National Interest | Ethiopia’s prime minister may want to coast on the laurels of the Nobel Prize but, realistically, he may very quickly become the first Nobel laureate to face war crimes charges.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced on October 11, 2019, that Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed had won that year’s Nobel Peace Prize “for his efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation.” The committee wanted to highlight Abiy’s initiative to end Ethiopia’s border conflict with Eritrea and “to recognize all the stakeholders working for peace and reconciliation in Ethiopia and in the East and Northeast African regions.” But they picked the wrong man.

In June 2020, Abiy extra-constitutionally postponed elections. When Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region refused and, on Sept. 9, 2020, held its own parliamentary elections marked by long lines and high participation that the opposition Tigray People’s Liberation Front won. Abiy responded two months later by cutting Tigray’s internet access and phone lines and sending in the Ethiopian Army to oust the elected government from Mekelle, the provincial capital. Multiple reports confirm that Eritrea’s military also entered the region, operating side-by-side with Ethiopian troops as they sacked and looted towns and villages in the region. On Jan. 13, 2021, Ethiopia announced that its forces had killed Seyoum Mesfin, the country’s long-serving former foreign minister, while fighting. Subsequent photos suggest that Abiy’s men had summarily executed Mesfin.

While Ethiopia repeatedly said that the situation in Tigray was calm, reports continued to circulate alleging that Ethiopian forces had engaged in widespread human-rights violations. With the restoration of communication to the region, it now appears these reports were legitimate. Ethiopians now circulate videos of summary executions. This video circulated today purports to show the summary execution of two men in the Tigrayan market town of Adwa. The greatest war crime, however, appears to be a massacre of more than eight hundred Tigrayans at the Church of St. Mary of Zion in Axum, reputed to be the resting place of the Ark of the Covenant, shortly after Ethiopian forces entered the area. Reached by phone by the Associated Press, a church deacon recounted the massacre:

The deacon recalled soldiers bursting into the church, cornering and dragging out worshippers and shooting at those who fled. “I escaped by chance with a priest,” he said. “As we entered the street, we could hear gunfire all over.” They kept running, stumbling over the dead and wounded along with others trying to find places to hide. Most of the hundreds of victims were killed that day, he said, but the shooting and looting continued the following day. “They started to kill people who were moving from church to home or home to home, simply because they were on the street,” another witness, visiting university lecturer Getu Mak, told the Associated Press. “It was a horrible act to see.”

The deacon confirmed that he had counted the bodies of those killed in the massacre, and alleged that Ethiopian forces left bodies in the streets for days where they were feasted upon by hyenas. With growing witness accounts, the Ethiopian Foreign Ministry has now tweeted that “Rape, plunder, callous & intentional mass killings, as observed & verified in #Mikadra, & every other imaginable crime might happen in #Tigray” although it continued to deny both the regime’s own culpability and ignore eyewitness accounts of Eritrean forces participating in human-rights abuses.

Just as the Norwegian Nobel Committee once honored Burmese politician Aung San Suu Kyi only to learn she was an apologist to genocide, so too must it confront Abiy’s increasingly murderous record. Paul Rusesabagina, the hotel manager made famous in “Hotel Rwanda” and lionized by Western politicians is likewise now facing accountability for his support of armed groups and designated terrorists.

Abiy’s apologists criticize Ethiopia’s constitutional federalism and still describe Abiy as a reformer. Suspending elections and unilaterally changing the law without regard to any constitutional process, however, is the mark of dictatorship rather than reform. Engaging in ethnic cleansing, rape, and murder against regional opposition puts Abiy in the class of Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s former president who was indicted while still in office for his genocidal campaign against Darfur.

Abiy and his forces still ban journalists from traveling to Tigray and other provinces where locals allege Ethiopian and/or Eritrean forces have massacred civilians. Abiy may deny such events, but innocent parties seldom ban journalists who could confirm the truth of their statements. Rather, the travel bans and communication cut-offs are likely meant to help Abiy to escape accountability for his actions. Filibustering the outside world will not work, however, nor will the truth fade from the memory of surviving victims or the family members of those killed in Tigray. Abiy may want to coast on the laurels of the Nobel Prize but, realistically, he may very quickly become the first Nobel laureate to face war crimes charges at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a frequent author for the National Interest

The Spectator | A man is filmed dying under a policeman’s knee in Minneapolis. Riots break out, statues are toppled and the Western world erupts with civil unrest. More than 50,000 people are massacred, tortured and raped, leaving orphaned children to forage for food and find their drinking water in puddles. Some of it is caught on camera. Nobody turns a hair.

In this social media age, activists tend to focus with great intensity on a narrow, politically-approved range of issues. Israel-Palestine, food banks, structural racism, unconscious bias, trans rights. You know the list. But fewer people seem to care about people being killed, mutilated and starved in Ethiopia.

In case you missed it, months of brutal fighting in the northern region of Tigray has left tens of thousands dead and many more malnourished, with almost five million people cut off from aid supplies. In recent weeks, videos of brutal executions of civilians in rural communities have emerged. Due to a media blackout by the Ethiopian government, they cannot be verified and must be taken as such. But they do seem to match the facts.

Part of the problem is that NGOs and journalists are largely being barred from the area. There have been some eyewitnesses, however. Ato Abera Tola, the Ethiopian Red Cross president, who recently visited the squalid displacement camps in the northern town of Shire, warned that tens of thousands would perish from starvation within eight weeks. Women and children, he said, were ‘all emaciated…their skin is really on their bones’.

