Ethiopia is putting the finishing touches on a much-trumpeted initiative for transitional justice in the wake of a devastating civil war in the northern Tigray region.
Ethiopia is putting the finishing touches on a much-trumpeted initiative for transitional justice in the wake of a devastating civil war in the northern Tigray region.
There is much popular demand for such an initiative. Ethiopians of all stripes now say they want accountability: In late December, a Justice Ministry body tasked with developing the policy in accordance with the November 2022 peace agreement, signed in South Africa between the government and the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), revealed a consensus on the need for prosecution of those responsible for the most heinous war crimes. It came hot on the heels of the state-affiliated Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) releasing its own recommendations, which also listed criminal accountability among an array of transitional justice components.
But expecting criminal accountability from the state that perpetrated most of the atrocities documented by human rights groups is a fool’s errand. In their probe into the 2020-2022 war, international investigators verified the mass killings of Tigrayans by Ethiopian and Eritrean troops in a pattern that had the makings of “androcide”—the systematic murder of men and boys.
The U.S. State Department, moreover, has designated the mass expulsion of Tigrayans from Western Tigray by Amhara militias—which were at the time allied with the Ethiopian army—as ethnic cleansing. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the United Nations, meanwhile, have documented the use of rape as a weapon of war as well as sexual slavery of Tigrayan women by soldiers from both Ethiopia and its neighbor Eritrea, whose troops fought alongside Ethiopian federal forces and remain present in Tigray. Amnesty International and others have also determined that fighters affiliated with the TPLF committed war crimes—including rape and summary executions—in neighboring regions of Amhara and Afar.
But the government of Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has mastered the art of deception. It continues to demonstrate adeptness at providing just enough to ease international pressure, only to reverse course once it gets its way. Transitional justice is its latest tool—elaborately devised to ensure impunity, all on the West’s dime.
Nearly three years ago, the Ethiopian state watchdog teamed up with the U.N. human rights office to launch a much-touted joint investigation into the atrocities in Tigray, with the EHRC chief commissioner pledging to cover each violation of international human rights, humanitarian, and refugee laws.
The resulting probe, however, ended up seriously flawed. We know because we were there: As advisors to the commission between 2020 to 2021 and 2021 to 2022, respectively, we found that the EHRC senior leadership was prone to downplaying the Ethiopian military’s crimes and skilled at systematically obscuring them.
In spite of a surfeit of evidence, the probe ultimately failed to visit the sites of large-scale civilian massacres in Tigray. In the face of irrefutable research from credible sources, its findings did not account for the systematic sexual violence against Tigrayan women. In defiance of the alarm consistently expressed by humanitarian agencies, the investigation gave short shrift to well-founded allegations that Tigray’s 6 million people were being deliberately starved.
And yet this woefully deficient investigation formed the basis of Ethiopia’s playbook to stave off demands for additional probes. The EHRC and its leadership, meanwhile, played a central role in the formulation of the transitional justice policy.
Crucially, though, the probe made one welcome recommendation: It conceded that an international investigative mechanism could be established. Yet after the international community duly responded and formed the International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia (ICHREE), the Ethiopian government mounted a fierce campaign to obstruct its work.
The ICHREE investigation, led by a team of three commissioners from Tanzania, the United States, and Sri Lanka before its dissolution in September, yielded extensive and far more accurate reflections of the conflict’s abuses than the joint investigation, but its work was cut short due to Ethiopia’s campaign. Addis Ababa had only accepted an international mechanism to lend credibility to the findings of the joint investigation, and thus sought to undermine ICHREE once it commenced work.
To quash what was the only remaining credible and independent investigative body, the Ethiopian government resorted to underhanded tactics. It twice proposed resolutions at the U.N. General Assembly to cut off the ICHREE’s funding.
Failing to generate sufficient support for these proposals, informed sources—who wish to remain anonymous due to security fears—said Ethiopia took to subjecting ICHREE members to threats. It also pressured some of their governments to withdraw their participation. But, amid rising Chinese and Persian Gulf state influence in the Horn of Africa and growing concerns about curbing migration from Africa at the heart of policy debates at home, some influential international backers in Europe saw little upside in upending their ties with Ethiopia, which is the seat of the African Union.
In September, the European Union—led by Germany and France—and African members of the U.N. Human Rights Council ultimately obliged Abiy’s government, with the Europeans allowing the ICHREE’s mandate to lapse by declining to bring forward an extension resolution. African members had earlier indicated a reluctance to vote in favor.
It is now abundantly clear that the Abiy government is once again dusting off tried-and-tested tactics for avoiding accountability. Preparations to launch the transitional justice policy have come close to completion in the absence of a transition from political violence, with one insurgency erupting in Amhara and another expanding in Oromia, and little prospect of truth-telling.
The process has also been undertaken without key participants. The working group said it has held 80 consultations across the country, the input from which is set to form the foundation of the policy. And yet Tigrayans say they lacked a voice in its design and argue their input—as the main victims of a conflict that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives—has not been sufficiently gathered. The process, they say, has failed to fulfill the essential element of transitional justice: the centrality of victims.
The working group also said its deliberations had revealed agreement on extending the temporal scope of the policy to include human rights violations from as far back as 1995, the year that the TPLF-led Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) ruling coalition put a new constitution into effect. But this has the look of a diversionary ploy, allowing room for manipulation by prioritizing human rights violations perpetrated before the outbreak of the war in Tigray. All the same, this time period merits scrutiny and accountability, but no plans have emerged on the part of the current government in terms of how, when, or even if an investigation into EPRDF-era human rights violations will ever be undertaken.
It is little coincidence that there aren’t any such plans: Incumbent government officials themselves would not be spared in the event that such an expansive probe is undertaken and crimes verified. The Oromo People’s Democratic Organization, the precursor of Abiy’s current party, was established in the early 1990s and remained part of the ruling coalition without interruption until the prime minister took on the top job in 2018. Abiy served the EPRDF as soldier, intelligence officer, and later on as a politician. Current cabinet members and senior military and regional officials served in similarly high-ranking positions.
Declarations along such lines are therefore indicative of the general direction of travel: a preemptive exercise aimed at turning the TPLF leadership—which ran Ethiopia until 2018—into the main subject of accountability rather than the perpetrators of atrocities in the 2020-2022 war in Tigray. An enlarged scope would then pave the way for the transitional justice policy to advance reconciliation without accountability.
In the meantime, a government emboldened by its success in thwarting pressure continues to dismiss fears of famine in Tigray and perpetrate atrocities in Amhara and Oromia. Western reluctance to shun Abiy due to geopolitical considerations means that it is now all but certain that the Ethiopian government will successfully sweep its atrocities in Tigray under the rug.
Perhaps, though, that is what some Western partners really have in mind. At the height of the war, one European diplomat in Addis Ababa summed up the EU’s attitude: “Abiy is an asshole, but he is our asshole.”
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