Eritrea gives condition for meeting U.N. envoy

ASMARA, April 8 (Reuters) – Eritrea said on Thursday it was willing to meet a U.N. special envoy trying to solve a border dispute with Ethiopia as long as he would not try to change the decision of an independent border commission.

Yemane Gebremeskel, a government spokesman, said Eritrea wanted assurance that the envoy, former Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy, would speed up the border demarcation process rather than change the commission’s ruling.

“If it was clarified that his role is expediting and lubricating then we might meet with him,” Gebremeskel told Reuters. “The special envoy should not tamper with a closed file, which is the decision of the Boundary Commission on where the border is and how it should be implemented.”

Eritrea and Ethiopia fought a war from 1998 to 2000 in which 70,000 people were killed in World War One-like trench warfare.

Physical demarcation of the new border should have started last year, but has been delayed indefinitely by Ethiopia’s rejection of the commission’s ruling that the dusty border village of Badme, which triggered the war, belonged to Eritrea.

On Tuesday, the EU warned the two countries that they must cooperate with the special envoy or face the consequences.

Eritrea said it had never closed the door on Axworthy.

“From the beginning – when there was first talk about the envoy in November last year – the impression given was that he was going to look into the Algiers Agreement and Eritrea was not going to accept that,” Gebremeskel said, referring to the peace accord signed in Algiers in 2000 that ended the conflict.

“Now people are saying that his purpose is not to tamper with the decision but to expedite and speed it up and we don’t have a problem with that.”