Eritrea hits back at Ethiopia in border row

Feb 2, 2006, (ASMARA) — Eritrean government wasted little time Thursday in firing back at comments by Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi who accused Asmara of arrogant war-mongering over their increasingly tense border.
Asmara said Meles had no legal grounds to continue to reject a 2002 border demarcation that emanated from the peace deal signed in Algiers in 2000 that ended the Horn of Africa rivals’ bloody two-year frontier war.
"Meles is not the judge in this case," said Yemane Gebremeskel, the director of Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki’s cabinet.
"He does not have the right to interpret the Algiers agreement or to question the judgement of the boundary commission," Yemane told AFP in an interview initiated by his office shortly after Meles made his comments.
In speech to the Ethiopian parliament earlier Thursday, Meles criticized Asmara for keeping the stance it held before the start of the war in 1998 by insisting it has the right to take by force territory it considers its own.
"The main reason and source of the border conflict ... is the arrogant and war-mongering invader that is the Eritrean regime," Meles said, noting that an international panel in December had blamed Eritrea for the start of the war.
Eritrea has said it disagrees with the ruling by the Ethiopia-Eritrea Claims Commission but will accept it.
Yemane said Thursday it has nothing to do with the main issue for the rising tension: Ethiopia’s rejection of the border delineation that awarded that flashpoint town of Badme to Eritrea.
"The claims commission does not have jurisdiction on the boundary and it has has found Ethiopia liable for a host of other violations," he said.
"The Claims Commission has given a judgement on a specific event, the events of May 1998, it only has juridsiction on the damages that each party may shoulder on account of humanitarian law," Yemane said.
Asmara is demanding that Addis Ababa accept the border demarcation and has angrily accused the United Nations and world powers of ignoring Ethiopia’s refusal to do so.
To show its displeasure, Eritrea has slapped restrictions on UN peacekeepers monitoring the 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) border and expelled the mission’s North American and European staff, while troop movements on both sides have heightened tensions and fears of a new war.
Meanwhile, the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE) on Thursday reported that the border area remained "tense" and that five people had been injured this week when their vehicle hit a land mine in near the border in Eritrea.
Two of the passengers in the civilian truck were seriously wounded in Tuesday’s incident, UNMEE said.