Ethiopia’s Orthodox Church patriarch condemns Tigray ‘genocide’

In a video recorded last month, Abune Mathias says government forces ‘want to destroy the people of Tigray’.

The head of Ethiopia’s Orthodox Church has accused government forces of carrying out “genocide” in the country’s Tigray region, where a six-month conflict between federal and allied troops and forces loyal to the former ruling party is believed to have killed thousands of people. In a video shot last month on a mobile phone and taken out of Ethiopia, the elderly Patriarch Abune Mathias addresses the church’s millions of followers and the international community, saying his previous attempts to speak out were blocked. “I am not clear why they want to declare genocide on the people of Tigray,” the patriarch, an ethnic Tigrayan, says, speaking in Amharic.