Eritrea unhappy with UN resolution on peacekeeping force

ASMARA, Sept 20 (AFP) — Eritrea has criticised as “out of place” portions of last week’s UN Security Council resolution that renewed the mandate of a peacekeeping force deployed on its border with Ethiopia, with which it fought a war between 1998 and 2000.

Resolution 1560 “places both the law-abiding party (Eritrea) and the one that completely violates international law (Ethiopia) on an equal footing,” the Eritrean foreign ministry lamented in a statement posted on its official website Monday.

It is “out of place to witness the Security Council concentrating on meaningless minor issues, instead of compelling the Ethiopian regime to immediately implement the EEBC (Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission) decision by honoring the (2000 peace) agreement it had signed in the presence of the UN Secretary General”, said the statement.

The resolution urges Ethiopia to accept the independent Boundary Commission’s 2002 decision on the path of the Horn of Africa neighbours’ shared border and calls on Eritrea to receive the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s special envoy to Ethiopia and Eritrea, Lloyd Axworthy.

The UN Security Council voted unanimously last Tuesday to renew the mandate of the peacekeeping force (UNMEE) until March 15, 2005.

It also approved a series of measures, notably a reduction of UNMEE’s troops, in order to limit the cost of the mission, currently 200 million dollars a year.

In September 2003, Ethiopia rejected the EEBC ruling as “unjust”, indefinitely delaying the crucial process of physically demarcating the border, and the peace process as a whole.