OPINION: The Tigrayan Genocide is Happening Now, and the US Must Act
Between early November 2020 and April 16, the Eritrean government denied Eritrea’s troops’ participation in the war in Tigray, Ethiopia. Now that the truth is out, the international community is hesitant to believe Eritrea’s claims that its government will be leaving the region soon. (Wikimedia Commons)
Madeleine Walker (SFS ‘24) is a guest writer for the Caravel's opinion section, a regular contributor to the Africa section, and a co-editor of the Western Europe and Canada section. The content and opinions of this piece are the writer’s and the writer’s alone. They do not reflect the opinions of the Caravel or its staff.
Content warning: This piece contains descriptions of rape and other physical violence that may be disturbing to some readers.
Today, in northern Ethiopia, Tigrayan people are the victims of genocide. They are being beaten, raped, and murdered en masse every day by Ethiopian troops, Eritrean forces, and nearby paramilitary groups. Crimes against humanity and acts of ethnic cleansing in the region have persisted since November 2020, and there appears to be no end in sight. Despite obligations under international law, the international community has largely ignored this reality.
Who are the Tigrayan people?
Tigrayans are an ethnolinguistic group from northern Ethiopia, making up more than six percent of the country’s population. More than 96 percent of these people are native to the Tigray region. They are the fourth largest ethnic group in Ethiopia, following the Oromo, Amhara, and Somali peoples.
The United Nations and Genocide
The United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect defines genocide as “an internationally recognized crime where acts are committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group,” wherein acts can be “the killing of members of the group; causing bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Notably, the victims of genocide are deliberately targeted “because of their real or perceived membership of one of the four groups protected under the Convention,” meaning that “the target of destruction must be the group, as such, and not its members as individuals.”
Before unpacking the genocidal attributes of the war in Tigray, I want to elaborate on a few of the sections of the Convention on Genocide. First, the Convention does not list “political parties” as a group that is protected under the Convention against genocide perpetrators. Some people will argue that Tigrayans make up a political party because the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) was part of the ruling coalition in the federal government, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), for 30 years.
However, at the time, the EPRDF was a coalition of ethnically-based political parties, meaning the Ethiopian government’s power distribution was largely based on clan or ethnicity. But even if a political party were considered a sub-group against which genocide could be committed—which it is, according to Ethiopia’s 1957 Penal Code—Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed ousted the group from the federal government in 2018, after accusing them, ironically enough, of carrying out ethnicity-based violence across the country. Thus, at the start of the genocide on the Tigrayan people, the Ethiopian government did not recognize them as an active and recognized political party, but rather an ethnic group.
Second, the phrase “internationally recognized crime” is problematic when used to define “genocide.” United Nations member states can—and will, as we have seen with COVID-19 vaccine purchases and distribution, in which roughly three-fourths of COVID-19 vaccines worldwide have only gone to the ten wealthiest countries—put the needs of their own countries and peoples above those of others. This is arguably the right thing to do in most cases, as national governments have an obligation to protect their own people.
But such a “me first” mindset should never be present in the case of genocide. Nowhere in the Convention on Genocide are there exemptions to the ratifying countries’ obligation to protect victims and punish perpetrators of genocide: these are not only obligations for countries to carry out during convenient times, but at all times.
An Incomplete List of Genocidal Attributes in the War in Tigray
It should be noted that the following information is in no way a complete list of the crimes that have been committed against Tigrayans. To assume so would mean undermining and ignoring the pain and suffering endured by the victims. Instead, the examples below should serve as brief evidence for the genocidal attributes that make up what is ultimately a much larger, drastically under-investigated, and consequently underreported war.
To this end, it should also be noted that the Ethiopian government barred humanitarian aid organizations and reporters access to the region until February. Thus, according to Sarah Jackson, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for East Africa, the Horn and Great Lakes, “[From November 2020 to February 2021], the full scale of human suffering in Tigray has been unknown, compounded by restricted access to the region, and internet and telephone blackouts.” Ongoing fighting has caused these problems to persist today, albeit on a lesser scale, so the following information is likely only a small portion of the whole story.
The killing of members of the group. The number of deaths believed to have been carried out in Tigray since November is perhaps the least reliable data point available to the international community.
The identification process of those killed has been time-consuming and, at times, impossible due to accessibility. Nonetheless, according to “a trio of opposition parties in Ethiopia’s embattled Tigray region,” the number of civilian deaths had reached 50,000 by February 2021.
William Davison, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, speculates that “the figure given for those in need of aid [3 million] is higher than Tigray’s estimated population, so it’s likely that the number of civilian fatalities is also.”
