Eritrea, 2008

I wish to take this

opportunity to warmly congratulate Mr. Miguel

d’Escoto Brockmann on his election as President of the

General Assembly at its sixty-third session. He has the

full support of my delegation, and I wish him every

success as he guides the important deliberations of the

session at this most critical time. I also wish to take

this opportunity to express my delegation’s

appreciation to his predecessor, Mr. Srgjan Kerim, who

successfully presided over the General Assembly at its

sixty-second session.

These are turbulent times indeed. The world

today is not getting safer by any standard. Alas, there

seems to be a vortex of perennial conflicts and crises.

The fires in Afghanistan and Iraq have not been

extinguished; to the contrary, they continue to

smoulder and intensify, punctuated by misleading,

short-lived lulls. The intractable conflict situations in

the Middle East are not nearer to a solution today. In

Somalia, humanitarian suffering of unparalleled

magnitude continues to unfold, although it remains

largely ignored by the international media.

Furthermore, the war in Georgia, with its potential

fallout for global polarization is symptomatic of, and

underscores, the extremely fragile security

environment that prevails in our troubled world today.

To add to that gloomy mix, the world is also

witnessing volatile and speculative fluctuations in the

price of fuel oil, an unprecedented hike in food prices

and a recent spate of insolvency of financial

corporations that in combination are driving the global

economy towards recession. Rapid climatic changes

resulting from progressive environmental degradation

and the resulting spell of more frequent floods and

droughts, as well as pandemics that are affecting

millions of people, complete the grid of the immense

challenges that our global community is facing today.

These multifaceted problems stem from multiple

causes.

At the same time, it cannot be denied that many

of those problems have been exacerbated, if not

instigated, by the misguided and domineering policies

of the United States Government. Indeed, the

fingerprints of the sole super-Power are discernible in

most of the conflict situations that are raging in many

parts of our globe, with the deleterious economic,

financial and humanitarian ramifications that they

invariably entail.

The perplexing feature of that overarching and

negative development is the emergence of the concept

of management by crisis as a new tool of policy

promotion. These days, candid efforts are not exerted

to prevent and manage conflicts. On the contrary,

crises are deliberately spawned and allowed to fester

and the resulting necessity for management then

provides the United States with opportunity and

latitude for control, in a situation of permanent

instability. The absence of countervailing forces in a

unipolar world has only aggravated the situation.

Principal among those is the weakness of the United

Nations in pursuing an independent line and acting as a

bulwark of robust multilateralism.

The strong misgivings that I have expressed are

attested to by the multiple situations of turbulence that

continue to unfold in our part of the world. Allow me

to illustrate this grim reality through a brief description

of the causes and complications of such turbulence.

In the border war between Eritrea and Ethiopia,

both parties had ultimately agreed to resolve the

dispute through binding arbitration on the legal basis of

the sanctity of the colonial boundaries. These are

cardinal principles of international law enshrined in the

United Nations Charter as well as in the Constitutive

Act of the African Union. Furthermore, these

commitments were solemnly enshrined in the Algiers

Peace Agreement that was signed by the parties in

December 2000. The Algiers Agreement was

comprehensive in its details. Essentially, it had two

components: first, confidence-building provisions and

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measures through the deployment of a modest United

Nations peacekeeping force; and secondly, settlement

of the border dispute through final and binding

arbitration on the basis of the colonial treaties and

international law.

As members know, the parties went through

lengthy and meticulous legal litigation in The Hague in

2001. The Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission — a

five-member arbitration panel of international

jurists — announced its unanimous final and binding

decision on 13 April 2002 and made serious efforts for

five years, until the completion of its work in

November 2007. From November 2007 onwards in

particular, Ethiopia’s military presence on sovereign

Eritrean territories has been one of blatant occupation.

This is so because the Boundary Commission has

decided to complete its demarcation functions —

which were disrupted and held hostage by Ethiopia for

five long years — through precise representation of the

boundary by coordinates.

