Last week The Economist ran a very curious article on Ethiopia headlined, “More Disturbing News from a Former Aid Darling of the West” (Click Here for a reprint). It was not the factual errors that made it curious, though there were a surprising number of those for such an eminent publication. Rather it was the style and tone of the piece - not just inaccurate but more a fantasy of hostility and disapproval. 

It started by suggesting that the story was reminiscent of “a cold-war spy tale”, and then proceeded to produce something straight out of John Le Carre’s The Spy that Came in from the Cold, and almost as equally fictional. Loaded words and phrases appear chosen to fit the story: diplomats trying to “smuggle dissidents” across borders and being deported; secret police “a step ahead”; a young human rights lawyer “dragged” off to prison and at “risk of torture”; Amnesty International claims that people suspected of printing and distributing an opposition calendar had been “tortured to death”; and “senior diplomats” suggesting another prisoner had suffered from “electric shock” torture.   

All that was missing was a few bodies. These were harder to produce as the central character, Yalemzewde Bekele, was actually brought to Addis Abeba and then released on police bail. It is unfair to criticize The Economist for not reporting this. Yalemzewde was bailed on Thursday, October 26, evening; The Economist was published the next day.  

But to fit in with the tone of the article, the reporter clearly assumed the worst: “[she] is now in prison and at risk of torture.” Another detainee, despite diplomatic claims, denied any maltreatment; his father confirmed he had been unharmed. Their denials were public early enough to have been used. Certainly, prisons in Addis Abeba are not comfortable, and the federal police do not treat people with kid gloves, but in this case the people were not treated unusually badly. 

Throwing in a gratuitous reference to the brutality of the “Soviet-backed Marxist regime” of the late 1970s, as well as to an “intensely religious, impoverished and ill-educated population”, the article went on to claim the government was using “a mix of spin and harassment” (of journalists) to avoid international condemnation of the long-drawn out trial of opposition leaders.  

This gives the game away. “Spin” is just what this article is all about. It repeats all the claims that the government “stacked” the inquiry Commission into the June and November killings with its supporters; and it quotes the two Commission members who “fled to Europe”, to the effect that the government tried to persuade the Commission to change the details of the report and when that failed attempted to bury it.  

That is not what the remaining Commission members told Parliament. When they met the Prime Minister, he told them to use their consciences.   

The Economist then gets back to the Le Carre cold-war Soviet themes. There is a reference to “labour camps” for 20,000 detainees, though it does add that “a government spokesman calls this ‘absolute rubbish’ ”. Next comes increased funding for the “secret police” and even for the state media! Israeli-trained units are involved in monitoring email and blocking opposition websites. Le Carre would have used East Germans, of course. And then, in the final paragraph, Berhanu Nega’s “Dawn of Freedom” is being “distributed in samizdat”. Hardly. I bought a nice printed copy on the streets weeks ago. It may have cost a bit more than the official price, but it was not an underground samizdat production, even if it apparently took “disloyalty in the security apparatus” for the manuscript to reach its Ugandan publisher!

One final spin: the government’s “credibility took another knock last week when Mr. Zenawi . . . was forced to admit Ethiopian troops had indeed been sent to intervene in the growing civil war in Somalia”. The Economist probably does not care about Ethiopia-Somalia relations, but it certainly does not appear to understand what is happening in Somalia between the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and the Islamic Courts or why Ethiopia has genuine national security interests in what happens in Somalia.  

But then Ethiopian relations with Somalia hardly fit into a Le Carre’s cold-war fiction.

I am not sure where The Economist got its information (the article was headed as written from Nairobi - surely not the best place to report about Ethiopia), but the latest Indian Ocean Newsletter, published in Paris, does not bother to conceal its sources for the same story. It quotes almost word for word from www.seminawork.blogspot.com. But it too continues the Le Carre theme: a heroine initially taking refuge in the EU offices, telephones tapped and conversations with expelled EU officials, and with the head of the EU delegation, recorded; and suggestions that the Ethiopian security firm involved in guarding the EU offices was really working for the government.  

It all makes good reading but it is not investigative journalism, nor is it unbiased. The writer continuously presumes the worst, automatically choosing the worst interpretation irrespective of any factual evidence. There is no indication of any effort, by either The Economist, or the ION, to check the information or to look at official government websites as well as opposition sites. It is all swallowed up in the fun of writing “a good story”.

This is something to be expected from the National Enquirer in the U.S. or the News of the World in the UK; they are notoriously casual about facts. It is not to be expected from The Economist.  

The Economist is a serious and well-regarded weekly that reaches many of the world’s opinion formers. Often portentous and self-indulgently clever, it frequently gives way to self-congratulation. It can be brilliant and interesting, but also inconsistent and often over-simplifies. But turning to long outdated cold-war fiction for a model is not just an attempt to be clever, it suggests something rather different, even malicious.

It may, perhaps, be no more than an aberration, but it is certainly not a practice in which its writers, or The Economist editors, should take pride.