Badme changes countries but not conviction
By Marc Lacey
The New York Times
BADME, Ethiopia, April 15 – There is nothing big about Badme. In fact, to call it a town is an overstatement. It is more of a collection of humble huts along a dusty dirt road with a population of several thousand, about evenly divided between people and livestock. Badme is just a speck on the map, if it appears on the map at all.
Yet a war has been fought over this place along the nebulous border between Ethiopia and Eritrea. More than 80,000 soldiers and civilians died during two years of trench warfare that began when Eritrea invaded this down-and-out place.
Since the fighting began, the tiny town has taken on big symbolic importance in the faraway Eritrean capital, Asmara, and the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, as well.
The Eritreans play ballads about Badme on state television. The Ethiopians talk of it as though it were an essential part of their ancient civilization.
Badme itself, a rough place to live at even the best of times, regrets all the attention. Residents point out the war damage that still mars the town, and they indicate the directions in which the armies advanced. Local people still
tread carefully with their livestock on the town’s outskirts, since the land is full of mines. Some men still dress in military fatigues from their days as members of the Ethiopian militia fighting to hold on to Badme.
Eritrea and Ethiopia first faced off over the ownership of Badme in May 1998. After the Eritreans seized it, the Ethiopians fought back. The conflict spread quickly along the 620-mile border, becoming one of Africa’s fiercest
wars.
A peace accord signed by the two governments in 2000 ended the shooting. Only today, though, when an independent commission based at The Hague released its report on where the border ought to lie, has the ownership of Badme been formally addressed.
But the commission, in its 125-page report, does not explicitly say which country has the legal rights to Badme. The members pored over 100-year-old colonial treaties, from the days when Italy ran Eritrea, and reviewed 281 maps.
They also did research to determine which government had collected taxes and built schools in the various border towns.
It then drew a new border that follows riverbeds and mountain peaks, a jagged line that does not completely please either country.
As for Badme, the commission avoided putting its volatile name on the new map. The panel members drew a line from the confluence of the Setit and Tomsa Rivers to the confluence of the Mareb and Mai Ambessa Rivers and called that the new
border in the disputed Badme area. Ethiopia received less land than it had desired. So did Eritrea, which found another important town, Zalambessa, inside Ethiopia.
According to United Nations and other experts who studied the complex decision, Badme appears to be on the Eritrean side of the commission’s new borderline. That will come as a surprise to the Ethiopians, many of whom have been celebrating the border decision on the streets of Addis Ababa since Saturday, when their government told them that Ethiopia had held on to Badme.
Tonight, President Isaias Afewerki of Eritrea appeared on state television to tell his population that Badme would become Eritrean again. “I am completely satisfied with the decision,” he said. “After the demarcation, the people will
be happier.”
In Badme itself, there is no electricity to power a computer to download the commission’s decision from the Internet. Even if there were, the decision has yet to be translated into Tigrinya, the local language.
Residents, who consider themselves Ethiopian, have relied on radio reports from Addis Ababa for news of the decision, and they had no indication today that Badme would be changing hands.
“The people here are Ethiopian; this is Ethiopia,” said Weldejewergis Weldedemariam, the local administrator. “It’s impossible to say what we’d do if Eritrea got Badme, because we can’t believe it would happen.” Residents
acknowledged that there was really little difference between them and their Eritrean neighbors. Both speak the same language and eat the same foods. Still, changing the border is a traumatic prospect for people who have spent
years viewing the Eritrean government as the enemy.
“I’m a seventh-generation descendant of Badme, and I’m an Ethiopian,” said Mamuye Legesse, who was dressed like a soldier but said he was just a peasant. “This is our place. We don’t believe it’s Eritrean.”
But Mr. Legesse offered one hopeful sign when asked what his reaction would be if Badme did fall within Eritrea once the commission carried out its next step of actually marking the border on the ground. He said that although
such a decision would be unjust, he has no intention of picking up arms and fighting over Badme again.
“I will claim in the right way, through the commission, that this is my land,” he said. “If that doesn’t work, I won’t fight. War is too destructive. That war destroyed our land.”