| dc.description.abstract | This study set out to examine the role of the United Nations in managing the Ethiopia-Eritrea border conflict. Its main objective was to examine the strategies employed by the UN in its bid to end the border conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea. It also set to analyse whether the international organization succeeded in ensuring cessation of hostilities and prepared the parties in conflict to resolve the conflict. However, the study limited itself to events/activities that occurred from the start of the conflict to the year 2002. The Study used secondary sources of data to collect relevant information.
The main publications used were books and journals. Additional data was sourced from the Internet. The data collected was analyzed and discussed in chapter four and five respectively.
It emerged that the Ethiopia-Eritrea border conflict began in the early 1990s after Eritrea gained independence. A border dispute (arising from arbitrary colonial borders) arose between Ethiopia and Eritrea, degenerating into violent conflict in the late 1990s leading to massive destruction of not only human life but also of the political, social and economic status of both countries. It was also evident that both Ethiopia and Eritrea failed to solve their disputes peacefully. The US and Rwanda intervened and offered a peace plan that was rejected by Eritrea on claims that it favoured Ethiopia.
The intervention by the Organization of African Unity (OAU) was also unable to end violent conflict between the two parties. However, DAU later came up with an agreement on cessation of hostilities. The agreement called for the end to all hostilities and the deployment of a UN peacekeeping force in the area. The intervention of the UN saw the creation of a UN mission to Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNME~) that facilitated the cessation of hostilities and eventual focus on strategies for resolving the conflict.
The parties in conflict in collaboration with UN and OAU representatives formed a Border Commission to look into issues of the disputed areas and provide solutions that are acceptable to both parties. The parties in conflict had accepted to go by the decision of the Border Commission once the border was demarcated. By the time of writing this study, the Border Commission had not completed demarcating the borders. It was concluded that the question of when to intervene in conflicts as discussed in the Ibrahim Brahimi report, appears not yet solved by the UN.
UN's intervention in the Ethiopia-Eritrea border conflict came rather late when both countries had brought massive destruction to their people and economies. It was recommended that UN should enhance the aspect of intervention to save further destruction by parties in conflict. Secondly the organization should work on modalities of empowering regional bodies such as the DAU (now African Union) to be able to manage and resolve conflicts in their respective regions. | en_US |
