By Prof John Harbeson
Diplomatic efforts to resolve the Ethiopian civil war, entering its second year, have been replete with calls for national dialogue to end the conflict. As of early January 2022, the best efforts of former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, High Representative of the African Union Commission for the Horn of Africa, and others have yet to yield any visible progress, let alone agreement on a national dialogue process charged with establishing appropriate measures to secure the peace.Â
This is the state of affairs notwithstanding that, currently, some of the most favorable circumstances for making the conflict ripe for resolution have emerged:
neither the Ethiopian government’s armies (EDF) nor those of the Tigrean People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) appear able to achieve a decisive military victory, notwithstanding the former’s use of externally supplied drones to attack the TPLF. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has apparently undertaken not to carry the war into the Tigre region, the TPLF’s bastion, and the TPLF, in its retreat into its home region, has signaled at least its suspension of an effort to force Abiy’s regime from power, and its contestation to recover a critically important agricultural region it lost to Amhara region forces aligned with the EDF during the war. Also, Eritrean forces, allied with the EDF, have appeared to return home after a lengthy intervention in Tigre.
Hurdles to negotiations are complicated by significant asymmetries, chiefly the continuing fundamental obligation of the Abiy’s government, more than a regional TPLF government, to address the massive humanitarian in Tigre region caused by the war and both armies, including two million displaced persons, and over a million facing famine. Abiy’s government has blocked all but about 10 percent of mobilized assistance to reach Tigre. They share possibly unequal culpability for genocidal level human rights abuses. Abiy’s government resists negotiations in part because they implicitly elevate the TPLF to equivalence with his government when constitutionally it is subordinate as a regional government.
National dialogues to address highly divisive, gravely endangered political stability have been undertaken in a number of countries in the post-Cold War era with uneven results. A 2017 study of 17 national dialogue initiatives by Geneva-based Graduate Institute for the United Nations Department of Political Affairs included several in sub-Saharan Africa; a Multi-Party Negotiation Process (1991) and a Convention for a Democratic South Africa (1992) that ended apartheid, in addition to National Conferences in Mali and Benin which set both countries on the road to democracy for a decade or more. Those in Togo and the Republic of the Congo achieved less progress.
This UN study identified ten factors affecting the likelihood of successful national dialogues. These included degree of international, national elite and general public support, prior involvement of local expertise, harvesting lessons from previous experience with these dialogues. They had a broad representation of actors to maximally legitimize the process, agreement on decision-making procedures, technical support for participants to encourage coalition building, and facilitation by neutral persons with high levels of personal legitimacy.
Calls for national dialogue to end the Ethiopian civil war have not appeared to take into account fully that if all these requirements for national dialogue could be met in advance for a successful launch, the conflict itself would already be well on its way to resolution. This is especially apposite in the Ethiopian case because the requirements presume a high level of legitimized procedural democracy not in place in the country itself after half a century of post-imperial rule under two authoritarian ruling regimes prior to Abiy’s ascendancy: the brutal military regime (1974-1991) and the TPLF led, four-party Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front regime(1991-2018) which oversaw continent-leading economic growth rates but ignoring democratic provisions of its own 1995 constitutional dispensation.
The democratic opening created by Abiy’s several important liberty-advancing initiatives on coming to power and reconciling with Eritrea, which led to his Nobel Peace Prize, created false expectations that more than full-scale Ethiopian democracy was in prospect. More fundamentally, it opened the prospect that democracy would, in turn, facilitate negotiations for the construction of a long-elusive post-imperial state, specifically terms on which the many ethnic communities thrown together by the conquests of emperor Menelik II (1889-1913) could freely consent to share membership in an Ethiopian polity together.
An effective national dialogue in reconciling the TPLF and Abiy’s regime would, thus, have significant implications, singularly, for the future, finally, of a post-imperial Ethiopian state on which, self-evidently, many other voices and interests would need to be represented. Unfortunately, Abiy regime’s mass of detention of thousands of Tigrean civilians based on their ethnic identity wherever they may be found has seemed to imply that realization of full democratic governance and a genuinely post-imperial state will continue to remain elusive. (
— Prof Harbeson is a professor of Political Science Emeritus and a professorial lecturer for the African Studies Program, Johns Hopkins University.
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