A couple of weeks ago, Yale MacMillan Center organized a panel titled “Responding to the Crisis in Northern Ethiopia.” The speakers on this panel were Senators Chris Coons, a representative from Delaware and a Yale law school alumnus, and Thom Tillis, a Republican senator from North Carolina. The director of Yale’s Center for Genocide Studies, Professor David Simon, was also a speaker while the session was moderated by CNN’s Nima Elbagir, whose reporting about Ethiopia has been rife with consequential loopholes and distortions. This is why it is important to give a background about Nima Elbagir and her reporting on the Ethiopian conflict in order to give context to the Yale panel mentioned above.
One of the issues with Nima’s CNN reporting about Ethiopia was her sole focus on the alleged atrocities committed in the Tigray region while purposefully disregarding the crimes committed by the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in Amhara and Afar regions. Any journalist speaking on this subject would be cognizant of the fact that the war in Tigray had moved to Amhara and Afar regions on June 28, 2021 when the Government of Ethiopia (GoE) declared a unilateral humanitarian ceasefire. The vengeful TPLF scoffed at this opportunity for peace created by the GoE and took the war to the neighboring regions to “settle scores’”, as its spokesperson Getachew Reda put it. The disinterest Nima showed to the ordeal of the Amhara and Afar people, therefore, raises serious questions about her journalistic ethos.
Other issues raise questions about Nima’s reporting on the alleged atrocities in Ethiopia. As a Sudanese national whose country has presently invaded Ethiopia over a long-standing border dispute, one has to ask whether this will not affect her journalistic impartiality. Sudan, along with Egypt, has also been embroiled in GERD-related disputes with Ethiopia. These are clear instances of conflict of interest that CNN seems not bothered by.
This conflict of interest showed up in Nima’s reporting on the conflict in Ethiopia time and again. There have been limitations and serious factual gaps in her several pieces about Ethiopia, and these have been painstakingly documented in several amazing threads by @Qnie_Addis. Here is one such thread https://bit.ly/3rLlt4v.
One wild accusation made against the GoE and Amhara regional forces includes the dumping of Tigrayan dead bodies in the Tekeze river, an attempt to invoke images of Tutsi bodies floating on the Kagera river during the Rwandan Genocide. Yes, the Ethiopian forces were accused of murdering Tigrayans, preserving their bodies with chemicals, and dumping them on the Tekeze river, only for the bodies to be discovered downstream in Sudan. One must ask the writer “why would Ethiopian forces go such great lengths to incriminate themselves?” It would later be discovered that CNN’s forensic expert was a dentist.
These threads have been compiled by @EliezerAbate and could be found here: https://bit.ly/3ry6jiK. Many other people have also shed light on the glaring gaps in Nima’s Ethiopia reporting. None of them got conclusive answers and most were completely shoved aside by Nima and CNN.
It was this reporter that Yale invited to moderate the aforementioned panel.
Yale not only invited a reporter who showed perpetual bias in her reporting of Ethiopia, but it also disinvited Professor Ann Fitz-Gerald, a professor at Wilfrid Laurier University and the director of Balsillie School of International Affairs, from the panel. Given her expertise and extensive work on Ethiopia, Professor Fitz-Gerald had a superior understanding of the subtleties of the war and a stack of evidence that could debunk Nima’s, and other panelists’, gross inaccuracies on air. It seems that the organizers of the panel disinvited this veteran professor anticipating a tough resistance to their wild claims.
Another puzzling claim made by one of the organizers of the panel, Professor David Simon, is that the Ethiopians he asked to be panelists declined “citing fears for their own safety or security.” That claim was of course nonsense as demonstrated by the article on Yale Daily News on November 21, 2021, that included several Ethiopians willing to speak up and tell their side of the story. It seems Yale’s own Daily News is more effective in finding prominent Ethiopians than Yale’s Center for Genocide Studies, if the excuse by Professor David Simon is to be taken at face value.
All of these shoddy events now seem to be making sense. The last piece of the jigsaw puzzle that involved Yale University’s Center for Genocide Studies and CNN has recently popped up. One of the panelists on the session, Sen. Chris Coons, is now promoting a draconian bill he co-sponsored. While this may not have been an easy puzzle for people who do not keep abreast with the politics of the Horn of Africa, for Ethiopians, this latest episode was foreseen from the day these events started unfolding. The question for most Ethiopians is “why take the trouble and gallivant only to get to an episode we perfectly predicted?”
Yet, many people worldwide still don’t see, or do not want to see, why, about 140 million people from the Horn of Africa, have lost trust in the mainstream media and Western politicians. Here is one such example where Ethiopians and the GoE were hard done by. Alas, farcical low-quality stunts such as this won’t strike a chord with people who only see what they want to see.
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This piece benefited a great deal from my great friends — Ermi Dejene, Fitse Fekade, Mahi Konjit-Solomon, Tesfa Mulat, and Yohanes Molla.
