Saturday, June 18, 2016
Eritrean soldiers parade during the young country's 16th Independence day celebrations in Asmara on May 24, 2007. Eritrea has said it killed more than 200 Ethiopians in a battle last week, one of the fiercest border clashes since a 1998-2000 war PHOTO | AFP
ASMARA
The two countries have thousands of troops in one of the world’s most heavily fortified borders.
Eritrea has said it killed more than 200 Ethiopians in a battle last week, one of the fiercest border clashes since a 1998-2000 war, while giving no mention of its casualties.
Each side blames the other for starting the two-day battle which broke out on Sunday, saying also that their rival suffered the most losses.
There was no immediate response from Ethiopia, which has not released numbers of those killed.
“More than 200 TPLF (Ethiopian troops) have been killed and more than 300 wounded,” Eritrea’s ministry of information said, calling it a conservative estimate.
There was no mention of any prisoners of war.
Ethiopian Government spokesman Getachew Reda on Tuesday said there were “significant casualties on both sides, but more on the Eritrean side”.
Eritrea won independence from Ethiopia in 1991 after three decades of war, but returned to battle in 1998 to 2000, when almost 80,000 died.
The neighbours are bitter enemies, with tens of thousands of troops dug into trenches eyeing each other along the heavily fortified frontier.
Open-ended, compulsory national service makes Eritrea one of the world’s most militarised nations, but with just five million citizens, it is dwarfed by Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous nation with 96 million people.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has urged both governments to exercise maximum restraint, and resolve differences through peaceful means. The United States has voiced similar concerns.
INTERNATIONAL CRISIS GROUP
Cedric Barnes, from the International Crisis Group, said the clash appeared to have been the most serious conventional military engagement for some time, while noting there had been at least eight significant flare-ups since 2011.
Eritrea and Ethiopia have long traded accusations of attacks and of backing rebels to needle each other.
Barnes said one theory for the clash was that it was a response by Addis Ababa to an armed action by the Asmara-linked Ginbot 7 group in southern Ethiopia in May.
The two countries remain at odds over the flashpoint town of Badme.
Long-isolated Eritrea has recently boosted ties with Gulf nations, including the United Arab Emirates, keen to utilise its strategic Red Sea port of Assab, a useful base just across the waters from war-torn Yemen.
While Ethiopia remains the far more powerful military, the ICG warned the clash should act as a “wake-up call” for renewed efforts to solve the conflict.
“Ethiopia’s well trained and armed military probably knows that delivering a decisive blow against Eritrea may fatally damage the regime and risk (another) complicated civil war on its doorstep,” Barnes added.
“A policy of robust containment has been pursued instead, but that looks increasingly difficult to sustain.”
In Summary
The neighbours are bitter enemies, with tens of thousands of troops dug into trenches eyeing each other along the heavily fortified frontier.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has urged Ethiopian and Eritrean governments to exercise maximum restraint, and resolve differences through peaceful means.
Eritrea and Ethiopia have long traded accusations of attacks and of backing rebels to needle each other.