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Ethiopia and Eritrea: Allergic to Persuasion

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Ethiopia and Eritrea: Allergic to Persuasion AFRICA PROGRAMME AFP BP 07/01 JANUARY 2007 R Ethiopia and Eritrea: Allergic to Persuasion E Sally Healy and Martin Plaut P A P Map © UNMEE. G Summary • Six years after they signed a peace agreement in Algiers, Ethiopia and Eritrea continue their confrontation. Ethiopia won’t accept the ruling of the Boundary N Commission. Eritrea won’t negotiate. Tensions rise in Somalia as Ethiopia and Eritrea back different sides. I • The United Nations peacekeeping mission to Ethiopia and Eritrea, UNMEE, struggles to maintain a presence in the border area, its activities restricted and F its exit strategy blocked. Major UN and US initiatives fail. The Border Commission resorts to a virtual boundary demarcation. E • This briefing paper charts the undermining of the Algiers Agreement by its two signatories. It examines the differing approaches of Ethiopia and Eritrea to I diplomacy and the challenges that this poses for the international community – the United Nations, the United States, the European Union (EU) and the African Union (AU) – in trying to achieve lasting peace between these two new and R highly antagonistic neighbours. B 2 Ethiopia and Eritrea: Allergic to Persuasion On 12 December 2000, the leaders of Ethiopia and Eritrea signed a peace agreement in Algiers. It marked The Algiers Agreement the end of the two-and-a-half-year war between the two countries that had cost the lives of more than The Algiers peace agreement of 12 December 2000 70,000 people. The underlying causes were local, but formally ended the war. It seemed at the time a model nonetheless complex. They had to do with growing of its kind. Major powers, notably the United States, economic rivalry, competing local nationalism and had put serious effort and resources into trying first to shifting power relations between former allies. prevent and later to resolve the dispute. This was The overthrow of the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia before the events of 9/11 changed the trajectory of had been achieved as a joint venture between two international politics. But in the 1990s signs of the rebel forces, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front new logic were already discernible in the region. (EPLF) in Eritrea and the Ethiopian People’s Ethiopia and Eritrea, along with Uganda, were allies in Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) in Ethiopia, the US strategy of containment of Sudan, then under which was dominated by fighters from the northern Hassan al-Turabi’s Islamist influence. As if to province of Tigray. Acceptance of Eritrea’s underscore the risks, the Al-Qaeda attacks on the US independence was a central plank of the alliance embassies in Kenya and Tanzania occurred in the early between two groups and was formalized in 1993. On months of the Ethiopia–Eritrea dispute, at a time when the surface excellent relations existed between it still seemed possible that an all-out conflict could be Eritrea’s President Isaias Afeworki and Ethiopia’s Prime prevented. Both countries were regarded as friends of Minister Meles Zenawi and their ruling inner circles in the United States. Their sudden and bitter falling out the initial years after independence. was a grave disappointment to Washington. The In reality deep differences had plagued relations moment the fighting was over rapid diplomatic steps between the rebel groups for many years, leaving a were taken to move to a peace settlement. residue of resentment and distrust. Some differences Central to the peace agreement was a mechanism were over military strategy and tactics. Others were to decide the location of the border between the two ideological. At times relations had deteriorated into countries. For external mediators this was the most open confrontation and occasional clashes. While the tangible problem to solve in a conflict that otherwise outside world was largely unaware of these seemed to defy logical explanation. Whether or not difficulties, they were never forgotten by the political the un-demarcated border was the real cause of the elites. war, neither side objected to treating it as the central All of this went largely unspoken, and was not issue. open to public scrutiny. Formal arrangements were made for Ethiopia’s continuing use of Eritrean ports. Colonial borders Eritrea also used Ethiopia’s currency. But little was done to develop the institutions required to manage The Algiers Agreement was founded on the notion complex and increasingly divergent interstate that border demarcation would permanently solve the interests. conflict. It provided for the establishment of a neutral Serious economic rivalry developed, particularly Boundary Commission consisting of eminent legal between party elites in Eritrea and the adjoining experts chosen by both countries. Their mandate was Ethiopian region of Tigray. Eritrea decided to adopt its ’to delimit