Throughout these years, Ethiopia’s reckless acts

of destabilization and aggression were supported by the

United States, and they continue to be. Throughout

these years, the United States not only used its

formidable clout in the United Nations system to

forestall appropriate measures against Ethiopia

pursuant to the Algiers Agreement and that were based

on Chapter VII of the Charter, but it concocted various

formulas — special envoys and extensions of the

mandate of the United Nations Mission in Ethiopia and

Eritrea (UNMEE), among other things — of

“management by crisis”, to perpetuate the conflict and

derail enforcement of the Commission’s legal decision.

The tragedy in Somalia is another extremely

grave humanitarian situation that has been exacerbated,

if not brought about, essentially because of wrong

United States policies. Half a million Somalis are today

displaced and living in abysmal conditions mainly as a

result of Ethiopia’s military invasion in 2007.

Thousands of innocent civilians have been killed.

United States warplanes occasionally pulverize Somali

villages in the name of the war on terrorism.

Were these interventions legal or justified? The

portrayal of Somalia and the Union of Islamic Courts

(UIC) as the epicentre or hub of terrorism was neither

true nor candid. Somalis should and could have been

given a chance to sort out their own problems through

the reconciliation processes that they had begun in

earnest. But all of those efforts were nipped in the bud

through a pre-emptive invasion by Ethiopia at the

instigation of the United States that resulted in massive

humanitarian tragedy that dwarfs other contemporary

crises in Africa.

Nor is the situation in the Sudan any different,

either. While the complexities of the long and varied

conflicts cannot be downplayed, the fact remains that

United States policy in the Sudan is driven by other

objectives and considerations. The net outcome has

been and remains an aggravation of the multiple

problems there, whether in relation to the

implementation of the Comprehensive Peace

Agreement between the North and South or with

respect to the situation in Darfur.

Recently, the United States, which has a military

base in Djibouti, has fabricated a new conflict situation

between Djibouti and Eritrea to keep alive the hot spots

of tension in the region. As I explained earlier, due to

United States influence, the Security Council has been

paralysed and rendered impotent in the face of

Ethiopia’s occupation of sovereign Eritrean territories,

including the town of Badme. At the same time, the

United States doggedly tried to use the Security

Council platform during its presidency last June to

fabricate a non-existent problem and establish a case

against Eritrea.

All those destabilizing acts are sometimes

portrayed as unavoidable consequences or collateral

damage of the war on terror. The fact is that the war on

terror was derailed long ago from its original

objectives and intentions in order to undermine and

subvert forces and Governments that do not toe

Washington’s line. Furthermore, the dragnet has been

widely extended to involve the transparent interference

of the United States in the subregional and regional

organizations in our part of the world.

This untenable state of affairs cannot go on and

should not be tolerated. The human sufferings have

been and are too great, the time too long. Therefore,

the collective international efforts to check United

States excesses are timely and imperative — all the

more so because those failures are widely recognized

and acknowledged by significant segments of public

opinion in the United States itself.

The perils of unchecked unipolarism have

become glaringly obvious in the past few years. That

reality can only accentuate the need to bolster the

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United Nations to make it a democratic and robust

institution of multilateralism through prolonged and

concerted collective efforts.

The need for prompt action requires great

urgency, particularly in our region. For that to happen,

first of all, illegal occupation of sovereign territories

must be terminated and the rule of law and the Charter

of the United Nations fully respected. Secondly, the

invasion of Somalia must come to an end and the

perpetrators of war crimes must be held accountable.

Thirdly, the interferences in and complications of the

problems in the Sudan must cease, and a conducive

climate must be created to bring about a lasting

solution. Lastly and most importantly, United States

meddling in the affairs of the Horn of Africa region,

which has invariably led to the instigation of crises,

must be terminated.

The consequences of failing to act are dire

indeed. Unless effective measures are taken to remedy

the multiplying problems that our global community is

confronting today, we run the risk of further widening

and exacerbating them. The situation in the Horn of

Africa may in fact spiral out of control unless those

destabilizing practices are brought to an end.

In conclusion, I sincerely hope that our plea will

be heeded so that further turmoil and suffering in our

region may be avoided.