Global Policy Forum

By Anthony Morland

As a UN Security Council delegation departed Monday from the Horn of Africa at a crucial stage in peace efforts between Eritrea and Ethiopia, the neighbours showed little sign of easing their mutual mistrust or their disappointment with the UN itself. "The United Nations Security Council mission came to ... express our unwavering support for the peace process," its leader, Ambassador Ole Peter Kolby of Norway, told a news conference before leaving.

Judging by the noises emanating from both sides of a 1,000 kilometre (600 mile) border bristling with landmines and the UN's blue helmets, hopes for an end to tensions that led Asmara and Addis Ababa to go to war in 1998 were slim. Each accused the other of violating the spirit, if not the letter, of texts signed after the war ended in May 2000 and both blamed the UN peacekeeping mission, UNMEE, for doing to little to punish the alleged infringements.

Late next month, an independent international body is due to deliver its findings on the exact definition of the Ethiopian-Eritrean border, along which about half a dozen areas are claimed by both countries. Both governments, as Kolby repeatedly pointed out, have pledged to comply with the Boundary Commision's crucial ruling.

Doubt about Ethiopia's commitment, however, emerged Saturday, a day after the Security Council delegation met Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. "We will not be bound by any unjust decision that is based on appeasement and compromise," Solomon Enkway, the parliamentary speaker of Ethiopia's northern Tigray region, which lies next to Eritrea, told the diplomats at a meeting so hastily arranged that some described it as an "ambush."

Tigray, as Enkway emphasised, was a major theatre of the war and suffered extensive damage, and its population is seen as a source of pressure on the distant capital not to allow Eritrea to get off too lightly. The disputed and devastated town of Zala Anbessa and nearby villages, "are Ethiopian territories and remain Ethiopian. There is no force that can change this reality," he said. During his meeting with the diplomats, Meles, himself a Tigrayan, reiterated his grievances against both Eritrea and the United Nations.

The grievances mostly related to a supposedly demilitarised buffer zone in which some 4,200 UN peacekeepers and military observers are deployed. In what was seen as a clear snub, Ethiopia failed to send a signifcant delegation to a symbolic ceremony Saturday on the Mereb River Bridge border crossing.

Eritrea, for its part, did not miss the opportunity of throwing a few stones at Ethiopia. "Fundamental tenets of the (peace) agreements were never observed and at times willfully violated by Ethiopia," according to an official account of a meeting between Eritrean President Issaias Afeworki and the UN diplomats. An article on landmine removal, for example, "remains unfulfilled by Ethiopia, which for no plausible reason has still refused to provide UNMEE with detailed landmine information."

Issaias also criticised "UNMEE's and the international community's attitude of leniency towards Ethiopia" and suggested the force leave in the months following the Boundary Commission's ruling, much sooner than is generally regarded as feasible, given the need for extensive landmine removal before the border can be physically demarcated.

Asked whether all this was cause for serious concern, Kolby was doggedly optimistic. "...We know that there are apprehensions from both sides," he said. "But what I think is most important here is that both leaders... have stressed that they would like to work with the United Nations to secure the implemention of the Boundary Commission's decision and this, I think, is what we should focus on."

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