The Government of Ethiopia today criticized several international media outlets for being biased and misleading international community while reporting the current internal affairs of the country.
The Government said thatf for the past nine months from Al Jazeera English, Bloomberg, BBC, The Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, to The Guardian, Financial Times to Reuters and AFP, the international media outlets have been engaged in a ‘copy and paste’ of a deliberately biased and unfair narrations and reorting along with ‘continued character assassination of the Prime Minister’ with the aim of misinforming the international community.
“Yesterday, August 10 2021, the Office of the Prime Minister released a statement in which a call was made to all Ethiopians in every corner to guard their nation from the further incursions and hostility of the terrorist group TPLF [Tigray Liberation Peoples’ Front].
The statement intended for our population of more than 100 million, has been of course positioned and presented to an international audience by many media outlets in a skewed way and in a manner consistent with most international media reporting since November 4, 2020,” said Ethiopian Government in a statemen issued today.
“A scan of most of the headlines issued yesterday August 10th following the release of the statement is telling of the disconnect and/or intentional misrepresentation,” it said.
The key issue the Government mentioned as biased report by the above media outlets in relation to their news report based on yesterday’s statement of the Office of the Prime Minister of Ethiopia are:
1) After an audible silence for weeks not fully raising the alarm on the hostility of the terrorist group TPLF and the atrocities the group has committed in Amhara and Afar regions, most have chosen rather to distort a nation’s call for survival as a call against Tigray.
2) All headlines fail to show the perpetrators (TPLF) against which an entire nation has risen, rather framing the Government as perpetrator instead.
3) The utilization of ‘Tigray forces’ purposely utilized to draw divides within communities. Considering that ‘Tigray’ is a region within Ethiopia, headlines continue making it seem like Ethiopia is at war with a separate state called Tigray and with Tigryans. Similarly, by using terms like ‘Tigray forces’ ‘tigrayan forces’, efforts to depict the national call in a manner that is against an entire regional state or a people of a regional state is tantamount to purposely intensifying divides in a sensitive situation. International media houses are equally culpable in spewing divisive narratives.
4) Most of the headlines and the content of the stories continue to deny through silence and turn a blind eye to the role a terrorist organization TPLF is playing in wreaking havoc in the stability of the country, rather choosing instead to continue blaming the Prime Minister as an individual.
5) AFP issued a piece ‘Timeline of Ethiopia’s Conflict’ riddled with a myopic view of events and purposely calling into question the rule of law operations launched in November 2020 in response to TPLF’s attack of the Northern Command. The undermining nature of the piece, like most other ones that pull into question TPLF’s aggression when the TPLF itself admitted to have taken pre-emptive strikes against the Northern Command is questionable.
6) The continued character assassination of the Prime Minister evident in most pieces like copy/paste scripts among media houses is characteristic of how little effort the media is exerting to understand the context and continuous oversimplification of the overall situation as just a single story.
"The battle is not with #Tigray, but with terrorist forces…we are battling to liberate the people of Tigray who are being used as an instrument by #TPLF, and the whole of #Ethiopia from the terrorist group, to maintain the peace and unity of our country." https://t.co/ucmlkthEvc
— Office of the Prime Minister – Ethiopia (@PMEthiopia) August 10, 2021
7) AP’s and the Washington Post’s continued sympathetic narrative to a group designated ‘terrorist’ in a Constitutional process raises a lot of concerns for the standard of ‘non-partisan journalism’ that many media outlets pride themselves for.
8) The refusal by most international media outlets to acknowledge that a sovereign nation and its parliament have designated TPLF a terrorist group and the aggrandizement of the terrorist group is tantamount to misinforming the world purposely.
“These are among a few of the examples that constitute orchestrated gross misrepresentations of a country of more than 100million, gross misrepresentation of a people, a government and a head of state in favor of rebel group. Media monitoring results indicate these common trends over the past 9 months of reporting on Ethiopia which calls into doubt the principles of fairness,” stated the Government of Ethiopia.
It is recalled that Geopolitics Press has exposed a covert operation funded by some Western countries, which is currently working for a regime change in Ethiopia from its base in Nairobi, Kenya. Named C2FC, the covert operation team has been engaged in fabricating biased news stories and narrations defaming the current administration of the Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia, which over the past few years has been engaged in political and economic reforms with results at home and abroad that won him a Nobel peace prize.
“…Upcoming narratives will call on rebel coalition to execute regime change so as stabilize Ethiopia as a Federal Republic, or non-belligerently break it up, while enabling the trial of Abiy Ahmed Ali in an international court,” stated Geopolitics Press indicating that C2FC project is replication of the Basma covert project, which has been executed in Syria to topple President Bashar Hafez al-Assad.
“…Among the issues discussed in the West concerning the future of Ethiopia are questions about whether Ethiopia can be peacefully broken up if a rebel coalition takes power in Addis Ababa, and then allows the ethno-regional states to use referendum to vote for secession, which the central government will accept. This is to avoid the Somaliland limbo where the semi-autonomous state cannot gain full recognition as a republic unless the national government in Mogadishu consents to its secession. For the United States Government and its European Allies, this will allow for a peaceful Yugoslavia-like breakup, while enabling the trial of Abiy Ahmed Ali for crimes against humanity in an international court just as it happened to the last President of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic,” according to Geopolitics Press investigation.