U.S. envoys to Eritrea-Ethiopia

by William N Reilly

UNITED NATIONS, United States (UPI) --
The United Nations says it sees no immediate threat of war along the tense border between Eritrea and Ethiopia as the United States dispatches a diplomatic delegation to the Horn of Africa in an attempt to avert another clash between the neighboring nations.

U.S. Ambassador John Bolton Monday said he told fellow members of the U.N. Security Council Washington was sending Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Frazer and retired U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Carlton Fulford Jr. to the region within a week. Frazer is an assistant secretary of state, heading up the Bureau of African Affairs.
Bolton also said he had asked the council to hold off taking any action in the crisis for one month, to give diplomacy a chance to work.

Members of the panel of 15 said they agreed, following a closed-door briefing by the top U.N. peacekeeper, Undersecretary-General Jean-Marie Guehenno, who later briefed reporters.U.N. peacekeepers have been monitoring the 620 mile border between the two nations for the last five years. More than 80,000 people were killed in a two-year border war between the two countries, ending in 2000. It is not yet fully demarcated.
Eritrea, increasingly upset at Ethiopia`s refusal to recognize a bilaterally approved border-drawing commission`s decisions, late last year grounded U.N. peacekeeping flights from its side of a temporary security zone along the frontier and ordered North American and European -- including Russian -- peacekeepers out. This has stymied the U.N.`s role.

Guehenno said last month the Eritrean restrictions and demands were 'unacceptable.'

Both countries moved troops close to the TSZ, raising fears of renewed warfare.

But, in his briefing Monday, Guehenno told the council 'The mission, with its degraded capacity, hasn`t seen any significant movements in the TSZ and the mission hasn`t seen any tanks or artillery in the TSZ. We cannot say without total assurance that there hasn`t been an introduction of troops from Eritrea, but our sense is that at the moment in the TSZ there is no, let`s say, deployment that could threaten a war.'

He lauded Washington for its diplomatic initiative.'The United States prepared to take the diplomatic risk and to engage itself to move the region away from war,' he said. 'That`s what`s needed.'Guehenno, who visited the region last month, said there had been a pullback on the Ethiopian side from positions taken as early as December 2004.

'The government of Eritrea claims it has not reintroduced troops into the TSZ,' he said, while acknowledging reports of troop sightings on the Eritrean side. However, he said, 'There are places where you will see small numbers (85-100 personnel) where you haven`t seen them' previously.

'The Eritreans would say they were militia,' the undersecretary-general said. 'Whether militia or troops is hard to tell; what we don`t see is a massive movement.'

Guehenno said in a report on his December visit to the Horn of Africa he was able to meet with Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, but no senior Eritrean government official agreed to meet him, nor did the Eritrean authorities respond to two letters he sent them reminding the Asmara of its obligations and urging it to reconsider its damaging decision to request the withdrawal of certain UNMEE staff as well as the other restrictions it had imposed.

Only last week, in a report to the council, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan offered a number of options for coping with the current stalemate, ranging from redeployment of peacekeeping troops to the total withdrawal of the U.N. Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea.

'The government of Eritrea did not respond to my own calls to rescind the decision,' to remove the North Americans and Europeans, he said.

In the middle of last month the Security Council allowed UNMEE to temporarily redeploy 77 mission civilian staff and 61 military personnel from Eritrea to Ethiopia.