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Peace process 'under stress'
16/10/2003 21:47 - (SA)
Asmara - The UN envoy to Ethiopia and Eritrea warned on Thursday that the peace process between the Horn of Africa neighbours, who went to war between 1998 and 2000, faced major problems.
"The peace process right now is under severe stress," Legwaila Joseph Legwaila, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's representative, told a news conference in Asmara.
"We are hoping and at the same time we are doing everything we possibly can, all of us, the UN, the African Union, the European Union and the USA," he said.
By now, a key element of the peace process, the marking of the border between the two countries, should have been well under way.
But Ethiopia has rejected the ruling of the neutral commission that defined the precise path of the border, insisting that it, Ethiopia, not Eritrea, should have been given the town of Badme, where the last war began in 1998.
When they signed a peace accord in Algiers in December 2000, both sides undertook to accept the commission's ruling as final and binding.
The threat of renewed war has been raised by both sides in their recent official communications, even if in terms of something to be avoided at all costs.
"I am appealling to the press and to the two governments not to talk about war. It frightens the people," said Legwaila.
"I am not going to be pessimistic, because there is no alternative for Ethiopia and Eritrea not to go through this peace process," he said.
"The alternative is too ghastly for the two countries to contemplate," he added.
"The people of Eritrea and Ethiopia are yelling for peace, they are dying for it... I am planning to mobilise the international community to make sure that the situation never comes to a point where it is judged to be beyond salvation," he told the news conference.
- AFP
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