There’s Forgiveness and Then There’s Betraying Your Own Values: An Open Letter to the Amhara Association of America

The AAA celebrating Zecharias Zelalem is a slap in the face to those who lived through the TPLF war and those who remember his contemptible behavior.

Dear Guys,

I wrote a thread on X about this, but I am still so angry at 4 in the morning that congratulations! You now have me devoting a whole Substack article to this because I genuinely believe a thread isn’t enough. That’s how much you pissed me off. And with any luck, others will be pissed off as well and tell you to get back on track.

Let me be clear. I have enormous respect for the work you do. No one can deny that AAA’s research and its regular reports and updates on the ethnic cleansing of the Amhara people are absolutely crucial to this cause. Without you, those of us trying to stop what’s happening, who are trying to get this outrage more global attention, would be poorer for it. You have my respect and my gratitude.

But now you’ve earned my disgust. How can I put this politely? What the hell is wrong with you? This is the glowing, fawning, nausea-inducing post you put out on X as well as on Facebook.

I’m turning 62 in a few days. I’m the one who’s supposed to have a fuzzy memory and to start forgetting things, not you.

Let’s take a closer look at who you’re giving bouquets to here. Way back in May of 2021, you’ll recall Will Brown and Lucy Kassa put out a farcical tale in Britain’s Telegraph, claiming with no solid proof that “Ethiopian and Eritrean armies may have used powerful incendiary weapons in civilian areas,” i.e. white phosphorus. Note the may. Neither Brown nor Kassa met their single burn victim in person, interviewing her and her mother by phone, and the story is full of holes you can drive a truck through. Neither Brown nor Kassa apparently bothered to consult a military source to even confirm an attack, so there is no proof that Ethiopian or Eritrean forces were there. Anyone could also reasonably wonder: How could there not be more victims if it was a deliberate attack? And why were there no victims ever again?

Yet Zecharias Zelalem rushed to treat the story by his “friends” (his word) as established fact, claiming they “unearthed a whole new horror of a despicable war.”

Only they didn’t. They unearthed nothing but speculation. And this wouldn’t be the last time Zecharias did a great job for the propaganda wing of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. In fact, he had already shown his true colors.

This one takes a bit of explaining. Earlier that same month, a brilliant report titled Disinformation in Tigray: Manufacturing Consent for a Secessionist War came out from an operation calling itself the New Africa Institute. I was one of the first, if not the first, to track down its lead author and front person, Simon Tesfemariam. Simon would soon become a major figure in the diaspora activist fight in 2021 against the TPLF, but only days after New Africa Institute made its release, a former journalist from Cape Town named Tessa Knight imperiously phoned Simon up to demand an interview right away so she could do a hit job on him.

Knight would later publish her smear on various websites (and no, I will not link to them and give her the traffic). She suggested that Simon, a natural-born U.S. citizen, and his small outfit worked for the Eritrean government and that he must be an Eritrean operative.

But it was Abraham Zere of Voice of America’s Tigrinya service who first attacked Simon in a long thread, neglecting to share any of the responses to Knight from her brief ambush interview.

Guess who thought this was swell? Guess who doesn’t understand basic friggin’ libel law? Piling on was Zecharias Zelalem, who thanked Abraham and tweeted, “Personally, it was pretty obvious that this was some state commissioned initiative.”

Only it wasn’t. And what’s really interesting is that Zecharias the boy wonder journalist didn’t bother—just like Knight and Abraham—to do a balanced and deep analysis of the content of the report.

Time and again, Zecharias served on Twitter as a one-man cheerleading section for some of the most shamelessly distorted stories that supported the TPLF’s victim narrative. When the Holocaust Museum was duped into supporting the phony “Tigray Genocide,” Ethiopians, especially in the diaspora, were naturally appalled and showed their disgust. Here is Zecharias doing his best to convince the world that no, folks who actually love their country and don’t like a terrorist organization attacking its army must be hired guns, trolls, or bots.

Zecharias cheerfully joined the ranks of Nima Elbagir and Ilhan Omar, among others, who applauded the joint report of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch of April 2022. It called for the Ethiopian and Amhara regional authorities to “immediately demobilize and disarm” but didn’t ask the TPLF to do the same.

If you remember that report at all, it’s probably because to promote it, the two human rights groups put out some shitty animation to portray alleged war crimes and because there were howls of laughter from Ethiopians over one outstanding gaffe. Turned out Amnesty and Human Rights Watch had made ludicrous estimates for the numbers of people in Welkait and were, in effect, inventing whole populations of victims.

But hey, Zecharias thought it was great.

He also had no problem with Tom Gardner of The Economist trying to intimidate an academic institution through email and commit libel against Professor Ann Fitz-Gerald.

Gardner keeps pushing this fairy tale of “the great mobilization” as well. In article after article. In his book that got glowing reviews from all his besties (including Zecharias) but that will be in remainder bins a few years from now. Both Zecharias and Gardner know full well there was no great coordinated campaign, no mobilization, there was just me and my article, and the Ethiopian government decided they’d had enough of a British creep who had the ethics of your average skid row pimp.

And that’s our theme here. Ethics. Those of Zecharias Zelalem and the ethics of you guys.

Because when you gush over a creep like this, you are endorsing his conduct. His denials, his bullshit minimizing of what Amhara went through in Dessie and Lalibela and elsewhere, what the Afar went through, what every internally displaced person went through.

