U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Samantha Power has asked colleagues about ways to embarrass the Ethiopian government, according to a report.
Politico website reported on Thursday citing “a senior USAID official” as saying that, in an early brainstorming session with staffers after she was sworn into office to head USAID on May 3, 2021, Power asked “about ways to embarrass the Ethiopian government given its role in the unfolding catastrophe in the Tigray region and beyond.”
Though the Biden administration’s increasingly hostile tone towards Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has become abundantly clear over a growing conflict in the northern state of Tigray, such attitude and blunt pronouncement from the senior U.S. cabinet member is all the same remarkable.
The report did not provide further details of the exchange except to say that over the course of events aid workers on the ground in Ethiopia have expressed worries that their work may be endangered with Power’s agenda in discrediting the Ethiopian government. Indeed, the former US ambassador to the United Nations and Pulitzer Prize-winning author has been blunt and undiplomatic with which she had publicly attacked Abiy Ahmed and the Ethiopian government.
When Samantha Power visited Ethiopia in August, she hadn’t met with the Ethiopian prime minister, which many observers took as a deliberate snub, according to Politico. After her return to the US, she told NPR news that the Ethiopian government “was not seeking to come to the peace table for an inclusive dialogue, but rather deploying forces.” She was curiously silent about the alleged atrocities committed by the Tigrayn rebel forces.
The Biden administration’s Horn of Africa envoy, Jeffrey D. Feltman, also showed mocking condensation, in an exchange with the New York Times, relating how Prime Minister Abiy chauffeured him around Addis Ababa on May 2021, passing “smart new city parks and a refurbished central plaza and even crashed a wedding where the two men posed for photographs with the bride and groom”.
