Mereja.Forum

[sarcasm]

By Meron T. Gebreananaye and Bruck Kebede

One of the defining features of the War on Tigray has become the struggle to control the narrative via social media. From the very outset, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed declared the war on his Facebook page on 4 November 2020. Following the declaration of the war, Tigrayans and friends of Tigray across the world mobilized online around an anti-war agenda. The Ethiopian government, which in the last three years had cultivated official government social media accounts with tens of thousands of followers, responded vigorously. It maintained a complete communication blackout in Tigray while at the same time co-opting the entire apparatus of the state, including government media and diplomatic missions, to establish narrative dominance. In the first few weeks of the war, these efforts focused primarily on promoting the government line that the war was simply a “law enforcement operation” intended to capture named Tigrayan leaders. The government’s efforts have since evolved to employing largely four tactics: disinformation, intimidation, demonization, and gaslighting.

Disinformation

Disinformation is the most common tactic used by the Ethiopian government from the start of the war. While it became immediately obvious to all impartial observers that an “operation” which involved drone warfare and heavy artillery could be anything less than a devastating war, the Ethiopian government, to this day, continues to push its narrative that it is undertaking a “law enforcement operation.” The Ethiopian government went as far as launching a dedicated social media platform in the form of the State of Emergency Fact Check [SoE Fact Check], which sought to co-opt the media term ‘Fact Check’ for propaganda purposes. On 12 November 2020, the SoE Fact check, denied the involvement of Eritrean troops by repeating the pre-emptive lie that TPLF had manufactured Eritrean military uniforms at the Almeda Textile Factory in Adwa, Tigray in an effort to dress its own fighters in Eritrean military uniform and mislead the public. On 28 November 2020, the same day as the Axum Massacre, the SoE Fact Check restated the government line that Ethiopia is undertaking a “law enforcement operation” and reassured readers that the operation “will come to an end soon.” In the same ‘fact check,’ the government reiterated the Prime Minister’s now infamous claim that “no civilians died” in the operation by stating civilians “received maximum protection” during the “law enforcement operation.”

For any astute observer of the war, the Prime Minister’s “Mission Accomplished” claim on 28 November 2020 would have seemed far-fetched. However, supporters and officials, both higher-rung and lower-rung, of the Prime Minister’s Prosperity Party took to Twitter to create the impression that the “law enforcement operation” had been completed. According to them, Ethiopia had prevailed by uprooting the “plague” that had afflicted it and it was on the road to peace, prosperity, and fraternity. Former Prime Minister Hailemariam Dessalegn even went as far as congratulating the National Defense Force for “liberating” the people of Tigray and the people of Tigray for said “liberation.”


Propaganda efforts from the State of Emergency Fact Check and other accounts did not suffice to quell the negative coverage engendered by the continuous reports of extreme brutality, mainly coming from Tigrayan refugees who had fled into Sudan. At this stage, the Ethiopian government went on the defensive and began to push its supporters to take to social media to counter the news coming out of Tigray with positive “messaging.” Using #EthiopiaPrevails and #RisingEthiopia, this campaign sought to create the impression that there was “nothing to see here” and that Ethiopia had started rebuilding Tigray. Given the obvious reality that the conflict was not only ongoing but that it was attended by increasingly troubling news of civilian massacres, destruction of civilian infrastructure, and looting, however, the #EthiopiaPrevails and #RisingEthiopia campaigns were not able to gain much traction. The Ethiopian government could also not escape what it did not want the most: international attention. In fact, it resented it to such an extent that it upped its social media tactics to include intimidation and demonization, spearheaded by government officials.

In the meantime, the Prime Minister continued with his purposeful, but somewhat pointless, edits of the accounts of conversations with foreign leaders, and Ethiopian state run media, ministries and diplomats have continued to amplify disinformation campaigns. As can be seen in the examples below, the Prime Minister’s tweets about meetings with the Prime Minister of the Netherlands and the Secretary of State of the United States both leave out their concerns about humanitarian access in Tigray and focus on the generic messages about continuing bi-lateral relationships. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in a now deleted Tweet, amplified an article that dismissed Amnesty’s report on the Axum Massacre as a “barrage of misinformation” and called for intimidation of the Tigrayan diaspora community by explicitly stating that “it’s time to make their secret army in the diaspora community know what it’s like to be afraid.”
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[Tog Wajale E.R.]

Gereaneniya:- Filthy Scumba*gs Agga*me Thieves Rapi*st Murderers Beggars:--- You Will Be Ruled By Mighty Amara People The Next 1000 Years To Come. Go Figure Bissbiss Shettattam Agga*mes.