House of Lords

Debate:  Eritrea - Ethiopia

30 November 1999

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 organised 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 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 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 started 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

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?


It is a pity that the Security Council did not act immediately in May 1998
to prevent fresh arms supplies pouring into the region. The EU decided on an
arms embargo last year, but western Europe was never the main supplier to
the region. At the end of last year Eritrea acquired six MiG 29s and
Ethiopia eight Sukhoi 27s. In each case there was reported to be a package
of support in terms of training for pilots and technicians. Since the de
facto cease-fire in June, both sides have been re-arming. One authority on
the region says that, between them, the two countries are spending an
estimated 600 million dollars a year on foreign weapons, a shocking
diversion of resources from the development needs of a desperately poor
region. In Ethiopia, humanitarian agencies are asking for extra money to
help the internally displaced and those affected by the severe drought. The
number of people in need of food aid in Ethiopia has been revised from the
previous estimate of 5.6 million to 6.8 million for November and 4.6 million
for December, according to USAID's famine early warning system.

The United Nations ought to be more joined up and say that countries which
cannot afford to feed their people should not be spending billions of
dollars on weapons. Will the Government propose a mandatory UN arms embargo
on the Horn of Africa as a whole, plus Yemen, which has broken the existing
embargo on Sudan and could well be dealing with other countries in the
region?

After Mengistu was overthrown and Eritrea gained its independence by force
of arms, it looked as though a new era of peace and co-operation between
previous enemies was beginning. The UK and the EU were ready to help with
development aid and technical help in promoting good governance, democracy
and human rights, and Ethiopia was receiving steadily increasing amounts of
development assistance. Now all that is being jeopardised by the conflict
and the refusal of Addis Ababa to listen to the advice being offered by the
OAU and the UN with the support of the whole world. The loss of life, the
immense suffering of the wounded and the displaced, the sacrifice of
economic potential and the criminal waste of resources on military hardware
have already threatened the future of the people of both countries. If the
fighting is resumed, the catastrophe will have repercussions far beyond the
region. Britain, as a friend and ally of both states concerned, must do
everything to prevent this tragedy.

For Part 2 - click here