Why Ethiopia's Orthodox Synod Called Media, U.S. Sanctions On Tigray Conflict ‘Indirect Colonialism’
An Ethiopian Orthodox priest carries the tabot, a replica of the biblical Ten Commandments. Creative Commons photo.
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(OPINION) A viral video of His Holiness Abuna Mathias, a Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church (EOTC), describing barbaric killings of civilians in Tigray has prompted heightened concern in the international community about human rights abuses, while many Ethiopians remain cautious and skeptical about whether disinformation campaigns driven by anti-government activists, geopolitical forces, “Ethiopia analysts” and media outlets are influencing Western communities and governments.
Abuna Mathias hails from Tigray, a region in northern Ethiopia, where armed conflict in November 2020 started following forces loyal to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) attacking army bases of the Northern Command of the Ethiopian federal army. TPLF was the ideological parent of the country’s former ruling party, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), which ruled Ethiopia for decades with ethnic-based system and repressive policies.
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The armed conflict was the climax of political wrangling between TPLF and the federal government led by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who introduced democratic and economic reforms. TPLF was defeated but some of its leaders have retreated to the mountains and are engaging in insurgency. The U.S. government has insisted that the federal government must declare a ceasefire and negotiate with TPLF, who are now classified as a terrorist group by the country’s parliament. To put pressure on the Ethiopian government, the U.S. government has imposed sanctions on Ethiopia. In a rare criticism of the U.S., tens of thousands of Ethiopians in the capital and elsewhere in the country recently protested the Biden administration’s sanctions.
It was soon after the video of Abuna Mathias came out and CNN’s report from Tigray that the sanctions were announced. According to the Associated Press, the video was secretly recorded in April on a mobile phone by a man called Dennis Wadley, who runs a U.S.-based organization called Bridges of Hope.
Abuna Mathias talks about the massacres of civilians that took place in Mahebere-Dego, Maryam Dengalat and Axum in 2020. He also decried the looting of all resources of Tigray, farmers being prevented from farming, women being raped, and youth being searched out in towns and villages and then killed and thrown off the cliffs.
READ: Were 750 Christians Really Massacred? The Truth About Ethiopia’s Recent Crisis
“They have no rest until they wipe the people of Tigray off the face of the earth,” he said in the video. He seems to be implicitly referring to either Ethiopian or Eritrean government forces or both.
The significance of his statement cannot be underestimated. However, while I share his sentiment about the suffering of the people of Tigray, I was disturbed by the corresponding overtones and verbal similarities between many of his assertions and media reports based, by and large, on dis- and misinformation. In this connection, it is no coincidence that AP and the Tigray Media House (TMH) reported his statement almost at the same time. His statement contains some of the elements previously reported by major broadcasters such as CNN and BBC, which have been accused of depending on suspect sources, a misleading use of facts and blatant partiality. And yet, Abuna Mathias’ statement cannot be overlooked, not least because the Synod Committee of EOTC declared that his statement did not represent the view of the church while the Tigray diocese of EOTC supported his statement. One can already see how horribly complex the issue has become. Let me first provide a brief background for this complexity.
Two Patriarchs, One Church
As is well known, EOTC is one of the world’s most ancient churches with almost 1,700 years of history and probably not less than 40 million members in Ethiopia and abroad. It is not an exaggeration to say that Ethiopia as a nation-state was built on and has been sustained by this church and its stable leadership and uniting symbols.
My readers may have been surprised when I referred to Abuna Mathias as “a” patriarch of EOTC in my opening sentence. This is why. EOTC has had two patriarchs for the last 30 years. Until 2018, one of the patriarchs, Abuna Merkorios, was in exile in the U.S. It was the government dominated by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) that forced him into exile in the early 1990s and had Abuna Paulos instated as patriarch (before this, ironically, Abuna Paulos was himself in exile in the U.S.). Such an action violated EOTC’s doctrine and tradition, where its spiritual head would only be replaced upon his death. For TPLF, ecclesiastical doctrine did not matter, as it eagerly sought to use EOTC as an ethno-political instrument. It was a divisive action, though, as the church was split over the legitimacy of Abuna Paulos as patriarch.
