A United Nations-appointed panel told Eritrea and Ethiopia on Wednesday to resolve a six-year border dispute within a year or face the UN taking the matter out of their hands.
Eritrea and Ethiopia both last week rejected plans by the panel, the Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission, to demarcate their contentious frontier on paper.
The stalemate has left the status of the 1 000km border unclear six years after a peace deal has and raised tensions, heightened by UN reports that both nations are militarily active in Somalia.
But the panel said on Wednesday it would not let the dispute run beyond November 2007, when it will rule on boundary points closely following a delimitation decided in 2002.
”If, by the end of that period, the parties have not by themselves reached the necessary agreement and proceeded significantly to implement it … the commission hereby determines that the boundary will automatically stand as demarcated by the boundary points” defined by the panel, it said.
The commission’s warning comes amid growing tension between the two countries that many fear could lead to a renewal of their war and spill over into Somalia, threatening a wider regional conflict.
When a border war between both countries ended in December 2000, they pledged that they would implement any frontier decision by the panel.
While Eritrea accepts the panel’s current plan, which awarded it the flashpoint town of Badme, but wants it to be physically laid out, Ethiopia, which rejects the boundary, said the commission was acting outside its mandate.
Eritrea last week warned that the current stalemate is ”not sustainable” and refused to rule out a new war with its arch-foe Horn of Africa neighbour.
At the same time, Asmara repeated denials that Somalia had become a proxy battleground for it and Addis Ababa amid reports the two countries are backing rival factions there to settle scores from their bloody 1998 to 2000 conflict.
Last year, Asmara restricted patrols by the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE) and then expelled all of its North American and European staff, rebuffing UN Security Council demands to reverse the steps.
Since September, Eritrea has expelled five UNMEE staff for alleged espionage, and sent troops into a demilitarised buffer zone along the border in what the UN said is a ”major breach” of the 2000 ceasefire. — AFP
