The UN Security Council has agreed to a demand from Eritrea to withdraw all Americans, Canadians and Europeans from the UN peacekeeping mission that monitors the tense border with Ethiopia.
But the council and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan made clear on Wednesday that the decision to redeploy about 180 Western military observers and civilian staff to the Ethiopian capital was just a first step. Both promised a speedy review of the entire UN peacekeeping operation -- and one option is almost certain to be to end it and send the nearly 3,300 civilian and military staff home.
The UN established the mission after a two-and-a-half-year border war between the Horn of Africa neighbors. A December 2000 peace agreement provided for an independent commission to rule on the position of the disputed 1,000km border, while UN troops patrolled a 24km buffer zone between the two countries.
But Ethiopia has refused to implement the international commission's April 2002 ruling, which awarded the key town of Badme to Eritrea.
In response, Eritrea has accused the international community of shirking its responsibility to ensure the demarcation ruling is obeyed. Since October, it has banned UN helicopter flights and vehicle movements at night on its side of the buffer zone.
On Dec. 6, Eritrea gave the force 10 days to pull out peacekeepers from North America and Europe, including Russia. It gave no reason, but the move came amid mounting concern that both sides were massing troops near the buffer zone as a prelude to a new war.
The Security Council said Eritrea's lack of cooperation prevented the UN from "implementing its mandate satisfactorily" and warned that continuing restrictions "will have implications" for the mission's future.
The council said in a statement adopted by consensus and read at a formal meeting that it plans to review promptly "all options" for the mission's deployment in the context of its original purpose and ability to act.
It said a UN military presence would remain in Eritrea during the period it is reviewing future plans for the UN mission.
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric also said the recent Eritrean decisions "have made it impossible for the UN mission to implement its mandate ... [and] to work effectively."
The secretary-general "will go back to the Security Council next week to present a broad range of options on the way forward," he said.
Several UN diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity because no action has been taken, said one option will be to close down the mission.
The Security Council strongly condemned Eritrea's "unacceptable actions and restrictions" and said it approved the decision to temporarily relocate military and civilian staff "solely in the interests of ... safety and security."
"The council is not caving in," US Ambassador John Bolton said, explaining that the Western peacekeepers affected by the Eritrean order were unarmed military observers and staff.
"They are not a fighting force and it would be irresponsible not to take their safety into account," he said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema