January 28, 2002

Defying The Hague verdict is not a Game

 

M. Filli A.

 

Let it be known up-front that there is no war coming, going, to, from or against Eritrea as a result of The Hague verdict. If there were any such repercussion then the war is not against Eritrea but against the international community and the Guarantor Nations (USA, UN/UNMEE, EU, OAU, ALGERIA). And that is not a game.

 

The Hague verdict is the crux of the Algiers Agreement. Thus, defiance of The Hague verdict is not a peccadillo but a blatant challenge to the might of the international community and the Guarantor Nations, which have pledged, repeatedly and unequivocally, their resolute commitment to implement the outcome of the Border Commission. To this effect, the UN has recently approved a new Mission to be dispatched to Eritrea and Ethiopia to let the parties know unmistakably and one more time that the Guarantor Nations mean business come D-Day at the end of February 2002.

 

The Algiers peace accord will certainly occupy a special chapter in the annals of international border dispute resolution for at least the following distinctive reasons:

  • The Algiers peace accord comes with an ironclad guarantee of third-party nations to assure its implementation per request of Eritrea and Ethiopia.

 

  • Both Eritrea and Ethiopia chose “a process where there will be no appeal and no further arbitration”; hence waiving their right to appeal and agreeing to make the decision of the Border Commission final and binding.

 

  • Both Eritrea and Ethiopia accepted the colonial treaties of 1900,1902,and 1908 and agreed to achieve the resolution of their border conflict based solely on those treaties and only the hereto-pertinent international laws. To accentuate this, both nations stipulated that the Commission shall not make any decision based on ex aequo et bono.

 

  • Both countries agreed to abide by the 1964 OAU-CAIRO resolution, which in essence declares the sacrosanct nature of colonial borders inherited at independence.

 

That being the quintessence of the Algiers accord, the Registry in the Hague reveals that the mandate of the Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission is “to delimit and demarcate the colonial treaty border based on pertinent colonial treaties (1900, 1902 and 1908) and applicable international law."

 

To top that up, let me draw your attention to one more consequential Eritrean Syllogism:

  • Almost all African countries attribute their territorial sovereignty to colonial treaties, which secured their colonial borders that the 1964 OAU CAIRO resolution has declared sacrosanct.

 

  • Eritrea is one such African country

 

·         Therefore Eritrea’s territorial sovereignty is attributed to colonial treaties (1900, 1902, 1908), which secured its colonial borders that have been declared sacrosanct per the 1964 OAU Cairo Res., to which Ethiopia is one of the major signatories, too.

 

With that backdrop and in light of it, let me now turn to the dialectics of the Algiers accord and the mandate of the Boundary Commission. Considering all of the above and without preempting the Commission, it escapes the normal intelligence of a lawyer, political scientist, historian, or a court of law/arbitration how one can come up or even speculate an outcome other than upholding the cited colonial treaties, which constitute both the laws and the basis for resolving the issue at hand. Eritrea sought The Hague to reaffirm not to renegotiate its territorial sovereignty, which has been secured explicitly by the cited treaties. Eritrea is out looking not for the best deals but for the best approximation on the ground (demarcation) of what has been explicitly secured on the map per cited colonial treaties (delimitation). That is what the Algiers accord is all about and that is the sole mandate of the Boundary Commission.

 

The notion that “Eritrea and Eritreans are prepared to accept even negation of Eritrea’s colonially inherited boundaries as final in keeping with the government’s prior commitment to be seized by the Boundary Commission’s ruling as unappealable” is utterly absurd because Eritrea’s colonially inherited boundaries per the above cited colonial treaties have been accepted by Ethiopia and constitute the laws and basis for the Boundary commission to mark them on the ground as only technically possible.

 

Apropos “claims based on prior administration”, it is baseless unless Italy and Great Britain join the fray and raise the same claim for administering our country as part of their respective Imperium, Italy (60 years) and UK (10 years) and drag us to The Hague, in which case there won’t be much left for Ethiopia to claim!

 

UN Charter: ACTION WITH RESPECT TO THREATS TO THE PEACE,

                       BREACHES OF THE PEACE, AND ACTS OF AGGRESSION

Chapter VII

 

 

Eritrea will prevail

 

Dr. Mesoud Filli A.