ETHIOPIA-ERITREA: Egypt Steps In To Mediate Border Dispute

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Jun 2 1998 (IPS) - Egypt is the latest country which has stepped in to try and mediate a border dispute between Ethiopia and Eritrea over the Yigra Triangle.

Rwanda, Djibouti, the United States and the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) have so far, failed to reconcile the two neighbours in the border dispute which erupted last month.

“I hope Egypt will succeed in its mediation bid,” said Fekadu Ibrahim, a former Ethiopian army officer, now a refugee in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi. “It will be catastrophic for both sides if the tension turned into a full-blown war.”

Unconfirmed reports Tuesday said Ethiopian and Eritrean forces had clashed at the border on May 31.

“I received telephone calls from Ethiopia that Ethiopian and Eritrean forces had exchanged fire on Sunday with casualties on both sides,” Ibrahim told IPS on Tuesday.

Kenyan media reports said that the fighting, in which both sides exchanged heavy artillery fire, took place 20 kilometres inside Ethiopia near the village of Alitena, about 600 kms north of the capital, Addis Ababa.

There has been no comment from Addis Ababa or Asmara.

Disturbed by the incident, Egypt’s Foreign Minister Amr Mousa said this week that Cairo would step up diplomatic contact with both Ethiopia and Eritrea to defuse the tension.

“Egypt wants peace. We do not want conflict in the region,” Mousa told journalists in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, this week.

The conflict between the two neighbours surfaced on May 13 when the Ethiopian Council of Ministers accused Eritrean forces of occupying part of the northwest of the country on May 12. Eritrea promptly denied the accusation, saying its forces merely retaliated after Ethiopian militia violated its borders on May 6.

The disputed territory — Yigra Triangle — covers 400 square kilometres, along the Ethiopia-Eritrea border.

Egypt’s mediation efforts come on the heels of a series of diplomatic shuttles by the OAU Secretary General, Salim Ahmed Salim, who has expressed concern about the deteriorating security along the Ethiopia-Eritrea border.

Salim, in a statement issued at the OAU headquarters in Addis Ababa on Sunday, urged both sides to avoid military confrontation and to seek a peaceful solution.

“Military confrontation cannot and will neither resolve the fundamental dispute that gave rise to the current dispute in the first place, nor serve the long-term interest of the people of the two sister countries,” said the statement.

The OAU Secretary General warned that if mishandled, the conflict could get out of hand and spill across the Horn of Africa. “This is what both Egypt and IGAD fears,” said Ibrahim.

The Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) groups Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, Djibouti and Kenya. Its current chairman, President Hassan Gouled Aptidon of Djibouti, has met with both Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia and President Issaias Afewerki of Eritrea in an attempt to diffuse the tension.

Salim, too, has been shuttling between Addis Ababa and Asmara, since the dispute erupted on May 12.

Ethiopia insisted on Tuesday that it would not negotiate unless Eritrea withdraws from the territory it occupies. “Ethiopia has repeatedly made it clear that it will not negotiate with Eritrea, while its troops occupy part of its territory,” the state-run Radio Ethiopia, monitored in Nairobi, said.

Egypt’s major concern seems to be the water of the Nile — its lifeline — much of which originates from the Blue Nile in Ethiopia. A conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea also would likely involve Sudan, which has been accused by Egypt, Ethiopia, and Eritrea of trying to export its extreme brand of Islam to destabilise them.

Sudan hosts a sizeable number of refugees from Ethiopia and some 500,000 from Eritrea, most of them people who fled the country during a 1961-1991 rebel war.

The situation is further compounded by the fact that about half a million Eritreans live in Ethiopia, mostly in Addis Ababa, and some of them hold top positions in the Ethiopian government. And, 120,000 Ethiopian nationals live in Eritrea. The majority work in the Port of Assab, Ethiopia’s only outlet to the Red Sea.

The history of the two countries is closely intertwined. Sections of what is now Eritrea were part of the Ethiopian and Ottoman empires, and even of the Sudanese and Egyptian fiefdoms until 1889, when Italy occupied the area.

Italian rule was followed in 1941-1952 by a British military administration, and later by a federation between Eritrea and Ethiopia.

However, then Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie gradually reduced Eritrea’s autonomy, sparking a guerrilla war that began in 1961, one year before he reduced Eritrea to an Ethiopian province. This war ended in 1991 with Eritrea’s independence from Ethiopia.