No peace, no justice: The politics of forgetting and the Tigray war
The Tigray war was not the first sign of a decayed international order, but it was undoubtedly one of the bloodiest. Ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, war crimes, mass sexual violence, induced starvation, telecommunications blackout, mass killings, and more besides defined the war on the Tigrayan people, carried out by the Ethiopian government and its Eritrean allies and Amhara paramilitaries. At least 600,000 people perished in the two-year conflict between 2020 and 2022, and over 120,000 women and girls were estimated to have been raped. And over two and a half years since the fighting ceased, harrowing stories and reports continue to emerge almost every day from the conflict, only adding to the reams of evidence stacking up against particular soldiers, units, and commanders. However, under the current federal administration and with another conflict involving Asmara and Addis looming -- this time against one another-- such questions of justice and accountability appear more distant than ever before.
Since the conclusion of the fighting in November 2022, Tigrayans have been trapped in a grim limbo, a kind of 'no war, no peace' scenario. Hundreds of thousands remain in overcrowded, underfunded displacement camps, with malnutrition and preventable diseases rife. The region's bombed-out and looted hospitals, schools, roads, and telecommunications infrastructure are all in dire need of repair. Consequently, much of the Tigray economy lies in tatters as well, with some of the only profitable activities being relegated to illicit gold mining. Fuel and goods into the region have been repeatedly choked by the government this year, and power, even in Mekelle, is often intermittent. Many more of the scars are unseen. There are the children who witnessed the killing of a parent or family member, the women who experienced sexual assault, the PTSD of those struck by drones, and all the scars of famine as well --choosing which starving child to feed and neighbour to turn away. Amid the growing rhetorical aggression from Addis, Asmara, and even some Tigrayan politicians, the fears of a return to the brutality of 2020-2022 remain high.
The Pretoria agreement was always a flawed document, a rushed process that lacked an implementation matrix and was secured with the Tigrayan delegation under intense pressure to sign a deal. But the deteriorated relationship between Mekelle and Addis, and particularly amid the ousting of Tigray Interim President Getachew Reda earlier this year, has not helped either, with the federal government dragging its feet on dispensing funds and helping to rebuild Tigray. It is apparent that the ruling Prosperity Party would prefer a much-weakened Tigray, and a Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) that cannot challenge its hold on power. This ongoing arm-wrestle between Addis and Mekelle has now been joined by intermittent clashes in Southern Tigray in recent weeks, further raising the stakes and pressure in northern Ethiopia.
As part of the Pretoria agreement, the Ministry of Justice established the Transitional Justice Technical Working Group of Experts, tasked with developing various policy options for transitional justice models in Ethiopia. But from the outset, it was readily apparent that Addis had little inclination towards a serious investigation or any subsequent transitional justice model. At successive intervals, the Ethiopian government has adopted hypernationalist positions as a means to stave off international criticism or attention on its dire human rights record. As part of its misleading framing of 'Ethiopian solutions for Ethiopian problems,' Addis argued that it could do a better job of implementing a context-specific model and that outside bodies, such as the International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia (ICHREE), were simply neo-imperial, meddling institutions. But even before the war had ended, the Ministry of Justice was muddying the waters of any reports from the ICHREE and others, attempting to create a false equivalence between the human rights violations carried out by the Ethiopian federal government and its allies, and those of the Tigrayan forces.
Eventually, and with its work unfinished, the ICHREE was shuttered in September 2023, following concerted pressure from Addis on the relevant UN member states. What has come next has been immensely disappointing for the victims and survivors of the Tigray war. In April 2024, a transitional justice policy was adopted by the government after being presented to the Council of Ministers. But beyond that, there has been no concerted outreach to the Tigrayan population, no truth-telling amongst those that carried out atrocities, nor any sense of how Addis might prosecute the many thousands of Eritrean soldiers implicated in massacres in Adigrat, Axum, and elsewhere. The clearest sign of the political expediency of war crimes in Tigray and justice can be best seen in relation to Eritrea, with senior Ethiopian officials having latterly woken up to the violations committed by Asmara. Ethiopian officials were largely silent about Eritrea's role during the war until just a few months ago, but are now clamouring about its military's presence in Tigray as part of its thinly veiled casus belli, while wholly ignoring their own part in inviting them into the conflict. And the Fano paramilitary units involved in the ethnic cleansing in Western Tigray have similarly turned on Addis, and are now locked in a gruelling stalemate in Amhara.
Other avenues for justice or reconciliation have been similarly wielded as lip service for foreign and domestic pressure. The National Dialogue Commission is widely regarded as a farce, as it lacks the power to prosecute and is limited to recommending options to the federal parliament. Opposition parties from the Tigray, Oromia, and Amhara regions, as well as others, have all withdrawn from participation. The coalition of Fano militias in the Amhara region and the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) has also refused to participate. Any conclusions it arrives at will be widely disregarded as illegitimate by a much-polarised country, even if rubber-stamped by the Prosperity Party-dominated House of Representatives. Even the state human rights body, the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC), is facing pressure, coming under heavy criticism from the prime minister in recent months. Several senior officials have resigned from their posts well before their term limits had expired, including two just days before the EHRC's grim annual report was published earlier this month.
Since the end of the war in November 2022, no attempts have been made to begin repairing the frayed political settlement of the country. Hundreds more journalists, opposition politicians, and critical activists have either been detained on flimsy grounds or fled overseas, while insurgencies in Amhara and Oromia continue to rage. And in Addis, there has been no introspection from the government about the human, political, or economic costs of the Tigray war to the country. Nor has there been one from the international community. Tigray should be considered one of the graveyards of the liberal international order– and the pretence that international humanitarian law means anything today. It helped lay the foundation for the deliberate and continuing starvation of civilians in Sudan and Gaza, with any notion of Responsibility to Protect having long vanished to a collective shrug of international shoulders.
Last month, a major report by Physicians for Human Rights was published, entitled "You Will Never Be Able to Give Birth": Conflict-Related Sexual and Reproductive Violence in Ethiopia.' It makes for harrowing reading, highlighting the widespread nature of gender-based sexual violence during the conflict, as well as the impunity for Eritrean soldiers and others to carry out sexual assaults after the war. None of these women and girls, with ages ranging from children to the elderly, has seen justice. And the very notion that one can have 'transitional justice' without any kind of transition is nonsensical. Hundreds of thousands in Tigray are barely surviving, still dependent on dwindling humanitarian aid. Western Tigray remains occupied by a mixture of Eritrean, Ethiopian, and Amhara forces. The TPLF have reasserted their vice-like grip on the politics of Tigray. Addis continues to sabre-rattle against both Mekelle and Asmara. And Eritrea has once again reinserted itself in the politics of northern Ethiopia. Perhaps the only aspect to have changed is the breakdown of the alliance between Addis and Asmara, one that propelled the war in Tigray and which now looks set to return conflict to the two countries. And it is Tigrayan civilians-- still grieving their loved ones and wrestling with the devastating consequences of the last war-- that will be caught in the middle once again.
The Ethiopian Cable Team
