Don’t Let Ethiopia Avoid Accountability

Eight months after warring parties signed the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement in Ethiopia, the United States is eager to reengage in a full bilateral relationship with the Ethiopian government. According to a congressional notification seen by FP, the U.S. Treasury Department last month “determined that Ethiopia no longer is engaging in a pattern of gross violations of human rights.”

Indeed, there is now a danger that the U.S. government is willing to deprioritize justice and accountability for the survivors of the conflict in exchange for a close relationship with Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government.

The cessation agreement, signed in November 2022 between the Ethiopian government and Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), came after two years of fighting that left hundreds of thousands dead from direct conflict and hundreds of thousands more dead from lack of access to food and medicine. While the conflict received significantly less media attention, the death toll may be even higher than that in Ukraine.

Following the agreement, the situation has improved for civilians, with desperately needed humanitarian aid and a restoration of services such as banking and telecommunications arriving in parts of Tigray. Nonetheless, human rights violations remain ongoing in Tigray, as well as in Oromia and Amhara. Just last month, Human Rights Watch reported that local authorities and Amhara forces continued to expel Tigrayans.

No doubt, the atrocities have been perpetrated by multiple parties, including forces from the Ethiopian federal government, the TPLF, and the neighboring Eritrean Defense Forces—which was not a party to the cessation agreement. The international community is solely focused on Tigray, however, while largely ignoring tensions in other areas of Ethiopia, to the detriment of civilians in those regions. For example, in April 2023, Amnesty International raised concerns regarding journalists being detained amid rising violence and mass arrests in the Amhara region.

Although the United States played a significant supporting role in getting both parties to the negotiating table, the agreement was publicly orchestrated by the African Union (AU). As a result, the agreement has been touted by the international community as an example of African solutions to African problems, and there’s reason to celebrate this, especially in a region whose autonomy has often been sidelined in the context of “great-power” competition.

The peace agreement’s success greatly depends on the United States effectively using its leverage to advocate for justice and accountability.

Nevertheless, it’s worth acknowledging that in many parts of the continent, accountability to—and for—people who have suffered human rights harms and abuses is sorely lacking. In fact, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights recently made the decision to terminate its Commission of Inquiry on the Situation in the Tigray Region, demonstrating a lack of political will to remain engaged. Consequently, as the agreement enters the implementation phase, its success greatly depends on the United States effectively using its leverage, along with the rest of the international community, to advocate for justice and accountability.

U.S. influence on Ethiopia remains strong. Although Washington recently halted the provision of food aid to Ethiopia, the United States continues to be the largest humanitarian aid donor to Ethiopia. Ethiopia also greatly benefited from being a trading partner under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA)—a designation that was revoked during the protracted war with TPLF. The Ethiopian government is keen to once again have its products receive duty-free access to U.S. market goods through AGOA. However, in its revocation, the United States notes that before reinstatement, the Ethiopian government must first meet clear benchmarks toward the “gross violations of internationally recognized human rights” it has perpetrated.

In 2022, the Biden administration released a new U.S.-Africa strategy document, calling for equal partnership with the continent in tackling both regional and global challenges. However, critics of the strategy have rightly highlighted the inherent tension between the administration’s rhetoric of supporting human rights and its silence when some of its African partners may be contravening those same human rights principles. On Ethiopia, for example, the administration could have actively encouraged the AU to act with greater urgency. The AU was silent throughout the conflict in northern Tigray, even in the face of clear war crimes and crimes against humanity documented by leading human rights organizations.

To live up to its espoused values, the United States must be willing to take more of a principled and prominent role in its partnership with the AU to ensure both Ethiopia and the TPLF are meeting their obligations. The international community, led by the African Union and the United States, must insist that the agreement be complemented with substantive efforts to pursue justice and accountability for and with survivors of the war. The current crisis unfolding in Sudan exemplifies what happens when the international community focuses on the immediate cessation of violence at the expense of real accountability.

