The Crimes of Tedros Adhanom
JOHN MARTIN
WHO’s Tedros Adhanom Should be put on Trial for Crimes Against Humanity
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, as well as being the first WHO director without a medical degree, also has a somewhat political background compared to his predecessors. On his online biography, the WHO lays out his qualifications as Ethiopian Minister of Health from 2002 to 2012, impressive stuff.
Aside from his medical credentials, Tedros happens to be a member of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) which is an organisation about as peaceful as its name suggests. Founded as a communist revolutionary party that came to power in 1991, it led a guerrilla campaign against the Mengistu dictatorship and formed a coalition with two other ethnic parties after his exile.
Over time, the TPLF began to exert more and more influence over the other two parties. Most military generals and key leaders within the government are Tigray, including the Prime Minister who ruled the country for 21 years before his death. The Tigray represent only 6% of the population of Ethiopia, one of the major ethnic groups are the Amhara who mostly made up the Mengistu regime.
Favourable treatment under Megistu created a lot of resentment towards the Amhara from other ethnic groups like for example the Oromo. Tedros himself hails from the Tigray region and was a senior member of the party and became involved with the TPLF after the removal of Mengistu. The same party that in its 1968 manifesto called the Amhrara people its ‘eternal enemy’. Just how senior was Tedros? Well this Ethiopian newspaper listed him as the 3rd most important member of the politbureau standing committee, which gives the impression he was more important than a simple medical administrator.
The TPLF was listed as a terrorist organisation by the US government in the 1990s, and is still listed as one by the Global Terror Database because of its unfortunate habit of carrying out armed assaults in rural areas.
The Amhara people have reported systematic discrimination and human rights abuses by the current government. Humans Rights Watch in 2010 wrote a report on how aid in the form of food and fertiliser was withheld from local Amhara villagers because of their affiliations with the opposition party. Other forms of aid denial involved the refusal of emergency healthcare by ministry of health workers; the same ministry which was at the time being led by one Tedros Adhanom.
The Amhara People’s Union, an activist group based in Washington, has issued many other accusations of human rights abuses against the TPLF led government, including noting that the birth rates in the Amhara region was far lower than those experienced in other regions. They noted at a session in Ethiopian parliament that, around 2 million Amhara were found to have “disappeared” from the population census.
Not content with denying aid to political dissidents, Tedros was also health minister at a time when the regime was accused of covering up epidemics. A cholera outbreak spread the region in 2007, infecting thousands in neighbouring countries. When it spread to Ethiopia, the government simply renamed the outbreak and called it Acute Watery Diarrhoea (AWD). International organisations were pressured not to call it Cholera (despite the UN testing the infected and finding Cholera), and were pressured by government employees not to reveal the number of infected. Another stunning victory for the health minister.
More: https://www.roughestimate.org/roughestimate/the-crimes-of-tedros-adhanom