And yet, doctrinal unity was maintained and EOTC continued as a single entity. Then, Abuna Paulos died in 2012 and Abuna Mathias was elected. He too had gone into exile during the military-communist regime in the early- to mid-1980s and had been re-appointed Archdiocese of Jerusalem sometime around 2009. His election was surprising to many of us, as there were many other potential candidates among the nominated bishops, but again the TPLF-dominated government played a central role in the process, as it saw Abuna Mathias as a safe pair of hands for its political goals. Many within EOTC continued to question his authority, however, and the schism persisted. The Synod-in-Exile led by Abuna Merkorios became instrumental in shaping the anti-TPLF/EPRDF resistance movement amongst the diaspora, particularly in North America.
But when Abiy Ahmed became Prime Minister in 2018, he resolved to accelerate the reconciliation process that had been going on for years. He succeeded in helping the two factions to agree that Abuna Merkorios would oversee the spiritual aspects of the church while Abuna Mathias would be in charge of the administrative aspects. The process culminated with Abuna Merkorios returning to Ethiopia. The TPLF was not pleased with this shared leadership, but for the church and its faithful, it was a successful, albeit strange, conclusion. Now, the recent conflict in Tigray is threatening to divide the church once again. I would argue that media dis- and misinformation coupled with the TPLF propaganda is exacerbating the already complex and very volatile situation not only within EOTC but also within the state of Ethiopia.
TPLF Propaganda
In the recent battle for the soul and survival of Ethiopia, it has to be admitted that the TPLF has overwhelmingly won a propaganda war. But much of its propaganda is characterised by dis- and misinformation and a misleading use of facts. International media and governments, wittingly or unwittingly, have fallen prey to such egregious abuses of truth. Abuna Mathias’ statement suggests that he too may have fallen prey to the TPLF and media dis- and misinformation.
However, it would be wrong to deny that the recent conflict in Tigray has caused the loss of so many lives, collateral damage and the displacement of hundreds of thousands. It would also be wrong to deny that atrocities have been committed even by some legal entities such as the army and the police. Emotionally, it is heart-breaking not only for His Holiness, who hails from Tigray, but for all Ethiopians and non-Ethiopians. It is, therefore, absolutely legitimate to insist that the people of Tigray must be protected and any atrocities and unlawful killings should be investigated by law enforcement bodies and human rights organizations within the country. But TPLF has been sensationalizing every piece of bad news and condemnable deeds for its secessionist goals.
The Tigray Media House (TMH), which is owned and run by TPLF-affiliated entities and individuals, is the chief culprit in misinforming the world by providing misleading facts, false accounts of events and sensationalized stories to the international media. The CEO of TMH has publicly boasted that TMH has provided information for major media organisations such as AP, CNN and BBC. TMH and its leadership follow journalist-turned-activist Martin Plaut’s perverse principle of journalism.
While speaking to TPLF activists, Plaut said: “Journalists are very simple one-celled organisms. They look for things; they gobble them up…VOA, BBC Tigrigna … they are there, we can feed into them, they are actually hungry for news…but we should think about it and we can then feed things in…We need to make the news and this is not as difficult as it sounds…You are manufacturing the news, but you need to think of the angle…”
TMH is engaging in precisely this business of manufacturing the news in order to provide stories to journalists who are looking for things to “gobble up”. Indeed, TMH embodies and exemplifies the TPLF that we Ethiopians have always known. Not only is TPLF known for its perverse propaganda and outright lies but also for setting up atrocious incidents and blaming them on its opponents.
To give but only three well-known examples, in 1988, the Ethiopian government carried out an aerial bombardment of a market in a town called Hawzen in Tigray. We later learnt that TPLF had misled the government into believing that TPLF fighters were in the center of Hawzen. TPLF had indeed gone into Hawzen but they had left before the bombing. Having been led to believe that people in the market were TPLF fighters, Ethiopian fighter jets bombed the area. Hundreds of civilians were killed. TPLF carefully recorded the bombing and its aftermath in graphic detail and used it for a very successful propaganda campaign. This was probably the most decisive event that turned around TPLF’s fortunes. We learnt all this only later from former leaders of the TPLF (Aregawi Berhe, ”A Political history of the Tigray People's Liberation Front” (1975-1991) (Los Angeles: Tsehai, 2009), p. 150).
In 2002, a hotel was bombed in Addis. The Oromo Liberation Front was blamed for it. But we later learnt that the TPLF-led EPRDF government set up the bombing in order to gain advantage from the global war on terrorism, as such an action was probably believed to draw Ethiopia closer to the U.S. government and enable it to gain resources for its own counterterrorism activities. In 2006, three bombs went off in Addis Ababa, which were blamed on Oromo resistance groups and the Eritrean government. But we later learned that the bombing probably was the work of the Ethiopian security forces led by a TPLF official called Getachew Assefa, who was then the head of intelligence. Both stories were manufactured. The majority of Ethiopians at the time believed the stories to be true, but they were lies.
