US seeks to end UN impasse in Eritrea, Ethiopia
Jan 9, 2006 (UNITED NATIONS) — The United States launched a new diplomatic push on Monday to mark the disputed frontier between Ethiopia and Eritrea and head off a possible resumption of a 1998-1999 war that cost 70,000 lives.
Jendayi Frazer, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs, will head a U.S. mission to the two Horn of Africa neighbors in search of an end to the dispute, which has paralyzed progress on a 2000 peace accord ending the conflict.
Carlton Fulford, a retired Marine Corps general who heads the National Defense University’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies, will also go along on the mission, said John Bolton, Washington’s ambassador to the United Nations.
The U.N. Security Council, meanwhile, will put off plans to reconfigure the U.N. peacekeeping mission there for 30 days to give the U.S. team time to work, Bolton told reporters after briefing the 15-member council.
Frazer, U.S. officials said, would travel with 6 to 10 staff and would go to northeast Africa in about a week, after attending the inauguration on January 16 of Liberia’s president-elect, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. Frazer’s boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, also plans to attend.
Bolton said he told the council there was no guarantee of success, “but we felt that this kind of diplomatic initiative could bring movement on the underlying political dispute.”
As part of the 2000 peace deal, about 3,300 U.N. peacekeepers patrol a demilitarized buffer zone along Eritrea’s 620-mile (1,000-km) border with Ethiopia.
Under the deal, both countries agreed to accept as “final and binding” the ruling of an independent commission charged with mapping out their shared border.
But Ethiopia rejected the decision and Eritrea refused to hold new talks on it, creating the current impasse.
Eritrea then grounded U.N. helicopter flights in October and imposed other restrictions on peacekeepers.
That crippled U.N. monitoring of the border area and prompted both sides to move up troops and arms, stoking fears that fighting would resume.
The council had been set to discuss various ways to reshape the U.N. operation when Bolton announced the U.S. initiative.
“The United States has solid relations with the two countries so it certainly has the clout, the credibility, to move the process forward,” U.N. peacekeeping chief Jean-Marie Guehenno told reporters, welcoming the U.S. decision to take the diplomatic risk “to move the region away from war.”
Guehenno said that the most important tasks were demarcation of the border and normalizing relations so both sides could focus on development.
“How you get there is extremely difficult because I believe every country is afraid of showing its cards too early and losing the possibility to get what it wants to get from that process,” Guehenno said.
(Reuters)