Ethiopia’s Leaders Misinform the World
September 29, 2013
New York has hustled and bustled with heads of state and delegations visiting the city to attend the 68th UN General Assembly. Ethiopia’s PM Hailemariam Desalegn and Foreign Minster Dr. Tedros Adhanom each made speeches on themes relating to sustainable development, conflict and security in Ethiopia and Africa. The PM spoke as a head of state and chairperson of the African Union during the General Assembly “Debate”, while the FM Dr. Tedros Adhanom spoke during the after party by Global Citizen Festival,an anti-poverty advocacy concert ambitiously campaigning to end extreme poverty in 2030, at Central Park, New York. This analysis focuses on unpacking for readers how the two leaders of the known autocratic and genocidal Ethiopian state went to great heights using the international opportunity afforded them to take a domestic version of their propaganda to international levels.
Making speeches at such important global venues is assumed to be a “deliberative process” that influences UN policy and decision-making. Because of the global reach of their speeches, we cannot take the speeches very lightly. The speakers had single purpose in minds when they delivered two speeches that relied on a fundamentally similar narrative framework: Ethiopia’s economic growth and its asserted “success” in meeting the Millennium Development Goal on child morality, the promotion of a false sense of peace and tranquility while the country is in ever-increasing turbulence in reality because of the excessive repressions in Oromia, Ogaden, SNNP and other regions of the empire. Those who have ever watched Ethiopian Television, there is nothing new in what the leaders claimed. We heard incessant propaganda like that for the last 22 years of Tigray domination of Ethiopian politics and economy via the fake coalition known as the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). Tigrean People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) is the engine of this totalitarian party. Tired of such propaganda back home, some have even broken their TV and radio sets.
Dr. Tedros Adhanom’s “Public Diplomacy” at Global Citizen
At the festival, Tedros employed what appeared to be an innocuous sense of humor as way of connecting with the audience. The Minster preached the importance of diversity to New Yorkers and told them how Ethiopia’s economy is growing and how Ethiopia met its MDG “3 years in advance of the 2015 deadline.” The hard fact about preaching diversity to audiences like New Yorkers is aimed to hide the reality that his regime not only suppresses diversity for people different from ruling Tigire (and Amhara) ethnies such as Oromo in Ethiopia, but also hides its genocidal aggression towards them. Predictably, the aim of the speech was to hide and misrepresent the brutality of the Ethiopian “government” and to paint a rosy picture about the genocidal sate. Tedros demonstrated that he felt satisfied when he used the opportunity to misrepresent and mislead the so-called “global citizens” (I wonder if they consider themselves such). The Minster could not hide his excitement when he immediately took to his Twitter account on a smart phone and pic-tweeted:
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