For TPLF, the end justifies the means even if it means lying and misleading others. Mr. Avi Granot, who was Israeli Ambassador to Ethiopia, said: “One of the things I learned in the region is that lying is a justified means to achieve greater opportunities”. Granot’s statement sums up the kind of relationship that Ethiopian politicians in the TPLF-EPRDF era had. Therefore, any information provided by TPLF and its mouthpiece (TMH) must be taken with a generous pinch of salt. Those who have ears, let them hear!
International Media
And yet, international media outlets continue to take the information sourced by TMH and its CEO, Alula Solomon, at face value. Since the end of 2020, many have suspected that media outlets such as AP, New York Times, the Telegraph, CNN, the Guardian and even BBC have colluded with TPLF, TMH and Western “Ethiopia analysts”. While I could not be certain about the collision, it is true that with regard to the recent crisis in Ethiopia, these media outlets have frequently provided the global community with reports which are unverified and whose credibility is highly doubtful. They have also depended on the reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, whose evidence has not been credible, incontrovertible and unbiased.
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It seems to me that the international media want to focus on the “what and how” questions rather than on the “why and who” questions. That is, they want to focus on the bad things that happened in Tigray and how they happened. In this process, they often ignore why they happened and who the responsible body is for the crisis. They do not wish to emphasise the fact that TPLF prepared for the conflict for three years, refused to accept any mediation attempts, started the conflict, destroyed the infrastructure in Tigray, continues to menace innocent populations in Tigray and other parts of the country, and seeks to secede Tigray from Ethiopia. They report about women being raped but they don’t report about the rape and mistreatment of hundreds of women from the federal army, who were detained by TPLF in November 2020. They report about people in civilian clothes being killed but they say nothing about thousands of TPLF forces in civilian clothes continuing to fight against the federal forces, assassinating officials of the Tigray Interim Administration (the number reportedly has reached 24), and engaging in sporadic attacks against settlements, buses and aid convoys.
Abuna Mathias implicitly referred to a very distressing video, which had been circulating on social media and which BBC and CNN have also used. He referred to the name of the place relating to this video as Mahebere-Dego. In this video, people in uniforms of the Ethiopian federal defense forces were throwing dead bodies of young people in civilian clothes off a cliff. A person can be heard instructing in perfect Amharic another uniformed person to finish off one wounded “TPLF fighter”, who cannot be seen. He also said, “Don’t waste bullets” and mocks TPLF’s claim of invincibility. International media concluded that the federal defense forces carried out such a despicable and inhumane act.
CNN broadcast Nima Elbagir’s report about the atrocities carried out by the Ethiopian federal army against Tigrean civilians. In the report, the abovementioned clip was linked to other clips. One of those clips shows people in civilian clothes being rounded up and searched by a group in the Ethiopian federal army uniforms. Then, another transitional clip, which involves firing guns, can be seen between the clip with live people and the abovementioned clip with dead bodies. Elbagir then claims that the people in army uniforms took the youth in civilian clothes about a kilometer away, shot them and dumped them off the cliff. She sought to verify this by using satellite images. Her emotionally charged reporting seemed compelling. Following Elbagir’s report, BBC also reported more or less the same content. Then, expectedly, concerns were expressed from different quarters.
Alas, this massacre story was carefully fashioned to mislead the global community and tarnish the reputation of Ethiopia and the Ethiopian army. No media outlet, including CNN and BBC, has produced any incontrovertible evidence that there is a relationship between the clip with live civilians and the one with dead bodies. Nor is there any evidence that those in army uniforms belonged to the Ethiopian federal forces. The truth of the matter is that both clips had been circulating on social media separately well before the CNN and BBC’s reports. One was recorded with a video camera and the other with a mobile phone. The voice of the person who speaks in the second video is thought to have been recorded somewhere else, perhaps in a studio. An attempt is made in the transitional clip to make it look as if those who were rounded up by people in Ethiopian army uniforms were taken to a certain place and shot. But the shots are fired on the ground rather than on a person. Also, there does not seem to be a relationship between the place where the shooting takes place and the dead bodies that were thrown off the cliff. All this seems to confirm that the information was carefully cooked up to mislead. Or, at the least, it brings up many reasonable doubts.