and demarcate the colonial treaty border own currency in 1997. This move brought simmering based on pertinent colonial treaties (1900, 1902 and economic tensions surrounding bilateral trade and 1908) and applicable international law’.1 The mandate investment to the boil, rupturing the informal specifically excluded the Commission from making channels of communication and negotiation between decisions ex aequo et bono, a term that meant the two political elites. ‘according to the right and good’. In the context of It was against this background, in May 1998, that a arbitration, it refers to the power of the arbitrators to small border incident was mishandled and erupted out dispense with consideration of the law and solely take of control – neither side had planned it. The fighting account of what they deem to be fair and equitable in ended in June 2000 after Ethiopian forces dislodged the case at hand. Eritrean forces from border positions they had seized Both countries agreed in advance that the decision in 1998. of the Commission would be final and binding, and would be followed by ‘expeditious’ demarcation. A UN peacekeeping force, UNMEE, would oversee the demilitarized border area while the Boundary Commission came up with its findings. Ethiopia and Eritrea: Allergic to Persuasion 3 Ethiopia and Eritrea both accepted that the reasoning behind the Commission’s adjudication was boundary should be based on the international long and complex, but essentially turned on two treaties signed by Ethiopia, Italy and Britain in the specific points: what the colonial treaties said and early years of the twentieth century. Most other whether either party had established by African borders were established unilaterally by the administration a claim so strong as to supersede the colonial power and accepted, sometimes unwillingly, provisions of the treaties. The effective date for such at independence in the 1950s and 1960s by the newly administration was 1935. emergent nations. This was the principle adopted by The Commission considered the location of the the Organization of African Unity (OAU) as a means of western portion of the border, which covered the preventing a new scramble for Africa at the time of town of Badme, on the basis of the 1902 treaty (to independence. The principle of abiding by existing which Britain was also a party since it related to the borders, no matter how unsatisfactory, was also frontier between Eritrea and Sudan). Having weighed accepted in the case of Ethiopia and Eritrea. up the treaty and the map evidence presented by the But their border has had an unusually troubled two parties, it agreed upon an interpretation of the history. In the last 100 years it had often been in straight-line section of the boundary such that it fell dispute, it had never been demarcated and it had to the east of Badme, placing the town, therefore, just twice been abolished. Where other African boundaries inside Eritrea. were simply reaffirmed at independence, the Italian The Commission then went on to examine administration on which Eritrea’s boundaries were Ethiopia’s claim that it had administered the Badme founded had ended some 60 years previously. area for such a long time that it had won effective Eritrea’s most recent existence as a colony was under title to the area, even if it had not been awarded it by the temporary British Military Administration that treaty. Having looked at evidence such as the ended in 1952. With the reassertion of Ethiopian collection of taxes, the establishment of an elementary sovereignty over Eritrea in 1952 and unification in school and the destruction of incense trees, the 1962, the boundary had been abolished and became Commission concluded as follows: an administrative division. It remained so until Eritrea’s formal separation from Ethiopia in 1993. These references represent the bulk of the The authorities in Addis Ababa and Asmara were items adduced by Ethiopia in support of its aware of the need to reach agreement on their un- claim to have exercised administrative demarcated border. But the war broke out before authority west of the Eritrean claim line. The they had got beyond the initial conversations. Commission does not find in them evidence of administration of the area sufficiently clear in location, substantial in scope or extensive in The ruling – false dawn time to displace the title of Eritrea that had crystallized as of 1935.3 The Boundary Commission deliberated for just over one year. Much of the 1,000-km border followed natural features and was unlikely to prove That appeared to be clear enough. Certainly the controversial. But a great deal rested on the location legal team that drew it up thought they had made of the little town of Badme. Badme was an Ethiopian- their decision crystal clear. However the Commission administered town that lies in the vicinity of a did not indicate the location of Badme on the maps ‘straight line’ section of the border, as defined in the that accompanied the decision.
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