Days before BBC Tigrigna journalist Desta Gebremedhin picked up an AK-47 to join the TPLF insurgency, several VOA Tigrigna staffers were downplaying atrocities by the Tigrayan Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF) in Tigray. The situation escalated when current and former Tigrayan employees of VOA who supported TPLF began defaming VOA Amharic employees for not portraying only Tigrayans as victims.
However, the latest Reuters article, one of the most comprehensive reports on atrocities in Tigray, appears to have vindicated VOA-Amharic’s cautious and balanced coverage, since the Reuters media investigations showed that both the Welkait Amhara and Tigrayan communities have been victims of atrocities. In fact, the report, alongside EHRC investigations so far, reveal that there were hundreds more Amhara civilian victims in the Western regions compared to Tigrayan civilian victims.
A colleague of one of VOA Amharic’s journalists, on the condition of anonymity, told Awasa Guardian (AG) that VOA Amharic “can not wait for Western media outlets to catch up.”
“Most profitable Western media reports are knee-jerk articles of sensationalism and they actually confess to using partisan and discredited TPLF sources like Alula Solomon’s TMH, Stalin Gebreselassie and Lucy Kassa. That is why Western media often downplay or deny atrocities committed by TPLF. It took Reuters almost 6 months to finally reveal the whole truth and publish a balanced piece that matches what the professionals inside VOA-Amharic’s program already reported long time ago”
He praised VOA Amharic and said that VOA will start losing credibility among most Ethiopians if VOA acting director Yolanda Lopez does not address the crisis in VOA Tigrigna until it adopts the balanced coverage of VOA Amharic.
There are also alleged efforts by other VOA managers to discriminate against VOA Amharic journalists and to censor news about the upcoming election in Ethiopia as well as promote the grievances of TPLF insurrectionists, he added.
“After we just experienced an insurrection here in Washington DC, the anti-election pressure from Joe Biden’s State Department on Ethiopia is truly stunning and ironic”
The only non-Tigrayan critic of VOA-Amharic mentioned recently was a white-American named Annette Sheckler, who had a noticeable conflict of interest as she was a consultant for the “Meles Foundation,” an organization established to honor former TPLF dictator Meles Zenawi.
These controversies at the VOA was however overshadowed by the BBC Tigrigna program where its journalists have been accused of supporting TPLF for years. The crisis escalated when one of the journalists (Desta Gebremedhin) who wrote several BBC articles shaping the Tigray narrative for months joined the battlefield in support of the TPLF group recently labeled as “terrorist organization” by parliament.
As a manifestation of what many Ethiopians consider “Tigrayan privilege,” several other TPLF operatives who got promoted to western institutions have recently came out, including Mulugeta Gebrehiwot of the World Peace Foundation (WPF) and Dr Tedros Adhanom of World Health Organization (WHO).
While the decades old Tigrayan supremacy in the political, economic and security sectors in Ethiopia was well-known, TPLF’s outsized representation and networks inside Western institutions have been widely underreported.
