[Richard Dicker was the longtime international justice director and is now a senior legal adviser for advocacy at Human Rights Watch. He teaches courses on international criminal courts at Columbia Law School.]
Goitom, a 42-year-old ethnic Tigrayan farmer, living in that northern region of Ethiopia, watched helplessly when, on January 17, 2021, Amhara Special Forces – a brutal paramilitary group – beat up and detained Tigrayan men in his town.
As he told Human Rights Watch researchers, “Our numbers were decreasing by the day. After the Tekeze incident [a massacre of 60 Tigrayan men] happened, Tigrayans left in big numbers. There was nothing to live for. We were not part of the town; it was taken over by other people. We were not allowed to live.” Read more