Ethiopia's Civil War and the Western Media

I love to read. My Grandmother insisted on it.

It came to me recently that since I don't take notes as I read, I should, so I've decided to use this newsletter as an outlet for me to critique the books, academic papers, long-form articles, and documentaries or films that I'm reading and watching. I'll use the newsletter to put them in perspective around current events and make recommendations.

I will not promise weekly essays on what I'm reading or watching, but I will send frequent updates.

That brings us to today's essay and recommendation.

The amount of unrest in the Maghreb, the Sahel, and the Horn of Africa is astonishing. Many of you know I have a healthy obsession with the Maghreb. As a result, I've also been following the civil war in Ethiopia, unrest in parts of the Sahel, and the various coup d’états across the region for the past two years.

What I find fascinating is, is in many ways that in the middle of a global pandemic, instead of bunkering down for survival to fight the COVID pandemic, there is a fight for the survival of another kind.

Several months ago, I read an academic article by the author of today's essay, Solomon Kassa.

He co-authored that article with Mohammed Yimam based on the Gramscian theory of hegemony and counter-hegemony.

After reading the paper, I reached out to Solomon, and here we are. He's the first guest columnist to write for The Weekly Fertilizer.

Before we get to the essay, let me provide some background to give you some perspective.

About Gramsci and Hegemony - (Pronounced: Gram-she)

For those not familiar with Gramsci's theory of hegemony, watch this short video.

Here is my quick explainer on Gramsci to guide you before watching the video.

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was a leader in the Italian Communist Party, and in 1926 he was arrested, imprisoned, and sentenced to 20 years in prison for speaking out against the Fascist State – this is the era of Benito Mussolini. He never made it out of prison, but we were left with his thoughts of the more than 2,000 pages of his writings in what is now called the Prison Notebooks, where he synthesized Marxist thought and began to outline his theory of hegemony.

Unfortunately, he dies before he can fully give us the complete picture, so historians, theorists, and translators like Joseph Buttigieg – yes, the Transportation Secretary's father – have helped place the fragments of his writings in a more coherent roadmap.

Here is one sentence about Gramsci's view of hegemony: people are not only ruled by force but by also by ideas.

Another part of this puzzle: during Gramsci's imprisonment was the 1935-36 Italo-Ethiopian War. This was Italy's second attempt to colonize Ethiopia (Abyssinia), and I think scholars largely agree that their success at this time was because of Abyssinia's ongoing dispute over Somaliland, which essentially opened the door to give Italy an advantage.

The video linked above will give you a better understanding of Gramsci and hegemony.

As you read today's essay, think about the role that the media, social media, and advertising play in driving ideas in today's political discourse.

One more thing about the guest essay

I am not endorsing the author's views, as I am by no means an expert on the Horn of Africa or what's happening in Ethiopia. These views are his and his alone, but I thought it was critical to provide him a place to share these views with a broader set of people, and especially given my relationship with the media elite in the West, I thought it was important to share his perspective about his homeland of Ethiopia.

I hope you'll enjoy it.

Peace, Monique

Why everything the Western mainstream media tells you about the war in Ethiopia is a lie

By Solomon Kassa

Since the outbreak of war on November 3, 2020, between the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF) and the Federal Government of Ethiopia, Ethiopia has become an essential news item. Like other crises in the global south, the perils of post-truth politics have crossed boundaries and blurred the distinctions between fiction and the realities of Ethiopia's conflict. Although the war received extensive mainstream media coverage, the content and tone of the news coverage exhibited severe bias, partisanship, and outright fabrications. Except for minor variances in tone, the mainstream media has displayed a strong aversion to the federal government, portraying the TPLF in a sympathetic light and presenting its propaganda as unquestionable truth. By deciding to limit the range of views about the war, sensationalizing, misrepresenting the facts, and investing in reality, the mainstream media has deceived the international community. Further, this gave credence to the flawed foreign policies of the US and its allies.

