Thousands of Ethiopians protest against premier’s peace plan with Eritrea

ADDIS ABABA, Jan 2 (AFP) — More than 50,000 people demonstrated in the Ethiopian capital on Sunday against plans by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi to kick-start the stalled peace process with neighbouring Eritrea.

The demonstration, organised by the country’s opposition parties, was aimed at denying Meles’s peace plan popular support ahead of general elections scheduled for May.

In November Meles offered fresh hope for a breakthrough when he finally accepted a special commission’s ruling designed to resolve a border dispute that led to a two-year war in 1998 and offered a plan to push forward the process.

But since the two countries signed an accord in Algiers in 2000 to end the war hardly any progress has been made. Eritrea has also rejected the peace plan, and accused its arch-nemesis of buying time.

Opposition leaders have accused Meles of endangering Ethiopia’s territorial integrity.

“We are calling on the public to pressure the government into pulling back its anti-people and anti-national integrity peace initiative,” Beyenen Petros, deputy chairman of the Ethiopian United Democratic Front (EUDF), told the demonstrators.

Former Ethiopian president Negaso Gidada, who left power in 2000, said: “There is no reason to accept the new initiative, which is based on the principle of give and take. We have no reason to give an inch of our territory and take an inch of Eritreans’.”

He also urged the voters to throw out Meles in May polls.

“I call upon the Ethiopian people to vote the prime minister out of office and bring in a new government that will look for a new peace initiative,” said Gebru Asrate, a sworn rival of the prime minister.

“Unless the basic causes of the war are identified and resolved, there cannot be any peace with a dictatorial regime of Eritrea, which considers itself a “Big Brother” in the region,” said Gerbu, who fought alongside Meles in a guerrilla war that toppled the dictatorial regime of Soviet-backed Mengistu Haire Mariam in 1991.

“The new peace initiative is a plan by the prime minister to give land and terrirorial rights to the (Eritrean) government,” he added, a view echoed by several opposition figures in the poverty-stricken Horn of Africa nation.

Police said between 50,000 and 60,000 people demonstrated in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, but organisers put the figure as high as 100,000.

The border between the two Africa nations has remained closed to all but UN peacekeepers, and bilateral relations have been limited to hostile declarations.

Since Ethiopia dismissed the ruling in September 2003, both states have refused to give an inch despite a desperate search by the international community for some kind of compromise.

Eritrea repeatedly took the moral high ground, insisting that Ethiopia had violated international law because the Algiers accord called for the ruling on the path of the border to be accepted as “final and binding” by both sides, and rebuffed appeals for dialogue and UN mediation.

Ethiopia justified its rejection by claiming the ruling violated other provisions of the peace accord concerning demographics and that the flashpoint town of Badme, which the commission attributed to Eritrea, had long been administered by Addis Ababa.