Normalise relations, Security Council urges

The UN Security Council has urged Ethiopia and Eritrea to normalise their relations, saying it was encouraged by the recent move towards a peaceful resolution of their border dispute. The Council, in a statement issued by its president for December and ambassador of Algeria, Abdallah Baali, commended both Ethiopia's recent announcement that it had a new peace plan and Eritrea's continued acceptance of an independent boundary commission's decision on the frontier as binding. "Members of the Security Council are encouraged by this movement towards a peaceful solution of the border dispute and now look forward to the beginning of the border demarcation process," the Council said. It urged the two neighbours to "refrain from any action in the border area, which could be viewed as provocative or destabilising". Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi warned Eritrea last week that attempts to turn tough words into military action would "endanger the peace of the region". His comments followed demands by Eritrea that Ethiopia withdraws from territory along the 1,000-km border, which it says Addis Ababa had illegally occupied. Tensions also rose when Asmara accused Addis Ababa of sending troops into a remote Eritrean village in November. Ethiopia denied the accusations and UN peacekeepers patrolling the region said they had found no evidence to support the accusation. Last month, Ethiopia accepted "in principle" a ruling on the border that was made as a part of a peace deal, which ended the two-and-a-half year war. The ruling on the border was made in April 2002 by an internationally-appointed commission. It was initially rejected by Ethiopia, which still insists that the decision by the commission to award Badme - the border town where the war flared up in 1998 - to Eritrea, was wrong. Eritrea has reiterated that Ethiopia must abide by the ruling, saying the dispute could be resolved if Addis Ababa withdrew "its forces from sovereign Eritrean territories". It said the border stalemate had dislocated 60,000 people from their homes and villages and created "clouds of another unnecessary and unjustifiable confrontation".