PART ONE

Ethiopia and Eritrea - House of Lords, UK

November 30, 1999

7.27 p.m.

Lord Avebury rose to ask Her Majesty's Government what steps they will take
to help solve the conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia.

The noble Lord said: My Lords, I am extremely grateful to the House and to
your Lordships who are to take part in this debate for the opportunity to
raise a conflict which has claimed more lives than any other in the world.
Some 15,000 people have been killed so far in the Eritrea/ Ethiopia war;
that is, up to 1st August of this year. Some authorities put the numbers
much higher. A journalist says that each side is mobilising an army of a
quarter of a million men and that tens of thousands of people have been
killed in fighting that has used First World War tactics. He is probably not
exaggerating the capacity of Ethiopia to put men into the field but Eritrea,
with a twentieth of the population of its neighbour, probably could not
raise an army of that size.

Amnesty International says that up to the end of January this year 53,000
Eritreans had been expelled from Ethiopia since the fighting began. Further
deportations, including 635 only last month have brought the total up to
65,000. As an added twist, the Ethiopians charged the deportees in the
latest batch between six and 18 dollars for "transportation and baggage
handling." However, the expulsions do not seem to have been organized in the
deliberately cruel manner of earlier ones when families were deliberately
split up, with children being kicked out of Ethiopia at different times,
sometimes months apart, from their parents.

On the other side, the ICRC says that it helped 22,000 Ethiopians who were
living in Eritrea to return home and that many others went back under their
own steam. There was no systematic policy of ill-treatment of Ethiopians by
the Eritrean Government or their security forces. The UNHCR says that
300,000 people have been internally displaced by the conflict in Eritrea and
272,000 in Ethiopia.

What are these colossal upheavals and losses of life all about? When Eritrea
gained independence in 1991, the borders between Eritrea and Ethiopia were
not clearly defined, although the two states had agreed that the colonial
boundaries between the Italian colony and Ethiopia should be retained in
accordance with Organisation for African Unity principles. However, each
side encroached on the other and the problem continued to smoulder until
1997 when a border commission was established following the alleged
occupation of an Eritrean town by Ethiopian

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forces. The border commission met several times but reached no conclusions.
Then on 6th May 1998 fighting broke out after the Eritreans occupied the
thinly inhabited area known as the Badme triangle, which they claimed, even
though it had been administered by Ethiopia.
Such local border disputes cannot be the whole reason for the war, any more
than the Archduke Ferdinand's assassination caused the First World War. Many
Ethiopians still resent Eritrea's independence, its military superiority in
the war of liberation and its desire to have its own currency. As a
landlocked country, the Ethiopians disliked their dependence on the Eritrean
port of Assab. Indeed, Ethiopia's real agenda may have been revealed when
last week its Minister of Defence said that Ethiopia had the capacity to,

"break the backbone of the invading army and restore its territorial
integrity".

If the Ethiopians had been concerned only to restore their correct borders
with Eritrea, by now they would have accepted the proposals made by the OAU
which I know that Ministers at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office have done
their best to support.
In summary, the OAU framework agreement of June 1998 recommended that there
should be an immediate cessation of hostilities; redeployment of armed
forces to the positions they held before the fighting started, supervised by
OAU military observers in all contested areas of the border;
demilitarisation of the border; delineation of the border by UN cartographic
experts; investigation of the circumstances which led to the hostilities;
and the cessation of action by either party against each other's nationals.

The Eritreans, who have been put at a disadvantage by the expulsion of their
ambassador to the OAU from Addis Ababa, at first quibbled a little about the
framework agreement by submitting a number of questions for clarification.
However, they accepted the replies and signed up to the agreement after both
parties were urged to do so by the UN Security Council in February 1999.

At the Algiers summit of the OAU, the parties signed up to the modalities
for the implementation of that agreement, agreeing to put an end not only to
all military activities, but also to,

"all forms of expression likely to sustain and exacerbate the climate of
hostility".

That has not been honoured. Both sides have continued to hurl insults at
each other. Furthermore, the formal cessation of hostilities, which was to
be the first step in the sequence of implementation, has not yet occurred.
Notwithstanding the firm statement issued on 11th August by the chairman and
secretary-general of the OAU that interpretation of the framework
agreement--the modalities and the technical arrangements--fell within the
exclusive competence of the OAU, the Ethiopians submitted a long list of
questions about the technical arrangements. To take just one example, they
asked
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why the modalities called for the immediate redeployment of troops to the
positions they held before 6th May 1998 while the arrangements said that
this would occur 50 days after D-Day. They received a response saying that
the experts had advised that it would take that long to deploy OAU military
observers. However, the Ethiopians have continued to quibble and prevaricate
ever since they received a very detailed explanation from the OAU in
mid-August. They have argued that further dialogue is necessary to,

"close the loopholes and eliminate the inconsistencies between the Technical
Arrangements and the Framework Agreement".

