Shame On the International Media
By Yohannes Woldemariam

The American new-world-order has so dulled public sensibility that it is now impossible for ordinary people to make sense of a complex world. Bullet point summaries of events, combined with images that are sanitized, and manipulated, have become the dominant model. Regarding the Ethio/Eritrean war, the international media have joined the chorus and have been guilty of cowardice, prejudice and gross oversimplification, functioning as a gutless and witless tool of Ethiopian propaganda. News organizations are guilty of playing down politically inconvenient moral outrages against Eritreans and the genocidal use of ethnic Oromos as mine sweepers in its invasion of Eritrea and failing to report those aspects of the OAU sponsored negotiations being trampled upon by the minority TPLF regime.

Copying from Walta (the Ethiopian government's official website) has become a lazy way for journalists to identify the "goodies and baddies" in this war and a preferred alternative to complex political histories of places, such as how Eritrea and Ethiopia came to be and what the OAU charter has to say about borders in Africa. The cause of this jaded and superficial journalism is a convergence of interest between the Ethiopian regime's expansionism and the operations of the cheaply manufactured news of the multinational news factories, which are themselves a consequence of the unchecked power of the American-dominated global market and the agenda of neoliberalism. Capital is looking into the fact that Ethiopia has sixty million people compared to Eritrea's four million. Moreover, and as scandalous as it is, Ethiopia is supposedly a "show case" of structural adjustment in addition to sitting beneath a staggering $ 9 billion of foreign debt.

In this context, the temptation every reporter faces is to paint the world in his or her own image, or the image desired by those that he or she serves. Even the BBC did not escape becoming part of this scandal despite the professionalism of Kathy Jenkins and Alex Last. To the most part, Eritrea has been portrayed by the BBC more as Patrick Gilkes wishes it to be, rather than as it really is. Patrick Gilkes and Peter Biles have performed better as Ethiopia's propagandists than Ethiopian spokesmen themselves and even going so far as promoting the mythology of Ethiopia's warrior tradition and trying to create an outrageous parallel between this war and Ethiopia's victimization by fascist Italy in 1935. Watching Ethiopian spokeswoman Salome Tadesse and General Tsadkan Gebre Tensae imitate commander H. Norman Schwarzkopf's press briefings with maps and laser pointers, one wonders if the BBC is reporting about a "victory" by a superpower or Ethiopia . Pathetic pretensions notwithstanding, I wonder if it escapes even the most isolated Tibetan monks in the Himalayas that Ethiopia is hell on earth and in the company of the most wretched places on the planet.

By failing to expose Ethiopia's invasion, the use Oromos as a human wave mine sweepers, and the relationship between famine and Ethiopia's war policy and entrusting Patrick Gilkes (a known crony of the TPLF and Eritrea hater), the BBC joined the chorus in distorting the nature of the conflict. If we are to believe Gilkes in the absurd claim that Ethiopia is the victim in this war, then we become like the Turks who cling to the fiction that the Armenian genocide earlier in the century never took place.

The refusal to come to grips with Ethiopia's crimes and the western media's enthusiastic embrace of the ethnic triumphalism by the TPLF is tantamount to being an accomplice in the destruction of the region and the murderous policies of the regime. Until this is understood, the TPLF are doomed to carry on a dialogue with outsiders that resembles that between Alice and the March Hare.

"Have some wine," the March Hare said in an encouraging tone.

Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea. "I don't see any wine," she remarked.

"There isn't any," said the March Hare.

It shouldn't be for journalists to decide what people should or should not know. This kind of manipulation is the work of advertisers and propagandists. Lies, including the lie of omission, do work briefly, but once uncovered dishonor the values they may have been employed to protect. The failure to report honestly erodes the concept of dispassionate truth and temporarily empowers tyrants like the TPLF and their ethnic cleansing and war mongering policies.