In Ethiopia, glossing over what justice is due to people who have suffered human rights violations offers only a shortsighted win; it also ignores the ongoing threats as other regions in the country face their own violent struggle with the central government. The Ethiopian government, its neighbors, and militias have no incentive to end human rights violations perpetrated elsewhere, in regions such as Oromia and Amhara, unless perpetrators of human rights abuses in the Tigray conflict are brought to account and survivors provided a remedy.

The cessation agreement is vague on requirements for justice and accountability, leaving it to those implicated in crimes to investigate and hold themselves accountable. The ICHREE, whose mandate is set to expire unless voted for renewal in September, is therefore a powerful tool for documenting crimes that were committed. While both parties have acknowledged the need for justice, the Ethiopian government—emboldened by some members of the United Nations Human Rights Council—is attempting to use the cessation agreement as a pretext to thwart the commission’s important work, demonstrating that in the absence of pressure from Washington, it will not likely take meaningful steps on its own.

Without ICHREE, only domestic and regional mechanisms—currently ill-equipped for the task—will remain to carry out the necessary tasks of documenting atrocities and seeking accountability. As one of the guarantors of the cessation agreement, the United States needs to use its influence to amplify and center the rights of survivors of the conflict to ensure the truce delivers more to the Ethiopian people than to the elites who signed the agreement. For one, the Biden administration must begin to proactively support ICHREE’s renewal, along with the EU, instead of appearing willing to acquiesce to the Ethiopian government’s desire to end its mandate.

While U.S. policymakers may claim the decision on ICHREE is out of their hands given U.N. Human Rights Council dynamics, this simply shows a lack of prioritizing the issue—and perhaps of Ethiopia more broadly. We’ve seen positive dividends on the continent when the United States used the full force of its senior leadership to push through difficult mandates, such as former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley’s efforts to get an arms embargo for South Sudan passed through the U.N. Security Council. The United States could use similar levels of diplomatic heft with its European and African partners to protect the rights of survivors, instead of assigning lobbying to junior diplomats.

Some close U.S. partners within the European Union appear willing to move on in their bilateral engagements. However, unless Ethiopia’s partners are unified in advocating for justice and accountability, the Ethiopian government may simply ignore those that do. Senior U.S. diplomats can cajole European allies and use their presence in multinational forums to pressure allies to speak with a unified voice.

In March, the U.S. government took an important step in its effort to support justice and accountability when Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced an atrocity determination implicating the Ethiopian National Defense Force, TPLF, and the Eritrean Defense Force in committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. The determination puts the United States on record as saying that these crimes were committed during the two-year conflict, echoing the conclusions of ICHREE and major international human rights organizations. Having acknowledged these crimes, the United States cannot then half-step mechanisms that ensure justice and accountability.

If survivors of the conflict do not feel safe participating in a government-led process, that should give the United States pause.

Finally, the Biden administration must ensure that any domestic accountability process it endorses is considered legitimate not just by the government but also by the Ethiopian people, and in particular, survivors of the violence. Early indications are that the vast majority of Ethiopians and Tigrayans don’t understand the cessation agreement and may therefore be skeptical of its promise. Moreover, if survivors of the conflict do not feel safe participating in a government-led process, such a process should give the United States cause for concern.

To ignore these warning signs in exchange for an improved relationship with the Ethiopian government would be a mistake. Sudan’s unfolding horror is a reminder that impunity and unaddressed tensions only fester. To simply return to business as usual with Ethiopia, just months after releasing the atrocity determination, would be an affront to survivors of the conflict. Furthermore, by ignoring its own determination to resume regular order, the United States would be signaling to rights violators across the globe that even an atrocity determination will not force Washington to reassess its own diplomatic and foreign policy priorities.

The recent U.S. acknowledgement that African governments are equal partners is an important and long-overdue shift in U.S.-Africa policy. However, as in all equal partnerships among nations, the United States is not absolved of its responsibility to advocate for human rights and support survivors of war crimes and crimes against humanity when dealing with partner governments.

As a long-standing supporter of the Ethiopian people, the United States has a responsibility to use its clout to set a clear expectation that justice for survivors is paramount, and those who seek to avoid accountability will not succeed.