Eyewitness Ethiopia: US Media Lies About Tigray War w/ Rania Khalek & Eugene Puryear

Empire Files

News

4.8 • 754 Ratings

🗓️ 28 January 2022

⏱️ 77 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Western media spent months giving one-sided coverage of the civil war in Ethiopia. To learn more about the complexities of the conflict and why the corporate media has taken the side of the Tigray insurgency, Empire Files is joined by two journalists from BreakThrough News who travelled to the conflict zone, Rania Khalek and Eugene Puryear. Support our ad-free work and get EXCLUSIVE content by supporting us at www.patreon.com/empirefiles or donate at www.paypal.com/paypalme/empirefilesinc FOLLOW // twitter.com/EmpireFiles // www.instagram.com/empirefiles/ LIKE // www.facebook.com/TheEmpireFiles MERCH // empirefiles.store

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Empire Files podcast. This is Abby Martin.
0:10.7	Ethiopia has been rocked by over a year of fighting between the government and the Tigray
0:15.5	People's Liberation Front that has left thousands dead and millions displaced.
0:26.6	Western media reports largely described the conflict as perpetrated by the Ethiopian government, which is brutally repressing the minority Tigray ethnic group and committing egregious human rights abuses.
0:32.6	But unsurprisingly, the story is much more complex.
0:42.2	Ethiopia receives about $1 billion of U.S. aid annually.
0:48.4	Yet as a result of the Civil War, the Biden administration has taken measures to punish the country,
0:55.3	establishing a sanctions regime, defense trade restrictions, and removal of the country from the African Growth and Opportunity Act.
0:58.0	So what's really going on?
0:59.7	Well, to get the information we aren't hearing and learn why we should care about the fate
1:04.2	of Ethiopia, were joined by journalists Rania Kalik and Eugene per year.
1:10.0	They were recently on the ground in Ethiopia doing
1:13.1	some excellent reporting, which you can watch at Breakthrough News. So the government of Ethiopia
1:20.3	recently declared an end to the state of emergency that was in effect for quite a while.
1:25.6	The conflict between the government and the TPLF to
1:28.6	Great People's Liberation Front officially began in November of 2020, but this fight has been
1:34.2	mounting for decades.
1:36.4	Rania, why don't we start by just having you explain the two sides?
1:41.1	Well, okay, you've got obviously the government side led by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who came to power in the last few years after decades of really dictatorial rule by the Tigray People's Liberation Front or the TPLF.
1:57.2	They were in charge of Ethiopia since the 90s. They were a very close ally of the United States and in many ways acted as kind of like the police of the U.S. in the Horn of Africa.
2:09.5	They fought with the Eritreans in the 90s. They invaded Somalia in collaboration with the Bush administration over the so-called war on terror in the early 2000s.
2:22.3	And they behaved in a really brutal way.
	...

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