Martin Plaut Wants to Hug Ethiopians to Death
One of Ethiopia’s worst enemies in the past four years has had his feelings hurt, and he’d like us to know it. Someone apparently left Martin Plaut a comment on his post promoting his own appearance on France 24, snidely remarking, “For the first time, you spoke well of Ethiopia.” Plaut, has written that he’s “amazed,” and “if Ethiopians feel that I have anything but respect and affection for them, and their extraordinary culture and history, then something is clearly wrong.”
That Martin feels stung is understandably human, but there is something darkly comical bordering on farce in his response. It reminds me of two classic moments from TV and film. One is so spot-on for such occasions, it’s become a meme, a scene from The Simpsons in which Principal Skinner asks himself, “Am I so out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong.”
The other is from the film version of the Unbearable Lightness of Being, and there’s a scene in which a Soviet official looks with disdain at our heroes, Tomas and Tereza, and the others protesting the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and he says with nauseating insincerity, “Don’t you know that we love you? We’ve always loved you!”
Yep. It’s love like this that could hug Ethiopians to death.
That Martin Plaut feels the need to defend his record in a semi-autobiographical column suggests that yes, he might suspect he’s out of touch. The way that he defends himself confirms that he is.
He feels compelled to give us a highlight reel of his career, and let’s be fair, Martin has accomplished a lot. No one can or should try to take these milestones away from him. He was involved in the anti-apartheid fight, and he did rip the lid off the TPLF stealing aid. Some people might not know that Martin was front and center of the effort to get Black Caribbean and African war veterans the proper recognition in the UK that was denied to them for so long.
On a more personal note, Martin was quite generous when I needed to use rare photos he posted on his website for my book, Prevail, and years ago, he agreed to do an interview with me for a documentary based on my book (which for various reasons, my team and I couldn’t finish).
I tried to be kind in return. When it was clear that we were very much on opposite sides of the TPLF war, I urged folks time and again not to engage in juvenile tactics to blast him, like silly and clearly fake shots of Martin in military uniforms, or spreading things he didn’t say, which I considered counter-productive. Martin and I steered clear of each other for months, and even when he eventually came after me, breaking the unspoken online truce, his attack was rather tepid.
But I came to realize that beneath the surface British civility, the reporter has a fanatical streak. And he is the worst kind of hypocrite. For this latest article defending himself he quotes a line from George Orwell, one that he keeps as a pinned tweet: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
Except that Martin doesn’t truly believe in these words. When it was announced that Tiffany Haddish had been cast in the lead role of a biopic on Florence Griffith Joyner, he tweeted, “How is it possible that someone who can take such controversial stand on the tragic war in Tigray is given a starring role in a film? Surely wrong for Tiffany Haddish to get this part.”
Oh, really? So, we’re casting Hollywood actors now on the basis of their politics, the way they once did in the 1950s? It was a clear attempt to get Ms. Haddish “cancelled” as the kids call it and ruin her career, simply because she “told him what he didn’t want to hear.” It wouldn’t be the last time Plaut targeted her… only she showed she’s quite capable of handling herself.
Worse, in a move that is jaw-droppingly unconscionable for even a retired journalist, Plaut amplified a tweet by Alula Solomon in April 2021 that showed the faces and uniforms of commercial air pilots and maintenance workers, calling them, “Foreign military experts who are helping Abiy Ahmed Ali to commit more war crimes and crimes against humanity.” There was and still is no evidence of this, nor did Alula bother to bring any. One Twitter user pointed out that these individuals were “civilian South African flight crew flying cargo for DHL… I know two of them. Please don’t put more innocent lives at risk.”
Solomon ignored this, and the tweet remains up to this day, as does Martin’s quote tweet that also presumed these individuals were guilty. “Who are these people? What role are they playing in the Tigray war?”
What kind of reporter, or activist for that matter, recycles a baseless accusation that could have easily got innocent people murdered?
But this is the heart of the issue. The intrepid correspondent Martin Plaut is not the Martin Plaut of today, and maybe the intrepid correspondent was never the completely decent, honest journo he would like us to think he was. He betrays himself when he boasts, “I interviewed Meles Zenawi, surely one of the most brilliant leaders I have ever had the opportunity to question.”
