The post has been shared more than 80 times and has generated more than 2,700 interactions.
In the accompanying video clip, Debretshion Gebremichael, the chairman of the TPLF, speaks for 90 seconds during a press conference.
The video begins with him saying in Amharic: “Our demands are clear… we demand the appointment of the real members of the TPLF to the positions of the interim government.”
Leadership gap
The Tigray war between the federal government and the TPLF killed more than half a million people before it was ended by a peace deal in Pretoria in November 2022 (archived here).
A few months after the peace agreement, an interim administration for the Tigray region was established under the leadership of Getachew Reda, a senior TPLF official (archived here).
However, the TPLF was deeply divided internally, resulting in two factions: one led by Getachew and the other by Debretshion (archived here). Divisions have since escalated, deepening the vulnerability of a region still reeling from two years of conflict, displacement and humanitarian crises.
Tensions have reached critical levels since the party’s general meeting, held by Debretshion’s faction in August, which Getachew’s faction rejected as “illegal” (archived here).
However, the video does not show the TPLF chairman talking about ousting the chief or the interim government.
Debretshion’s press conference
AFP Fact Check used the video verification tool InVID-WeVerify to perform reverse image searches on key frames from the video.
In doing so, we discovered that the footage was originally published on the official YouTube channel of the Ethiopia Insider news site (archived here).
The original footage lasted over 11 minutes.
The editor of Ethiopia Insider told AFP Fact Check that the video was recorded during a press conference in Mekelle – the capital of the Tigray region – on August 21, 2024.
The clip in the misleading post came from a segment in the original video, recorded from 6’34” to 8’04”.
In this section, Debretshion says: “Those in power are not true representatives of the TPLF. They look like TPLF representatives, but they are not TPLF representatives.”
“The Pretoria peace agreement was concluded with the TPLF,” he continued. “Therefore, the party can appoint appropriate representatives by excluding those who do not belong to the party. However, we believe that the appointment of representatives as heads of different agencies should be done by consensus.”
“This issue requires a thorough discussion with the bodies that appointed the interim administration,” he added. “We need to agree on how to correct the interim administration.”
Debretshion made no specific mention of the removal of the head of the interim government, either in the original video of the press conference or in the clip shared on Facebook.
