IGAD hopes to fix Ethiopia-Eritrea dispute

Mar 20, 2006 (NAIROBI) — East Africa must focus on solving the Ethiopia-Eritrea border dispute and also bolster the continent’s credibility by shepherding Sudan’s and Somalia’s peace deals, regional leaders said on Monday.

As well as the tenuous aftermath of civil wars in Somalia and Sudan and the potential of renewed conflict on the Ethiopia-Eritrea border, the leaders were using their Nairobi summit to discuss a devastating drought, diplomats said.

Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki urged Ethiopia and Eritrea to exercise restraint and negotiate to end a row over their border, the source of a 1998-2000 war that killed 70,000 people.

“I believe that there is a window of opportunity to resolve the simmering tensions amicably,” Kibaki told the summit.

Kibaki on Monday assumed a two-year chairmanship of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), a 7-member bloc founded in 1986 to counter drought and desertification.

Since then, it has metamorphosed to push peace and development in its member states – Kenya, Djibouti, Uganda, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea.

It led talks to end Sudan’s two-decade civil war with an historic peace pact in January 2005, and those that created Somalia’s transitional federal goverment in late 2004.

To boost Africa’s integrity, those peace plans must succeed, African Union Peace and Security Commissioner Said Djinnit said.

“No room should be left for scepticism in the international community,” he said in a speech.

FEEDING MILITIAMEN

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, the outgoing chairman, said there could be no lasting peace in Somalia and Sudan until their national armies were up and running properly.

Burundi’s success in integrating former foes in one army is proof Africans can solve their own conflicts, he said. “This was because the region was in charge,” he said.

Anarchic Somalia has no national army yet. Sudan, under its peace deal, has integrated some former southern rebels and regular soldiers from the Khartoum government into joint units.

A request by the regional bloc to give food to Somali militiamen who had stayed out of the city of Baidoa – allowing the country to hold its first parliamentary meeting on home soil in 15 years – was also being discussed at the one-day summit.

There was a proposal on the table, offered by ministers who met over the weekend, to give food to about 1,000 militiamen who had been camped outside Baidoa in south-central Somalia.

“There is no way traditional donors will pay for that,” one Western diplomat said, adding that they would push to have the money given by other means.

Regional leaders feel the militias’ absence has allowed the legislature to stay in session. Somalis say that is the best chance to break a rift that has paralysed the government’s work at establishing central authority for a year.

Baidoa’s militiamen have, however, been coming back to the city in recent weeks and one of them shot and killed a businessman on Saturday in front of the city’s police station.

East African foreign ministers over the weekend proposed creating a regional emergency fund to counter drought and famine, which the leaders were expected to consider.

The drought has put at least 6.25 million people in need of immediate food aid across the region.

(Reuters)