Thank you.
More than 100,000 have been externally displaced. Socio-economic infrastructure, including health facilities and educational institutions, factories and small industries have been destroyed by the joint forces of Ethiopia, Eritrea and the Amhara region.
It is reported by the International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, New Lines Institute, and the U.S. Department of State that war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and gender-based violence have been committed by the joint forces. I believe that the degree of atrocities, massacre, rapes and drone attacks, sieges and blockades of basic services that the people of Tigray faced was unprecedented, so horrific and amounts to genocide.
According to the genocide convention in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, article 6:
...“genocide” means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group...
And so on.
Atrocities committed in the Tigray region of Ethiopia clearly meet the above definition of genocide. Tigrayans have been killed and massacred based on their ethnic identity. Tigrayan women and girls have been raped and gang-raped, causing them physical and mental harm, and denied access to all basic human needs, including food and medicine. Conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction have been deliberately inflicted on Tigrayan children, women, girls, boys and elders. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed incited hate propaganda that Tigrayans are daylight hyena, cancer and weeds. Also, Daniel Kibret Birhane, who is an adviser of Abiy Ahmed, cited that Tigrayans are evil and ghosts and must be exterminated from the face of the earth and erased from our mind.
During the rapes and gang rapes, the rapists put unimaginable objects with the intention to damage Tigrayan women and girls' reproductive organs to prevent them from giving birth. As reported by Human Rights Watch, Tigrayans in western Tigray were told by Colonel Dameke Zewdu, who is the head of security in western Tigray, and his allies, “We will erase you from this land.”
Pekka Haavisto, the European Union's special envoy—