My address to the FANA and Amhara Media Council’s Virtual Candlelight Vigil, November 15, 2025
Justice and truth are not gifts… Justice and truth are the bitterest, bloodiest of trophies, scratched up and stained with effort but never compromise. Earned, always.”
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, and as always, my words are given for myself alone and don’t represent the views of Fana or the Amhara Media Council or anyone else…
Greetings from cold, bleak Toronto, with the rain coming down and where most people don’t know how heavy your hearts are. Each death is a great stone piled up on the soul. I reposted only a couple of days ago my report on Mai Kadra, and someone—quite reasonably—replied with a list of massacres in other spots. And the names went on and on, the stones piling up, weighing on your chest, and if any of you cry out, I know that any voices of comfort that float back are virtually all Amharic. More is the pity.
You’ve named this event a candlelight vigil. If you look up the word “vigil,” you’ll find definitions that talk about staying awake and alert and guarding something. I know by now from bitter experience that you are not simply trying to guard lives—it’s an entire culture in jeopardy. I don’t believe in God, I’m an atheist, but I have stood on a hill, watching the faithful make their way in white across a stunning landscape of green and brown to a beautiful church in Gondar. I’ve sat under the majesty of Lalibela. I can’t say prayers with you, but I do believe in hymns of freedom, songs to summon every voice.
I know that we need more events that spark curiosity rather than make noise. I wish I could see the firefly glow snaking its way through Toronto’s Nathan Philips Square. I want to see footage of lights piercing the dark on London’s Regent Street, competing and winning attention away from the department stores’ coarse neon. We need to cut the darkness in Atlanta and in Paris and in Brussels, enough to make people ask, “Who is this all for? Why do they mourn?” Why do they keep this vigil?
Why indeed?
One of your most gifted advocates, , put in a post on X “To honor those we lost — and the courage of those who remain.” This is a noble sentiment.
And I am here for that, too. And because I have committed myself to the truthful expression of your history—through books, through articles, through speech—I am duty-bound to honor all those senselessly murdered for simply fitting a category set by fanatics. And I put faith in the courage of those who remain.
But what is the way forward? Which brings us back to the question of who is this for? Awareness is not a goal in itself. It never is. The goal is leverage.
Justice will never come as a gift from others. I saw a post on X this week from a gentleman, a city councilor—clearly well-intentioned but hopelessly naïve—who announced that he wrote to one of Donald Trump’s officials about the persecution of Orthodox Christians. It’s obvious that he must have seen Trump’s ridiculous video in which he promised to go into Nigeria “guns a-blazing” (his actual words), all to supposedly save Nigerian Christians.
Except that Trump hates Black people. It’s quite obvious that he would like nothing better than an excuse to kill Black people, and so would the white nationalists of his Cabinet. Do we need to go over again how his administration has tried to erase African-American history at the museums and online? His own record of denying Black applicants to rent in his buildings, and his vendetta against the Central Park Five? My heart’s in my mouth every time one of you flies in and out of the United States, even those who have called it home for decades.
Do not expect justice from autocrats. Do not expect justice or help from Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, who only want to co-opt your suffering to complete their donation drives. These are the same organizations that lied about you during the TPLF War. Why would you expect them to behave any differently?
I saw a post recently by the high-profile historian Anne Applebaum, who shilled for an article in Foreign Affairs by Alex de Waal and claimed he “knew Sudan better than anyone.”
But of course, he doesn’t, even if he weren’t the lying scumbag that Ethiopians know he is. It doesn’t occur to Applebaum to promote an article by a Sudanese person of note.
Do not put your faith in Western media, or even for that matter in African reporters who work for Western media. Again, the lessons from the TPLF War still hold. The tragedies of your families and friends are mere content to them, they’re spectacle.
This is why the truth about Gaza didn’t finally have its moment, didn’t break through to the mainstream until there were literally no Western media operations who could insert their filter into the area. In conducting their extermination campaign, the Netanyahu government slaughtered Palestinians, banned Western media from going in and created a vacuum which could only be filled by Palestinian journalists and advocates.
You! You organizers, you diaspora advocates. This lesson has been staring you in the face for almost two years.
You have the power to shun Western media, to cut off their access. Do it. The time has never been more urgent. You have the power to shame them when they don’t tell the story properly, just as Palestinians have. But I always hear, “We need to take what we can get.” No, you don’t. Those in Gaza don’t.
Justice and truthful depiction are not gifts. They are the prizes that the bravest of your relatives earn through sweat and blood and fighting in a battle, and that you earn by holding up the candle for those who fought… and fell. Justice and truth are the bitterest, bloodiest of trophies, scratched up and stained with effort but never compromise. Earned, always.
So, I am telling you: do not beg for attention. In fact, shun the kind that does you no good. Yes, it takes discipline and commitment to tell a huge Western news network, “No, we won’t settle for your scraps. Get out. No one here trusts you. No one here wants to talk to you. We’ll tell our own stories, thanks, and we can do it more ethically than you.”
Send them this message. Because they expect you to fight on your own and to invite them in and then to just sit back and watch you bleed. And then claim it’s a both-sides thing. While white Ukrainians get a completely different treatment. This is a world I know well, and it’s full of predators.
You must impose the discipline, exact discipline to keep the message straight, to get the truth out, to keep the vigil for your people’s story—not any blow-dried broadcaster’s version of it, not any counterfeit summary written up in the New York Times.
Your stories told by your own people on yourterms.
Do this, stick to this, hold true to this, and I promise you that the proper attention of the world will finally come.
I mentioned earlier that there is a whole culture in jeopardy. Almost every day, I see posts and articles which are each a bad, tasteless joke, calling Ethiopian history a fairy tale or impugning what Menelik did, what Haile Selassie did, and so it goes.
I think we are long overdue for a recruiting call to artists and academics to make their voices louder, to make their work speak to this terrible, seemingly endless night.
It is a night that I know that is filled with grieving despite its mission to honor so many.
The dimmest of candles will cut through the darkness, and it takes a vigil to keep a small flame burning. This is why even in times of almost inconsolable grief, action must be taken. Life demands that we pay it back, that we reimburse what life has given us, with an effort to confirm meaning. And there is no greater, more noble purpose than finding justice and truth for the fallen and persecuted.
Thank you.