Addis Abeba — Lieutenant General Tadesse Werede, President of the Tigray Interim Administration, spoke of the urgent need to document the atrocities committed during the two-year brutal war in Tigray.
Speaking at a consultative forum organized by the Tigray Genocide Inquiry Commission on 16 June, the interim president stated that "the genocide perpetrated against the people of Tigray must not be forgotten", and called for justice and accountability to prevail.
"The genocide committed during the war in Tigray must be thoroughly documented," said General Tadesse. "We must ensure such crimes never happen again to the people of Tigray."
He stressed the importance of preserving material evidence, warning that without proper documentation, critical proof could be lost with time. "It must be preserved until justice is served," he added.
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The forum, titled "Collection and Preservation of Material Evidence Indicating Genocidal Acts in Tigray," aimed to enhance ongoing efforts to collect and safeguard evidence of mass atrocities committed in the Tigray region during the war.
While commending the commission for its work and encouraging it to intensify its efforts, President Tadesse reiterated that accountability and prevention must be central to the region's healing and rebuilding process.
Commissioner of the Tigray Genocide Inquiry Commission Yemane Zeray reported that despite significant internal and external pressures, the commission has managed to collect material evidence over the past years. Consultative forums have been held across multiple zones in Tigray and, he said, and urged Tigrayans - both within the region and in the diaspora - to support the Commission's efforts. "We must ensure that the genocide is neither forgotten nor repeated," he said.
Yemane told The Reporter newspaper in April last year that the them Tigray Interim Administration (TIA) has instructed his office to begin working with the Ministry of Finance and the World Bank.
"We're currently funded by the Interim Administration," he said. "It has ordered us to begin working in collaboration with the Ministry office responsible for implementing the national five-year strategic plan set to expire next year. We're now getting into their format."
In May last year, New Lines Institute, a U.S.-based think tank, released a report presenting what it described as "strong evidence" that Ethiopian forces and their allies committed genocide during the Tigray war.
The 120-page report stated that government forces, along with the Eritrean Defense Forces and Amhara regional militias, engaged in mass killings and deliberate starvation tactics against the Tigrayan population. The report urged the international community to bring the case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), citing war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Separately, a study released in May 2025 by the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR) found that social media platforms failed to control content "that promoted genocide" during the two-year war. The study, conducted by a team of journalists, activists, data analysts, and former content moderators, including DAIR's founder, Dr. Timnit Gebru--revealed widespread dissemination of hate speech, incitement to violence, and atrocity-related content online.
Previously, in its final report released at the end of the Human Rights Council's 54th session in October 2023, International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia (ICHREE) implicated Ethiopian federal forces, Eritrean forces, and allied regional forces in "mass killings, widespread and systematic rape and sexual violence, including sexualised slavery against women and girls, deliberate starvation, forced displacement, and large-scale arbitrary detentions which amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity" during the war in the Tigray region.
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It also accused Tigrayan forces of "killings, widespread rape and sexual violence, destruction of property and looting amounting to war crimes" in the Amhara region.
"The scale and continuity of violence in Ethiopia since 03 November 2020 is such that the present report cannot be considered to be fully reflective of the harms experienced by civilians in the regions under investigation," said Mohamed Chande Othman, then chairperson of the Commission.
The commission said it did not have sufficient time or resources to make a determination on potential genocide or crimes of extermination and stressed the vital need for fuller investigations to establish facts and legal accountability.
ICHREE's mandate has since been terminated.
