New York Times Lies and Distortion Cannot Change Facts About Ethiopian War

December 15, 2021

It was TPLF that was preparing for war for years after losing power in central government in 2018, not the Ethiopia government as the New York Times claimed

Borkena

Editorial 

The war in Ethiopia as much as it as exposed, through stories of rape including an eighty-five-years old nun and massacre of innocent civilians, the very nature of Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) cruelty, it has exposed the very nature of mainstream media. 

What started out as a deceptive advocacy against “genocide in Tigray,” which never happened as established by the joint investigation that involved United Nations High Commission for Human Rights Council and Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, turned out to be rather a cover for regime change agenda and tacit support to the terrorist Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). 

In the latest string of campaigns to distort the story about the Ethiopian war, The New York Times published, on December 15, 2013, an article that toiled to paint an image that Ethiopia was making preparations for the war in TIgray long before it was started. 

The fact that TPLF started the war when it attacked several bases of the Northern Command of the Ethiopian Defence Force on November 4, 2020 is something the likes of The New York Times could not change. It was one of  the TPLF leadership , Seko Ture, who confessed about it on record and in a live show with Tigray TB  when he said that TPLF launched instant Blitzkrieg attack on the Ethiopian  Defence Force with the aim to seize key military arsenals and heavy weaponry. 

Declan Walsh had to stretch in time before November 4, 2020 to craft a story with which it can distort the fact that TPLF started the war. “…Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, won a Nobel Prize for making peace with his country’s longtime enemy — and then used the alliance to plan a war,” he wrote. 

The Ethiopian government was actually criticised for being too soft on the TPLF by resorting to arduous mediation and lobbying to convince the TPLF to avoid war. Even ethnic Tigray opposition leaders, like Aregawhi Berhe who was also one of the founders of the TPLF, were criticising the government for not taking action against the TPLF. 

Mediation efforts by elders, for it is in the Ethiopian tradition, and religious leaders, and patriarch Abune Mathias was in the delegation, did not bear fruit simply because TPLF was determined to resolve the difference with the Federal government through war. 

Gebru Asrat, former TPLF central committee and executive committee member and president of Tigray region, who later fell out with TPLF and turned out to be a leader of another ethnic Tigray opposition party, was on record telling Ethiopians that the TPLF had been preparing for war. He was speaking about it at least one year before the outbreak of the war. 

A simple video footage from the celebration of the 45th anniversary of TPLF would clearly demonstrate the level of militarism the TPLF was indulging in. 

Irrespective of what the New York Times thinks, no amount of distortion and misinformation will change the facts on the ground that TPLF was the cause for all that is unfolding in Ethiopia right now. 

Good thing is that Africa is clear about it. Important international actors are clear about it. And Ethiopia is determined, more than ever before, to make TPLF history. Based on recent updates about the war from official government sources, it is apparent that TPLF will be history, sooner rather than later.