Dear Colleagues,
Greetings from Asmara.
1. A consultation in Sana'a last week-end indicates that, as things
stand, there is unfortunately no chance of Ethiopia agreeing to the
Technical Arrangements of the Framework Agreement. (a) Ethiopia is
unhappy with the Security Council for not condemning what it perceives
as aggression, and with what it calls the SC's "politics of interest,"
if not indeed with its composition. (b) It is not comfortable with the
implications of a peace-keeping force, as compared with an observer
mission. (c) It objects to the fact that there is no specific
identification of areas from which withdrawal will take place. (d) It
believes that by setting up a plethora of different bodies and
commissions the Technical Arrangements have diluted the concept of
sovereignty, perhaps even unintentionally. (e) It sees an inconsistency
between the Framework Agreement, in which the OAU was in the driving
seat, and the Technical Arrangements, in which the UN appears to have
taken over, for reasons which are unclear. (f) It wonders how its
concerns can be accommodated if the process "cannot be amended." (g) It
believes that in any case Eritrea cannot be trusted to stick to any
agreement.
2. To me, this adds up to a recognition by Ethiopia that its claim to
areas north of the "colonial" border is legally weak; it knows what the
outcome would be if demarcation were allowed to go ahead as proposed.
There is alas another way of ensuring that Eritrea gets the message,
rather different from the negotiating table, and there could - any day
now - be a terrible human tragedy, on a huge scale. In Assab last week,
a woman in tears just deported from Addis Ababa (one of 64,000) showed
me - in front of her six children - the marks round her ankles caused by
the shackles she had worn for three months in prison, where she had been
thrown for being of distant Eritrean descent. See that and it's not easy
to be "impartial."
3. On a lighter note, I was vividly reminded on Monday of a different
border dispute/arbitration, the one between Eritrea and Yemen. On the
strength of my few words of Romanian (forgive me: I studied Romance
Philology), the crew of the Red Sea Air plane returning to Asmara via
Assab (who are rotated from Romania every 45 days) invited me to sit in
the cockpit, on a jump-seat just behind the pilot and co-pilot.
Excitement! And lo, there below us, on the port bow, were the Hanish
islands (see IBRU Bulletin, Autumn 1998). Leaning forward, I pointed in
their direction and asked: "Are those the Hanish Islands? Hanish
islands? HANISH...?" but the pilots both just looked blank, so perhaps
actually reading the Air Navigation Chart is not part of their flight
planning procedure. But then from that altitude you could see both
shores of the Red Sea easily. Assab, incidentally, surrounded by
lava-flows, would not be my holiday choice. With no Ethiopian shipping
any more it's virtually a ghost-town.
Best regards.
Merrick Fall
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