BY ZEKARIAS WOLDEMARIAM
Part I
It has been a while since efforts were launched to apply Transitional Justice (TJ) in Ethiopia. But since the conclusion of the war in northern Ethiopia with the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement (CoHA) on 4 November 2022 in Pretoria, South Africa, there has been renewed interest in TJ.
Experts in the field and related research indicate that TJ is not limited to addressing grievances and injustice committed during conflict or civil war. Rather it also helps to address decades of social, economic, and gender imbalances and marginalization that could have contributed to these grave abuses.
Since its inception in 2001, the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) has worked in more than 50 countries around the world, including Ethiopia. The center helps societies as they embark on a path toward a more just, inclusive, equitable, and peaceful future and begin to take collective action to address legacies of massive human rights violations and restore civic trust in state institutions.
Anna Myriam Roccatello is ICTJ’s Deputy Executive Director and Director of Programs. “The Center was established more than 20 years ago to systematize and export the lesson learned from many different countries that had gone through a political transition particularly after a violent conflict and to highlight those experiences and offer them to other contexts that are facing the same dilemmas,” she explains.
The Ethiopian Herald recently interviewed Roccatello about transitional justice, its advantages and possible obstacles, and why Ethiopians may benefit from it. Enjoy reading!
To begin, could you briefly describe ICTJ’s program in Ethiopia?
Our program in Ethiopia started very modestly. Initially, we just wanted to understand the context, understand the different positions of victims’ groups that we wanted to raise, and find a way for the state to recognize their experience and the need to address the violations they suffered. We tread very lightly, and with great respect for civil society, which is very diverse. We don’t have, and we don’t pretend to have, the resources to include everybody. So, we started very small, with a select number of individuals who could reliably represent the grievances of bigger groups.
But we made a point to always be in contact with the state authorities. We started to do this even before the war in Tigray erupted. Obviously, with that, the situation became even more complicated. So, in Ethiopia, we have the same role that we aspire to have everywhere. We are advisors to all parties involved, we are committed partners, and
we are impartial. Our only goal is to help create the conditions for the different parties to talk to each other and find together a possible way to start the process of dealing with the legacy of mass abuses. There is a lot to be done. The state has great challenges, victims are still in a dreadful situation, and it seems that tensions are now changing and multiplying. But at the same time, there are very good, promising processes that have begun, and the state representatives with whom we are in contact are genuinely trying to understand and learn as much as possible. It’s a very complex situation, but . . . if given the required amount of time, attention, and support, there is no reason why Ethiopia cannot succeed in a number of years, certainly at least to improve the situation.
In speeding up the process of TJ in Ethiopia, what do you think would be the role of the conclusion of the war in northern part of Ethiopia with a peace agreement?
Any agreement that stops the fighting is good because at least you have the possibility to talk to each other without violence. But it’s not sufficient. It can be very fragile and volatile; the situation may continue to be very volatile, unless you have a larger process of reforms, reckoning, and accountability. The first step, though, is always stopping the fighting.
Could you explain why we need to apply TJ?
Originally, transitional justice was applied only to situations that had experienced a very violent repression or an internal conflict. It was meant to remedy and provide justice for what we call gross violation of human rights; violations that infringe on the personal integrity of human beings. But over time, transitional justice has been applied progressively in more nuanced and varied situations—for example, in contexts where conflict is ongoing or where a relatively small number of individuals suffered grosshuman rights violations. Nonetheless, society broadly feels that there is a need to transition to a different political structure.
What are the conditions in a country that call for the application of TJ?
Well, you need to have a demand from the victims and broader society that certain systematic abuses—whether they are gross violations of human rights, or even economic, social, and cultural rights—must be addressed and that structures, institutions, and accountability measures must be put in place to limit the chances that these abuses will reoccur. So, this is the condition; it’s really the need and the demand of a society to change.
What kind of situations or conditions should be fulfilled for an effective TJ?
TJ has four pillars: truth, reparation, criminal prosecution, and guarantees of non-repetition. Though, we are very careful in using this terminology, because each context needs to find its own way to change and remedy the past. And the pillars are indicative of the types of remedies that you can implement and that are more often needed. That said, there are a variety of different processes that can be established that are very meaningful, even if you don’t ultimately pursue criminal prosecution, or do not ultimately have a full-fledged reparation program for victims. Of course, those remain ideals.
But another important issue to understand is that all remedies are complementary. You may have some criminal prosecution, but alone it will not bring change. You need to achieve acknowledgment by the political establishment that victims will obtain remedy, will obtain justice in all its forms, and justice doesn’t necessarily equate with criminal prosecution. And very often, it has been proven that in contexts where only criminal prosecution was pursued, the divisions remain, because criminal prosecution can be very divisive as an accountability process. What is much more important is to establish truth-seeking or other consultative processes to change authoritarian legislation, in which victims and broader society participate.
