The Importance of Calling the Tigray Crisis a Genocide

As we Africans, blacks in the diaspora, and other socially conscious people commemorate the Rwandan genocide from the 1990s, we are all being stared down by the elephant in the room, the ongoing Tigray genocide and the painful lack of attention and recognition brought on to it.

Around November of last year, after two years of Ethiopia being ravaged by civil war, and the Tigrayan people facing unprecedented atrocities that are tanatamount to genocide a peace agreement brokered by the African Union and overseen by the United States called the Pretoria Perman Cessation of Hostilites Agreement was signed officially ending the conflict between Ethiopian forces and Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF). And the terms of the agreement of course included ideas such as disarmement, demobilization, and reintegration. It also created a national police force among other provisions.

My fear is that this agreement seems promising it created an illusion of peace, security and normalcy and allows the world to justify continuing to ignore the ongoing crisis within Tigray and to a large extent Oromia.

The fact of the matter is Tigray is still very much occupied, beseiged and in some areas still completely cut off from the world. The Eritrean government refused to honor the peace agreement and withdraw its troops from the regional state, who are continuing to rape, kill, loot and torture civillians long after the agreement was signed. Additionally they have been proven to support the Amhara troops (still actively terrorizing TIgray), financially and militarily.

As I mentioned in my previous article, 600-800k civilians have been killed in Tigray, there have been 120-130k reported rapes of women and girls. On top of that there are active concentration camps where they imprisoned members of the Ethiopian National Defense Forces simply for their ethnicity, as well as for Tigrayan civilians throughout the regions of Ethiopia (particularly those impacted by war).

What happened in Tigray was so far beyond a civil war, it was targeted, deliberate, systematic genocide. The intent to wipe out the people of Tigray was stated by Abiy Ahmed himself along with many people in his leadership.

I think another important question to raise is why under these circumstances is the situation in Tigray not universally seen as genocide? And what has kept the U.S state department from making that obvious determination? And the answer is politics and power. The label aside, the basic facts about what the Tigrayan people are and were going through have been intentionally suppressed by much of the Ethiopian (namely Amhara) diaspora. Many people have had their lives and livelihoods threatened for daring to speak out against the Ethiopian government's actions in Tigray. Two examples would be professor Alex De Waal and the campaign to get him fired and discredited and the personal threats against his safety he faced for speaking truth to power about the Tigray genocide.

Another example would be the #NoMore movement, a primarily online campaign spearheaded by propagandists in the Ethiopian and Eritrean diaspora like "journalist" Hermela Aregawi, which worked to actively deny the siege/blockade on the regional state, the massive rapes committed onto Tigrayan women and girls by enemy combatants, the droning campaign, massacres, and mass destruction and looting. But simultaneously cloaking itself in the illusion that they are fighting imperialist forces meddling in Ethiopian affairs. The point is to confuse the public and those who might ordinarily side with the Tigrayan people and ultimately dissuade them from taking a stand. Make no mistake this movement killed real people in Tigray.

But the question of why the United States State Department refused to officially name it a genocide is of course more complicated and requires in depth understanding of geopolitical matters and some situational issues.

His official assessment of what took place after weighing all the facts was that there were atrocity crimes on all sides, that the Ethiopian National Defense Forces, Eritrean Defense Forces, Tigray People's Liberation Front forces and Amhara forces commited warcrimes in the conflict in Northern Ethiopia.

Members of the Ethiopian, Eritrean and Amhara forces also committed crimes against humanity, "including murder, rape and other forms of sexual violence, and persecution,” Blinken said. “Members of the Amhara forces also committed the crime against humanity of deportation or forcible transfer and committed ethnic cleansing in western Tigray.”

Now, the definition of genocide is the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the goal of the destruction of that group. And according to experts in comes in 10 stages, and countries go through 8 steps before reaching genocide. One step is ethnic cleansing, 900,000 Tigrayans total were forcibly removed from their homes in Western Tigray by Amhara forces, and that displacement also resulted in the mass murder of Tigrayans.

So the million dollar question is, again, given all of the facts of the situation and what experts understand about the nature of genocide, what has kept Blinken and his department from making that determination? And a large part of it is that making that sort of accusation means that a measure of accountability is owed. Abiy Ahmed and Isias Afwerki (of Eritrea) and their would logically be expected to be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court. And the geopolitical ramifications of that would be unfathomable, it could destroy diplomatic relations with Ethiopia who has long been an ally of the United States and entrusted to keep stability in the horn of Africa. There also isn't a great incentive to prosecute Abiy Ahmed in particular who was by all accounts an unelected creature of Western creation.

But we must call it a genocide because that is the pathway towards justice and accountability for the millions of nameless, faceless victims in Tigray that the West refused to save. The simple acknowledgement is the first step. The horror of what they have endured must be accepted, their stories must be properly told, the crimes must be investigated and justice must be served otherwise this tragedy is doomed to repeat itself and next time there maybe none of us left.

-Hannah S. Habtu