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Eritrea Army Moves Raise Tensions in Ethiopia: UN Envoy
Reuters, Agence France Presse, Arab News
ASMARA/NAIROBI, 28 November 2003 — Eritrean troop movements are making a dispute with Ethiopia over a war-torn stretch of border more tense than ever, the United Nations said yesterday. Eritrea told the UN its troops had moved westward toward the border “for harvesting, agricultural and construction purposes”, the UN said in a statement.
An independent commission had been due to start marking out a new boundary between the two countries this month, but Ethiopia has repeatedly called for the line to be redrawn and the physical demarcation of the border has been postponed.
“When we look at the political situation there is a stalemate. We are concerned about that and the situation appears to be tense. More tense than it has been before,” UN spokeswoman Gail Bindley-Taylor Sainte said.
“None of us wants to contemplate war being possible and those are not words that we should bandy about lightly.” The two Horn of Africa countries went to war over the 1,000-km stretch of frontier between 1998-2000. A shooting earlier this month underscored growing hostility.
A UN investigation of the incident in which an Eritrean militiaman was killed sparked criticism from Ethiopia, which accused the UN of blaming Ethiopia’s armed forces.
At the center of the deadlock is the village of Badme, which Ethiopia controls despite the independent commission’s ruling that it belongs to Eritrea.
Sainte said she could not give any details on Eritrea’s troop movement as it was part of military intelligence but said there had been similar movements at the same time last year. Eritrean President Isaias Afeworki and his foreign minister are out of the country lobbying the international community for support.
Last week, the Foreign Ministry said it had recalled its ambassador to the African Union in protest at the body’s failure to press Ethiopia to accept the border ruling. United States and UN diplomats have also started shuttle diplomacy between Ethiopia and Eritrea in an attempt to break the stalemate between the two countries.
Meanwhile, the environmental group, Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), warned yesterday that a rabies epidemic is threatening to wipe out a rare Ethiopian wolf, a statement released in Nairobi said.
“A rabies epidemic in parts of southeastern Ethiopia is threatening the survival of the most endangered member of the dog family — the Ethiopian wolf,” the statement said. “At least 30 Ethiopian wolves have died from rabies since the disease broke out in Bale Mountains National Park at the end of September,” the statement added.
The park is home to some 300 wolves, more than half of the total population of 500 still left in the Horn of Africa nation. WWF said that since the first death was reported in September, conservationists have been isolating affected wolves and started a vaccination program to try to contain the epidemic.
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, like a Python (Alquds, 1/25/03. |
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