The Ethiopian National Defence Forces (ENDF) have denied these reports. Nima Elbagir had not interviewed anyone on the ground, including the ENDF officials. Elbagir’s source of information was the Tigray Media House (TMH). That the clips were provided by TMH is not surprising, because the clip with dead bodies was first shown by Dimtse Woyane. The same video had also been reported by the Telegraph about a month earlier than CNN and BBC’s reports. But Elbagir’s report was based not only on the three videos I have mentioned so far but on five different videos. The question then is: how did TMH obtain them?
The CEO of the TMH, Alula Solomon, in a TV interview said that the videos were obtained from soldiers who were killed and captured. But previously, a presenter of TMH called Stalin had claimed that they obtained the videos from a whistleblower from among the Ethiopian soldiers. He also claimed that the videos were paid for to obtain from a soldier who had defected from the ENDF. These contradictory claims in themselves would lead anyone to call the credibility of the story into question. Stalin’s “whistleblower” did not tell TMH the names of the soldiers whose faces could clearly be seen and who were presumed to order such a massacre. We don’t know the names of Alula’s captured soldiers either. That this story is a fabrication is accentuated not only by the made up transitions, pretensions and cobbled up clips, but also by the fact that the dead bodies did not have fresh blood. The ENDF has argued that the bodies had already been there for a while. If this is true, who killed them?
A well-known investigative journalist of Tigrean origin called Araya Tesfamariam has claimed that TPLF set the whole death scene by posing as federal soldiers and wearing their military uniforms, which TPLF had acquired from the soldiers murdered during the Nov. 4, 2020 pre-emptive attack. According to him, the dead bodies were that of Tigrean youth, who were conscripted as guerilla fighters by TPLF but who, after days of hunger and thirst, tried to escape, only to be killed by their commanders.
This claim will need to be verified, of course, but this and claims by ENDF and others show that none of the media outlets, which have been competing to report the incident, have done their due diligence. Reports that the TPLF was making military uniforms that resembled the ENDF and the Eritrean army in a textile factory in Tigray, that its members had removed uniforms from ENDF members that they had killed after ambushing them on the fateful night of Nov. 4, 2020, and that ENDF members loyal to TPLF have defected with their military outfits have so far been ignored by the international media. Association by uniform and Amharic language in such a complex case is over-simplistic and lazy, and wittingly or unwittingly allowing dis- and misinformation to spread can be dangerous.
This was exemplified by the fact that soon after TMH and AP published the patriarch’s statement, Denis Wadley called on the people in Addis to encircle the patriarch’s residence. In so doing, Wadley set off a false alarm that the patriarch was in some sort of danger. Since then, he has been engaged in smearing Ethiopians. Even more seriously, on May 14, Alula Solomon tweeted that he was receiving multiple reports about a plot by Abiy Ahmed to assassinate His Holiness Abuna Mathias and implicate it on Muslims, TPLF and Oromo armed groups. These imply that the release of the video of Abuna Mathias’ statement was intended to cause political havoc and divide the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church (EOTC). This has not succeeded, however, as the Holy Synod of EOTC at the conclusion of its bi-annual meeting on June 2 rejected any form of foreign interference in Ethiopia’s internal affairs, calling it indirect colonialism.
It is unfortunately perverse attempts by some media and individuals to cause chaos rather than those that honestly seek a solution to the current crisis in Ethiopia that grab the attention of the mainstream media and global superpowers such as the U.S. Nowadays, mainstream media on the whole do not seem to be willing to give all parties a fair hearing. They rarely report, if at all, on Ethiopia’s official government statement or balance its reports by including Ethiopians’ accounts of incidents. Ethiopia’s Ambassador to the U.S, Fitsum Arega, complained that he was repeatedly denied a platform by the New York Times to counter inaccurate and misleading articles by the news outlet. BBC, which is seen as impartial, unbiased and the champion of truth, continues to fail in terms of balanced reporting as well.
My conclusion is that Ethiopia has been intentionally and disingenuously muzzled by the mainstream media while a plethora of dis- and misinformation is painting Ethiopians as savages, rapists, ignorant and morally bankrupt. Any decision by any superpower based on this well-orchestrated campaign of propaganda, like the recent U.S. sanctions against Ethiopia, is regrettable and counterproductive.
Desta Heliso studied at King's College London and London School of Theology and served as lecturer and director of the Ethiopian Graduate School of Theology (EGST). He currently resides in London but continues to coordinate the Centre for Ancient Christianity and Ethiopian Studies at EGST in Addis Ababa. He is also a fellow of the Center for Early African Christianity (New Haven) and a visiting lecturer at the London School of Theology (London).