Those who made it to the camps were the lucky ones, he suggested. In rural areas, away from the camps, people are suffering unimaginably. ‘We have to get prepared for the worst, is what I’m saying,’ Abera said. Further east, in an act of ‘systematic aggression to health facilities’ in the regional capital of Mekele, hospitals have been looted, leaving them with no medicines or essential supplies. Basic vaccines have expired, and HIV drugs have run out.

‘I have never seen a place (like it) where a simple antibiotic is not present,’ Francesco Rocca, president of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said. ‘This is unacceptable. There is a high risk of an outbreak of cholera or other diseases.’

The catastrophe is rooted in Ethiopian political history. The richness of the country stems from its diversity of culture and civilisation (it is home to one of the world’s oldest forms of Christianity). The state is a federation of ten different ethnic and linguistic regions.

Prime minister Abiy Ahmed has tried to enforce a pan-Ethiopian, nationalist agenda, aiming to unify the ethnic factions under a single banner. This has butted against the pride of minorities. In September, under pressure of Covid, there was a disputed election in the fiercely independent Tigray region. Ahmed – who, ironically enough, won a Nobel Peace Prize two years ago – sent federal forces in, sparking conflict with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. Eritrean troops weighed in behind him.

‘The fighting made people want retribution for old grievances,’ Ahmed Soliman, an Africa expert at Chatham House, told me. ‘On the Eritrean border in particular, there has been conflict between communities on either side.’

As the unrest spread, local fighters saw themselves as battling to correct historic wrongs. There was looting in the towns. Numerous lives were lost to missiles, rockets and bombs from Chinese-made drones, and there were accounts of mass executions of civilians, some conducted with knives and machetes. After Rwanda, everyone vowed never again. How’s that going?

Where were the petitions? Where were the street protests? Where were the security council resolutions, the outrage, the international solidarity? The African Union sent three former presidents to Addis Ababa in an attempt at mediation. It flopped. The UN and EU struggled to get to grips with the crisis. Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, made a half-hearted visit in January. The NGOs were in despair. But overall, the level of urgency does not seem commensurate to the horrors. And that is bound up with public opinion.

The hard fact is that the hellish suffering of millions of Ethiopians has failed to move Western hearts and minds. This may be depressing, but it is not entirely surprising. I remember, for instance, waiting grimly for news outside the morgue in Colombo while covering the horrific Easter bombings in Sri Lanka for the British press a couple of years ago. The question from editors wasn’t about the number of victims. The question was: ‘How many Brits?’.

Some argue that by covering stories the way it does, the media shapes its audience’s priorities, rather than the other way round. There may be some truth in this. More often, however, the reader is master and the hack must jump to his bell.

Human nature is not always a pretty thing. A wealth of psychological research has shown that people instinctively feel empathy and affection for those similar to themselves. That informs what they want to read and watch, which in turn drives the ugly side of our trade, pithily expressed by the late American foreign correspondent Edward Behr: ‘Anyone here been raped and speaks English?’

Making people care about a story is about making it relevant to them. And – as appalling as it is – one man who died at the hands of a cop in Minneapolis holds more emotional currency for many people than piles of corpses surrounded by unbearable tragedy on the other side of the world.

So much for the media. But what about the international community? Last year, the United Nations General Assembly condemned Israel 17 times. By comparison, it issued just six critical resolutions for the rest of the world combined, from China to North Korea to Yemen (not to mention Ethiopia).

Imagine the outrage if the 50,000 dead Ethiopians had actually been Palestinian, and the aggressors Israeli troops. It would never happen, of course. But the street protests, the petitions, the Security Council resolutions, the diplomatic pressure, the social media campaigns would speak for themselves (not to mention the synagogues attacked in France). And Tigray? Tumbleweed.

Human nature may have its ugly side. But I’m an optimist. It is within our gift to care. If man is part angel and part ape, I’m with Disraeli: we can strive to be on the side of the angels, especially when it comes to the desperate people of Tigray. What stands in the way, however, is the noisy, virtue-signalling obsession with things like Israel, or unconscious bias, or misgendering, or mixed-sex lavatories, all given rocket boosters by social media.

And you thought that black lives mattered.

NAIROBI (Reuters) – Scores of women have been raped in Ethiopia’s northerly Tigray region, authorities have confirmed, in the chaotic aftermath of an armed conflict last year that ousted the local ruling party.

“We have received the report back from our Taskforce team on the ground in the Tigray region, they have unfortunately established rape has taken place conclusively and without a doubt,” Ethiopian Women’s Minister Filsan Abdullahi tweeted late on Thursday.

Though witnesses, medics and aid workers had spoken of widespread sexual abuse since fighting began in November, Filsan’s comments were the first confirmation by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government.

The state-appointed Ethiopian Human Rights Commission said that 108 rapes had been reported in Tigray – nearly half in the regional capital Mekelle – in the last two months.

Though Abiy’s federal troops captured Mekelle at the end of November from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), sporadic fighting has continued, with communications and access to the mountainous region of 5 million people restricted.

While some victims have identified their abusers as federal forces or allied soldiers, Reuters has been unable to independently verify accounts of rape. The government has said it has zero tolerance towards sexual violence.

The Rights Commission said many rapes were likely to have gone unreported.

“The war and the dismantling of the regional administration have led to a rise in gender-based violence in the region. Local structures such as police and health facilities where victims of sexual violence would normally turn to report such crimes are no longer in place,” it said.

Spokesman Adinew Abera said the Women’s Ministry had so far assessed only Mekelle and the nearby town of Quiha, adding: “We will deploy experts to all districts of Tigray. So the number will be higher than what is mentioned.”