The UN Security Council voted on Wednesday to end its eight-year-long peacekeeping mission between Eritrea and Ethiopia, a failure the UN chief has warned could lead to a new war between the Horn of Africa neighbors.
Council members voted unanimously to withdraw the remaining peacekeepers from what was once a 1,700-strong force monitoring a 1,000km long buffer zone between the two countries.
Belgian ambassador Jan Grauls told the council that the mission, known as UNMEE, “had become impossible to implement” because Eritreans progressively limited peacekeepers’ movements — including restricting night patrols, supply routes and diesel fuel. The mission was also undermined by Ethiopia’s refusal to accept an independent boundary commission’s ruling in 2002 to award the key town of Badme to Eritrea, he said.
“The border dispute between Ethiopia and Eritrea remains total, and the United Nations is withdrawing without having been able to assist the two countries in finding a common ground, in spite of having tried all to achieve it,” Grauls said.
Other peacekeeping missions that were unable to fulfill their mandates for political reasons, though they succeeded in protecting some civilian lives, were ones to Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Angola, all of them in the 1990s.
Azouz Ennifar, a Tunisian diplomat speaking for the UN mission from Addis Ababa called it “a difficult mission in geographically harsh locations” that tried its best.
Mission officials said about 320 military personnel remain on the Ethiopian side but most of their peacekeeping personnel have already left the Eritrean side. They said the “formal liquidation” of the headquarters in Addis Ababa and Asmara, Eritrea would begin today.
Among both nations the mission has fewer than 400 civilian staff still in place.
Fewer than 200 UN staff remain in Eritrea, most of them Eritreans tasked with guarding UN equipment until it could be evacuated.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned in April that a new war could break out if peacekeepers were to withdraw entirely from along the disputed border, and urged Eritrea to restore the UN’s ability to patrol its side of the border.
Ban wrote on Monday cautioning the council that “the risk of escalation of tension in the border area and a resumption of hostilities, by accident or design, following the withdrawal of UNMEE remains a reality.”
He included letters from Ethiopian Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin saying the Security Council could have done more to protect the mission and Eritrean ambassador Araya Desta saying the council should have thrown its weight behind the boundary commission’s ruling.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver