Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

Before the WHO

Before delving into the history of Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, it is noted that Tedros has been known to accuse those who unearth unflattering information about him as having a “colonial mind-set”. (McNeil, 2017)

In order to avoid this charge, the following investigation will take care to provide ample space for the voices of his fellow Ethiopians.

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Tedros Ghebreyesus bears the notable distinction of being the first WHO Director-General not to be a medical doctor.  (Beaubien, 2017) (Wiki Archive, 2023)

While he may never have been a medical doctor in his native Ethiopia, the Ethiopian Registrar has nonetheless described Tedros as a man of prominence, specifically, “a top Executive and Central Committee member of the Tigray People Liberation Front (TPLF), a brutal and corrupt ethno-fascist political group mainly responsible for gross human rights violations and crimes against humanity in Ethiopia… Before it came to power in 1991 through a violently destructive armed struggle, the TPLF was blacklisted as a terrorist organization by the U.S. Homeland Security’s Global Terrorism Database [DHS, 2014]. There are a select few key decision makers within the TPLF… Adhanom is among the top three.” (Gellaw, 2020)

After holding regional and state positions in the early 2000s, Tedros was promoted to Minister of Health of Ethiopia by TPLF chairman Meles Zenawi in October of 2005. Per the Washington Post, during his tenure as health minister, the government referred to Cholera only as “acute watery diarrhea”, preventing the country from receiving international medical resources while potentially protecting tourism and/or other sources of revenue dear to party leadership.

As the Post put wryly:

In the past 10 years, Ethiopia is also the only country in the Horn of Africa that has not been touched by cholera — according to the government.

Since a cholera outbreak in 2006 in the Oromia region, Ethiopia has referred to the disease as “acute watery diarrhea” (AWD), essentially a symptom of the deadly waterborne cholera, which is caused by the Vibrio cholerae bacterium. Tests at the time by the United Nations confirmed that it was actually cholera.

TPLF’s manifesto labelled the Amharas, one of the two largest ethnic groups in Ethiopia, the enemy of the Tigray people (Yideg & Premanandam, 2019). Their history of participating in genocide against the Amhara people is well-documented. (Wiki Archive, 2022)

According to the Amhara Professionals Union (APU), Tedros’s policies conspicuously reflected the enmity of the party of which he was third most prominent member.

The organization released a lengthy research document detailing some of the abuses. (APU, 2017)

For example, using demographic and health survey data, the researchers showed contraceptive use roughly on a par between the Amhara region and Tigray in 2005 when Tedros began his tenure as health minister. By 2011, use in Tigray had gone up by a modest degree, whereas usage in Amhara had nearly doubled. The discrepancy in terms of injectable contraceptives was even starker, dropping slightly in the Tigray region at the same time as it more-than-doubled in Amhara. The researchers showed that those in the Amhara region were less informed about family planning methods than those in Tigray, casting doubt on the level of uptake being the result of the dissemination of information. In fact, the researchers showed that this high use of contraceptives in the Amhara region was a considerable anomaly, demonstrating that in terms of other health services, uptake in the Tigray region was substantially higher, indicating routine preferential treatment.

The paper further referenced testimony from witnesses who became barren after getting contraceptives without receiving proper informed consent. Indeed, video in which Amharic women testify of having been rendered infertile subsequent to the scare tactic of an impending epidemic (which never materialized) remains publicly available online. (AYSM, 2013)

The Amhara Professionals Union further accused Tedros of being responsible for a de facto “chemical genocide” during his tenure on account of presiding over “poorly treated and handled chemical waste” in the region.

While the accusation of a secretive depopulation agenda under the guise of family planning, medical care, and/or poor chemical waste-handling may seem outlandish to those sheltered enough never to have contemplated such things, it is far less incredible than the other more brazen methods of achieving the same end that appear to have been carried out in the region. As reported to Genocide Watch, the means of ethnic cleansing that have been perpetrated on the Amhara are often of a spectacularly gruesome character. (Mekonnen, 2016)

Another way members of the Amhara ethnic group have been murdered, especially in the region of Gelemso, West Harar, is by dismembering their bodies bit by bit and forcing the victims to eat their own flesh.

During a shocking presentation to Parliament, the TPLF-run government’s own Central Statistical Agency head, Ms. Samia Zekaria, revealed that 2.5 million people were conspicuously missing from the 2007 census, 2 million from the Amhara Regional State alone. (ethiopiantvlive, 2013) (backup)

In a subsequent independent analysis, Dr. Berhanu Abegaz, Professor and Chair of Economics at the College of William and Mary, estimated the number of missing Amharas to be in the ballpark of 3 million, and perhaps several million more.

