April 17, 2002
Martin Pratt is the head of the world renowned International Boundaries Research Unit (IBRU) based in the UK. Here he analyses the highly detailed and complicated decision on the Ethiopia-Eritrea border by the Boundary Commission, which issued its ruling in The Hague on Saturday. The IBRU web site is http://www-ibru.dur.ac.uk.
What does this ruling mean both internationally and for each country?
The decision of the Boundary Commission is an important step in the ongoing peace process between Eritrea and Ethiopia. As long as the boundary remained disputed, it would have been almost impossible for the two countries to normalise relations. Although neither country gained everything it wanted from the decision, the foundations have now been laid for peaceful coexistence. This is obviously good for Eritrea and Ethiopia, but it is also good for the wider international community.
Has the Boundary Commission achieved its goals?
The Commission has successfully completed the first part of its job, namely the delimitation of the boundary. It has evaluated the competing claims of the parties and identified a single line which it feels represents the boundary that was intended by Ethiopia and Italy in the treaties of 1900, 1902 and 1908. It then modified the line in a few areas on the basis of subsequent conduct - administrative activities, diplomatic exchanges, the production of maps, etc - by one or both parties which demonstrated title to the area in question under international law. However, the Commission still has the important task of demarcating the boundary - translating the line that has been identified during the delimitation phase into a line on the ground. Only when the demarcation has been completed will the Commission have achieved its goals.
Can you explain why there is confusion over which areas lie in which countries? How will demarcation help?
The maps illustrating the boundary in the decision document are quite a small scale: 1:360,000 in the central sector and 1:1,000,000 - 10 km per centimetre - in the eastern and western sectors. They omit many small settlements and other landscape features which people may be used to seeing on maps of the border region. The maps were drawn to highlight features which the Commission felt were relevant to the delimitation, which is perfectly sensible, but they can be a little disorienting at first. I think it would have been helpful if the Commission had included maps of the three sectors which show both the claim lines and the defined boundary, rather than asking the reader to switch between maps to compare the various lines. It must be stressed, however, that the maps in the decision are only intended as general illustrations of a line defined by description and a set of geographical coordinates in the 'dispositif' at the end of the decision. This line will be further refined during the demarcation phase, and the final line will be depicted on a series of large-scale (1:25,000) maps which should leave no room for confusion.
Now that the ruling has been made public, does it give any indication of how difficult the task was and why it was difficult?
Both sides clearly presented a large amount of evidence to support their claims, all of which had to be read and evaluated by the Commissioners in a relatively short period. The decision was delivered less than 10 months after the first set of written pleadings was submitted. Not all of this evidence was deemed relevant to the delimitation but it still had to be considered. The poor geographical knowledge of the border region at the time the colonial boundary treaties were agreed, particularly with regard to the course of the rivers which make up large portions of the boundary, clearly caused the Commission some headaches in terms of interpreting the intentions of the treaty-makers. Anyone who reads the decision will quickly appreciate how complex some of the issues that the Commission had to address were and, although its reasoning is not always easy to follow, it has done its best to explain how it reached its conclusions.
Badme is clearly a contentious area. What does the report say about Badme and what does it mean?
Badme is only mentioned in one paragraph in the entire decision document and it is not marked on any of the illustrative maps. The reference to Badme indicates that Ethiopia appears to have exercised some administrative authority in both Badme Wereda [district] and town in the last 30 years, but the evidence of Ethiopian administration west of the Eritrean claim line in the area between the Setit and Mareb rivers is not sufficient to displace the Eritrean title that had crystallised by 1935.
This would seem to suggest that Badme must be part of Eritrea. However, the boundary delimited by the Commission in the vicinity of Badme actually lies a few kilometres to the west of the Eritrean claim line, which raises the possibility that it could be in Ethiopia. Personally, I can't find anything in the decision that proves the matter one way or the other. However, if the new boundary is plotted on the Soviet topographic maps that the Commission used to identify the location of settlements, Badme appears to lie about 1.5 km to the west of the boundary. Although we may not know officially until demarcation of the boundary has been completed, I think the Soviet maps - which both parties used in their pleadings - are sufficiently accurate to say with some confidence that Badme is in Eritrea.
Could you explain where Ethiopia has gained/retained and where Eritrea has gained/retained?
In the western sector the Commission largely agreed with Eritrea's view as to the alignment of the boundary. The picture in the central sector is more complicated, although Ethiopia will probably be more pleased with the overall outcome than Eritrea. In the central sector, the Commission decided that the subsequent conduct of the parties justified a number of adjustments to the 1900 treaty line: the town of Zalembessa and the southern and eastern areas of Irob were acknowledged as Ethiopian, while Tserona and Fort Cadorna were acknowledged as Eritrean. In the east, the Commission didn't like either side's proposed method for determining the boundary - defined in the 1908 treaty as being "parallel to and at a distance of 60 km from the coast - and produced its own line which divided the area of overlapping claims more or less equally.
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