Former acting U.S. Ambassador to Ethiopia, Vicki Huddleston has openly expressed support for the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in its bid to advance toward the capital city of Addis Ababa with the goal of overthrowing the Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government. “I hope that you’ll have military success fairly soon because the situation is only becoming drastic,” she told a TPLF official and former foreign minister Berhane Gebre-Christos in a meeting over the video conferencing service, Zoom.

Her remark was in reaction to “the distinguished guest” of the meeting Berhane Gebre-Christos’s lengthy talk in which, among others, he claimed that Abiy’s government refused to negotiate “because they have committed so, so, so much heinous crimes” and negotiations could lead to government accountability, in his words. Berhane said that there was wide support for the TPLF’s program and that Abiy’s intention from the very beginning of his 2018 election was to consolidate power around himself and use the Tigrayan people as a pariah with which to do it.

Addressing the talk, Vicki Huddleston said: “I couldn’t agree more that you know, Abiy should step down, there should be an all-inclusive transition government.”

Another former U.S. diplomat to Ethiopia Donald Yamamoto, who was present in the meeting, made his view clear by saying that “Abiy is not listening… Obasanjo (the African Union’s High Representative for the Horn of Africa) has not been extraordinarily helpful or very active, and so are there any other opportunities that you see?”

The video, posted on the YouTube page of Jeff Pearce, a Toronto-based Canadian journalist and historian, has drawn lots of attention, receiving over 50,000 views and 1.222 likes in few hours. According to Jeff Pearce, the video was shot on a phone camera by an unnamed participant in the meeting, held under the auspices of the Peace and Development Center International, and given to him.

Bronwyn Bruton, the director of programs and studies at the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center took to Twitter to react, saying that “deeply disturbing recording of senior US officials expressing their desire for a TPLF military victory and the establishment of an unelected transitional authority led by TPLF. Hard to read this 2-hour discussion as anything other than US green-lighting of a military coup.”

Ben Norton, a journalist and writer has to say this:

The meeting also included a host of former ambassadors to Addis Ababa from European countries, including former UK ambassador to Ethiopia Robert Dewar; former EU ambassador to Ethiopia Tim Clarke; former French ambassador to Ethiopia Stéphane Gompertz; former and former Finnish ambassador to Ethiopia Kirsti Aarnio.

“Even if Abiy sticks to his guns, which unfortunately he seems to be doing, you either hope that people around him either in government or in the military realize that this is going nowhere and might force him to, well, accept the cessation of hostilities or force him to step down?” asked Gompertz.