By Louis Charbonneau
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – The U.N. Security Council rebuked Eritrea on Wednesday for refusing to cooperate with a U.N. investigation of clashes on its border with Djibouti that left a number of Djiboutian soldiers dead.
Djibouti accused neighboring Eritrea of moving troops across the border in June, triggering several days of fighting that killed a dozen Djiboutian troops and wounded dozens more. Eritrea denies making any incursions.
After the incident in the volatile Horn of Africa, the U.N. Security Council called for a fact-finding mission to go to the region to determine what happened and who was responsible. Asmara refused to let the mission come to Eritrea.
“The members of the council welcomed the cooperation of the Djibouti authorities and regretted that the mission could not go to Eritrea,” Burkina Faso’s U.N. Ambassador Michel Kafando told reporters after a Security Council meeting.
The council also “expressed its concern regarding the tension and militarization on the contentious border zone that may lead to open clashes” in the future, said Kafando, the president of the Security Council for September.
French Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert said the council had asked U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to step up his efforts to get in contact with Asmara.
Ripert said the Eritrean government was “refusing any form of contact with the U.N.”
Kafando said council members also called for demilitarization of the border zone and normalization of relations between the two countries.
Eritrean Ambassador Araya Desta said the reason his government wanted nothing to do with the Security Council’s fact-finding mission was that the council had issued a statement immediately after the June clashes that appeared to blame Eritrea without waiting to find out what had happened.
In a unanimous statement passed on June 12, the Security Council urged both sides, “in particular Eritrea,” to commit to a cease-fire, show maximum restraint and pull back forces to previous positions.
“The condemnation is already done,” Desta told Reuters. “It was illegal.”
Djibouti hosts French and U.S. military bases and is the main route to the sea for Eritrea’s archfoe and Washington’s top regional ally, Ethiopia.
The United Nations withdrew a peacekeeping force from the volatile Eritrean-Ethiopian earlier this year after Asmara cut off fuel supplies to the U.N. troops and personnel. The force had been in place since 2000 after a two-year war between the the two countries that killed some 70,000 people.
(Editing by Bill Trott)