Sides pledge to maintain military stability

Armed forces’ leaders from Ethiopia and Eritrea have committed themselves to maintaining military stability between the two countries, the UN said on Monday. The pledge came at the latest Military Coordination Commission (MCC) meeting in Nairobi, Kenya - the only forum where the two sides hold face-to-face talks, under UN auspices. In a statement, the UN Mission in Eritrea and Ethiopia (UNMEE) also said the two countries were looking at setting up three separate military bodies to resolve “incidents in the border areas”. Three Sector Military Coordination Committees (SMCCs) would be established for the western, central and eastern border regions of the 1,000 km frontier. Both countries fought a bitter two-year border war which claimed tens of thousands of lives, but they agreed to a full peace deal in December 2000 after a six-month ceasefire. Since then there have been no clashes between the two forces, but border incidents like cattle rustling and shootings by unidentified armed groups have alarmed peacekeepers. Border demarcation - originally scheduled for May 2002 - has been indefinitely delayed amidst continued wrangling over the line. The Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission (EEBC) was set up under the peace deal to resolve the dispute but its ruling has been rejected by Ethiopia as flawed. UNMEE has stated that the situation between the two is now “politically tense” but insists it is militarily stable. In its statement, the UN said the MCC meeting "was conducted in a cordial atmosphere during which the political difficulties in the peace process were discussed". But Eritrean Brigadier-General Abrahaley Kifle said the international community was “not doing enough in the peace process”. He added that recent visits by diplomats and politicians to the two countries were complicating the three-year old peace process. The "only solution" to resolving the impasse, he stated, lay with the EEBC mechanism. According to the UN statement, his Ethiopian counterpart Yohannes Gebremeskel welcomed the international community’s involvement in trying find a peaceful solution to the stalemate. The next MCC meeting is due to be held on 2 February 2004.