Prof. Nyssen: Genocider Abiy Ahmed Must Go to The ICC For Commiting Genocide in Tigray, Ethiopia

💭 Professor Jan Nyssen’s Speech at the “Save Tigray” demonstration in Brussels, 14 November 2022

👉 Prof. Jan Nyssen, Ghent University, Belgium

Good day to all!

All of us are very sad. We haven’t heard from our friends and relatives in Tigray for one or two years. We all know people who have died before their age. And we are alone: besides some smaller countries, NGOs and individuals, the international community has let Tigray down. Among the smaller countries that have understood the suffering of Tigray, there is Ireland. Ethiopia has direly punished them for that. But why is Ireland taking such a principled attitude? In my understanding, that is because, just like Tigray, Ireland knows what famine is. Just like Tigray, Ireland knows what it is to have an imperial neighbor. Ireland was living on the side of imperial Britain, Tigray is living on the side of imperial Ethiopia.

We are two weeks after the Pretoria agreements, and the humanitarian aid has not arrived – humanitarian aid should be there in any case, it should not even have been part of the peace negotiations.

We have calculated that 5 to 10% of the Tigray civilians have died due to massacres and starvation; to that you may add the numerous young fighters who took up weapons not to defend a party but to defend their families, their mothers and sisters from the killer armies.

Yesterday (13 November 2022), the Ethiopian chief of staff, Berhanu Jula said that “Tigray has been sufficiently punished”. What does that mean “Tigray has been sufficiently punished”? Let it sink in: “Tigray has been sufficiently punished”! So this was indeed a war against Tigray and not a war against TPLF! We have proven since the beginning that this is a war against Tigray, and not just a war to capture 128 individuals, or so, as Abiy claimed.

Abiy Ahmed is the main responsible, he has invited the Amhara fanos and Isayas. I listed their programme on my poster boards. But then, so many people have been killed, so many war crimes. The whole diplomatic world knows it, they express concerns after concerns but they do not take action. Are our governments really that naïve?

I think that they are more concerned with big business than with nitty gritty things like humanity and war crimes. At global scale we have the IMF which was just waiting for the Pretoria paperwork to give new loans to the Ethiopian government. But even here at the scale of Belgium: one of our Belgian MPs, Samuel Cogolati, has proposed to sanction the Ethiopian regime by curtailing the landing rights for Ethiopian Airlines. It would be a sanction that does not hurt the poorest of the poor in Ethiopia, because they cannot afford international air travel anyway. But what do we hear then as feedback from our government circles? “Oh, but we should not be tough on Ethiopia, otherwise they will shift their cargo flights from Liège in Belgium to Maastricht in The Netherlands; and we’ll lose income”… That’s how far the complicity is going...