Buying into Ethiopia’s reconciliation

A European plan to build trust and democratic reforms may help Ethiopians address a war’s atrocities.

The Monitor's View

The European Union on Tuesday announced a new effort to help Ethiopia rebuild from an ethnic-driven civil war that still lingers nearly a year after it was brought formally to an end. Then, yesterday, a United Nations mandate for an inquiry into human rights violations during and since the war expired.

The two developments raise a question: Might Ethiopia be a testing ground for new approaches to bringing justice and protection for civilians in a conflict? If so, that possibility may reflect a global shift in how democracies coax reforms in post-conflict countries.

The United States and countries in Europe and Asia have “begun to move closer ... in their emphasis on the shared values that unite them and separate them from their authoritarian rivals,” Princeton political scientist Aaron L. Friedberg notes. Bolstering democratic practices abroad, he wrote for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, requires new approaches in political credibility and economic investment.

Since the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, and arguably further back, individual countries and the international community have embraced truth-telling as indispensable to post-conflict reconciliation and lasting peace. The U.N. inquiry commission, established by the Human Rights Council in 2021, was meant to “provide guidance on transitional justice, including accountability, reconciliation and healing.” On Tuesday, it reported that “most, if not all, of the structural drivers of violence and conflict” in Ethiopia remain unaddressed and require “continued international scrutiny.”

The commission needed the request of at least one member state of the council to keep working. Yet even as the EU commits to postwar reconstruction, no European country made the call. Critics fear that, without the panel’s oversight, potential war crimes will go unpunished. But the E.U.’s new investment plan espouses many of the same goals as transitional justice through other means. This includes investments in essential services that war-affected communities need to rebuild their lives and initiatives that “promote social cohesion, trust, and a culture of mutual respect and dialogue.”

Those investments, starting with an initial EU pledge of nearly $700 million over three years, align with Ethiopia’s own projects to rebuild local economies disrupted by the war. In August, the government estimated it would need $20 billion over five years to rebuild.

Postwar reconstruction involves renewing “a social contract between citizens and the government,” notes Alpaslan Özerdem, dean of the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University, in a Wilson Center blog. In Ethiopia, the EU may be shaping a new model for reform and reconciliation, one that targets investments toward uniting a country around shared values of good governance.