Ethiopia’s national dialogue, which opened on July 15, was billed as the country’s best chance in years to talk its way out of cycles of conflict that have battered the country for decades. In Addis Ababa, 4,000 participants gathered for 35 days of discussions on the critical issues dividing different groups.
During this period, however, stark realities have disheartened genuine Ethiopians who long for a country where citizens can engage in a life free from the constant fear and burden of conflict. While discussions continue in the capital, massive military operations have escalated in parts of the Amhara region. These campaigns not only undermine trust in the dialogue but also drive-up civilian casualties. Most devastating for the nation was the tragic report of nuns killed in a drone strike.
On July 22, a drone strike hit a Monastery in South Wollo, killing two nuns, wounding more than a dozen people, and tearing into a centuries-old pilgrimage site according to the information confirmed by the South Wollo Diocese of EOTC. The government that says it wants dialogue is, in the same breath, prosecuting a military campaign whose civilian toll keeps mounting. That is not a paradox process managers can talk around. It is a credibility problem the National Dialogue Commission cannot fix with reassurances alone.
The Commission’s defense of its own design has sometimes leaned on a claimthat even though several armed actors and political groups are not sitting at the table, their constituencies’ views are somehow carried into the room by proxy, through other participants who claim to speak for similar grievances. It is possible to be charitable toward that argument and still find it wanting. Representation by analogy is not the same as representation by presence. One can assume that groups actually fighting the state have reasons, grievances, and red lines that differ from those of parties merely adjacent to them, and a dialogue that cannot bring the fighting parties into the same room has limited power to actually end the fighting. Even more concerning, however, is the recent strike on a monastery.
According to the church, two nuns were killed and thirteen others were wounded.Local reports have attributed the strike to the Ethiopian National Defense Force, allegedly aimed at Fano fighters believed to be in the area; federal authorities have not offered independent confirmation. Whatever the precise chain of events, this is not an isolated data point. It follows a pattern of drone and artillery strikes that have hit civilian targets, each time accompanied by official assurances that extraordinary care is taken to avoid civilian harm. Assurances repeated after each new incident stop functioning as assurances.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church’s response was measured but unambiguous: uphold the rule of law, protect monasteries and their communities, hold perpetrators accountable, and deliver emergency aid to the injured and displaced. These are not radical demands. They are the baseline obligations of any state waging an internal conflict, and Ethiopia has bound itself to exactly these standards through its own constitution and criminal code, and through international instruments it has ratified, including the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols governing the conduct of hostilities, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. The principles of distinction and proportionality in armed conflict are not diplomatic niceties; they are legal obligations that attach to every strike, drone or otherwise, and their violation carries individual criminal responsibility, not just institutional embarrassment.
None of this is an argument against dialogue. If anything, the monastery strike is an argument for urgency. A national conversation that hopes to be credible must be paired with visible restraint on the battlefield and real accountability when restraint fails. That means independent investigation into the particular monastery strike and similar other incidents in the past, not silence; transparent findings, not vague talk of ongoing review, to ensure they do not recur; and prosecution of anyone found responsible for unlawful harm to civilians, regardless of rank or uniform. It also means the Commission confronting, rather than talking past, the fact that a dialogue process advertised as inclusive cannot indefinitely coexist with active offensives against the groups it claims to represent.
Ethiopia does not lack the legal architecture to do better. What it has lacked, strike after strike, is the follow-through. Civilians in different parts of the country have paid for that gap in blood, and a monastery that survived centuries of history did not survive a week of the country’s newest attempt at peace. That is the measure the national dialogue will ultimately be judged by, not its opening ceremony, but whether the guns fall quiet enough, and the accountability follows fast enough, for the process to mean anything at all.
