The Ethiopia–Eritrea Conflict and the Search for Peace in the Horn of Africa

Abstract

The Ethiopia-Eritrea border dispute is embedded within a set of domestic political conflicts in each state, is linked further through proxy conflicts to instability in Somalia and the Ogaden, and is skewed additionally by the application of Washington's global counter-terrorism policies to the region. Each of these arenas of contention has its own history, issues, actors and dynamic; however, each is also distorted by processes of conflict escalation and de-escalation in the other arenas. The intermeshing of domestic insecurities, interstate antagonisms, and global policies create regional ‘security complexes’ in which the security of each actor is intrinsically linked to the others and cannot realistically be considered apart from one another. Prospects for both the escalation and resolution of the Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict are linked to domestic political processes (such as increasing authoritarianism), regional dynamics (such as local rivalries played out in Somalia) and international policies (such as US counter-terrorism policies).

Notes

Letter dated 7 October 2003 from the President of the Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission to the Secretary-General, reprinted in ‘Progress Report of the Secretary-General on Ethiopia and Eritrea’, 19 December 2003, S/2003/1186.

Ethiopia stated in a June 2007 letter to the Security Council, for example, that ‘Ethiopia has accepted the Commission's delimitation decision of 13 April 2002 without precondition’. Letter dated 8 June 2007 from the Chargé d’affaires of the Permanent Mission of Ethiopia to the United Nations addressed to the President of the Security Council, 13 June 2007, S/2007/350.

The Committee to Protect Journalists labelled Eritrea ‘one of the world's worst jailers of journalists’. Reporters Without Borders ranked Eritrea 166 out of 168 counties in its 2006 Worldwide Press Freedom Index, Freedom House ranked the state as ‘not free’ in its 2007 report. The US Department of State's ‘International Religious Freedom Report 2007’ says that the Eritrean Government ‘continued to harass, arrest, and detain members of independent evangelical groups, Pentecostals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and a reform movement within the Eritrean Orthodox Church’.

US Department of State statement, ‘Ethiopian Political Violence’, 7 November 2005; Statement by the Development Assistance Group, Addis Ababa, 11 November 2005; US Department of State, press statement, ‘Political Dissent and Due Process in Ethiopia’, 6 January 2006.

James Swan, Deputy Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, ‘US Policy in the Horn of Africa’, address to the 4th International Conference on Ethiopian Development Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 4 August 2007. The statement goes on to characterise President Isaias as ‘increasingly tyrannical and megalomaniacal’ and states that: ‘The Eritrean Government has fabricated a national mythology by demonising neighbouring Ethiopia, for the central purpose of garnering complete compliance with his autocratic domestic policies. By channelling Eritrean patriotism into hostility toward Ethiopia, the government ensures that [it] can rule as it likes, without public opposition.’

Jendayi Frazer, Briefing on US-Eritrea Relations, 17 August 2007, Washington DC.

‘Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Frazer Interview with VOA’, 22 November 2007. James Knight, Director, Office for East Africa, Bureau of African Affairs, US Department of State characterised Eritrea as pursuing ‘expensive and dangerous adventurism’ that encourages ‘unending violence’. See ‘US Policy in the Horn of Africa’, remarks from the Conference ‘Working toward a Lasting Peace in the Ogaden’, University of San Diego, California, 7 December 2007.

Rice said in an Ethiopian TV interview: ‘We’ve worked very, very diligently to try and help relief agencies, non-governmental agencies to be able to deal with the humanitarian situation there and we need the cooperation of the Ethiopian Government.’ Secretary Condoleeza Rice, interview with Tefera Ghedamu of Ethiopia TV, 5 December 2007.