United States Department of State (Washington, DC)
4 December 2007
document
United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrives in Addis Ababa on Wednesday for wide-ranging talks with leaders from the Great Lakes and Horn regions of Africa on issues of regional peace and security, including the situations in Somalia and Sudan.
Rice's assistant secretary for African affairs, Jendayi Frazer, gave this briefing on the trip in Washington, DC, last week.
ASSISTANT SECRETARY FRAZER: Thank you very much. The Secretary will travel to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, arriving Wednesday, December 5th. She is going to hold a Great Lakes summit, essentially a meeting of the Tripartite plus heads of states and ministers, foreign ministers and defense ministers from Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Congo.
The Tripartite Plus group was established by the United States to facilitate dialogue and build confidence among the four countries in the Great Lakes region. This meeting is expected to further develop strategies and common security mechanisms to address what are known as the negative forces in the Congo, groups like the FDLR, the former Rwandan genocidaires, the Lord's Resistance Army and other groups in the Congo.
The meeting will also foster dialogue between the governments and seek common efforts to eliminate gender-based violence. We expect it to be attended at the head of state level, from the officials of the four countries as well as observers being invited from the United Nations, AU Chairman Konare, and the Great Lakes envoy for the EU.
She will also hold a Somali ministerial with regional countries and, again, attended by the AU Chairman Konare, the UN Special Rep for the Secretary General Ould-Abdallah. The Somalia ministerial will also have present President Yusuf and the new Prime Minister of Somalia, Nur Ade, attending the meeting. The goal is to consult and further coordinate a regional response to the crisis in Somalia. We're hoping that the consultation will focus on how to achieve a more inclusive political dialogue and reconciliation to move the country towards 2009 elections, how to mitigate the impact of the current violence, especially in Mogadishu on the civilian population and address the humanitarian emergency, working together to further isolate extremists and spoilers who continue to use violence, and then to push for quicker deployment of the African Union force into Somalia, the AMISOM force.
The countries attending the meeting, the ministerial, will be the Somali president, prime minister, Uganda, Djibouti, Ethiopia. We hope Kenya will be there. Kenya is in the midst of an election campaign, a very close election campaign. But also, the AU Chairman Konare will attend and the UN Special Rep to the Secretary General Ould-Abdallah.
The Secretary will also hold a ministerial meeting on Sudan to continue the U.S. focus on the Comprehensive Peace Agreement implementation. It will be held with the regional countries, particularly those who are members of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, IGAD. These are the countries that were, in a sense, semi-guarantors of the CPA, having helped to negotiate it under Kenya's leadership. And so we want to consult on how to move the process forward or to get the CPA back on track.
The expected participants from these IGAD countries, ministers will be from Djibouti, Ethiopia, Uganda, we hope Kenya, as well as Sudan, the AU, Chairman Kanare and the UN Special Rep to the Secretary General Qazi.
In addition to the head of state summit on the Great Lakes, the Sudan ministerial and the Somalia ministerial, the Secretary of course will hold bilateral meetings with the Ethiopian Government, including a meeting and dinner with Prime Minister Meles and Foreign Minister Seyoum, in which we would expect a discussion to focus on regional stability, fighting terrorism, democracy promotion, economic development and food security in Ethiopia, including issues of the Ogaden and, of course, the robust program that the United States and Ethiopia are partnering on dealing with HIV and AIDS, TB and Malaria.
The bottom line is that the Secretary has been very much focused on the Great Lakes, Sudan and Somalia, and she wants to now to go Africa, go to Addis Ababa, in order to have the regional consultations because in all of these cases we've found that the key to the conflict prevention and promotion is to work with the regional countries themselves and their leadership. And so she has been involved on all of these issues, doing phone calls, meeting with these leaders here in Washington, and now she's going to go to the region to have an opportunity to bring them together once again so that we can try to promote conflict resolution.
And with that, I will answer any questions that you may have.
QUESTION: Can I ask you about a subject that you didn't mention, which I think is very likely to come up, and that's Ethiopia-Eritrea. As you know, today the Boundary Commission's mandate expired with no demarcation on the ground and tensions high despite what Meles and others seem to be saying, things are just as fragile as they were when perhaps when the war ended. How much is that going to be a part of the agenda? And also, how much of just plain Eritrean -- the Eritrea issue on its own, the state sponsor designation, how much is that going to play into her (inaudible)?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY FRAZER: I would imagine that, obviously, in her consultations with Prime Minister Meles and Foreign Minister Seyoum, one of their biggest challenges is dealing with the Boundary Commission, so I would imagine that that would be a topic of discussion bilaterally between the Secretary and the leaders of Ethiopia.
As far as Eritrea's role in the region, it would probably be more of a discussion on the Somalia -- during the Somalia ministerial. And it'll be a key one because we do need to deal with how to bring legitimate opposition into dialogue with the Transitional Federal Government, and when we say legitimate opposition, that's the need to try to isolate those who continue to call for attacks, for instance, against the peacekeeping forces, those who will continue to use violence as a tactic of dissent and a tactic of destabilization. And obviously, Eritrea has played a role in training, financing and providing some safe haven for groups that are more extremist, but also groups that are what I would say legitimate opposition groups, "the full parliamentarians." Some of them also sit in Eritrea. And so yes, Eritrea certainly will feature prominently on the agenda in the Somalia ministerial.
QUESTION: Can I just ask one more very briefly on the Boundary Commission thing? Former Ambassador Bolton has written in his book that you in February of 2006 told him that you wanted to reopen the Boundary Commission's 2002 decision and to give the area or parts of the area around (inaudible), to award that which had been already granted to Eritrea to Ethiopia. Is that correct?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY FRAZER: No. Thank you for asking the question. I actually haven't read the book, so I am surprised that I even feature in it. But I can assure you unequivocally that I've never advocated for reopening the boundary decision, the EEBC decision on the -- you know, the land, the delimitation line. In fact, we've been very clear that we accept the delimitation line. The issue was how do you move from delimitation to demarcation. And I've always advocated that that has to involve dialogue between the countries because, clearly, territory that was Eritrea's has been given to Ethiopia, territory that's Ethiopian has been given to Eritrea. That's what drawing straight lines typically does. And so not to reopen the decision, but rather to have a dialogue about the demarcation, including options of open borders so that the people on the borders can move back and forth. And that really is, I think, just a matter of how do you implement the decision, not reopening or questioning decisions. So I could say without -- unequivocally that I've never advocated for changing the delimitation decision of the Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission.
QUESTION: You talked a little bit about the choreography for the various meetings and for the summit and the ministerials. Can you give me -- us a sense of the achievables, particularly when you're talking about the ministerial on Sudan and indeed the summit on the Great Lakes? These are enormously perennial issues. The Secretary is there for a limited period of time, a very short period of time. Can you give a sense of what concrete you expect to get out of these meetings?
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