Event Description
Join PILPG, Covington & Burling, and a panel of Ethiopian experts on March 27 at 12:00 pm ET / 7:00 pm Addis Ababa time for an expert roundtable on the Amhara conflict, including its causes, recent developments, and potential pathways forward.
The Amhara conflict in Ethiopia, the second most populated country in Africa, is an ongoing armed conflict that began in April 2023 between the Government of Ethiopia and the Amhara Fano—a popular armed resistance— comprising members of the Amhara ethnic group. On August 4, 2023, the Government of Ethiopia declared a State of Emergency in the Amhara region, which was followed by mass arrests of Amhara politicians, journalists and activists, accompanied by internet and telephone shutdowns in the region. In February 2024, the State of Emergency was extended for another four months.
The conflict is driven by a combination of deep-rooted grievances of the Amhara population, including political exclusion and marginalization, ethnic-based killings and widespread displacements that span over three decades. These challenges have exacerbated over the past five years culminating in the present violent conflict that has been marked by atrocity crimes and widespread attacks on civilian populations in the Amhara region. Members of the international community, including the U.S. and the EU, as well as the UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and others have issued statements expressing alarm about increasing attacks against Amhara civilians, calling for an independent investigation.
This roundtable will be moderated by PILPG President Paul Williams. Our panelists will provide historical background to the Amhara conflict, as well as discuss recent developments. The panelists will then examine the root causes of the conflict, explore options for accountability, and examine pathways for durable conflict resolution moving forward.
This is part of the PILPG Thought Leadership Initiative. The Initiative focuses on prominent international law and international affairs topics and organizes monthly expert roundtables to share expertise and reflections from our work on peace negotiations, post-conflict constitution drafting, and war crimes prosecution.
Speakers
Berhanemeskel Nega
Mr. Nega has over thirty-five years of professional experience in international affairs and multilateral diplomacy, mediation, peacekeeping and peacebuilding. From 2015 to 2020, Mr. Nega served as the Head of Office and Director of Political Affairs at the United Nations in Sudan, where he worked to support the Juba and Doha peace processes and to facilitate the national dialogue and reconciliation processes. Prior to that role he served as the Chief of Staff for the United Nations Peacebuilding Mission in Guinea Bissau. Mr. Nega also served as the Chief of Staff, Deputy Head of Mission, and Acting Executive Representative of the United Nations Secretary General in Sierra Leone.
Prior to these deployments, Mr. Nega served as a Diplomat in the Ethiopian Foreign Service, including as the representative to the United Nations and other international forums. Mr. Nega has extensive experience in the negotiations of international instruments, including the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
Mr. Nega holds a Masters in International Law with Honors from Kiev University of Law, and a Master of Arts from St. John's University.
Dr. Senait Senay
Senait Senay (PhD) is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of biosecurity and a full-time researcher at the University of Minnesota, USA. She specializes in both slow and rapid on-set natural and manmade disaster risk modelling and prediction. She has in the past worked with UN agencies and has consistently volunteered for human right causes. She is also the director and co-founder of the volunteer-based iNGO, Genocide Prevention in Ethiopia (GPE), an initiative that is recently established to raise awareness about the ongoing genocide against Amharas and other alarmingly rampant ethnic based atrocities in Ethiopia.
Dr. Demissie Alemayehu
Demissie Alemayehu, PhD, is Adjunct Professor at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he has held several advisory responsibilities for graduate programs for more than three decades. In parallel, Dr. Alemayehu has also assumed executive leadership roles at major pharmaceutical companies for over thirty years. Dr. Alemayehu is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association and has served in various capacities at important professional societies. He has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and has co-authored at least three monographs on biostatistics and related fields. His current interests include exploration of the potential of machine learning and artificial intelligence in addressing public health problems. Dr. Alemayehu’s non-academic activities comprise genocide prevention and protection of human rights.
Ambassador Stephen Rapp
Ambassador Stephen Rapp is a Senior Peace Fellow at PILPG. He is a Senior Visiting Fellow of Practice with the Blavatnik School’s Institute for Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflict’s Programme on International Peace and Security. He also currently serves as Distinguished Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Prevention of Genocide, and as Chair of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, which has collected and analysed more than 750,000 pages of documentation from Syria and Iraq to prepare cases for future prosecution.
From 2009 to 2015, he was Ambassador-at-Large heading the Office of Global Criminal Justice in the US State Department. During his tenure, he travelled more than 1.5 million miles to 87 countries to engage with victims, civil society organisations, investigators and prosecutors, and the leaders of governments and international bodies to further efforts to bring the perpetrators of mass atrocities to justice.
Ambassador Rapp was the Chief Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone from 2007 to 2009, where he led the prosecution of former Liberian President Charles Taylor. From 2001 to 2007, he served as Senior Trial Attorney and Chief of Prosecutions at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, where he headed the trial team that achieved the first convictions in history of leaders of the mass media for the crime of direct and public incitement to commit genocide.
MODERATOR
Professor Milena Sterio
Milena Sterio is the Managing Director of PILPG and the Charles R. Emrick Jr. - Calfee Halter & Griswold Professor of Law at Cleveland State University’s Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. She is a leading expert on international law, international criminal law and human rights. Sterio leads PILPG’s Thought Leadership Initiative.
Sterio is one of six permanent editors of the prestigious IntLawGrrls blog, and a frequent contributor to the blog focused on international law, policy and practice. In the spring of 2013, Sterio was selected as a Fulbright Scholar, spending the semester in Baku, Azerbaijan, at Baku State University. While in Baku, she had the opportunity to teach and conduct research on secession issues under international law related to the province of Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh. Serving as a maritime piracy law expert, she has participated in meetings of the United Nations Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia as well as in the work of the United Nations Global Counterterrorism Forum. Sterio has also assisted piracy prosecutions in Mauritius, Kenya and the Seychelles Islands. Sterio is a graduate of Cornell Law School and the University of Paris I, and was an associate in the New York City firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton before joining the ranks of academia full time. She has published seven books and numerous law review articles. Her latest book, “The Syrian Conflict’s Impact on International Law,” (co-authored with Paul Williams and Michael Scharf) was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.