By Louis Charbonneau
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – A standoff between Eritrea and the United Nations escalated on Friday as a U.N. spokeswoman said Eritrea had cut off food supplies to U.N. troops on its border and stopped them withdrawing to Ethiopia.
Spokeswoman Marie Okabe said only around half a dozen U.N. vehicles had been allowed to cross into Ethiopia, U.N. personnel had been threatened at gunpoint and the Eritrean company providing food to the peacekeepers had said it could no longer do so.
“Not more than six vehicles have been allowed by the Eritreans to cross into Ethiopia,” she said, adding that peacekeepers trapped on the border between Eritrea and Ethiopia had only had a few days of emergency food rations left.
She said the U.N. Security Council had been informed about the situation with the U.N. force, called UNMEE. The council’s current president, Panamanian Ambassador Ricardo Alberto Arias, said the body would discuss the issue later on Friday.
“The situation of UNMEE is becoming very, very delicate,” Arias told reporters.
Eritrea’s Foreign Ministry dismissed the charges and accused U.N. peacekeeping officials and Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s office of making “unwarranted accusations” and “distorting the reality” of the U.N. peacekeeping mission.
Insinuations that UNMEE troops in Eritrea were in danger were “unfounded,” the ministry said in the statement posted on a government Web site.
U.N. troops on the Eritrean-Ethiopian border have been struggling for months to deal with an Eritrean fuel blockade and recently decided they would have to relocate to Ethiopia.
The 1,700-strong U.N. mission started work in 2000, at the end of a two-year war between the two Horn of Africa neighbors that killed an estimated 70,000 people. They have been stationed in a 15.5-mile (25-km) buffer zone inside Eritrea, which has made clear it no longer wants them.
The two countries insist they will not start another war, but both have moved tens of thousands of troops to the border because of a dispute over their 620-mile (1,000 km) frontier. U.N. officials have said their peacekeepers were reluctant to leave because they feared it could spark a new conflict.
BORDER DISPUTE
Okabe said there would be an emergency meeting of countries that contribute peacekeeping troops and added that formal protests would be delivered to Eritrea “at the highest level.”
Eritrea shut off fuel supplies to UNMEE in early December after an independent border commission marked the boundary by map coordinates in a ruling Eritrea accepted, but Ethiopia rejected.
Asmara, which said the commission’s ruling ended the border dispute, has ignored repeated U.N. and Security Council appeals to lift the fuel blockade, forcing UNMEE to begin withdrawing to positions in Ethiopia.
Advance units of the force began moving by road to designated relocation sites on the Ethiopian side of the border on Monday while the main body began moving on Thursday.
Eritrea has said the peacekeepers’ continued presence along the border was tantamount to occupation.
The U.N. Security Council renewed UNMEE’s mandate for six months on January 30 despite a proposal by Secretary-General Ban for an extension of just one month because of the force’s difficulties. Diplomats said the council felt a short extension would mean submitting to “blackmail” by Eritrea.