Ethiopia urgently needs inclusive national dialogue

And in order to start one, it needs to face its imperial past and legacy.

The civil war in the Tigray region of Ethiopia is fuelling a vicious national and regional conflagration. The five-month-long conflict, which Ethiopia initially defended as a rule-of-law operation with “clear, limited and achievable objectives”, metastasised into a lawless and bloody war, leading to credible allegations of war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have provided disturbing accounts of atrocities, breath-taking in scale and scope, where Eritrean troops and Amhara militias, fighting alongside the Ethiopian army, massacred civilians, committed horrific acts of sexual violence and “completely erased” whole villages. Media reports show that Eritrean troops carried out grisly massacres, gang-raped and tortured women, and engaged in extensive and deliberate acts of plunder and destruction of civilian infrastructure. A report by the United States government accused the Amhara militia of “deliberately and efficiently rendering Western Tigray ethnically homogeneous through the organised use of force and intimidation” – an act that Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, called “ethnic cleansing”. The UN has reported more than 500 cases of rape, including instances where men were forced to rape family members. Tigrayan forces have also been accused of committing atrocities.