiopia”. It paints a picture of committed UN fieldworkers in dire tension with senior UN political appointees, like Mark Lowcock, who prioritized hogging the limelight to take sides in the war over forging good cooperation to distribute relief supplies. This friction within the UN was confirmed by other incidents, such as the firing, in October 2021, of Dr Omamo’s compatriot, the UN Migration Agency’s Ethiopia chief, Maureen Achieng, after audio was leaked of her complaining that UN high-ups from outside of Ethiopia were aggressively pursuing a pro-TPLF agenda.
Dr Omamo does describe many obstacles to getting relief-aid trucks safely in and out of Tigray and other regions, but the Ethiopian government, notwithstanding its security concerns, acted as a trusted partner to the WFP. The Economist owes Ethiopia and the world a thorough review of this detailed testimony. It drew some attention from a magazine specialized in development issues, but it has been ignored by big media. This could be because it makes for uncomfortable self-questioning in newsrooms, which ran with the huge cultural meme on Ethiopia and man-made famine, evoking the legendary 1985 Live Aid concert, with every good person singing along to “We are the world”.
From early on in the war, Tom Gardner’s Ethiopia coverage in The Economist jumped on that cultural-meme bandwagon too, which is what later motivated the aforementioned caption: “No favours for killers”. In his book, Tom Gardner does make a clear retreat, as he admits that: “In mid-July [2022], an official from the World Food Programme told the BBC that famine had been successfully averted.” So, by then there had been widespread food insecurity but no famine. “But”, Tom Gardner continues, making the case that there was still a “slow strangulation” of Tigray. Part of the obfuscation here is to equate the misery in Tigray with the guilt of the government, though it was the TPLF, not the government, which had imposed an immiserating total-war regime on Tigray. Yes, there was a military blockade but not a humanitarian siege in place. Tom Gardner writes that, since the government “alleged” that fuel was being diverted to the TPLF’s war effort, fuel supplies were “tightly throttled” to the detriment of food distribution within Tigray. Well, what Tom Gardner knows, but chooses to omit, is that the TPLF took 12 WFP fuel tankers at gunpoint to power its last-ditch offensive in late August, 2022.
Also strangely absent from Tom Gardner’s account is how the TPLF war machine systematically confiscated the WFP’s trucks. The first 400-or-so trucks had gone missing by September 2021. By mid-2022, the Ethiopian Disaster Risk Management Commission (EDRMC) said that, out of 3,297 trucks entering Tigray, 1,128 had not been returned. This was UN capital stock being used not to save but to take lives. Again and again, Tom Gardner’s humanitarian concern is predicated on a moral judgement, or rather an immoral judgement, that the Ethiopian government must not care about its people getting killed in war.
Trust me, I am a liberal Westerner
Is it a mitigating circumstance that some of Tom Gardner’s peers were worse? For instance, The Telegraph’s correspondent based in Nairobi, Will Brown, threw everything plus the kitchen sink at Ethiopia during the war, with no follow-up to his mishits, such as his claim of chemical attacks. At the end of that fateful November 2021, this multi-award-winning young Englishman, said to have already “reported from over 30 countries“, wrote that “ethnic Tigrayans [in Ethiopia outside Tigray] are allegedly being rounded up into concentration camps and murdered”. This also went without follow-up.
The same month, an op-ed in The Guardian, penned by a trio of the great and the good, and sponsored by the Gates Foundation, raised the alarm about “a possible mass killing of interned civilians in Addis and elsewhere”, associating the Tigrayans with the Tutsis during the Rwandan genocide.
In February 2021, Associated Press awarded the “best of the week” to journalist Cara Anna for her “determined source work” behind a horror story about 800 Tigrayan church-goers in the holy city of Axum, who were cornered, dragged out into the central square, mowed down and eaten by hyenas. This version of events is still being commemorated by radical Tigrayan ethnonationalists, who will no doubt pass it down as the historical truth to their children and grandchildren. I went undercover online to get Cara Anna to loosen up about it. She fell for my two fake personalities, and it is both shocking and amusing how she squirms and squirms so as to neither own nor disown what she clearly knows was a fabrication. Cara Anna went on to report many more insanely inflammatory atrocity stories from the war, usually based on anonymous witnesses. Libelling Ethiopia is a free-for-all.
