NEW YORK– April 16, 2020 – An American adviser to Ethiopia’s democracy revolution has called publicly for Lady Gaga and the organizers of Global Citizen’s One World: Together At Home event to disassociate themselves from World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom.
Gaga has partnered with Dr. Tedros, who goes by his forename, and Global Citizen to launch the virtual festival April 18. The event is described on Global Citizen’s website as “a historic, cross-platform global special that will celebrate and support healthcare workers and others on the frontlines, and the World Health Organization (WHO) as they lead the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Lady Gaga Will Curate One World: Together At Home in partnership with the W.H.O. and Global Citizen Picture: Getty
The broadcast will include leading global health experts and will feature dozens of stars, including Billie Eilish, Lizzo, Sir Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder and Sir Elton John.
“I want to highlight this global, kind community that’s coming together right now,” Gaga said.
Gaga’s relationship with Tedros is a prominent feature of the event’s promotion. Tedros personally announced the partnership with Gaga, and the singer often refers to their friendship in One World Together media briefings.
“Lady Gaga and Global Citizen are cool,” the Ethiopian revolution’s adviser, David Steinman, stated. “And One World: Together At Home is a fantastic event that everyone should support. But it’s obscene to link a man like Tedros to it.”
According to Steinman, Tedros shares responsibility for crimes against humanity committed by Ethiopia’s former government when he was its foreign minister and politburo member from 2012 to 2016. The regime was led by a political party called the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF, listed on the Global Terrorism Database.
Human rights groups have documented widespread abuses committed by the TPLF-controlled government during Tedros’ tenure. These include wholesale shootings, torture, kidnappings, enforced disappearances, arbitrary incarceration of tens of thousands, including children, in concentration camps, and putting political prisoners in cells with wild animals.
“Tedros’ position alone makes him accountable for the dictatorship’s atrocities,” Steinman said. “He was too much a part of the system not to share responsibility for its brutality.”
Steinman, a Wharton-trained economist, was a strategist and advocate for Ethiopia’s democracy movement until the 2018 collapse of the TPLF regime Tedros served. He also exposed the TPLF’s human rights abuses and corruption in the Washington Post, NY Times and Forbes. Steinman first published his accusation of Tedros in a nonfiction afterword to a novel which criticizes celebrity support for the TPLF, Money, Blood and Conscience.
“Steinman is our voice. Our freedom fighter,” said Tekle Yeshaw, author of a report titled, The Amhara Genocide which documents the mass murder of Ethiopia’s Amhara tribe by the TPLF and its proxies.
The White House and some members of Congress blame the rapid spread of the Covid-19 pandemic on Tedros’ minimization of the Wuhan outbreak’s danger in its early days.
“For a man with so much blood on his hands to be associated with a great event like One World Together is an insult to the thousands of Ethiopian victims who grieve and suffer to this day because of Tedros and his TPLF pals,” Steinman said. “It also insults the Covid-19 victims whose loss might have been prevented had he not parroted Chinese propaganda which under-reported the crisis. Gaga and Global Citizen CEO Hugh Evans should deny this criminal hiding in plain sight yet another opportunity to legitimize himself.”
The W.H.O. declined to comment on the Ethiopian human rights violations. Tedros has responded to allegations of collusion with China with a plea for unity and a warning not to “politicize the virus.”