[Mb-civic] We Can Prevent This War - Ghebre Selassie Mehreteab - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

We Can Prevent This War

By Ghebre Selassie Mehreteab
Saturday, July 23, 2005; Page A17

President Bush has announced his commitment to fostering prosperity and 
stability in Africa, and as part of this effort he dispatched Secretary 
of State Condoleezza Rice to visit Senegal and Sudan this week. But 
there is nowhere in Africa that the United States could do more to 
promote prosperity and stability than along the border between Eritrea 
and Ethiopia. It is a place where war threatens to resume at any time, 
ruining hopes for prosperity. It is also a place where the United States 
has a unique capacity to prevent war.

In 1998 a long-simmering border dispute resulted in a two-year war 
between Eritrea and Ethiopia in which more than 100,000 combatants were 
killed and countless more were wounded. No one really knows the exact 
number of civilian causalities or the amount of destruction inflicted on 
the two countries. Now there is the prospect of renewed warfare.

<>The last conflict ended in December 2000, when Eritrea and Ethiopia 
signed the Algiers peace agreement, which created a neutral boundary 
commission in The Hague with a mandate to determine the line between the 
two countries. The agreement was the result of almost two years of 
negotiations brokered by the United States. The agreement provided that 
the boundary commission's decision would be "final and binding," with no 
provisions for appeal. In April 2002 the commission carried out its 
boundary-setting mission and ruled, among other things, that the town of 
Badme -- the flashpoint in the recent war -- was in Eritrea, not Ethiopia.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/22/AR2005072201583.html?nav=hcmodule 

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