I find this to be the jaw-dropping scandal here, that is, how big media became the real hyenas in an African war, howling as a pack, lacking the instinct for individuality to hold one another accountable. Tom Gardner has little interest in taking on his colleagues, except briefly criticizing CNN for its “wildly erroneous claim” (really: its disgusting psychological warfare, also never apologized for), on 5 November 2021, that “Tigrayan troops” stood “just outside Addis Ababa”. At least in book-promoting interviews, Tom Gardner has admitted that some media-driven atrocity stories turned out to be inaccurate.
Alas, this has not sharpened his critical faculties. For instance, when he says the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) “downplayed the scale” of one massacre by Eritrean soldiers, he assumes, without probing into the details, that Amnesty International got the scale right (though he thinks Amnesty did “an unusually rushed report” on another massacre that found the killers to be TPLF-affiliated). The EHRC is the only entity that has worked on the crime scenes, including jointly with UN staff, but Tom Gardner lambasts it as partisan. A footnote mentions that its chief Daniel Bekele once expressed some personal views. And, bonus info, he was indeed a prisoner for his personal views under the TPLF-led regime. Mapping out the political bias of war-crimes investigators is fair game, of course, but Tom Gardner consistently gives short shrift to Ethiopian complaints of political bias. His line of reasoning only works on the tacit assumption that Amnesty, as a Western-based organization, is more credible than the EHRC as an Ethiopian one. This may be so, or it may not. The good journalist finds out by comparing the different investigations, critically assessing their methodology and evidence, their sources and their sources’ possible motives, how their findings either match or fail to match the known facts. However, on all the controversial issues related to the Tigray War, too numerous to mention here, Tom Gardner’s footnotes and links defer (if one knows who is behind the pages and institutions that he refers to) to the individuals exposed in my book as activists, propagandists, some even as blatant liars out to stir the pot.
Presenting this case takes a whole book, but the short answer is: No, it is not a mitigating circumstance that Tom Gardner was less extreme than other war reporters. Because his relative moderation springs not from digging deeper in search of the truth, but rather from trying to make the smear job more believable.
What standards of proof for African rape?
Rape is even more taxing on the human heart than murder. We feel both empathy with the horrified victim and revulsion that a mind could be so sick as to obtain sexual gratification, or whatever it is, from the misdeed. Most gut-wrenching of all is a close-up of a woman in the grip of one or more such scumbags. Tom Gardner provides one too in his Chapter 17. Yes, a Tigrayan woman is the target.
This kind of personal story hits all the buttons of disgust and anger. It is easy to imply that the good-hearted person sits in these emotions, whereas the cold-hearted person demands evidence. Indeed, Tom Gardner writes that Ethiopians demanding evidence were “engaging in a cruel campaign to cast doubt on Tigrayan accusers”. Unsurprisingly, nobody in big media was up for being called apologists for atrocity rape by insisting on evidence, not even in the rare case when the victim was identified, like Mona Lisa Abraha, an 18-year-old Tigrayan, who, in her harrowing story in the New York Times, lost an arm when she fought off a sadistic Ethiopian soldier, though one month earlier, Al Jazeera had published that it happened when a whole gang of Eritrean soldiers had attempted to rape her.
To be clear, there is no denying that sexual violence was committed in the war, and yes, on both sides. The way forward is to support Ethiopian civil society and legal practitioners in investigating cases and bringing more perpetrators to trial than the handful of its own soldiers that Ethiopian courts have thus far convicted. This should be obvious, but apparently it needs to be said: the Ethiopian public wants its armed forces to be disciplined and decent. Almost nobody in Ethiopia wants any citizen of any ethnicity to be raped. Nearly everybody wants the men on their own side to be punished if they are found guilty, that is, not in trial by media or by organizations full of righteous zeal, but through justice based on evidence that holds up in court.
Nothing appeals to a man’s honour like protecting his mother and sisters from degenerate monsters. In some cases, it also appeals, alas, to a man’s dishonour, as when some TPLF fighters invoked “revenge” as a motive for raping women in Amhara and Afar regions. Again, make no mistake, nearly all Tigrayans, including diehard TPLF supporters, do not want their troops to commit rape.
