Business Daily (Nairobi)
J. Peter Pham
12 October 2007
opinion
A little-known border conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia is rapidly escalating again and threatens not only the peace of the neighborhood, but also against the broader struggle against Islamist terrorism.
The two countries went to war in May 1998, after Isaias Aferworki sent his army to occupy the contested border town of Badme (population 1,500), a move that Ethiopia's Meles Zenawi understandably interpreted as an act of aggression to be resisted with force.
The ensuing conventional war, over a strip of desert that was near-worthless to begin with and certainly rendered absolutely worthless after the fighting, claimed over 100,000 lives and displaced 1.5 million people before a peace accord, largely brokered by the United States.
The Eritrean ruler became even more intransigent when, at the end of 2005, an international claims commission ruled that even though Badme belonged to his country, aggressive actions to secure it when the ownership was still unresolved violated the UN Charter and thus Asmara was liable for damages Addis Ababa incurred as a result of the conflict.
Subsequently, Eritrea ratcheted up its practice, begun during the war, of supporting various rebel movements in fighting proxy wars with Ethiopia and other states in the subregion, including the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) and Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) in Ethiopia and the Alliance for the Liberation of Somalia (ALS).
With both countries armed to the teeth - thanks, in no small part, to the estimated $1 billion in arms which, as I have previously noted, the People's Republic of China has sold them - the danger of war is very real. And therein lays the problem.
A few days ago and before the Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health of the US House of Representatives, I argued that we have to exert every effort to prevent war from breaking out, not only because of the incalculable humanitarian toll that the fight would exact on the peoples of the Horn, but of the severe damage to our security interests that it would entail.
The reason is that the most significant national interest at stake for the United States in the Horn of Africa is to prevent al-Qaeda (or another like-minded international terrorist network) from acquiring a new base and opening a new front in its war against us and our allies as they have repeatedly sought to do, most recently through the radical Islamist elements within the Islamic Courts Union which had seized control of large parts of Somalia last year.
This is certainly the danger posed once more by Eritrea's dangerous sponsorship of anti-Ethiopian forces which include elements clearly linked to al-Qaeda and other jihadist movements.And there are already indications that the terrorists are spreading out across the subregion.
Less than two weeks ago, six al-Qaeda members were arrested by Ethiopian forces in the Somaliland town of Buholde, where they had stopped off en route to staging areas as yet undetermined. And these are the terrorists who were caught.
In recent years, US counterterrorism efforts in the Horn of Africa - both the occasional spectacular action and the less-heralded, daily "hearts and minds" work - have made significant progress.
That's why we have to ensure that the spat between Ethiopia and Eritrea over a literal scab of a border zone does not metastasize into a runaway infection consumes everything in its path, including the gains America has made in recent years against Islamist terrorists in the region.
Pham is Director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs and researcher on terrorism and political violence.
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