UN alarmed over risk of war
2005-11-03 09:57
New York - Senior United Nations diplomats expressed mounting alarm on Wednesday about the risk of war between Eritrea and Ethiopia after reports of troop movements along the tense border between the two Horn of Africa neighbours.
UN chief Kofi Annan said he was "extremely concerned about reports from the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea (Unmee) concerning movements of military personnel on both sides of the temporary security zone as well as irregular activities inside the zone".
Annan called on arch-rival neighbours Ethiopia and Eritrea to put "an immediate halt to any actions that may be misinterpreted by the other side or jeopardise the security arrangements which they agreed to" in a 2000 agreement.
Annan urged the UN security council and individual member states to "take decisive steps to defuse the escalating tension" and offered UN help.
UN discussing a draft resolution
"The information that we have is that there seems to have been (military) movements in the adjacent areas north of the security zone and on the Ethiopian side south of the security zone," said Jean-Marie Guehenno, head of UN peacekeeping operations.
The UN security council last week started discussing a draft resolution that calls on the two neighbours to implement a decision by an international commission on their border dispute.
The draft - circulated among the council's 15 members - calls on both parties to implement completely and without delay the decision of the Eritrea-Ethiopia boundary commission and to create the necessary conditions for demarcation to proceed quickly.
Asked about the status of the draft resolution, Russia's UN envoy Andrei Denisov, the incoming president of the security council for this month said: "I am not ready to disclose specific details but I think that we will accelerate the discussions and maybe take some action in order to try to calm down the situation because it is very grave," he added.
Situation deteriorating
South Africa also voiced alarm and called for urgent steps to prevent a new war between the two countries.
Over the past three weeks, since Asmara restricted UN patrols in a buffer zone in Eritrean territory, both Eritrea and Ethiopia have re-positioned soldiers and armaments on the frontier, raising the risk of a new war, according to the UN.
The situation along the border has deteriorated from "stable" to "tense" and "potentially volatile," said an Unmee official.
Eritrea and Ethiopia fought a bloody two-year war over their 1 000km mostly barren border from 1998 to 2000 in which about 80 000 people were killed.
Under international pressure, the two neighbours signed a peace deal in Algiers in 2000 that required them to accept a new border drawn by an international panel.
The panel's 2002 decision awarded the flashpoint town of Badme to Eritrea, but has never been fully accepted by Ethiopia which says it wants adjustments to avoid splitting up families on the border.