The Sept. 21 issue of The Hill newspaper falsely reported that Kinijit delegates Gizachew Shiferraw and Brook Kebede do not support H.R. 2003, while Hailu Shawel does. (see the report here)
It was a blatantly false report. Just a few days earlier, Ato Gizachew Shiferraw was standing next to Congressman Mike Honda at a pro-HR 2003 rally in front of the U.S. Congress as he made a speech urging Congress to pass the bill. Again, one week earlier, all the delegates had been at Congressman Donald Payne’s office to personally lobby on behalf of the bill. Yet, the EPRP web sites and radio programs used the false report to pound on the delegates as working against the bill.
Yesterday, another false report appeared. This time it was in the Washington Post which reported that Ato Hailu Shawel and Ato Mesfin Mekonnen were at the Congress when the vote H.R. 2003 took place [read here]. The fact is that Ato Hailu was and still is in Minneapolis getting medical treatment. Ato Mesfin was also not there on Tuesday.
Asked to correct the report, Nora Boustany, the Washington Post correspondent who wrote the report, responded:
“… they were both sitting in the gallery and I reached them by cell phone while the session was going on. You can probably find out by contacting the office of Rep. Smith. You can check this out independently. So, I hope you can have this faulty editor’s note corrected. Otherwise, thank you for your interest.”
This is the work of Ato Mesfin Mekonnen, an EPRP operative in Washington DC who is recruited by Taye to join the now defunct KIC (keysi).
But why? The misinformation can easily be discovered and disproved? Unless the objective is to create confusion even if temporarily.
Ato Mesfin Mekonnen could have been trying to earn credit for himself and Hailu Shawel for some thing they did not do, but that comes with a terribly high price — misinforming the American media the way he did acting as a representative of a major Ethiopian opposition party can have a negative impact on the whole Ethiopian community.