Why Africa's two bald men could return to war

OneWorld UK

By Daniel Nelson

There is a real possibility that Ethiopia and Eritrea currently locked in an uneasy peace could return to war, the co-editor of a new book on the conflict told a small audience at the Africa Centre in London this week.

The 1998-2000 war was memorably described at the time as two bald men fighting over a comb. But the results were catastrophic: an estimated 100,000 dead, tens of thousands injured, 1 million displaced, development programmes in two of the poorest countries on earth put back by a generation.

Yet at the end of the fighting, the border between the two countries was left more or less where it had been before the first shot was fired in what co-editor Martin Plaut says was initially a minor skirmish over a dusty town that few in either capital had ever heard of

Plaut pointed out at the book launch that five years after the end of the war, and three years after the UN-supervised boundary commission ruling on the demarcation of the border, Eritrean fighters were still in trenches on the front line and some had been there for seven years.

He was scathing about the attitude of both governments, both of which he charged with inflexibility. Eritrea, he said, was continuing to buy weapons at a time when up to one-third of its population needed food aid. Ethiopia was also buying weapons and training pilots, had put settlers across the border, would not allow demarcation and was happy to see Eritrea remain in a no war, no peace situation.

Plaut, Africa Editor with BBC World Service radio news, said he was gloomy about the prospects for breaking the impasse, and thought the only hope was the US government, which both countries respected and with which both maintained good ties.

Plaut described the $2.5 billion UN post-conflict operation to keep the peace on the border as an extraordinary amount for a useless activity

Lionel Cliffe, a contributor to the book, Unfinished Business: Ethiopia and Eritrea at War, who was in the audience at the launch, also expressed pessimism, and accused both governments of knowing nothing about politics about bargaining, dealing, negotiating a compromise. He warned that further fighting would destabilise neighbouring countries and would, for example, make the possibility of peace for Somalia even more remote.

Dawit Mesfin, an Eritrean academic who lives in Britain, said he did not think fighting would break out again because the presence of UN forces acted as a deterrent, Ethiopia could not risk the aid it was receiving (at least, not now) and Eritrea risked turning its isolation into sanctions if it started a new war.

But he emphasised that the absence of armed conflict did not mean there was peace. Peaceful warfare was being waged on the citizens of both countries civilians through lack of food, healthcare and jobs and by a shortage of people to look after those affected by the last war. Such suffering was no less severe than the suffering experienced during the war.

* Unfinished Business: Ethiopia and Eritrea at War, edited by Dominique Jacquin-Berdal and Martin Plaut, The Red Sea Press Inc, £19.99/ $29.95 UK distributor: Turnaround Publisher Services, Unit 3, Olympia Trading Estate, Coburg Road, Wood Green, N22 6TZ. Tel: 020 8829 3000/ email
orders@turnaround-uk.com

* OneWorld's Eritrea Guide