Thank you for that very excellent question.
I think genocide is a crime with intent, and I think we have two very strong indicators of intent here.
The first one is at a discursive level. The government itself has not been restrained or shy about expressing its intent. Regularly, they've used dehumanizing language to refer to the Tigrayan people. That shows that their target is not the TPLF, but the population at large. We have several instances where talk of exterminating the Tigrayan people has been expressly communicated by mass media, either by officials or by people who are allies of the government.
We also have a statement by the Finnish foreign minister and EU envoy to the Horn of Africa and Ethiopia, who, after his meetings with Ethiopian officials a year ago, stated that they told him they were going to “wipe out” the Tigrayans, so on a number of occasions, the government itself has made its intention to exterminate or destroy Tigray very clear.
Second, we have behavioural indicators that show this intent. We have the use of mass starvation as a weapon of war. We have very strong evidence that this is deliberate, intentional and systematic. At this point, there is no controversy around that. If anyone thinks that this is not indicative of an intent to kill part or all of Tigray, I would be interested in hearing the logic of the argument. What is the motivation behind putting an entire population under siege, denying them access to food, destroying their crops and essentially engineering famine if it's not to kill all of them? What happens—what is the logical sequence of outcomes—when one does that? Of course, it is the mass murder or extermination of an entire population.
We have a number of behavioural indicators showing that they are taking systemic actions in order to destroy the Tigrayan people. Recently, a report by the UN Human Rights Council also stated that this intent—