When Genocide Becomes a Shield Against Accountability

Why protecting TPLF leadership from scrutiny endangers Tigray again

This rejoinder is not written to defend Alex de Waal or Mulugeta Gebrehiwot. Neither requires protection. Their intellectual records and sustained engagement with the suffering of the people of Tigray stand on their own.

What necessitates this intervention is something else entirely: the need to set the record straight after the recently published viewpoint by Girmay Weldedawit and Ella Atsbeha, which attempts to close a debate that cannot, and must not, be closed.

Their article, Judging the Tigray Genocide Backwards, published in Ethiopia Insight, does more than disagree with two scholars. It seeks to redefine the boundaries of permissible judgment of the Tigray war and its aftermath by equating leadership accountability with victim-blaming and political scrutiny with moral harm.

If left unchallenged, this move risks hardening into orthodoxy at precisely the moment when clarity is most urgently required. The stakes of this debate are not academic. As instability again gathers on the horizon, understanding how political decisions were made before, during, and after the war is essential not only for historical clarity but for preventing repetition.

Genocide recognition and leadership accountability are not competing moral positions. They are analytically inseparable. A framework that treats one as undermining the other risks transforming tragedy into exemption.

This rejoinder is therefore written not in defense of particular authors, but in defense of ethical discipline and political responsibility.

Intervention becomes necessary when confidence outruns evidence. The viewpoint advanced by Weldedawit and Atsbeha seeks to carry more weight than it can sustain.

It draws sweeping moral conclusions from a fragile analytical foundation and conflates responsibility with blame. At the same time, it treats political authority as if suffering itself grants exemption from evaluation. In doing so, it places itself beyond critique while accusing others of distortion. This rejoinder puts the burden back where it belongs.

Responsibility Matters

In accusing Alex de Waal and Gebrehiwot, Weldedawit and Atsbeha’s central thesis is that scrutinizing the leadership of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) constitutes hindsight bias and narrative harm, shifting responsibility away from genocidal perpetrators and toward those who resisted them. This thesis collapses under close analysis.

The central error lies in confusing responsibility with blame. By collapsing political responsibility into moral guilt, Weldedawit and Atsbeha treat the timely and necessary evaluation of TPLF leadership decisions as equivalent to blaming victims. This is a category error.

Political responsibility requires judgment under conditions of known risk. Leaders are evaluated not because they failed to predict catastrophe with certainty, but because their decisions shaped civilian exposure to danger and the conditions of recovery.

Max Weber’s distinction between an ethic of conviction and an ethic of responsibility remains instructive: political actors must answer not only for intentions, but for foreseeable consequences. Ignoring this responsibility is abdication rather than restraint.

Holding leadership accountable does not diminish perpetrator responsibility. Genocide can be deliberately executed by perpetrators while simultaneously being politically mismanaged by those responsible for protecting society. These truths are not contradictory; they are interconnected.

Fortunately, the attempt to portray de Waal and Gebrehiwot as engaging in victim-blaming collapses when confronted with what they actually wrote. Their article for the World Peace Foundation was titled, without ambiguity, Tigray: Time for a New Leadership. That title alone makes clear that their argument was prospective, not retrospective.

They neither denied the genocide nor downplayed the perpetrators’ responsibility. Ethiopian and Eritrean leadership were identified as the principal agents of destruction.

At the same time, they insisted that political authority in Tigray is not exempt from evaluation simply because it governs a victimized population. Leadership that survives catastrophe does not automatically retain legitimacy. Authority that cannot convert survival into recovery cannot claim continuity as a moral entitlement.

To mischaracterize this position as shifting blame is to erase the difference between a people and those who claim to lead them.

Prewar Misjudgment

Weldedawit and Atsbeha’s argument also relies on a profound historical amnesia. The TPLF is treated as if it were a provisional wartime actor rather than a political organization that exercised decisive control over the levers of power in Ethiopia for more than thirty years.

This matters analytically. Decades of rule created entrenched habits, reflexive strategies, and weak accountability. These do not dissolve when crisis erupts.

A leadership that governed for three decades cannot plausibly be evaluated only through the lens of victimhood during a single phase of history. Power carries with it an enduring responsibility for decisions over time.

Before the war, TPLF leadership relied on militarized deterrence and assumptions about escalation control in a rapidly deteriorating regional environment. Those assumptions proved catastrophically wrong. Civilian risk was underestimated. Diplomatic isolation deepened. The configuration of hostile forces, including Eritrea’s decisive role, was misread.

The suggestion that such miscalculations are irrelevant because genocide followed misunderstands how genocidal violence develops. Genocide rarely appears fully formed. It evolves through stages: political isolation, threat construction, alliance formation, normalization of violence, and finally operational execution.

Preventing extermination entirely may not always be possible. But leadership responsibility extends to anticipating danger, mitigating escalation, and shielding civilians from greater harm wherever possible.

During the war, civilians endured immense suffering yet demonstrated remarkable resilience. Leadership, meanwhile, continued to make decisions under conditions of severe constraint. Such constraints inevitably shape what leaders can do, but they do not remove the responsibility attached to those decisions. Wartime choices therefore remain open to ethical and political evaluation.

Genocidal violence does not suspend the need for strategic judgment. If anything, it heightens it. In moments of extreme danger, the capacity of political leadership to reassess assumptions and respond to unfolding realities can determine whether catastrophe deepens or begins to stabilize.

After the war, failure became structural. Three years after the Pretoria Permanent Cessation of Hostilities Agreement, governance had collapsed. Civil servants went unpaid and reconstruction stalled. Survivors of mass violence were left without credible pathways to justice or psychosocial support.

Social trust eroded within the community itself. The party’s own internal factionalism further weakened institutional capacity and obstructed the possibility of coherent postwar rehabilitation.

Leadership that survives catastrophe but fails to reconstruct society afterward cannot claim legitimacy merely on the basis of wartime endurance.

Forward Risk

Compounding this failure is the role of a significant bloc of Tigrayan elites who struggle to confront this reality.

Rather than demanding renewal and new ideas capable of navigating the uncharted political terrain now confronting the population, sections of the elite remain invested in backward-looking narratives that displace responsibility.

When the TPLF is criticized, it is often done performatively, as a pretext to signal intellectual independence while ultimately defending continuity. External forces are blamed for everything. Internal failure is acknowledged only to be neutralized.

In practice this amounts to the policing of inquiry. Certain questions become taboo because they threaten established authority.

Hannah Arendt warned that the refusal to judge, masquerading as moral sensitivity, ultimately destroys the capacity to distinguish right from wrong. Shielding authority from evaluation in the name of solidarity undermines society.

This debate is not merely academic. Another war is approaching. Its configuration may differ, but the risk pattern is familiar.

Entering such a moment with unchanged leadership assumptions, protected by narratives that discourage accountability, risks a repeat of the previous disaster.

On what ethical or analytical grounds should the same leadership that misjudged the pre-war landscape, struggled to adapt during the war, and presided over post-war collapse be entrusted again with the fate of Tigray?

The answer cannot be supplied by invoking genocide as a shield against judgment.

Far from granting immunity, genocide intensifies the obligation to examine how power was exercised across time. Leadership that fails at every stage of crisis loses its mandate. Saying this boldly is the minimum needed to prevent the people of Tigray from another catastrophe.

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While this commentary contains the author’s opinions, Ethiopia Insight will correct factual errors.

Main photo: TPLF Chairman Debretsion Gebremichael (second from right) with TIRA and zonal officials at the 130th anniversary commemoration of the Victory of Adwa. Adwa, Tigray, 2 March 2026. Source: TPLF Facebook page.

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