Global Policy Forum

By Irwin Arieff

Eritrea warned the United Nations on Wednesday that it might rekindle its border war with Ethiopia if the world body failed to resolve a lingering territorial dispute between the two neighbors. "I wish to categorically inform the assembly that Eritrea is determined, and has the right, to defend and preserve its territorial integrity by any means possible," Berhane Abrehe, Eritrea's finance minister, told the 191-nation U.N. General Assembly.

"If the United Nations fails to reverse the occupation, it will be as equally responsible as Ethiopia is for any renewed armed conflict and its consequences," he said. Under a December 2000 peace accord ending their two-year border war that killed more than 70,000 people, Ethiopia and Eritrea agreed to accept the conclusions of an independent panel on where their border should lie.

The commission issued its findings in April 2002 and Eritrea fully accepted them. But the process of marking out the new boundary broke down after Ethiopia objected that the flashpoint western town of Badme had been awarded to Eritrea. The border war began when Ethiopia accused Eritrea of invading Badme. "Ethiopia is not only occupying the village of Badme and other sovereign Eritrean territory, but it has and continues to build illegal settlements in these areas with the view to, in (U.N.) Secretary-General Kofi Annan's words, 'creating facts on the ground,'" Abrehe said.

The 15-nation U.N. Security Council this month approved a resolution calling on Ethiopia "to accept fully the boundary commission's decision and take the necessary steps to enable the commission to demarcate the border completely and promptly." It expressed the council's intent to continue to monitor the peace process and stated that Ethiopia and Eritrea bear primary responsibility for implementing their peace agreement. The resolution also extended for another six months the mandate of a U.N. peacekeeping mission that monitors a buffer zone between the two Horn of Africa nations after Annan told the council the protracted stalemate in the peace process was "inherently destabilizing."

FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Policy Forum distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C íŸ 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.