However, the total number of deaths will not be known until an independent group can investigate, which likely will not occur for many months due to continued accessibility problems and the international community’s near-silence on the matter.
Causing bodily or mental harm to members of the group. On March 25, the United Nations reported that more than 500 rape cases had surfaced in five clinics in the Tigray region, in the cities and towns of Mekelle, Adigrat, Wukro, Shire, and Axum. This number does not take into account the number of people who died from rape, those who were raped and killed in other ways, those who did not decide to report the crime due to stigma, and those who did not have access to medical facilities as a consequence of the war.
Pramila Patten, the U.S. envoy on sexual violence in conflict, reported that there were “disturbing reports of individuals allegedly forced to rape members of their own family, under threats of imminent violence” while others had been “forced by military elements to have sex in exchange for basic commodities.”
Between the conflict’s recent resurgence in November, and January, a doctor and women’s group member “registered at least 200 girls under the age of 18 at different hospitals and health centers in Mekelle who said they had been raped.” Most of the rapists were wearing Ethiopian army uniforms. The doctor then noted that “one [girl] was constrained and raped for a week. She doesn't even know herself.”
One women’s rights group member theorized, “This is being done purposely to break the morale of the [Tigray] people, threaten them and make them give up the fight.” The Ethiopian army chief denied all related accusations.
Another woman, 27, was raped by 23 soldiers for ten days straight by Eritrean troops. She bled continually during this time while the troops put plastic bags, syringes, sticks, and nails inside her and left her there to die. She was found alive after five weeks and brought to a hospital. In response, Dr. Hagos, the gynecologist at the hospital in Mekelle who treated her, said, “‘Are these soldiers human beings? How can a human being do such a thing?’"
Doctors in the aforementioned Tigray hospitals report that the majority of victims have contracted sexually transmitted diseases, including H.I.V. Additionally, of the 200 women at the hospital in Agradat, 160 were impregnated by rape. The medical facility does not have the capacity to terminate all of these pregnancies or treat the STIs and sexually transmitted diseases, never mind the psychological trauma involved in such tragic circumstances.
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. Between last December and this March alone, nearly 70 percent of health facilities visited by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, or “Doctors Without Borders”) teams had been looted; only 13 percent were functioning normally. MSF notes, “While some looting may have been opportunistic, health facilities in most areas appear to have been deliberately vandalized to make them non-functional.”
Ambulances and other clinic vehicles were also found by MSF teams, who witnessed their use by soldiers near the Eritrean border as a means of transporting goods. According to MSF, “As a result [of this lack of clinic vehicles], the… system in Tigray for transporting sick patients is almost non-existent. Patients travel long distances, sometimes walking for days, to reach essential health services.”
The starvation and mass displacement of the Tigrayan people, other key consequences of the war, were also caused deliberately by Ethiopian, Eritrean, and other, nearby paramilitary groups.
The Associated Press reported, as early as January 17, “Food has been a target. Analyzing satellite imagery of the Shire area, a U.K.-based research group found two warehouse-style structures in the U.N. World Food Program compound at one [Tigrayan] refugee camp had been ‘very specifically destroyed.’”
Additionally, the World Peace Foundation details how starvation crimes go “beyond the immediate destruction or theft of food and other essentials,” also including the dismemberment of the components of an elaborate food security system built up over decades.” To this end, it should be noted that small Tigrayan farms and the jobs of those Tigrayans working as seasonal laborers are “now gone or reduced to a bare minimum,” leaving many malnourished and starving.
Madiha Raza of the International Rescue Committee described the rural areas’ circumstances at the end of March, saying, “Medical centers, schools, hospitals, banks, and hotels have been looted. People I interviewed had heard multiple reports of civilians being rounded up and killed. Farm animals and grain are being burned or destroyed and fear tactics are being used across the conflict.”
Roads within and to the region were blocked, flights prohibited, and communication lines cut. The limited communications to the region had detrimental effects on its residents even from the beginning of the conflict, as 600,000 of its residents were dependent on food relief assistance. About 200,000 of these people are refugees or internally displaced persons (IDPs). Additionally, those that rely on safety-net assistance of any kind number more than a million.
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group. One Tigrayan woman who survived an attempted rape with devastating wounds believes “soldiers are targeting Tigrayan women to stop them giving birth to more Tigrayans.” This accusation could explain why, in the Adwa hospital in central Tigray, soldiers destroyed medical equipment especially relating to pregnancy, such as ultrasound equipment and delivery rooms.
