UN moves some staff from Ethiopia, Eritrea border

Oct 24, 2005 (ASMARA) — The United Nations said Monday it was pulling some of its foreign staff away from the increasingly tense border between Ethiopia and Eritrea after Eritrea slapped new restrictions on UN troops monitoring a buffer zone there.

A senior UN official said five aid workers living in the western Eritrean region of Gash Barka region would be moved to the capital for security reasons after Asmara imposed a ban on helicopter flights and restricted ground patrols by the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE).

“They are moving to Asmara now that UNMEE cannot observe much,” the official said, noting that the restrictions have left the mission unable to work in nearly 60 percent of its operational area. “We cannot gamble with their security.”

The decision to move the staff followed an announcement from UNMEE that Eritrean authorties had imposed further restrictions on its ground surveillance operations less than a month after barring the helicopter flights.

In addition to the chopper ban and curtailing night patrols, Asmara has now restricted daytime land patrols to only main roads, officials said.

“UNMEE has been requested of late to confine its land vehicle movements to the main roads,” UNMEE said in its weekly situational report.

UNMEE spokeswoman Gail Bindley Taylor Sainte said the new restrictions have been in place “since last week in the central sector and western sector” of the buffer zone in Eritrean territory that runs along the 1,000-kilometer (600-mile) frontier.

“It further hampers the mission,” she told AFP.

UNMEE, which has 3,293 military personnel in the border area, said last week it was no longer able to operate in nearly 60 percent of the zone and could not report with certainty on military operations on the Eritrean side of the border.

Asmara has spurned repeated requests to rescind or explain its October 4 ban on UNMEE helicopter flights and the ensuing restrictions on ground patrols that have forced the mission to abandon nearly half of its observation posts.

It has also repeatedly warned that new conflict is looming because of Ethiopia’s refusal to accept the 2002 border delineation made by an international panel set up as part of the pact that ended a bloody 1998-2000 war.

The decision, which gave the flashpoint town of Badme to Eritrea, was to have been binding, but Ethiopia has demanded adjustments so that families are not split between the two nations.

Diplomats believe Eritrea may have imposed the helicopter ban to put more pressure on the international community to force Ethiopia to accept the boundary decision.

At the weekend, diplomats in Asmara said Eritrean President Isaias Afeworki had rejected an appeal from UN chief Kofi Annan to lift the ban that came after Ethiopia accused Eritrea of beefing up its forces in the buffer zone.

Annan has suggested that the world body may have to revisit UNMEE’s mandate if it is prevented from doing its job, something that Ethiopia has said would violate the 2000 Algiers agreement that ended the war.

Since the beginning of the year, tensions along the border have risen steadily risen, with reports of new troop deployments and security incidents raising fears of a new conflict.

Eritrean officials have engaged in a surge of saber-rattling rhetoric, accusing Ethiopia of duplicity, warning that the current situation is not sustainable and that it reserves the right to use force to recover land awarded it.

(AFP/ST)