Dr. Abegaz went on to state, “Persistent accusations of Amara women being subjected to long-acting contraceptives and deceptive sterilizations are common enough to warrant a thorough and impartial investigation.” (Abegaz, 2015)

Regarding Ghebreyesus’s fiscal dealings, APU noted; 

Dr. Ghebreyesus frequently mentions his role as Chair for Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria from 2009-2011…  according to the 2012 audit report of the Global Fund’s Office of the Inspector General [Jaramillo, 2012], the office led by Dr. Ghebreyesus and other partner organizations actually inappropriately used the money generously donated by tax payers and requested the Ethiopian government to refund $7,026,929.00. The inappropriate actions include misappropriation of funds and use of donor funds for unsound programs most of which were used for political purpose, substandard quality of constructed health facilities suggesting Dr. Ghebreyesus government plays with numbers not with quality and ineligible expenditures. The report stated over $5.5 million was advanced by HAPCO to the FMOH and was still outstanding by February 2011 although the grant expired in August 2010. Overall, the organization led by Dr. Ghebreyesus was noted to have weakness in accounting, poor budget preparation and monitoring, inadequacies of internal audit and overall poor financial management

Late in 2012, Tedros became Ethiopia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Decrying Tedros’s behavior in this role, the Ethiopian-made documentary “Tedros Adhanom Incompetency, Politics & Immorality” laid out a pattern of routine apathy towards the repatriation of endangered Ethiopians during his tenure, as well as the government’s go-to response of attacking Ethiopians who took issue with it. (E- Veracity, 2017) (Ecadf Ethiopia, 2021)(Backup)

“Whilst thousands of its nationals are detained, beaten, killed and raped, the Ethiopian government hangs its negligent head in silence in Addis Ababa, does not act to protect or swiftly repatriate their nationals, and criminalises those protesting in Addis Ababa” (Peebles, 2013)

"We see our brothers getting killed, doused with a three-liter jerrican of kerosene, and no one is helping us when this happens" (Abebe, 2015)

“Christian Ethiopian immigrants in Libya were barbarically killed by ISIS terrorists… There was a vigil carried out… and as it always does, the government started attacking Ethiopans (Euronews, 2015)… Mr. Adnahom’s response to the whole crisis was that the government’s response was the right measure.” (E- veracity, 2017)(Ecadf Ethiopia, 2021)(Backup)

When Human Rights Watch sounded the alarm about, among other things, the Ethiopian government’s attacking and firing into the crowd at the Ireecha Cultural Festival of 2016 (Human Rights Watch, 2016), the official statement from Tedros’s Ministry was “Indeed, it is quite clear from the videos that there was no shooting and the police were unarmed,” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ethiopia, 2016) despite that the Human Rights Watch footage revealed precisely the opposite. (Human Rights Watch, 2016) (Backup)

Tedros was also convincingly revealed to have played an active role in the kidnapping of prominent dissidents. Per the Ethiopian Registrar, In 2014, Tedros personally led negotiations with Yemeni officials to orchestrate the kidnapping of author and prominent democracy advocate Andargachew Tsege, as confirmed by multiple former security operatives. Tedros publicly announced the meeting with Yemeni officials, with the kidnapping occurring just five weeks later. Tedros subsequently took to Ethiopian media to claim that it had been justified.

Moreover, “one of the sources, former security official Ayalew Meshesha, sa[id] that Adhanom was not only involved in facilitating Tsege’s kidnapping but also played an active role in the rendition of over 760 dissidents who fled to Yemen.”

This was all business as usual for the dissent-criminalizing TPLF, which routinely incarcerated award-winning journalists on terrorism charges, including prominent examples such as Woubshet Taye (Rhodes, 2014) and Reeyot Alemu. (Macha, 2014)

As reported by the International Women’s Media Foundation,

The country has the second-highest number of imprisoned journalists in Africa, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, after notoriously oppressive Eritrea. Late Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi publicly attacked non-state members of the press, calling them “messengers” of terrorist groups.

Alemu is one in a number of journalists who have been prosecuted under the vaguely worded and broad-reaching anti-terrorism laws passed by the Ethiopian legislature in 2009. The laws allow for the arrest of anyone thought to “encourage” parties labeled as terrorists.

Often journalists and opposition politicians were taken to the Federal Police Crime Investigation Sector, Maekelawi. Per Human Rights Watch, “There they are interrogated, and, for many, at Maekelawi they suffer all manner of abuses, including torture.”

In 2017, Forbes put out an article showing that though the TPLF-led government received close to $30 billion since coming to power, the same amount, roughly $30 billion, was stolen by officials. Its author was David Steinman, a Nobel Peace Prize-nominated economist who directly advised Ethiopia's democracy movement for nearly three decades until it finally broke free of the shackles of the TPLF-led government regime in 2018. (Steinman, 2021)

As a result of what he witnessed, Steinman lodged a complaint with the International Criminal Court in Hague calling for Tedros to be prosecuted for genocide.

In British publications The Times and the Daily Mail, Steinman is quoted stating that Tedros “was a crucial decision maker in relation to security service actions that included killing, arbitrarily detaining and torturing Ethopians” and that the WHO chief oversaw the "killing, and causing serious bodily and mental harm to, members of the Amhara, Konso, Oromo and Somali tribes with intent to destroy those tribes in whole or in part” along with “intimidation of opposition candidates and supporters”, including “arbitrary arrest . . . and lengthy pre-trial detention”.

As for the on-the-ground view of Ethiopians, with the exception of the deposed ethnic ruling class of the TPLF, constituting just roughly 5% of the population, and the cadre of elites whose pockets Tedros lined, their voices have long been clear, from mass opposition online (Chala, 2017) to bearing the expensive travel costs required to hold a massive rally against Tedros outside of his confirmatory 2017 World Health Assembly in Geneva. In a particularly emblematic moment, one of the protestors, Zelalem Tesema, knowingly risking arrest in a foreign country, ran inside shouting, “No Tedros for WHO!” at the top of his lungs until he was dragged out by security. (borkena, 2017)

If anyone is truly guilty of having a “colonial mind-set”, perhaps it was those who refused to listen.

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