MSF teams heard reports of women in rural areas of Tigray who died in childbirth because they could not get to a hospital due to the lack of ambulances, roadblocks, road violence, and a night-time curfew. Many other women are forced to give birth in unhygienic conditions in informal displacement camps.
A Note on Deliberate Targeting
The UN notes that victims of genocide are deliberately targeted “because of their real or perceived membership of one of the four groups protected under the Convention.”
Evidence of this targeting is present in countless victims’ reports, such as one woman who was raped, as was her 89-year-old grandmother, supposedly as an “act of punishment by soldiers who suspected her husband was a fighter for the [Tigray Popular Liberation Front] TPLF.”
Similarly, Dr. Tedros Tefera, one of the doctors who fled Tigray and is now treating survivors in refugee camps in Hamdayet, Sudan, recalled, "The women that have been raped say that the things that [the soldiers] say to them when they were raping them [are] that they need to change their identity—to either Amharize them or at least leave their Tigrinya status ... and that they've come there to cleanse them ... to cleanse the bloodline.’” Another rape survivor recalled a soldier telling her, “‘You Tigrayans have no history, you have no culture. I can do what I want to you and no one cares.’”
Such deliberate ethnic cleansing is also represented by the number of deaths, the majority of which are confirmed to be Tigrayan people, although the exact numbers remain unknown due to communications obstacles and ongoing massacres.
The Guardian believes that “where blame can be confidently determined, Ethiopian soldiers appear to have been responsible for 14 percent of the killings, Eritrean troops who have fought alongside federal forces 45 percent, and irregular paramilitaries from the neighboring province of Amhara 5 percent. Witnesses blamed Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers operating together in 18 percent of cases.”
The Tigrayan people have been targeted by the Ethiopian state and other ethnic groups for decades. The image above is the historic center of Woyane, the town where Tigrayan peasants rebelled against their oppression under the Shoan elite in 1943. The term “Woyane” is now commonly used amongst Tigrayans to refer to their resistance against their oppression in Ethiopia. (Wikimedia Commons)
The Battle Continues
On November 4, Ahmed declared a six-month State of Emergency in the region for which “the State of Emergency Task Force led by the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces” was initiated. The Ethiopian government forces reported having secured the Tigray region and defeated the TPLF resistance groups by the end of November, but fighting has continued nonetheless. The Task Force has not yet left the region.
In a tweet on March 3, Ahmed announced, “Held a review meeting with the Tigray Region SOE Taskforce and the Provisional Administration to discuss activities and progress in the region. As of today, the SOE Task Force will continue its stabilization & rebuilding efforts under the leadership of Gen. Yohannes Gebremeskel.” No evidence of said stabilization and rebuilding efforts has been made available to the public. What is certain, though, is the alarming rise in the number of rape and murder cases.
Ahmed claimed to condemn the rape of the Tigrayan women, seemingly implicating Ethiopian troops by saying, “Anyone who raped our Tigrayan sisters, anybody who is involved in looting, will be held accountable in a court of law… We sent them to destroy the junta, not our people.”
In another tweet made on March 9, Ahmed linked a document that was delivered to the African Union Peace and Security Council. It stated, “Bringing the criminal perpetrators to justice is ongoing with some that have been apprehended and others still in hiding. While we continue to detain those that are wanted for high treason and crimes against the state and people, our priority is on rebuilding the Tigray region and ensuring that our citizens in the region regain normalcy to their lives.”
But innocent civilians are not criminal perpetrators. Violent rape and mass murder are not justice. Normalcy cannot ever be regained in the lives of the Tigrayan people after the crimes against humanity that have been carried out by the Ethiopian and Eritrean government forces.
So Ahmed’s claims should be viewed with caution: no other comments have been made on his behalf regarding the gross misconduct of his troops, and certainly, no action has been taken to investigate their actions.
Because the Ethiopian government made long-term war plans and insists that their troops will stay in Tigray to stabilize and rebuild the region, the genocide will not end soon.
The Convention on Genocide:
Who is Responsible for Preventing, Ending, and Punishing Genocide?
It should be noted that, between the genocide of Jewish and other marginalized peoples during World War II, and 2019, 152 UN member states have ratified the Genocide Convention. Several other UN member states are signatories, though they have not ratified the document. Ethiopia became a signatory of this convention on the first day it became available, on December 11, 1949, and was the first country to ratify it on July 1, 1949. Eritrea is neither a signatory nor a party to this convention.
Some of the corresponding obligations for ratifying countries are: not to commit genocide, to prevent genocide, and to punish genocide. However, according to the United Nations, the prohibition against committing genocide is considered a norm of “international customary law and therefore, binding on all States, whether or not they have ratified the Genocide Convention.”
