Date: Saturday, 02 April 2022
Apr 2, 2022 The Embassy of the State of Eritrea to the United States is appalled that WBUR’s Meghna Chakrabarti provided, perhaps unwittingly, a disinformation platform for TPLF collaborators on NPR’s On Point Radio Program that was broadcast under the title: “No Food, medicine or electricity – the truth about life in Ethiopia’s Tigray region”. In the program, Ms. Chakrabarti allowed her biased guests to wallow on maligned comments about Eritrea without as much as asking them for rudimentary evidence on their wild allegations. A responsible “journalist” will have asked for evidence to ascertain the veracity of grave allegations. A responsible “journalist” will have invited guests with different views and perspectives. A responsible “journalist”, who presumably went to great length to obtain a ‘’recorded message” from Mekele will have checked authenticity and veracity of “witness statements” Apparently, none of these logical and mandatory steps that are vital for ensuring objectivity were taken. One of her TPLF activist guests falsely alleges that “120,000 girls and women have been raped” by Eritrean forces. It is mind-boggling that such a comment did not deserve a follow-up with questions about evidence or investigations at the very least. Unfortunate and sad as it is, literature on rampant, officially sanctioned rape and gender-based violence in Tigray Region under TPLF rule prior to the current conflict is available in the public domain. This deplorable situation had in fact prompted the launching of the “Enough/Yikhono Movement” by concerned women groups in Tigray Region in 2019. These grim facts were obviously beyond the radar screen of the radio program. As pointed out above, Ms. Chakrabarti has utterly failed to provide balanced reporting as her guests were all parroting the false narrative of TPLF leaders. Her role seemed to be confined to sheer paraphrasing of their gratuitous vitriol against Eritrea without any serious attempt for validation and verification. Time and time again, TPLF leaders have wickedly propagated fabricated dramas and utter falsehoods. The TPLF has routinely used its networks – it allocated a whopping 32 million US dollars that it had siphoned off when it was in power in the first ten months of 2020 alone for these purposes – and lobbying firms for access to, and amplification by, certain media outlets. The TPLF’s preposterous allegations are motivated by, and intended for, deliberate misinformation. The sole aim is to sway public opinion in order to divert focus from the reckless War of Insurrection that it launched on November 3, 2020, including its cruel and unprecedented high crimes of the slaughtering of Ethiopian soldiers in their sleep. The TPLF also bombed Asmara, the Eritrean capital, and other targets in the country hurling a total of 22 missile attacks in the space of few days. To date, the TPLF remains the architect of chaos and mayhem in the region. The litany of TPLF criminality and malfeasance in the past three decades is indeed boundless. As underlined above, this has always been accompanied by lavish financial outlays and extensive media campaigns to hoodwink international public opinion. In this context, Ms. Chakrabarti radio program virtually endorses the continuance of the TPLF’s malicious disinformation campaign thereby contributing to confuse and mislead those with a less intimate awareness of the current crisis in Ethiopia. Embassy of The State of Eritrea Washington, DC 01 Apr 2022 © 2022 - Eritrea Ministry Of Information. All Rights Reserved.
