UN official calls situation in Eritrea “totally unacceptable”
Dec 15, 2005 (UNITED NATIONS) — Eritrea’s restrictions on U.N. peacekeepers have put them in a “totally unacceptable” situation, and the United Nations will have to review the mission’s future if things don’t improve, the top peacekeeping official said Thursday.
Undersecretary-General Jean-Marie Guehenno would not say if that meant the mission, made up of 3,300 military observers and staff, could be shut down, but diplomats in New York said it was a possibility.
“The situation on the ground is that it is totally unacceptable,” Guehenno said in a phone interview from the Eritrean capital, Asmara. “We are doing our job. We are not doing our job the way we would like to do it.”
The United Nations began to withdraw 180 peacekeeping staff from Eritrea on Thursday, acceding to an Eritrean demand that all peacekeepers from North America and Europe, including Russia, pull out. About 100 of those being withdrawn are from other nations — a signal to Eritrea that the U.N. won’t be dictated to, Guehenno said.
“We don’t want to have the authorities of Eritrea tell us which nationalities we are going to relocate,” he said.
The Eritrea-Ethiopia mission was established after a 2 1/2-year border war between the Horn of Africa neighbors. A peace agreement in 2000 set up a commission to rule on the position of the disputed border, while U.N. troops patrolled a 15-mile (24-kilometer) buffer zone.
Ethiopia has refused to implement the commission’s April 2002 ruling, which awarded the key town of Badme to Eritrea.
The Eritrean demand for the withdrawal came amid mounting concern that the two sides were massing troops as a prelude to a new war. Eritrea has also banned U.N. helicopter flights and vehicle movements at night on its side of the buffer zone.
“I think the situation on the ground, the restrictions that the Eritrean government has placed on our peacekeepers, has made it impossible for us to operate as effectively as we would want to,” U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Thursday.
Guehenno said Eritrean authorities had refused to meet with him during his visit, which ends Friday.
He stressed that the staff relocation was only temporary, and that if Eritrea didn’t back down, the United Nations would review the entire mission.
Several U.N. diplomats in New York said one option will be to close down the mission entirely. On Wednesday, the Security Council agreed to the relocation and warned that the restrictions “will have implications” for the mission’s future if they are not lifted.
(AP/ST)