Eritrea - Dangerous Games
blurb:isstoday:08052008eritrea
8 May 2008: Eritrea - Dangerous Games
There are times when observers of events in the Horn of Africa must entertain serious doubts about the usefulness of rational choice theory in constructing their analysis. Eritrea’s foreign policy and the latest developments on that country’s border with Djibouti, would certainly contribute to such doubts.
In mid-April this year the Djibouti government complained that Eritrean forces had crossed the border in the vicinity of Doumeira, on the Red Sea coast, and were erecting fortifications there, some of which, they claimed lay hundreds of metres inside Djiboutian territory. There have been previous problems in this remote area, and in April 1996 the two states nearly went to war after accusations of Eritrean shelling of the border town of Ras Doumeira. Relations between the two also became fraught at the time of Eritrea’s war with Ethiopia, in which Djibouti found it difficult to convince Asmara of its neutrality. Djiboutian rebel movements have also used Eritrean territory from which to mount operations from time to time.
This week, the alarm signals from Djibouti became louder, with accusations that Eritrea was building up a well-armed concentration of troops along the border, a development to which Djibouti felt bound to respond. Appeals were made to the African Union, the Arab League and the United Nations to press Eritrea to desist from provocations in an area, which, as the Djiboutian authorities were quick to point out, overlook the strategic Straits of Mandeb, at the entrance to the Red Sea.
The border between the two countries is indeed poorly marked, and rests on a definition contained in a Franco-Italian treaty of 1901, confirmed in 1954. In the interim, however, in January 1935 a secret agreement between France’s foreign minister, Pierre Laval, and Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator, ceded a sliver of the territory of French Somaliland, as Djibouti was then known, to the Italian colony of Eritrea. This agreement was never ratified by the French government, and was repudiated in 1938 by the Italian government, which by then was in control of Ethiopia as well.
Unfortunately, however, maps were printed by the Italians incorporating the changes of 1935, and it may be these maps that are being used by the Eritrean to press their claims to yet another unpromising piece of real estate.
What seems so extraordinary about this is that Eritrea has already managed, through sheer bloody-mindedness, to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in its border dispute with Ethiopia. The Ethiopian government’s position on an arbitration that came out squarely in Eritrea’s favour is an extremely poor one, and is vitiated only by Eritrea’s refusal to abide by stipulations of the Algiers peace accord of 2000. This and Asmara’s essential refusal to allow the UN observer mission UNMEE to function any longer on Eritrean territory tend to undermine its moral position. Even though one may have a measure of understanding for Asmara’s frustration at the failure of the international community to pressure Ethiopia into accepting the results of the arbitration, there seems little to be gained except a sense of self-righteousness from antagonising the UN in this way.
All the more remarkable then is what seems to be a senseless provocation on the borders of a small neighbouring country that also serves as the base for France’s principal garrison on the African continent and for the US’s Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa.
Senior members of the US government have already hinted at designating Eritrea as a state supporting terrorist activities, because of its involvement in the Somali crisis. One official went so far as to suggest that regime change in Asmara would not be unwelcome in Washington.
In short, it is hard to imagine what possible benefit could be expected from such adventures on the part of the Eritrean government, especially when calculated against the risks and costs involved.
Richard Cornwell, Senior Research Associate, African Security Analysis Programme, ISS Tshwane (Pretoria)
