The Curse of Bothsidism, Allsidism!

I am so repulsed by expressions carelessly thrown “all sides, both sides…” whenever the genocidal atrocities in and by Ethiopia are mentioned in relation to Tigray and Tigrayans. Whether this is out of laziness or intention of playing it vague doesn’t matter. It is very crude and cruel. Unjustified bothsidism favors the clear violator extending a face saving false equivalence. It is not fair for the otherside being elevated to thevstatus of the worst violator. But most of all, redistributing offense is wronging the victims again. The victims are best served when the the victimizers are recognized for exactly what they did.

A good example of this is how Mark Lowcock, the then UN Hum Releif Coordinator, reported the obstructions of releif work in Tigray during the US-EU High Level Roundtable held on June 10. He started by saying that therevwere about 154 instances of humanitarian aid obstructions and that all parties are responsible for stopping the releif work at different times. Disaggregating the instances by those forces who were involved, it was only one (one as in 1) instance that was attributed to TDF, where all the rest 153 were done by the three forces, namely, the federal government, the Eritrean goverment and the Amhara regional forces.

So, how is 1 against 153 presented as “all sides” or “both sides”?! Isn’t this amount to lying through aggregated numericals? Worst of all, wouldn’t that be misreporting and mis-characterizing the nature of the events and actors behind them? And yet, it has to always be about the justice, stupid! Victims would always seek not just all the violations counted but the violators also correctly and proportionally assigned to each counted violation.

Only Helen Clark et al have wisely qualified as to “who did what, at what level” in their recent article carried by The Guardian. In that article, they had to say this: “No side to this conflict is angelic. All sides in Ethiopia’s conflict have committed violations. But only one side has committed violations on a scale and nature that could credibly qualify as genocide – and that, we regret to say, is the coalition of the Ethiopian government, under the prime minister, Abiy Ahmed; the Amhara regional government; and the state of Eritrea.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/26/ethiopia-genocide-warning-signs-abiy-ahmed

Moving to another aspect of it, with the intensive genocidal war on Tigray, there is so much asymmetric incompatibility of pain and level of urgency felt among the victims and observers. You can say timespace relativity driven divergence appears notably at display.

The Tigray people have been subjected to famine and denied of basic living conditions at a very time massive war is launched on them. Call it a lethal combination designed and operationalized by the same forces of evil that meticulously put a plan to make them perish. The instruments and tools mobilized for the genocidal project are multifaceted feeding into each other for maximal “outcome.”

Every minute counts for the victms as they are struggling for their breath. Abiy Ahmed and his allies think they have little time to finish their genocidal war and they would do anything, mobilize all national resources, deploy all weapons… at their disposal to achieve their goal in that window of time.

The IC sees this tragedy through in/different prism of time. They think they have time and space to cuddle the actors involved to come to their senses and save the say. For that very reason, the IC goes painfully slow, mindful of protocol and procedural templates while at the luxury of trying to build int’l consensus in entirety. This situation in itself motivates Abiy& Isayas to rather rush for a quick kill and achieve their two goals: both crushing Tigray and owning the story with a condition of differend.

To the people of Tigray that are on incessant choke, what this means is fighting on their own for the next round of breath, surviving the day and enabling continuity as a people. Surviving as people also means owning the power of telling the story. There is no option but endure and survive. Many people have done it; Tigrayans too had done it many times before. There is no reason to doubt them today just because their enemies arev more prepared, more crude and much more barbaric.

The world should be ready to hear this story of 21st barbarism that it let it happen under its watch. Yes, post-truth remorses and regrets may flood in plenty after the fact. Those still are good but not hardly good enough.

Dade Desta, Analyst and Human Rights Advocate.