Eritrea urges UN to press Ethiopia on border row

By Ed Harris

ASMARA, March 11 (Reuters) – Eritrea urged the U.N. Security Council on Friday to press Ethiopia to abide by the settlement of a border row agreed under a deal that ended a 1998-2000 war.

An Eritrean soldier stands on a mound of earth behind his front line trench at Tsorona.

Council member countries should pressure Ethiopia to comply with the independent border ruling when they decide in the next few days whether to extend the mandate of U.N. peacekeepers patrolling the frontier, a senior official told Reuters.

“(The Security Council Resolution) must request Ethiopia to allow demarcation, accept its treaty obligations, allow demarcation without preconditions, withdraw its troops,” said Yemane Ghebremeskel, Director of the Office of President.

“Those are the kind of requests that we expect. Whether that will be adopted or not, we don’t know,” he said.

The Security Council is due to discuss the situation between the two former Horn of Africa foes late on Friday and to decide on the mandate by March 15.

The Eritrean-Ethiopian war centred on the small Ethiopian-run border town of Badme. An agreement signed in Algiers in 2000 ended the conflict, in which more than 70,000 people were killed.

But demarcation of the disputed border has been indefinitely postponed since Ethiopia rejected a ruling in 2002 by an independent boundary commission that Badme was part of Eritrea.

Under their peace accords, both sides had agreed that the commission’s ruling would be binding. Eritrea’s government accepts the ruling in full and insists Ethiopia follow suit.

Last November Ethiopia finally accepted the ruling in principle but said it wanted dialogue on how to implement it in the estimated 15 percent of the border that is contentious.

Diplomats from major powers say reopening negotiations on the border would go against the promise both countries made to be bound by the ruling. The European Union in December echoed Eritrea’s call for Ethiopia to respect the ruling in full.

Last month, the EU expressed concern over what it said was a military build-up on both sides of the border.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, in a report to the Council this week, urged Ethiopia to move troops away from the border where they had built up in recent weeks, saying he was worried it could raise tensions.