It’s over. The Commission that so many hoped would provide some form of justice and healing for the tens of thousands of victims of Ethiopia and Eritrea’s war in Tigray has been allowed to lapse.

Established in 2021 after the European Union pushed for its creation, the UN Commission was not without achievements. But was it ever likely to succeed?

From the start it had two major problems.

The Eritreans, and the Somali troops that fought alongside them, were never going to be held to account.

Second: the Ethiopians were never prepared to go along with it and the Commissioners were never given the access to Tigray or to the Ethiopian military that they required.

Now Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has had his way: it is over.

In the end the European Union and the USA decided that their relationship with Ethiopia was too important to be put in jeopardy by halting funds from the IMF that PM Abiy so badly needs to rebuild his shattered economy. They folded and he won. It is not much more complex than that.

Do victims ever get justice?

The international community is for every signing pledges that there will be ‘zero tolerance’ of sexual violence and other atrocities during conflicts.

The record is distinctly patchy.

First the successes

  • After the Second World War the Nuremberg trials held the most notorious Nazis to their deaths or to jail.
  • The wars that tore apart the former Yugoslavia resulted in the prosecution of some of the worst offenders like the Serb president Radovan Karadžić were convicted of genocide and war crimes.
  • The Rwandan tribunal offered a measure of justice to the hundreds of thousands of Tutsi victims of the 1994 genocide, but little to the Hutu who were also killed.

So it can be done.

But consider the omissions.

  • Which American President was indicted for dropping napalm and agent orange on Vietnam during the 20 years of warfare that ended in 1975?
  • No Russian general was held accountable for the atrocities committed during their occupation of Afghanistan – a conflict that cost up to two million Afghan lives? And that is before we consider the role of the USA, Britain and others in Afghanistan.
  • This is before one looks at the myriad neglected wars that have inflicted such damage on the world. This ranges from the Iran-Iraq war that ended in 1988 leaving between 1 and 2 million dead. Or the war crimes inflicted by Bashar al-Assad on the Syrian people.

What lesson can we draw from this dismal assessment?

Perhaps it is this: that we need to continue attempting to live up to our collective commitments. Sometimes they can be made to work, but when the stakes are too high all the high-flown rhetoric of our political leaders are soon set aside. This is the human experience.