NAIROBI, 16 January 2006 — The United States is throwing its geopolitical might into breaking the Eritrea-Ethiopia border deadlock but analysts say its only hope is to persuade Addis Ababa to fully accept the deal that ended a murderous war between the Horn of Africa neighbors. Washington is sending a delegation to the region this week to try to end a years-long stalemate between the two countries, so divided over the enactment of a legally binding mapping of their common border that some fear a new war could start.
Diplomacy in the sense of brokering a deal will not cut tensions, analysts say, because Eritrea insists the border is a clear-cut matter of law where compromise has no place.
Only persuading Ethiopia to follow a ruling that awarded a disputed town to Eritrea will solve the dispute.
“The Americans have to deliver something on the Ethiopian side to be credible, and that is Ethiopia accepting the border decision,” said Princeton Lyman, a former US ambassador to South Africa and Nigeria, who also worked in Ethiopia.
In a pact to end a 1998-2000 border war that killed 70,000 people, Eritrea and Ethiopia agreed to accept an independent commission’s mapping of the frontier.
The commission gave a disputed town to Eritrea. But Ethiopia refused the ruling, branding it unfair because it would separate Ethiopians from their farmland.
Eritrea has repeatedly said a deal is a deal and that the international community — especially the United Nations — had failed miserably in enforcing it.
It has rejected any efforts at diplomacy, including Ethiopia’s offer in late 2004 to accept the deal after new dialogue.
“Eritrea has made this extremely difficult to deal with. It’s not that their position is wrong, but their tactics are terrible. They feel everyone is against them,” said Lyman, now senior fellow for African policy at the Council on Foreign Relations think-tank.
Trying to force action, Eritrea last year cranked up its rhetoric, ejected Western personnel from the UN peacekeeping mission, restricted UN troop movements and banned helicopter flights over the buffer zone on the 1,000 km (620 mile) border.
Where other diplomatic forays have failed, one thing may give Washington a foot in the door — influence with Ethiopia.
“The US has been fairly clear on indicating that Ethiopia must accept the binding arbitration. On the record, they don’t disagree with Eritrea,” said David Shinn, a professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.
But the United States “has not been overly pushy because it obviously has other interests and concerns in the area,” he added.
Though militarily superior, Ethiopia is the top US counter-terrorism partner in the Horn of Africa, Eritrea controls a key stretch of coastline and also has good relations with Sudanese rebels groups in the east, west and south. That is valuable for the United States in terms of solving the Darfur crisis in Sudan’s west, keeping the year-old south Sudan peace deal alive and forestalling new fighting in the east, analysts said.
Where the United States may have been reluctant to push Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi too hard before, raised fears of war in the Horn and the prospect that the UN peacekeeping mission could fail has prompted action. “Clearly the danger that is there has sunk in. And there is a perceived — and quite correctly perceived — need to do something about it,” Tom Cargill, an Africa expert with the London-based Chatham House think-tank.
Washington’s leverage over Ethiopia is a promise to help Meles deal with a turbulent political situation at home and to persuade European donors to give back $375 million in aid they withheld over an opposition crackdown last year, Lyman said.
“I do think the Eritreans are going to hold to this very stubborn line, but the Americans can get Meles to move,” he said.
The US mission, headed by Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer, has already been given more of a welcome by Eritrea than the last high-level diplomatic effort.
Eritrea’s Information Ministry in an editorial on its website on Wednesday said Eritrea would welcome “initiatives that are focused at bringing about an appropriate resolution to the fundamental issue.”
But the editorial said Eritrea would not accept “other ‘diplomatic’ efforts” that would bypass the legally binding decision.
“Diplomacy doesn’t fit very well alongside international law in the sense that you can’t tinker with international law, a binding decision, because it would undermine every other decision,” said Martin Pratt, research director at the University of Durham’s International Boundaries Research Unit.
That was the lesson Eritrea tried to impart to UN Special Envoy Lloyd Axworthy, sent in late 2003 to break the impasse.
By the end of his term in August 2005, the former Canadian foreign minister had never even met the Eritrean leadership, which suspected he might try to circumvent the border ruling.
