From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Tue Apr 07 2009 - 16:47:59 EDT
Eritrea ignored troop withdrawal demand-UN council
Tue Apr 7, 2009 7:30pm GMT
* Eritrea ordered to begin talks with neighbor Djibouti
* France says no military solution to border dispute
By Louis Charbonneau
UNITED NATIONS, April 7 (Reuters) - The U.N. Security Council declared on
Tuesday that Eritrea has ignored its demands for a withdrawal of all its
troops from its Horn of Africa neighbor Djibouti.
The 15-nation council unanimously passed resolution 1862 in January, which
ordered Eritrea to withdraw its forces from its tiny neighbor within five
weeks to the positions they held before fighting broke out between the two
states last June.
If Eritrea continues to defy U.N. demands, the council has the power to
impose economic or political sanctions.
Claude Heller, Mexico's U.N. ambassador who holds the council's rotating
presidency this month, said the council agreed unanimously that Eritrea had
also failed to comply with another council demand that it begin talks with
Djibouti aimed at peacefully resolving their border dispute.
"They have authorized me as the president of the council to meet the
permanent representative for Eritrea in order to express the concerns ... of
the Security Council," he said.
Eritrea's U.N. ambassador was not immediately available for comment.
The two nations, on a crucial shipping lane linking Europe to Asia, clashed
in June after Djibouti accused Eritrea of moving troops across the border. A
dozen Djiboutian soldiers were killed in the fighting. Eritrea denies the
accusations.
French Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert urged Eritrea to fulfill its
obligations under resolution 1862, adding that "there is no military
solution to this crisis."
Djibouti hosts France's largest military base in Africa and is also a major
U.S. base. The country has said it would not allow itself to be pushed into
a war with Eritrea.
It has been Ethiopia's main gateway for trade since it lost the ports of
Assab and Masawa when Eritrea won independence in the early 1990s after a
30-year war.
Eritrea accuses Security Council members of ignoring what it calls breaches
of international law by Ethiopia, with which it fought a 1998-2000 border
war that killed 70,000 people. (Editing by Alan Elsner)
C Thomson Reuters 2009 All rights reserved
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