She is in her thirties, and she wants us to know: she wants to show what they deliberately want to hide from us. Lucy Kassa has been covering the civil war in Tigray since 2020, this region of northern Ethiopia where Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed sent his army to subdue the rebels, then the population, men, women, children. Absolutely all people from the Tigrayan minority. Two million displaced, thousands dead, and even more maimed.
The winner of the Written News category is ‘A Tigrayan womb should never give birth’: Rape in Tigray from @AJEnglish
-Powerful and moving work by @berhe_lucy
Congratulations to all concerned – @Teo_Kermeliotis, @jcvanmeek https://t.co/izj20ci4vd#AmnestyMediaAwards
— News From Amnesty (@NewsFromAmnesty) May 4, 2022
For months, she witnessed atrocities committed by both sides, she collected testimonies, evidence, all of which attested to organized ethnic cleansing, and her numerous reports published all over the world, from Daily Telegraph to Los Angeles Timestriggered the request for the opening by the UN of an international investigation for crimes against humanity.
War reporting is not just sensational, impressive images and the sound of bombs, it’s the essential black box that allows you to document the intolerable, “Thethe worst of what humanity can do”confides Lucy Kassa to the chain AlJazeera. For one of her investigations, she has just received the Amnesty International prize for war reporting 2022. A consolation for the one who almost paid for her work with her life. Last year, armed men broke into her home and threatened to kill her if she published her investigation into rape as a weapon of war.
Lucy Kassa had to leave her country, taking with her violent guilt and a feeling of helplessness: “It is the terrible observation that history repeats itself again and again. At that time, I had reached a point where I could no longer look at the images of my reports, the blood, the wounds, the deaths, the children, it was too much, and then one thinks of the survivors, the witnesses that we meet, and we continue.”
Today, Lucy Kassa no longer has the right to go to Tigray, but she continues to compile testimonies and does not want to be silent, like last week, at the Freedom Forum in Oslo, where she called never to think that telling is vain, “because war criminals think they can bury the truth, but the truth always catches on and it always comes out in the open.”