Appropriate Rectification
By: Shabait Staff
July 14, 2004

During his visit to Eritrea in the previous week, the United Nations Secretary General, Mr. Kofi Annan made his remarks concerning the appointment of his special envoy to Eritrea and Ethiopia that the mission shall be recalled considering Eritrea’s complaints that the UN itself has no legal grounds to nominate a representative as it pleases. As for the UN’s nomination of the so-called special envoy, Eritrea had labeled it as a move uncalled for and which should not have even been taken into consideration in the first place.

The detailed information of the implementation process of the Eritrean-Ethiopian peace agreement being in the hands of the International Community, it could have been realized from the beginning that going out of the legal track and rambling around the bush under the pretext of so-called alternative settlements would not have been necessary. If only the existing controversies that resulted from the TPLF’s rejection were handled objectively and legally, there would have been no point for the thought of nominating a special envoy. It also remains to be the fact that chapter seven of the United Nations charter and the Algiers agreement, to be specific, empowers the UN to take appropriate measures over the violator of the agreement, which in this case is Ethiopia. The UN has therefore no legal and justifiable grounds to look for an alternative mechanism. It would have been impractical to expect a special envoy to succeed in a mission where the UN itself failed the very responsibility it was mandated with, based on the Algiers Agreement. This is why Eritrea has been from the outset voicing its opinion on the insignificance of the nomination of a special envoy.

The UN Security Council as well as the guarantors of the Algiers peace agreement are clearly aware of Ethiopia’s non-compliance with the EEBC ruling and that Ethiopia is thereby derailing the Eritrean-Ethiopian peace process at large. The Algiers peace agreement as such underlines the responsibilities of the concerned bodies in situations that might appear in the peace process. If these stands however created uneasiness within the responsible bodies, from impairing the regime in Addis Ababa, the second alternative should have been taking the peace process back to its track, thus convincing the TPLF regime to accept the EEBC ruling and work for its implementation.

Although Eritrea has not to-date received a satisfactory explanation to its queries regarding the mandate and mission of the former special envoy, as many speculators indicate, if the mission was basically designed to meet the requirements of Ethiopia which arrogantly continues to hinder the peace process and with the aim of getting Eritrea to leave the legal settlements aside and accept the idea of beginning talks with Ethiopia, it was indeed a mission that lacks the essence of practicability.

With the nation’s sovereign territory still under occupation by the TPLF regime, the Eritrean people internally displaced and the TPLF regime’s prime minister incessantly beating the war drums, Eritrea should not have been expected to begin talks and create rapport with the violator. Would it not be rewarding the aggressor party to sideline the rule of law and dwell in the sinister schemes of a rogue-state governed by the rule of the jungle? Is it also not a very dangerous foretaste for other nations, when facts point in the direction that there is no price to be paid for violating international law and the UN Security Council’s decisions? Hence, so long as the mission of the UN’s former special envoy is just a lead to an endless and fruitless cycle of diplomatic wrangling, the UN’s move to terminate the mission can be labeled as appropriate rectification.