Ah, yes, the Meles Zenawi who with his cronies embezzled billions in foreign aid, who jailed journalists and who had torture centers disguised as clinics throughout Addis Ababa, who exploited the Afar and who kept their region an underdeveloped backwater, who carried a systematic campaign to persecute and ethnically cleanse the Amhara people. “Brilliant” is not the word that immediately comes to mind for him.
All of these charges have been easily proved. Long before what I call the Hyena War—the TPLF’s war on Ethiopia—Tekalign Gedamu noted in his memoir, Republicans on the Throne, how Meles wanted to rip off aid during the 1980s famine, leaving only a pittance for its victims.
Plaut surely knows this. If he doesn’t know of his “brilliant leader’s” complicity, it is through willful blindness. That seems to be his choice today, and he has raised willful blindness to an art. His book, Understanding Ethiopia’s Tigray War, is one of the most cynically dishonest works I think I’ve ever read.
For one thing, neither of its authors went to the war zones while the conflict was in progress. I did. Others did. Martin wasn’t there. Neither was his co-author Sarah Vaughn, whose chapters that attempt to summarize Ethiopian history are at best appallingly uninformed and at worst, comically inept (her interpretation of Mikael Sehul’s ambitions and place in the history of Zemene Mesafint is so far out there, it’s delusional, but it’s obvious she didn’t take the proper time to consult direct sources). For their tome, Martin does much of the heavy lifting on events of the TPLF, and you will look in vain to find in-depth treatment of the damage committed by his favorite pets to Dessie, Lalibela, or Afar. You search in vain for proper study of the TPLF’s use of human shields, child soldiers, its own widespread use of rape, or its despicable attempts to exploit rape victims to try to get a war crimes trial for members of the Ethiopian government.
That my own reporting should be ignored in the book hardly comes as unexpected, even though I broke stories that implicated the UN with its own documents. It noticeably ignores a vast amount of Ethiopian reporting on the war, assuming that only Westerners could cover it properly.
When it ignores the reportage and findings of others such as Getty Images’ Jemal Countess or of respected academic Ann Fitz-Gerald, it really gives the game away. Even after Martin quoted-tweeted a Reuters report that essentially confirmed Fitz-Gerald’s bombshell findings of forced recruitment, he made a point of attacking on X (then Twitter) the reportage of Italian journalist Francesca Ronchin, claiming she “has a long history of attacking narratives that support Tigray”—a statement that is absurd on its face and like the propagandists, presumes the TPLF and Tigray are one and the same. You won’t find an apology to Ms. Ronchin either in his book.
Of course, we have to consider that Understanding Ethiopia’s Tigray War was perhaps never written with the goal of it being read. It is a lazy book, contemptuous of Ethiopia’s genuine history, and it seems to have been written to sit on university library shelves. A weapon like a loaded revolver, waiting to be used. Cited and quoted by the gullible who, like Martin, were never there on the scene. He is betting on the supreme ignorance of fools who won’t bother to consult other sources, or who will readily accept that just because old, archived Bloomberg copy agrees with that of Reuters, it must be so (never mind the fact that their respective white journalists covering Ethiopia were married to each other).
Martin is a little older than me, but we both know that books, despite the steady incursions of the digital world, will last. He’s betting on that, too.
And he and those who back his sinister perversion of the facts might get the last laugh. People can believe anything. Creeps like Alex de Waal still peddle the lie that Haile Selassie was culpable over the famine in the 1970s when the evidence clearly shows he wasn’t. It’s only now that we’re learning that the Rwanda Genocide was far more complicated than we were first led to believe. Martin’s TPLF friends tap away at Wikipedia entries, inserting their fairy tales into any page that remotely touches on the events in 2020 to 2024. But those can be changed, edited. Martin’s book still sits in libraries.
Fortunately for Ethiopia, his book is numbingly, crushingly dull. Yes, Martin was once a very good reporter and in short articles, he is genuinely interesting. But as a long-form prose stylist, he will keep you up at night about as much his conscience interrupts his own sleep. My gawd, it’s dull. Worse, it’s the dull recital of a great lie.
