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UN agrees to Eritrea’s demand to withdraw peacekeepers

Dec 14, 2005 (UNITED NATIONS) — The United Nations has agreed to Eritrea’s demand to withdraw all Americans, Canadians and Europeans from the U.N. peacekeeping mission that monitors the tense border with Ethiopia, a U.N. diplomat said Wednesday.

The Security Council made the decision to temporarily redeploy about 180 Western members of the nearly 3,300-strong peacekeeping mission from Eritrea to the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, the diplomats said.

The rest of the peacekeeping force will remain on duty monitoring the buffer zone between the Horn of Africa neighbors, they said.

Brazil’s U.N. Ambassador Ronaldo Mota Sardenberg said the 15 council members were informing their governments about the decision and were expected to adopt a statement on the Eritrea-Ethiopia dispute later Wednesday.

On Dec. 6, Eritrea gave the force 10 days to pull out peacekeepers from North America and Europe, including Russia. It gave no reason, but the move came amid mounting concern that war could again erupt between Eritrea and Ethiopia, which have been massing troops near the border.

U.N. Undersecretary-General for Peacekeeping Jean-Marie Guehenno, who was dispatched to the region this week by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, has said the demand appeared to be connected to Eritrea’s continuing anger that Ethiopia has not accepted a border agreement from 2002.

Guehenno extended his stay in Eritrea on Wednesday, hoping to meet officials who refused to see him on Tuesday.

U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said the council had agreed not only to redeploy Westerners but some other nationalities as well to show that the United Nations wasn’t going to be “dictated to by Eritrea.”

But he also urged the council to deal with the underlying boundary dispute and blamed Ethiopia for the failure to resolve it.

Eritrea gained independence from Ethiopia in 1993 after a 30-year guerrilla war, but the border between the two was never formally demarcated. A border war broke out in 1998 and claimed tens of thousands of lives while costing both countries an estimated US$1 million (A850,000) per day.

A December 2000 peace agreement provided for an independent commission to rule on the position of the disputed 621-mile (1,000-kilometer) border while U.N. troops patrolled a 15-mile (24-kilometer) buffer zone between the two countries.

The international commission issued a ruling in April 2002, awarding the key town of Badme to Eritrea. But Ethiopia has yet to withdraw from Badme, and Eritrea accuses the international community of shirking its responsibility to ensure the demarcation ruling is obeyed.

In recent months, both countries have been massing troops near the border and Eritrea has been restricting the work of U.N. peacekeepers.

The U.N estimates that since December, Ethiopia has moved around eight divisions — some 50,000 men — and tanks, missiles and other military hardware to the border. Diplomats estimate around 380,000 troops are entrenched along the frontier — around 130,000 on the Ethiopian side and 250,000 on the Eritrean side.

On Tuesday, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said his country needed to maintain enough troops on the disputed border to keep Eritrea from starting a new war.

On Oct. 5, Eritrea banned helicopter flights by U.N. peacekeepers in its airspace in a buffer zone with Ethiopia. It then banned U.N. vehicles from patrolling at night on its side of the zone, prompting the U.N. to vacate 18 of its 40 posts.

Despite repeated appeals from the U.N. Security Council and secretary-general, Eritrea has refused to lift these restrictions _ or to rescind the order for the North American and European peacekeeping staff to leave.

Gail Bindley-Taylor Sainte, spokeswoman for the U.N. mission in the two countries, said the Eritrean order for the staff to leave by Friday has created a “crisis.”

The peacekeeping force is comprised of peacekeepers and military observers from some 40 countries. The largest contingent, more than 1,500 troops, is from India.

Last month, the Security Council passed a resolution warning of possible sanctions unless Eritrea lifts restrictions on the U.N. peacekeepers and the two sides reverse the troop buildup.

(AP/ST)

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