DRAWING THE LINE

Horn of African neighbours Ethiopia and Eritrea have tough times ahead. Almost four years after a minor border squabble escalated into a full scale war, the independent International Boundary Commission in the Hague, the Netherlands, is going to tell them where one country ends and the other begins. With the OAU brokered peace agreement of December 2000, the two countries promised each other - and the world - they would abide by the ruling of the commission. But it will not turn stubborn enemies into back slapping buddies overnight.

The governments of Ethiopia and Eritrea are under a lot of pressure. Tensions in the border area as well as in both capitals have been mounting over the past few months. Though the guns were silenced with the cease-fire of July 2000, the war of words had never really abated. Since the countries presented their cases in front of the border commission last December, insults and accusations are traded with renewed vigour.

Meanwhile the border decision was postponed twice. A full Security Council delegation came to visit at the end of February and March 15 the mandate of the United Nations peace mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea UNMEE was extended five months.

Pressures are also coming from inside both countries. In Ethiopia parts of the opposition are saying that as Ethiopia won the war, they should be the ones to decide where the new border is. In the first years of the conflict Eritrea had been the stronger party, but during the spring 2000 offensive the Ethiopian army occupied large swabs of Eritrea. An estimated one million Eritreans (one third of the country’s population) were forced to flee, their army just escaping being surrounded.

Amhara opposition groups – historically Ethiopia’s politically dominant ethnic group - have described Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi as an Eritrean mercenary, who has left Ethiopia landlocked by first allowing Eritrea’s independence in 1991 and secondly not pushing through when the tanks were rolling two years ago. The Ethiopian Democratic Party (EDP) – currently the strongest opposition party - collected onehundredthousand signatures for a petition saying Ethiopia should not be bound to the boundary commission’s ruling if it is not in her favour.

What really puts the thumbscrews on the Prime Minister is that hard-liners from his own ethnic group, the northern Ethiopian Tigrayans, also regret Zenawi not negotiating a more advantageous peace agreement. They think Ethiopia should at least have toppled its neighbour’s government. As the Tigrayans control the army, Zenawi briefly risked a coupe but outmanoeuvred them smartly. He imprisoned the dissidents; their families and some high placed symphatizers and charged them with corruption. Nevertheless, the amount of popular support they got forced Zenawi to copy part of their hard line ideas.

It all seems just factions of the population but together they voice a sentiment that many Ethiopians share. The country’s war propaganda has been so effective that the people now hate the Eritreans more as the government wants them to. It would seriously destabilise Zenawi if the Ethiopian people reject the peace his government agreed to. Dr. Kinfe Abraham of the Ethiopian International Institute for Peace and Development (EIIPD) – a government confidant – during a press conference March 27, made clear Zenawi’s tactic: Whatever the ruling, it will be presented as an Ethiopian victory.

Nothing new under the sun. Part of the problem is that the Ethiopian government is still picturing the whole war as a smashing Ethiopian success. The economic and human cost is still unclear. Observers estimate the Ethiopian war expenses at 2.9 billion US dollars. The real cost however is not in money spent, but in money not made and a stunted development.

Casualty figures will remain a mystery. The information has deliberately been spread and broken down in units the size of a kebele (neighbourhood). Totals will be impossible to compile. Eritrean president Isaias Afeworki last year announced his country lost 19.000 soldiers in the war. A shocking amount compared to the 60.000 Eritrean soldiers killed during the thirty-year liberation war against Ethiopia between 1961 and 1991. Military observers claim the combined number of war-deaths could have been as high as seventy to onehundredthousand.

Clearly the Eritrean government is under internal pressure too. Afeworki is already losing the confidence of his people after imprisoning a number of dissidents who openly challenged him to democratise. If the boundary commission finds Eritrea in the wrong with its claims, the people will ask why they ever went to war in the first place. Their politicians may deny it, but the Eritrean people widely suspect their country to have undertaken the first major offensive of the conflict, even though it was probably provoked by small Ethiopian border incursions. Nevertheless, it would look pretty bad if this war would turn the same result as the Hanish islands conflict, which was a brief confrontation between Eritrea and Yemen in 1996, only to have international arbitration decide most of the island group belonged in fact to Yemen.

Still, Eritrea now has a better case as with the Hanish, arguably an even better case as Ethiopia. Eritrea bases its border claims on colonial treaties from the beginning of last century between its Italian colonisers and Ethiopia. Later when Emperor Haile Selassie annexed Eritrea, the same borders remained administrative. In the late eighties, when most of Eritrea was in fact liberated and no longer under the control of Addis Abeba, practice was different. At that time the Tigrayan freedom fighters of the TPLF – which now governs Ethiopia – and the Eritrean guerrillas of the EPLF – which now governs Eritrea – administered parts of each other’s territory out of military and practical convenience. At independence they never bothered to address the issue, thinking it could be solved amiably.

According to the peace agreement between Ethiopia and Eritrea the International Boundary Commission is to judge the presented evidence on the basis of international law and treaties. The key question is whether the commission will deem the fact that Ethiopia administered parts of Eritrea (and vice versa) for ten years as enough for actually claiming the territories. What ever they will decide they will have to explain it very well, as someone (or everyone) is bound to try and politicise the judgement.

After the basic decision it will take many months to actually demarcate the border. Rolls of barbed wire will be spun along GPS determined points. And the new Iron Curtain will undoubtedly go through major battlefields still strewn with corpses and land mines.

The uncertainty over the border and those estimated one million landmines make it difficult for remaining refugees to return home. Some 73.000 Eritreans who used to live in what is now the Temporary Security Zone (TSZ) are still in camps, together with 13.000 who have been deported from Ethiopia. In addition the UNHCR is repatriating the last 121.000 Eritrean refugees fled to the Sudan during the liberation war.

The impact of the coming ruling on the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea can go way beyond the boundaries of these two neighbours in the Horn of Africa. If the decision of the independent boundary commission is not unrecognisably true, impartial and de-politicised, it may be an open invitation for a number of other African countries to start an armed discussion on their borders.

In addition Ethiopia and Eritrea itself may take up arms when challenged with good old geopolitics. Already the US depends on Ethiopia for battling Al-Queda en Al-Ittihaad guerrillas in southern Somalia, and Eritrea is being accused of harbouring Sudanese guerrillas and facilitating Ethiopian guerrillas.

Whatever the result and the implications, the ruling of the International Boundary Commission is sure to shake up both countries. All is not forgotten and forgiven between the two former comrades in arms.