1/This was a fascinating watch, as the interview went on @BeckyCNN got more and more incesnsed (a lot of eye rolling, face making and shouting) while @BilleneSeyoum kept hammering her points home with typical #Ethiopian dignity and a hint of bemusement. Ice cold!
1/ The voice of 150+ million people in East Africa is being actively censored by @Twitter. Over the past yr prominent voices have been deplatformed & many others shadow banned. Twitter even went to the extent of banning the trending section for the region!
2/ The global digital town square you envision @Twitter has been a distant dream for us. Twitter has been actively discouraging plurality of thought in the region by suppressing one narrative while promoting another, aligned with interests of certain powerful countries.
3/ Suppression forces ideas underground; makes them more violent by taking away the moderating effect of moderate voices. It fans the flames disinformation. It makes people more paranoid and less tolerant of opposing view points.
1/ Militarily, TPLF looks finished; at least as a conventional fighting force. At least for the time being. Its ranks decimated, its fighters demoralized and its popular support at an all time low.
2/ In reality, #TPLF has nothing in its hands to bargain with, other than the threat of future insurgency. At this point in time, the only bargaining chip it has is the support of the USG.
3/ The US is in the talks not only to 'observe' but also 'particiapte', as per @StateDeptSpox Ned Price.
1/ Borrell's Garden perpetrated unspeakable atrocities on Africans & other indigenous populations: genocide, slavery, colonialism, nuclear bombs, agent orange! And now they want the world to accept them as paragons of decency!
Shameless.
2/ The Garden People took a Congolese Pygmy by the name Ota Benga and kept him in a Bronx Zoo Monkey House. He committed suicide in 1916.
3/ In 1958, as part of Expo 58, Belgium put 598 people – including 273 men, 128 women and 197 children, a total of 183 families – brought over from Africa on display. The spectators "threw money or bananas over the closure of bamboo,” one journalist wrote at the time.
2/ Unlike the more comprehensive report of the JIT, the #IHRCEE depended on remote interviews, focused only on three incidents and two thematic areas and completely ignored Afar! And yet managed to arrive at more sweeping conclusions. This is as substandard as you could get!
2/ @LaurenBinDC's defense of @kaari_murungi is that she was not a member of the commission at the time she posted those clearly biased tweets calling for R2P against #Ethiopia.
1/ The tweets of @kaari_murungi
did not want to the world to see have been recovered [courtesy of @EthioCyberia]!
It is extremely striking how Murungi's tweets were predictive of the #IHRCEE's most recent statements
2/ Here is Mrs. Murungi calling for R2P in April 2021 long before her appointment to the Commission. Put her tweet side by side with the #IHRCEE statement from Sept 7 urging the UNSC to "take action" and how much her bias affected the Commission becomes glaringly obvious.
3/ Her tweets make it abundantly clear that Murungi has concluded that Crimes Against Humanity have been committed way before Sept 2022. No need for due diligence, no need for witnesses; apparently @kaari_murungi can make such weighty determinations from the comfort of her couch
1/ @DrTedros, recently accused the 'IC' of being racist for paying more attention to #Ukraine.
We (@Qnie_Addis & @Kings_of_Nile) analysed his tweets, RTs & likes starting from Oct 2021. Given his pronouncements, what we found was quite revealing.
2/ When you pay close attention to his Twitter activity, despite his protestations, #Tigray predominate his TL. He sometimes tweets, RTs or likes up to 8 Tigray related tweets per day! He has tweeted, RTd or liked tweets mentioning Tigray 208 times over the past 23 months!
3/ What about #Yemen you ask? And #Syria? Surely, the man who claims to be the conscience of the world would tweet incessantly about these humanitarian crises that had been raging for years. Nope! In reality, they are occasionally invoked only to accompany #Ukraine and Tigray.