Today, Martin has another lie to sell, one about his own sincere caring. But it’s too late, and I suspect, too, that he knows it. He has only himself to blame for the stains on a once proud record of solid reporting, and he offers us only empty bromides. “I know that only the people of the Horn will shape their own futures,” declares Martin. “No one else has the right to prescribe how they live or govern themselves.”
That would sound great out of the mouth of someone who demonstrated they believe it. But you can’t repeatedly, consistently, vehemently keep defending a terrorist group that forced people to fight for it and which used children as cannon fodder—not if you want to posture as a white ally of Africa. You can’t repeatedly dodge the facts staring you in the face, whether they be about massacres or the conduct of your pet terrorists, and then go out and try to smear journalists and actors who “tell you what you don’t want to hear.”
There is something vaguely reminiscent in Martin’s column here of the woe-is-me tour that Tom Gardner went on right after he got his ass booted out of Ethiopia. Like Martin, it was the Africans’ fault—they didn’t understand him. Poor me, he bleated. And here once again is a white man implying that everybody’s got it wrong about him, that he has principles, that Africans have the right to govern themselves…except when a terrorist group the West likes decides to overthrow a government, one that went on to have an elected mandate.
It matters not one bit that Abiy Ahmed betrayed the trust of the Ethiopians who believed in #NoMore and who rallied in the fight against the TPLF. You can be sure that Martin will keep making himself available to all the mainstream news outlets who want to interview him again, glossing over the fact that his chosen side was evil then and it’s still evil now.
For me, Martin is a cautionary tale. As a liberal South African, he enjoyed an assumption that still ensures many other white South Africans can get jobs in news outlets, think tanks and NGOs, that thanks to merely being from Cape Town, he would know more about Africa than others in the UK. (And again, to his credit, he at least admits that in his early days, he “had next to no understanding for Africa.”) We are still, unfortunately, in the era where white reporters are telling the world what happens in Africa, always deferred to as “objective” and “neutral” when we should know it’s a crock. I know it’s a crock because Ethiopian diaspora folks hired me as their own white guy to refute mainstream media bullshit, and they told me so.
I am neither a prophet nor especially clever, and I am very lucky to have good associates who would slap me upside the head should I ever demonstrate Martin’s hubris. It was easy to move from backing Ethiopia against the TPLF to backing Fano against Abiy because my own personal allegiance has always been to the Ethiopian people. Not a government, sure as hell not Abiy. By the time I was home from my second reporting trip in 2021, sources were already passing along disturbing first-hand accounts of federal soldiers imposing a curfew on Lalibela and going after Fano soldiers, their own allies.
Martin still doesn’t get that Ethiopians hold him in such contempt because despite his apologia, he never stuck by them as a people. He still isn’t with them if he can write in such glowing terms of Meles. And when you sift through his various articles, you pick up on the kind of white liberal sanctimony that infuriates Black folks in America and Africans in their respective countries. He writes in his column, “My overwhelming regret is that the Horn has had so few truly visionary leaders, who could bring their people with them without coercion.”
Ah, yes. Not like Europe, where some wonder if Macron has become authoritarian, or Viktor Orban, who is an authoritarian in Hungary, or Italy, where the descendants of Mussolini can still have political careers, or Putin, who is waging a ruthless war on Ukraine, or say India, where Modi dispatches killing squads to assassinate Sikh activists in Canada and the U.S. Once again, we are told that the Horn is somehow hopeless.
Only it’s not for lack of leaders that the Horn suffers. Its burdens come in part thanks to a greedy West that backs thugs like Meles Zenawi and now Abiy Ahmed. And the mainstream Western media has been its accomplice, knowing it can’t manufacture consent among Africans themselves, so it chose to make Ethiopians human rights pariahs.
Martin Plaut played a big part in this demonization process. For that, he sure as hell doesn’t deserve a hug of forgiveness, and his scorn, threats, distortions shouldn’t ever be forgiven. Ever.