You’re endorsing his brazen attempts to gaslight the world and just lie in public about how Ethiopians authentically felt and feel now—“they’re all bots, they’re all trolls,” don’t believe ’em.

When you endorse this jerk, you give a rubber stamp of validation to his bullshit. And you deny the experiences and opinions of millions, including the people you are supposed to fight for and represent.

And incidentally, you insult my friends and me. I didn’t go to war zones in 2021, looking for medals. Neither did my colleagues Jemal Countess and Sheba Tekeste. Neither did the Ethiopian reporters I worked with at Arts TV and Balageru TV. We did it because the truth needed to come out. I can only speak for myself in this instance, but I think it’s outrageous what you posted.

You gave a nice shoulder massage to a glory hound. He loves that shit. By now, he’s got a whole shelf of awards, and here’s an example of his taking a victory lap, which he does every so often.

Honestly, who the hell cares? Besides other journalists? Does he honestly think ordinary people know these awards?

One day, he might grow up and realize something that should shrivel his testicles and fill him with shame. That earning plaques and trophies and blocks of engraved Pyrex from the Western media establishment means nothing—not if what you did was bullshit about your own people and culture. Absolutely nothing if you betrayed their trust in you to report the truth. If you just shaped and crammed the facts into the kind of story your editor in London or Toronto thinks is the “right” take on things.

What I’ve valued far above anything else in the past four years is when Ethiopians both at home and those in diaspora communities across North America and Europe have told me they believe in my work. What matters is when they like what I do. When they tell me I got my facts right and did a good job.

This is why I’m so disgusted by what I can only label “political Alzheimer’s.”

I want you to think back on all those times when Getachew Reda started Twitter posts calling Abiy a war criminal, ranting that he would put him on trial for war crimes… And then lookee here! It’s April 23, 2023, and Ethiopian television shows us a disgraceful ceremony for “Sustaining Peace” in which Abiy Ahmed passed out framed certificates to Tsadkan Gebretensae and Getachew Reda. Funny how the “Tigray Genocide” narrative is still being endlessly recycled after Jabba the Hutt blew it up on live television.

Is this what you want? To emulate that? To completely deny what was said and done because a weasel is putting out an (almost) correct narrative now? What are you, the Amnesiac Association of America?

Tell me something: If the reportage of Zecharias on the #WaronAmhara is so “significant” NOW, why the hell wasn’t he making these significant reports on Amhara getting slaughtered and persecuted THEN?

Please ask him that. Better still, demand it.

I can guarantee that if he wants to pull out his clips (to use old journalist lingo), he won’t have nearly enough to match the hours or copy he put in for the TPLF narrative.

These posts I’ve included above show there is no fig leaf of “objectivity” for him to hide behind. I recognize that reporters can have a point of view on a story and that objectivity doesn’t ever exist—it’s a myth. But you can try to be fair. And all the examples I’ve provided show a brazen partisanship in defiance of the facts, not according to what actually happened. I remember so many Ethiopians hitting their keyboards to complain because the correct information was out there, only Zecharias and his buddies kept pushing the idea that facts are only defined by the Telegraph or the New York Times or CNN. If Africans didn’t know before that this is a crock, they know it now—and he helped disillusion them over mainstream Western media.

That’s what you’re endorsing.

So, should we wait now for the AAA to prepare a complimentary tweet about Nima Elbagir? Maybe Geoffrey York or Will Brown. Don’t worry, they’ll come around eventually and realize that Amhara make perfectly photogenic victims as well, with great quotes.

Or maybe you want to go for the full nuclear credibility blow-up and retweet Rashid Abdi.

The French, bless ’em, knew how to hold a grudge. They didn’t tolerate the collaborators after the Nazis were kicked out. They ran them out of their neighborhoods. No, I am definitely not advocating or condoning mob justice, but you can certainly understand why those folks were pissed. In the context that we’re talking about, it’s not unreasonable to shun this bastard and stop treating him like a potential resource and ally.

Let me share with you a horrifying little anecdote that will give you insight into how Western journalism on the global south works. The profession hasn’t changed much since this happened. If you doubt me, consider afterwards all the atrocity tales peddled by the TPLF and the garbage that Declan Walsh wrote for the New York Times even as his photographer took shots of child soldiers, and neither of them gave a damn about Black kids with rifles. It’s all about the packaged yarn.

In a memoir, the well-known war correspondent Edward Behr recounted a moment in the newly independent Congo in the 1960s. Under a “blazing” sun, he stood in an aircraft hangar where thousands of Congolese hoped to be flown away to Belgium for political asylum:

Into this middle of this crowd strode an unmistakably British TV reporter, leading his cameraman and sundry technicians like a platoon commander through hostile territory. At intervals he paused and shouted, in a stentorian but genteel BBC voice, “Anyone here been raped and speaks English?”

Yeah. That’s the kind of Western news organization that Zecharias Zelalem likes to work for. That pays better than any Ethiopian operation can. That passes around the nice trinkets and gives you pats on the head in public.

I wouldn’t even object to that so much if he told the damn truth, but he didn’t before so why should you think he’ll keep doing it for you now? Because he “cares so much” for the Amhara?

Or because he’s hoping for a Polk Award?

You seem willing to overlook and forgive a lot.

I can’t. I won’t. And I don’t think the people you supposedly serve should either. And I hope they tell you off in tweet replies and emails and phone calls and raise holy hell.

I like the AAA’s work. I like integrity even more. Try showing some please.