(See the United Nations website for a map that illustrates the signatories and ratifying countries of the 1948 Convention on Genocide, as of January 2019. Since this map was created, Mauritius and Dominica have also ratified the document.)
The United States Must Recognize the War in Tigray as Genocide… and ACT
Taking into consideration the above information, with the acknowledgment that much data regarding deaths and brutalities have not yet been uncovered, the war against the Tigrayan people of Ethiopia meets the conditions of genocide. And yet, there has been little to no discussion in the international community of taking action. Instead, there is a seemingly unanimous denial that what is happening to Tigrayans is genocide at all. I consider this silence an outrageous neglect of human rights, most prominently the right to live, and correspondingly, a violation of the Convention on Genocide under the United Nations.
It is not possible at this time to quickly and successfully rally all international powers, especially those who ratified the Convention on Genocide, to send troops and other aid to Ethiopia. There is also no point in waiting until the other member-states of the UN or NATO declare the war in Tigray as genocide before taking action. After months—well over five months, at the time of writing—of what amounts to international silence on the genocide, I do not have faith that other countries will step in and act anytime soon. However, the United States can uphold its end of the Convention by recognizing the war in Tigray as genocide and taking immediate action.
Although I strongly believe that it is the entire international community’s duty to fight genocide, if just one country were to act, the United States is in the best position to do so. The U.S. is the wealthiest country in the world and—not coincidentally—has one of the best COVID-19 vaccination programs. 26 percent of the U.S. population has been fully vaccinated already, and by the start of the summer, every member of the Department of Defense (who chooses to) will be vaccinated. As an extra cautionary measure against the spread of the virus and given the U.S.’s track record of imperialism, I propose that only vaccinated U.S. troops are sent to Ethiopia and that they leave the country immediately following the cessation of the genocide.
To ensure that this genocide comes to an end in a timely manner, for the sake of the Tigrayan people and U.S. troops, an additional diplomatic coalition or military subgroup with political and/or developmental expertise should be sent to Ethiopia to strategically and ethically accomplish proper mitigation in-person. Organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International should be consulted and perhaps even temporarily recruited by the U.S. government in this endeavor, as they are some of the only organizations to have kept a close eye on the genocide in Tigray since its start in November. Their knowledge and expertise are critical at this time to ethically and effectively de-escalate the genocide, rehabilitate Tigrayan victims and communities, and rebuild towns and necessary medical facilities. These measures should be undertaken alongside the presence and force of U.S. troops to both ensure long-term Tigrayan safety and punish those who played roles in perpetrating the genocide. Then, upon return to the U.S., the troops and diplomats should be required to quarantine for a prescribed period in the case of COVID-19 infection, particularly its variants.
Some will still try to argue that the U.S. should not be the police-keeping force of the world. I mostly agree with that belief. If our country’s national security is not threatened by another, then our military should not intervene in foreign wars—except in the case of genocide. Roosevelt’s infamous “speak softly and carry a big stick” mantra means nothing if the only time we carry around a big stick is in pursuit of colonialist desires and “forever wars.”
Others will argue against any kind of U.S. intervention in foreign affairs on the grounds that a state should have absolute sovereignty over its people and its borders—to this I ask, how else can genocide be stopped, if not through outside intervention? Citizens of a country do not sign up to be subject to discrimination, brutalism, and mass murder, whether they are native-born or naturalized. Their existence under their national government should not inherently mean that their national government is free to slaughter them at will. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer of Jewish descent who first coined the term “genocide” in 1944, commented on this debate, saying, “Sovereignty cannot be conceived as the right to kill… innocent people.”
Lastly, it is vital to note that the U.S. has already poured more than $152 million dollars into humanitarian aid to Tigray, a number that will only rise as the genocide persists. The discussion here, then, is not if the US should intervene, because they already have. Instead, we need to take action and carry out additional measures of American intervention that would be more efficient and effective in saving Tigrayan lives. Humanitarian aid is necessary, but it is not enough. For long-term change, the U.S. needs to attack the problem at the root. This means sending U.S. troops to Ethiopia to put an end to the genocide of Tigrayans while also enabling long-term domestic safety and stability.
If the U.S. takes action in the genocide of Tigrayans, they would set a necessary international precedent, in which gender- and ethnic-based violence is not only considered a serious crime against humanity but is treated as such. This precedent would help uphold the legitimate humanity of women and minority ethnic groups worldwide, and serve as a warning and hopefully preventative measure against similar conflicts in the future. There is no time to wait. There is no point in waiting. The U.S. must act. This is genocide.
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