These can be very reparative in nature and can really change the balance in how citizens and the political elite relate to each other. That is what is particularly significant in a transition.
In what way does TJ attempt to achieve its outcomes compared with conventional criminal procedures?
The principle here is that, whatever a society decides to do in order to make things better, to achieve an inclusive, transparent, accountable, peaceful society, requires the inclusion of everyone. And therefore, if you have a past where some groups for a variety of reasons were marginalized, were ostracized, were repressed—regardless of the reasons that have brought about the violent confrontation—in order to reset the basis for a peaceful society, you need to come back to the whiteboard and say, “We are all here.” We all need to work together and to live together. What are the rules that we can all accept to govern our society in a peaceful manner, so that violence and abuses and gross violation of human rights do not characterize it again?
Criminal justice is an important element of transitional justice, but criminal justice is also a very institutionalized formal process, where victims are part of judicial proceedings, decisions are made by a representative of the state authority, and this representative makes decisions on the basis of what is admissible as evidence. It doesn’t very often provide, particularly in situation of systematic violence and climate of human insecurity, what victims need. It doesn’t provide space for the dignified participation of victims as active agents of change. Prosecuting and trying perpetrators is important because it signals that the state doesn’t tolerate certain behavior, but it has to be complemented by larger policies that are directed at changing the rules relating to victims and governing the society at large.
How does TJ attempt to treat issues from the perspective of the victims?
The term victim is obviously a legal term that indicates an individual who has suffered a violation of his or her own rights. In international law, it’s a person who has suffered violations of the most fundamental human rights.
Obviously, gross human rights violations—which, include extrajudicial killing, torture, systematic sexual violence, enforced disappearance, systematic discrimination based on race, those that are encapsulated in international conventions like genocide—are important. But economic, social, and cultural rights are equally important. Specifically, a society that is unbalanced and systematically marginalizes or excludes certain groups can apply transitional justice principles to address these problems.
Of course, the classic context where you revert to transitional justice is one where gross violations of human rights occur on a daily basis and on a massive scale and the state, any state, even the richest or the most developed, cannot deal with the number and the nature of those violations. In such contexts, you need multiple remedies that go at the source, at the root causes of the problems in order to remedy such a disastrous situation.
But as I said, remedying only the physical integrity violations, which is of paramount importance, without taking a very careful look at and strategizing about how to address economic and social marginalization may be shorter lived, because the imbalance in the society or discrimination persists. Access to resources and to political power continues to be limited for some. And therefore, you may be able to patch it up and to provide effective remedies. But you need to be cognizant that your society has not yet transitioned to a place where all possible contentious disputes and tensions can be democratically and peacefully resolved.
Does it mean even in the absence of conflict there is a need for TJ to address social and economic grievances or imbalances?
This is what we believe. Obviously, there are many countries that have gone in different directions, and that have tried to address those problems with more than, say, traditional rule of law mechanisms, which are judicial proceedings and law enforcement and criminal policies. It’s perfectly legitimate. In our experience, we believe that the magnitude of those problems, which erode the social contract between citizens and the state and state institutions, cannot effectively be solved by the traditional judicial remedies alone. But, this is a position of the practitioners and experts of transitional justice; it’s not a universal answer.
What are the challenges to implementing effective TJ in countries like Ethiopia?
Well, in a situation like Ethiopia, you have what we call the multifaceted conflict, with multiple groups that revendicate different opportunities and pursue different goals, and you have a central government that has the responsibility to keep all the different groups together, while at the same time, react to the commission of crimes and violence.
So, it’s in a way more complicated than a situation where you have the state against an opposing armed group. There, a political dialogue that hopefully brings about a peace accord is theoretically easier. And on the basis of a peace accord, you start restructuring the state so that the groups of the opposition feel represented. An adequate representation allows different groups to negotiate the political, institutional, and social structures that would make them accept the norms.
In Ethiopia, you have a multitude of different groups that have different demands, and that may find themselves in conflict with other groups at different points in time. So, it’s not only a binary dynamics between the state and one group, and even though the war in Northern Ethiopia obviously is quite binary, you nevertheless have other groups that agitate and have concerns and revert to violence. Of course, there, the problems are compounded and you may need to engage in bilateral dialogues, or hopefully at some point there would be the possibility to bring the different groups to the same table and install a process of dialogue among all of them, because at the end of the day what Ethiopia needs to achieve is a situation where these different groups that are equally Ethiopian and have lived in the territory of Ethiopia find a way to live together, to coexist without fear, without suspicion or resistance and resentment against state agents.
So, there is really a process of rebuilding trust in each other and that is very important. By offering processes that are consultative and inclusive and reparation for what has happened, that is a way to foster that dialogue which can bring about a solution for peaceful coexistence.
The second part of this interview will be published next Saturday
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD SATURDAY 29 APRIL 2023
