[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 112 (Friday, July 25, 2003)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E1639]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           THE HORN IN PERIL

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. GREGORY W. MEEKS

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                         Friday, July 25, 2003

  Mr. MEEKS of New York. Mr. Speaker, I submit the following document 
for the Congressional Record.

               [From the Financial Times, June 17, 2003]

                           The Horn In Peril

       When is a ``final and binding'' decision reached by a 
     neutral body of legal experts open to negotiation? The 
     international community is facing this question in the Horn 
     of Africa, where the regional giant Ethiopia has rejected as 
     ``unacceptable'' a Border Commission ruling on its border 
     with tiny Eritrea.
       The outside world was appalled when two of Africa's poorest 
     countries went to war in 1998. It heaved a sigh of relief 
     when both governments agreed, after losing at least 70,000 
     lives, to submit their frontier to international arbitration. 
     But Ethiopia's rejection of the unanimous decision reached by 
     a Border Commission sitting in The Hague has raised the 
     prospect of, at worst, a new war and, at best, an indefinite 
     stand-off.
       External donors sympathise with the tricky position in 
     which the ruling places Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia's prime 
     minister. Undermined by hardliners in his own party, Mr. 
     Meles is also resented by ordinary Ethiopians who have never 
     accepted the independence of Eritrea, their former coastal 
     province. Foreign governments know that losing Badme, the 
     settlement that was the flashpoint for the war, represents a 
     symbolic humiliation for the prime minister. They also nurse 
     a certain distaste for an authoritarian Eritrean government 
     that has jailed domestic dissenters and closed down the 
     private press.
       But if international arbitration were easy for losing 
     parties to swallow, wars would never occur in the first 
     place. If the Border Commission's decision on Badme were to 
     go unenforced, Eritrea could reconsider its prompt pull-out 
     from the contested Greater Hanish Island, allotted by an 
     international court to Yemen in 1998. Nigeria could continue 
     to defy the International Court of Justice's ruling last year 
     that the oil-rich Bakassi Peninsula belongs to Cameroon. 
     ``Might is right'' must not become the deciding principle in 
     territorial disputes across Africa, where so many colonial 
     borders cut across cultural and ethnic lines.
       Ethiopia's rejection comes at a time when both countries 
     are appealing for millions of dollars in food aid to 
     alleviate a four-year drought. The failure to settle the 
     border dispute will not come cheap. Maintaining a 4,000 
     strong United Nations buffer force has already cost about 
     $500m (euro 420m), which could have been better spent feeding 
     starving rural families.
       Donor countries cannot sit idly by while positions harden 
     to a point where future compromise becomes impossible. While 
     there is an understandable reluctance to use humanitarian aid 
     as a bargaining chip, they should leave Ethiopia in no doubt 
     that longer-term development aid is at risk. And they should 
     firmly spell out this link before Ethiopia's ruling party 
     conference takes place this autumn, when Mr. Meles risks 
     being boxed in by the impassioned nationalistic rhetoric of 
     his colleagues. There is far more at stake here than the 
     relationship between Ethiopia and Eritrea.

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