In the Amhara conflict, the gravest crimes are also the quietest. Rape and sexual violence have been used against women and girls not as an accident of war but as one of its instruments — to terrorise, to punish, to break a community through its women. The United Nations and independent human-rights bodies have said so plainly. And still the crime stays largely in the dark, because the people best placed to describe it are the ones with the most reason to stay silent.
This investigation does not recount individual assaults. The dignity of survivors does not require their suffering to be displayed, and the case does not depend on it. What follows is the institutional record — what the United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, peer-reviewed researchers and the United States government have each, separately, found.
Across those sources the conclusions converge: sexual violence in the conflict has been widespread, committed by multiple parties, and — in the language investigators use repeatedly — systematic.
01 · The patternA weapon, not a byproduct.
Sexual violence in war is sometimes treated as the regrettable conduct of undisciplined soldiers. The record in northern Ethiopia describes something else: a tactic. Investigators have documented rape used to terrorise and demoralise populations — the working definition of a weapon. In the Amhara conflict that opened in August 2023, the UN human-rights office folded sexual violence into its count of civilian harm, and researchers surveying women in conflict-affected Amhara found that all parties had committed it.
The findings below come from bodies with no shared agenda beyond the facts.
Six institutions, six methods, one conclusion. The dispute is about scale and accountability — never about whether it happened.
"Rape is being used as a weapon of war. It is systematic. It is planned." From the documentary Violence Against Women in Amhara
02 · The silenceWhy so little surfaces.
If the crime is so widely documented, why does it stay invisible? Because reporting it can cost a survivor almost everything: stigma in her community, the risk of reprisal, the absence of medical or legal services in a war zone, and a justice system that rarely moves. Humanitarian access to Amhara has been among the most restricted in the country — the UN has described the region as facing the highest levels of violence against aid workers in Ethiopia — so the very services that would record and treat survivors often cannot reach them. Underreporting is not a gap in the evidence. It is part of the crime's design.
03 · The impunityNamed, documented, unpunished.
The United States Department of State concluded that Ethiopian, Eritrean and Amhara forces committed rape and other sexual violence amounting to crimes against humanity. The UN Secretary-General's 2025 report warned of a steep global rise. But naming the crime is not the same as punishing it. Prosecutions remain rare and selective; command responsibility is almost never reached. Each year the record grows and the accountability does not — which is its own message to the next set of perpetrators.
04 · The film A Silent War Crime.
This investigation is the written companion to the documentary Violence Against Women in Amhara — A Silent War Crime, produced by GADTF and published on the @AmharaDiplomacy channel. The film gives space to survivors' own voices, with their dignity and safety protected.
05 · What this meansCounting the uncounted.
A killing leaves a body; a drone strike leaves a crater. Sexual violence often leaves nothing a satellite can see — only a survivor who may never speak, and a community that learns to be afraid. That invisibility is exactly why it is chosen, and exactly why it has to be documented with the same rigour as any other war crime.
The institutional record already exists. It is consistent, it is independent, and it is damning. What is missing is not evidence but consequence. Until naming the crime is followed by punishing it, the silence the perpetrators count on will keep doing its work.