A London-based Amnesty International, a non-government organization but government-funded foundation had produced, as usual, distorted, unfounded and biased report that lacks minimum level of honesty and intellectual integrity. The report titled “The Massacre in Axum” dumped the actual happening in Tigray with inaccurate and politically motivated sentiments. The objective of the new Amnesty International’s report was not to help the people of Tigray, which has been tormented by the unlawful and unrepentant TPLF remnants. The double edge objective of the report is to derail the momentum and direction of change in Ethiopia and to poison the Eritrea-Ethiopia peace process. Amnesty sarcastically came to Ethiopia holding the torchlight of ‘human rights’ to expel darkness and observe the conditions in Tigray. The report didn’t try to answer the source of the conflict and why the people are suffering? Instead of helping the sufferers by telling what is true and what is not, it adds its own dust of disinformation to conceal the reality and the way out of the conflict.
The report lacks a piece of evidence and sense of balance. It projects an extremely negative portrait of Eritrea and chooses to ignore the widely admired self-restraint of the country on the face of TPLF desperate assault. Amnesty International has long been known as an advocate of regime change in Eritrea. To realize its diabolic project it has been tirelessly engaged in manufacturing lies and brewing tensions. The organization has worked closely with anti-Eritrea forces and dedicated its instruments to achieve regime change. When coercion failed to bring down the government, Amnesty and other human rights organizations began to hope change through the creation of illusion. Eritrea, armed with truth, escaped and survived the ambushes of Amnesty International in different times. No lies have yet created to rust truth.
Currently, Eritrea is shouldering its regional role and constructively contributes its share in resolving conflicts in the region. Eritrea demonstrates its positive role through active engagement and initiatives that encouraged member states in the region to reexamine their policy. More importantly, it has entertained the idea of and the need for strong, united, peaceful and prosperous neighborhood is vital for regional as well as national security and prosperity.
There is a notable lack of consistency and honesty within Amnesty International and other human rights organizations. Prejudice and falsification had become the organization’s leading instrument. The issue of human right has been used for political purposes. The disinformation and propaganda produced by the so called human rights organizations have negatively impacted the human rights in many respects. They used the human rights concern as bullet aimed at targeted countries to nourish confusion and exacerbate the situation. Massacre, murder, crimes against humanity and other sensational venomous words are frequently and deliberately employed as ammunitions to attack the target. The recent report was concocted cleverly to establish fact on the ground favorable to their purposes. It’s a deliberate distortion made to create another fiction to instill fear and hatred among the people of the two countries. Amnesty International’s report, in many respects, resembles to the TPLF narrative of manufacturing and sawing the seeds of hate and boiling the people with resentment.
Amnesty International has lost its moral authority and legitimacy as a human rights judge. Amnesty arrogantly presumes that it knows best how other countries should behave and transform themselves. The organization has gone too far from its established mandate. As a western institution it goes all over the world to point out and criticize the human rights situation of countries without due inspection and say nothing about the human rights situation in western world.
The government in Ethiopia and the regional interim government of Tigray are telling the objective realty and widely respected information about the situation. According to them, although problems are still there, progress is underway in security and daily lives of the people. The impiety of the organization and its farcical report is an insult to the dignity and intelligence of the people under scrutiny. In fact, the people of Tigray had experienced crimes against humanity under the human rights-abusing band TPLF for nearly thirty years. In the past all major human rights organizations were covering the crimes of and sometimes praising the cruel regime. They all have several faces. The hypocrisy and trade on the name of human rights of Amnesty International is not new. The report is a new episode of the drama written and played by the hypocrites. Shamelessly Amnesty International is trying to appear more catholic than the pope. Distortion and illusion are rooted in visceral impulses of Amnesty international.
The report is one-sided, inaccurate, and far from truth in all categories. The content is pronounced for political reasons than for the concern of human rights. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for Amnesty International to report accurately and genuinely. It has always been penetrating other nations, especially Africans, in violation of the principle of nonintervention in another country’s internal affairs. In the operation of penetration the organization used appealing phrases like human rights in most effective way. Through the seemingly “helping hand” it secured almost unbridled freedom to violate the freedom of others and rob through the pernicious hidden hand. Double standards exist throughout the works of the Amnesty International; usually certain countries are treated differently within the context of a particular issue. The track record of Amnesty tells us that it privileges certain kinds of abuse over others. Historically, the organization has generally condemned liberation movement, revolution and decolonization as anti-human rights movement. The weaponization of human rights may well continue to this date to serve western ideological needs. What gave Amnesty International and other human rights organizations the right to judge all other countries of the world is an important question that awaits a critical answer.
Amnesty International’s report is a requiem on the death of TPLF. We, the people of Eritrea and Ethiopia are fed up of TPLF’s crimes and crocodile tears of human rights organizations. As they say “the dog barks, the camel marches”; are jointly proceeding to the better.
Simon Weldemichael