Thus they have challenged the OAU's sole right of interpretation and, in
effect, have threatened to start the whole process of conflict resolution,
laboriously undertaken by the OAU, again from square one.
A note of the current position of the Ethiopians sent to me by their
ambassador states why they are dissatisfied with the explanations given by
the OAU. They want the TA document to repeat words already included in the
framework agreement which they interpret as being critical of Eritrea but
which have nothing to do with the solution. They want Eritrea to withdraw
from all occupied areas before the cessation of hostilities, even though
paragraph 4 of the modalities, which they themselves signed on 14th July,
states plainly:

"The redeployment of troops shall commence immediately after the cessation
of hostilities".

In practice, that means as soon as the OAU observers can get there. The
Ethiopians say that the TA document has to specify the areas from which
Eritrea must withdraw, again ignoring the modalities' requirement that OAU
military observers should supervise the redeployment of both Eritrean and
Ethiopian forces. The TA document provides for a neutral commission to
decide as a matter of fact what were the positions occupied by the
respective forces prior to 6th May 1998. That is fair, considering that in
any case the resumption of those positions is without prejudice to the
ultimate determination of the boundary by the UN cartographers.
Mr Ahmed Ouyahia, the OAU special envoy on the Horn of Africa, has worked
hard to bring Ethiopia into conformity with formulas so carefully and
systematically developed. But when his last round of shuttling between the
capitals of Asmara and Addis Ababa was completed at the end of last month,
there was no announcement. Again, at about that time the rainy season was
coming to an end and the de facto ceasefire which had operated since the
Algiers summit began to look increasingly fragile. Tension is rising and
there is even a danger that Djibouti would be drawn in if fighting starting
again. On 11th November the president of the UN Security Council urged
Ethiopia and Eritrea to exercise maximum restraint. However, there are
reports that Ethiopia is getting ready to launch a new offensive. As someone
I was

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talking to this morning who has just returned from Addis put it,

"They want to destroy Eritrea. The media is completely dominated by
warmongering and reconciliation is not discussed at any level. Isaias is
compared to Hitler. It is common knowledge that troops and heavy armaments
are being moved up to the front line".

Can the Minister tell the House whether the UN Security Council has access
to satellite intelligence of troop movements on either side and, if so,
would it consider asking for that intelligence to be published so that the
world can judge who is the aggressor and who will start the fighting again?
If the Security Council does not have access to that data, would Britain
suggest to the other member states of the council that an approach be made
to satellite-owning member states to see if they would be prepared to make
available the images and analyses both in this case and in any others where
large military operations may be apprehended?

As I see it, the problem has been that up to now the Security Council has
treated the two parties as being equally responsible for the failure to
resolve this conflict. If an even greater catastrophe is to be prevented in
the Horn of Africa than has already occurred, it needs to identify Addis
Ababa as the one responsible. The Eritreans have no motive for prolonging a
war they cannot win. They have signed up to the spirit and letter of all
three OAU documents. On the other hand, Ethiopia wants to defeat Eritrea on
the battlefield and has turned a deaf ear to pleas from the OAU.

No doubt it was considered that Ethiopia was more likely to be persuaded
into compliance if it was not blamed for the failure to implement the
agreements that it had signed. However, surely there must come a point where
the aggressor is identified and measures taken against it. The Security
Council determined in its resolution of 10th February that the situation
constitutes a threat to peace and security, but it has not taken the further
step of deciding, in the words of Chapter 7,

"what measures shall be taken ... to maintain or restore international peace
and security".

Before deciding what measures should be taken, I propose that the Security
Council should ask President Bouteflika whether it may see copies of the
special envoy's reports on his efforts to persuade the two parties to agree
to the OAU package. If he says that Eritrea did agree to the OAU proposals
but that Ethiopia is backtracking not only on the technical arrangements but
also on the modalities, then the Security Council should not express its
next resolution in terms of an equal demand on both states but should
welcome Eritrea's co-operation and require Ethiopia to accept the OAU
package as well. Have the Government seen Mr Ouyahia's reports, and will
they try to get them into the public domain? Will the Government ensure that
the obstacles to peace are clearly identified in a Security Council
resolution and, if one party turns out to be mainly responsible, that that
party is identified?

(continues on Part 2)