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Abiy Ahmed: The First Nobel Laureate On Trial at the International Criminal Court?

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.

by Michael Rubin

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.”

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