But for the same reason that rape churns good people’s stomachs and provokes a natural urge to kill the rapist, rape accusations are the most powerful demonizing and recruitment tool of all. This created a strong motive for the sophisticated TPLF propaganda team to fabricate. Indeed, a Tigrayan journalist deserting from Radio Dimtse Woyane (‘Voice of the TPLF’) testified on Ethiopian television (incidentally to a famous interviewer who is also Tigrayan) about Tigrayan sex workers being paid to pose as university students and tell rape stories to foreign NGOs. The journalist’s task is to tell the truth from the lies by examining the evidence. Because, again, in a war scenario in which truth is the first casualty, the truth, and sticking to evidence as the standard of truth, is the only way to navigate that fine line between championing human rights and inciting hate. So, in his book, how does Tom Gardner perform this delicate duty?
Well, in his aforementioned theory that rape was used for “male bonding” between Eritrean and Ethiopian soldiers, he throws a grenade. At least as far as I know, this was never even alleged before, which must be why there is no source indicated, other than a piece from the general literature on conflict rape. Hand on heart: would the burden of proof have been so light to make a frivolous suggestion about, say, Scandinavian soldiers strengthening their togetherness at the expense of Afghan women? Of course not, and the theme that rape served as a morale-booster for the common soldier speaks volumes about how Tom Gardner sees people in this part of the world.
Indeed, Tom Gardner’s demonization goes the whole hog by portraying Ethiopians in general as fine with rape. He writes that many of them heard Tigrayan complaints as “special pleading”, because rape is par for the course in Ethiopian wars. To illustrate the backward savage mentality, he quotes an anonymous Ethiopian businessman who is supposed to have told him about Tigrayan rape victims: “It’s karma; they got what they deserve”. Tom Gardner should be careful talking to blabbering psychopaths. And when he uses an anonymous quote without any way to tell if he just made it up, may be it should not be something hateful and incendiary.
Tom Gardner moves on to the topic of baby-killing rapists who think they “purify bloodlines”. To show where this information comes from, a footnote takes the reader to a celebrated Al Jazeera article “No Tigrayan womb should ever give birth”. This was written by an Addis Ababa resident of Tigrayan origin, Lucy Kassa, who got her big break in international journalism, freelancing for the world’s most prestigious media, by telling tales of spine-chilling inhumanity. For instance, one featured in The New Humanitarian recounts a group of Ethiopian soldiers viciously executing a toddler for some political comment that they overheard the little boy say to his mother. Referred to endlessly as “courageous Lucy” and winning a grand human-rights award, it was as if her being Ethiopian gave her license to go one up on her colleagues in portraying Ethiopians as depraved, fiendish, diabolical. In her depictions, civilians would not only be rounded up and murdered, but also mutilated and dismembered. Women and girls would not only be raped, but gang-raped with a hot metal rod being inserted into their uterus. Lucy Kassa never went to the frontline. Her stories were based on anonymous witness accounts. One simply had to take her word for it, as indeed, all of big media did, The Economist too. The only evidence for her rape stories that she would come up with, on the exceptional occasion when someone in big media mentioned it ever so timidly, was “medical records”. Not that she ever showed any, but also medical records could easily be made up by an insurgency regime that is engaged in a fierce propaganda war.
Not rape, mass rape
To dispel the just-a-few-bad-apples defence, rape statistics became another battleground in the propaganda war almost from day one.
Tom Gardner writes that “plausibly” the real figure is 100,000. The footnote to back this up refers to Tigray’s regional authorities and that this is “a figure later supported by a comprehensive study conducted by the Columbia University biostatistician Kiros Berhane.”
Here, Tom Gardner invokes the moral authority of Columbia University, but refrains from throwing the additional respectability card that the survey-based study was published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), oh yes, very respectable (except if you are an anti-vaxxer or something). But what ought to be more respectable, if truth-seeking is the goal, is to actually read the study, subject it to critical scrutiny, and yes, look at the politics of the team behind it. I did that, finding it inconceivable that it could have reached any other conclusion, and that the BMJ might as well have published a survey conducted in North Korea by North Koreans to document North Koreans’ love for their leader. But don’t take my word for it. Start with my article, but then also read the study report in the BMJ, especially the small print, google the team listed in the study report, learn about the political climate in Tigray in which these interviews took place.