Why is the Western mainstream media consistently ignoring the empirical and contextual realities of the war in Ethiopia? Why is the Western media so quick to lionize the TPLF and herald the federal government's demise? Why has there been such uniformity of content and tone, and why is there so little nuance in the coverage of such a complex war in Ethiopia across the western media spectrum? Other questions have allowed many to reflect on the biases that often surface in the practice of journalism. The media bias also triggered a worldwide popular movement known as the "no more movement," challenging the mainstream media to cease manufacturing news and baseless reports on the war in Ethiopia.

This piece argues that Western mainstream media's relentless biased reporting on the conflict in Ethiopia is so common that it would be a mistake to treat all the biases as isolated incidents of the usual media bias towards an African issue or rooted in a lack of understanding of the complex background underlying the war. Rather, mainstream media coverage of the war seems to have the objective of manufacturing consent for regime change in Ethiopia. The mainstream media coverage of the war is intertwined with the machinations of an imperialist struggle for influence and their zero-sum geostrategic objectives in the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea regions.

Since the beginning of the war, the mainstream media outlets in the West have been manufacturing reality and hegemony of thought that is conducive to the US and its allies' interest to topple the government of Ethiopia and replace it with a regime that is considered reliable and predictable to the US's rising geopolitical interests in the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa. In this regard, mainstream coverage of the war almost universally asserted from the beginning that the Ethiopian government provoked and waged war against the TPLF, not only disregarding the TPLF's provocations against the federal government since 2018 but also conspicuously omitting the TPLF's gruesome attack on non-Tigrayan soldiers in the Northern Command on the night of November 3, 2020. Admittedly, the mainstream media have effectively produced a sanctioned discourse that portrayed Prime Minister Abiy as a charlatan Nobel peace prize winner turned war hawk and the TPLF as the innocent victim. Also, the mainstream media has been denying analytical space for journalists and experts who defy their biased but established narrative.

The mainstream media has been reproducing and labeling egregious charges on the federal government to manufacture a sense of urgency and justify imperialist intervention in the name of humanitarian assistance and the responsibility to protect. International humanitarian organizations have also been part of such imperial projects by dishing out lies, disinformation, and false narratives. Exaggerated and purely concocted accusations such as genocide, chemical warfare, ethnic cleansing, deliberate starvation, and systemic use of rape as a weapon of war were regarded as facts, even though none of them have ever been objectively proven.

As the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) report by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) made apparent, all parties to the war are definitely guilty of crimes of varied hues and colors. In fact, the JIT findings confirmed previous reports that ethnic-based massacres were first initiated in this conflict by the TPLF in Mai Kadra.

All efforts initiated by the federal government to end the bloodshed have received little or distorted media coverage. In line with this, the federal government withdrew its forces from Tigray and declared a cease-fire on June 2020. Rather than reciprocating, the TPLF mounted a scorched earth offensive into the Amhara and Afar regions, killing thousands of civilians and destroying civilian infrastructures. The tragedy that had afflicted Tigray in the first eight months has now been replicated manifold in Amhara and Afar Regions. Nevertheless, for the past seven months, the TPLF's industrial-scale lootings, atrocities, and rapes in Amhara and Afar Regions have received no mainstream media coverage. Instead, the mainstream media have been busy glorifying the TPLF when they advance and painting them as victims when attacked. In this respect, the most notable examples of biased reporting include CNN's fake report that TPLF and Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) forces were at the doorstep of Addis Ababa and Declan Walsh's piece that exalted Tigrayan child soldiers.

Let me conclude by reiterating a few points: one, while it is a depressing situation for anyone anywhere interested in the truth about the war in Ethiopia, the mainstream reporting on the war will continue misleading and perhaps get worse. Two, it is time that balanced readers or followers of the situation in Ethiopia wake up to the fact that their understanding of what is happening in Ethiopia, and, for that matter, many other places from Libya to Venezuela, is being shaped by those media with an unholy agenda. Three, my advice for keen international observers of the situation in Ethiopia is to read the objective, balanced and humane views offered by a few sources, often published in parts of the world without major geopolitical interests that are opposed to the Ethiopian government. If you rely solely on western mainstream sources, you'll keep getting the same distorted picture and story.

Solomon Kassa is an independent political analyst based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.