Ease border tension, top UN official urges

Ethiopia and Eritrea must take concrete actions to ease tensions along their shared frontier given continuing fears that war could break out afresh between the two countries, a top United Nations official said on Monday. A miscalculation could lead to further bloodshed, the UN Under Secretary-General for Peacekeeping, Jean-Marie Guehenno, said in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. "Nobody should be complacent in the present situation," he told reporters after meeting Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. "There is always a risk of war by miscalculation." He added: "I think both countries have stressed that they don't want to go to war. That is not quite good enough; there are concrete actions that need to be taken." Guehenno is on a three-day mission to Ethiopia and Eritrea to try and break the stalemate between the two Horn of Africa countries and dampen tensions over their common border. Speaking on the fifth anniversary of the peace deal that ended their bloody two-year war in December 2000, he added that mistrust, misperceptions and poor communications with local commanders could lead to war. "We have seen in the past five years that minor incidents can escalate because of the mistrust, because of misperceptions and sometimes because of the command and control issues at the very local level," he added. "We all know that we are five years to the day after the Algiers Agreement and that there are a lot of expectations." On Saturday, Ethiopian foreign minister Seyoum Mesfin announced the country would pull back its troops in compliance with a UN demand. "We appreciate the decision of Ethiopia to pull away its troops from the front line," Guehenno added before he flew with UN military adviser Gen Randir Kumar Mehta to Eritrea for talks with President Isaias Afwerki. The UN estimates that since December 2004, Ethiopia has moved around eight divisions - some 50,000 men - as well as tanks, missiles and other military hardware to the border. Diplomats estimate that around 380,000 troops are entrenched along the 1,000-km frontier - around 130,000 on the Ethiopian side and 250,000 on the Eritrean side - where both countries waged a bloody two-year war that began in May 1998. The visit to the region comes after Eritrea ordered the expulsion of nearly 200 western peacekeepers, a move the UN force said could cripple its operations. On 5 October, the Eritrean government banned helicopter flights by UN peacekeepers in its airspace in a buffer zone with Ethiopia. It then prohibited UN vehicles from patrolling at night on its side of the zone, prompting the UN to vacate 18 of its 40 posts. Last month, the UN Security Council passed a resolution warning of possible sanctions unless Eritrea lifted restrictions on the UN peacekeepers and the two sides reversed the worrisome troop build-up. It demanded that Ethiopia begins implementing a border decision to demarcate its frontier. Ethiopia has so far refused to hand over territory awarded to Eritrea by the independent boundary commission set up under the 2000 peace agreement to resolve the dispute over the border region. Eritrea gained independence from Ethiopia in 1993 after a 30-year guerrilla war, but the border between the two was never formally demarcated. A border war that erupted in 1998 killed tens of thousands of people.