Tom Gardner’s book does touch upon a more nuanced view of the rape issue, but only obliquely, not apropos rape, but to make the point that the UN was largely biased in favour, and not against, Ethiopia: “In reality, the top leadership of several of the largest UN agencies in Addis Ababa were broadly supportive of Abiy’s government. The leaked audio of an internal meeting in March 2021 on the subject of sexual violence in Tigray, to take one example, demonstrated just how instinctively sympathetic many UN officials were to the arguments of their Ethiopian counterparts. Yet such was the force of official propaganda—and its narrative of Ethiopia alone against the world—that inconvenient facts like these were easily obscured.”
This is a new level of condescending. Does Tom Gardner take Ethiopians for such simpletons that they see the UN as a single sentient being? It also showcases Tom Gardner’s steely determination not to listen to Ethiopians. Of course, they always distinguished between the different individuals who compose the UN, and paid attention to how power is distributed throughout this vast organization. Yes, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and Mark Lowcock became national villains, but Steven Were Omamo and Maureen Achieng became national heroes. The leaked audio from March 2021 was of seven UN professionals serving in Ethiopia, who privately discussed the difficulty of sorting rape facts from rape fabrications, feeling under pressure to feed the media sensationalism and thus fuel the war with more hate. One of the seven was Letty Chiwara, representative of UN Women to Ethiopia and to the AU, who pronounced the taboo words: “You take it with a pinch of salt”. While some vilified her for that, Ethiopians thanked her for her integrity.
Between pacifism and warlordism
So now it should be clear why Tom Gardner made Ethiopians angry and disinclined to cooperate with his book project. Given that he trots out so many TPLF talking points, all the way down to using the term “Western Tigray” about a territory that is disputed with Amhara Region, he often gets accused of being pro-TPLF. He shrugs this off, and in good conscience, because, actually, he is not. Nor does he side with Fano militia in its ongoing insurgency in Amhara Region, or with the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), still waging armed struggle in Oromia Region. Indeed, to my pleasant surprise, there were some good parts early on in his book describing the chauvinism of these ethnonationalist militias. But again, he suggests that it is up to Abiy Ahmed to solve these conflicts too. He clearly does not mean by spending more on arms and prevailing militarily, so it must be by making concessions. A negotiated settlement could be preferable to war, but for now, both the OLA and Fano aim to take the capital. Meanwhile, both are bleeding men and popular support, as they descend into banditry and infighting. As in the Tigray War, but not in the Ukraine War, the Western mantra here is that there is no military solution. More accurate is that any solution will have to have a major military component.
This aversion to legitimizing legitimate use of force is illustrated in Chapter 18. Tom Gardner revisits December 2021, when the TPLF offensive is beaten back through the unity of Ethiopians of different ethnicities and faiths. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, a protestant Christian, thanks his Creator for being with him. Tom Gardner seizes on this to harp on his pop-psychological theme that Abiy Ahmed believes himself to be some kind of Messias. In the final sentence of the chapter, Tom Gardner then laments Abiy Ahmed’s success in repelling TPLF’s attack on Addis Ababa: “Now, it seemed, he might never need to compromise.”
This reflects a philosophy which, as I learned to my indignation during the Tigray War, is prevalent among liberal Westerners out to ‘help’ the developing world: That patriotism and peace through strength is a luxury for rich countries with superior morality, whereas poor ones with inferior morality, like Ethiopia, must make do with pacifist sermons and deals between its strongest warlords.
To be fair, the liberal Western moral-superiority complex made more of a fool of itself than it decided the war in Ethiopia. But it did exacerbate the rancour and the suffering. In the attempt to look good doing bad, some infuriatingly smug careerists resorted and continue to resort to shocking dishonesty. Tom Gardner’s book about Ethiopia says more about Tom Gardner than it does about Ethiopia.
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Thank you for this, although it's really painful to watch your eyes being yanked open to what's going on EVERYWHERE all the time. Just think of the reporting you've heard from Iran, Myanmar, Sudan, Nicaragua, Cameroon, Libya, or Venezuela, and remember that the same sinister forces of colonialist superiority, Western racism, and fealty to a pre-set narrative are also at play.
I personally live in a country that's been villainized 99.9% of the time by Western media and sometimes my jaw hits the floor when I read the cartoonish lies told about this place (my favorite so far: government agents deliberately uncap bottles of Coca-Cola to remove the bubbles to make it less appealing LOL).