Brewing Border Battle Threatens U.S. Counterterrorism Gains

[Jacaylbaro]

By J. Peter Pham

 

 

 

While such crisis management attention as both policymakers and pundits in the United States are generally wont to give to the geostrategically important Horn of Africa sub region has largely been focused at efforts to resolve the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan, a little-known border conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia is rapidly escalating and threatens not only the peace of the neighborhood, but also hard won battles in America’s broader struggle against Islamist terrorism.

 

In 1991, allied movements led by a pair of distant kinsmen, Meles Zenawi’s Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) and Isaias Afewerki’s Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), succeeded in overthrowing the brutal Marxist dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam which had tyrannized Ethiopia since it overthrew the Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974. While the EPRDF entered Addis Ababa and, with its other partners, went about forming a transitional government which, three years later, gave birth to a new order with the promulgation of the constitution for the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, the EPLF assumed control of Eritrea and, after an internationally-sanctioned referendum in 1993, led the one-time Italian colony to separate independence as the State of Eritrea ruled by the single legal political party that the EPLF transformed itself into, the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ).

 

After the novelty of both governments wore off, the burdens governance caught up with both them. Ethiopia, with its population of 76 million, its rich history as Sub-Saharan Africa’s oldest state, and vast natural resources, was better positioned, while Eritrea, with less than 5 million inhabitants, few natural resources, and an economy almost entirely dependent on remittances from emigrants in the West, had only the advantage of geography: unlike now-landlocked Ethiopia, the regime in Asmara had a 1,151-kilometer coastline along and several islands in the Red Sea. Rather than leveraging its access to the sea into a mutually beneficial relationship with his erstwhile ally in Addis Ababa, Eritrean President Isaias cynically tried to exploit nationalist pride to shore up his economically-troubled (and increasingly despotic) regime, picking a fight over unsettled boundaries with Ethiopia (the new state also had similar issues with its two other neighbors, Djibouti and Sudan). In May 1998, Isaias sent his army to occupy to contested border town of Badme (population 1,500), a move that Meles 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 with former national security advisor Anthony Lake acting as the President Bill Clinton’s special envoy, was signed in Algiers in December 2000.

 

Under the Algiers Agreement, Eritrea, which had come off the worse for the fighting, withdrew its forces back 25 kilometers from the Ethiopian lines, with the vacated “transitional security zone” subject to monitoring by an international peacekeeping force, the United Nations Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE), with an originally authorized troop strength of 4,200 that has subsequently scaled back to under 1,700. The border dispute was submitted to international arbitration by a specially-appointed Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission (EEBC). The EEBC was mandated to delimit the border on the basis of a series of early 20th century colonial treaties and “applicable international law.” As ultimately constituted, the EEBC was a veritable blue-ribbon panel of world-class experts. Chaired by Sir Elihu Lauterpracht, director emeritus of the Lauterpracht Centre for International Law at Cambridge University and son of the legendary international jurist Sir Hersh Lauterpracht, its members included Prince Bola Adesumbo Ajibola, a former judge of the International Court of Justice; Professor W. Michael Reisman of Yale Law School; Stephen Schwebel, former president of the International Court of Justice; and Sir Arthur Watts, a former British diplomat who has represented various European, African, American, and Asian states before the International Court of Justice.

 

In April 2002, the EEBC issued its 135-page decision awarding Badme to Eritrea on the basis of the colonial era frontiers. Ethiopia objected, but could not prevail upon the commissioners to revisit their ruling, despite prolonged entreaties and considerable foot-dragging on implementation. Finally, in November 2004, Prime Minister Meles accepted the ruling in principle, but proposed opening negotiations with his counterpart given the on-the-ground realities of local communities which the proposed lines would divide. President Isaias, however, insisted that the demarcation proceed and took measures aimed at forcing the process forward, including banning helicopter flights by UNMEE, halting the peacekeepers’ demining activities, and forcing their withdrawal from certain sectors. 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, its 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, as I reported in August, 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 sub region, including the ****** National Liberation Front (ONLF) and Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) in Ethiopia and the Alliance for the Liberation of Somalia (ALS), whose founding was, as chronicled in this column two weeks ago, an Asmara-sponsored affair. After a visit to the region, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazier, who had in August revealed that a dossier was being assembled with a view toward formally designating the Eritrea a “state sponsor of terrorism” for its activities, described the country’s leaders to an international conference in Rome as “spoilers, extremists, and insurgents.” Meanwhile, events have been cascading at a dizzying pace:

 

 

 

▪ On September 12th, after meeting with representatives from both Eritrea and Ethiopia, the EEBC issued a statement lamenting the fact that the conditions were such that the commission could not actually install the pillars demarcating the border as arbitrated and hence, per the Algiers Agreement, at the end of next month “the boundary will automatically stand as demarcated by the boundary points listed in the Annex [of the 2002 decision] and the mandate of the Commission can then be regarded as fulfilled.”

 

 

 

▪ On September 25th, the Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that, three days earlier, Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin had sent a letter to his Eritrean counterpart – with copies to the President of the UN Security Council, the UN Secretary-General, the Chairperson of the African Union Commission, the Foreign Minister of Algeria, the U.S. Secretary of State, and the Foreign Minister of Portugal (Portugal holding the rotating presidency of the European Union) – and, citing Eritrea’s “material breaches” of the Algiers Agreement, including the occupation of the transitional security zone that was supposed to be demilitarized, threatening to terminate or suspend the accord.

 

 

 

▪ On September 27th, Eritrean Foreign Minister Osman Saleh responded with a public letter of his own accusing Ethiopia of trying “to create maximum disruption” as “a precursor for initiation of renewed hostilities.”

 

 

 

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 lies the problem. On Tuesday, in my testimony before the Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health of the U.S. House of Representatives, I argued:

 

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 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. What I noted to the congressional panel regarding the Eritrean-sponsored proxy conflict in Somalia applies even more to direct Eritrean-Ethiopian hostilities:

 

[it] creates an ideal operating space in for Islamist terrorists like [al Qaeda-trained Adan Hashi] ‘Ayro and Fazul Abdullah Muhammad, a long-time member of al Qaeda in East Africa who figures on the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorists” list with a $5 million bounty on his head for his role in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya; as well as Hassan Abdullah Hersi al-Turki, an al-Itihaad veteran who is reputed to lead al Qaeda’s East Africa cell; Mukhtar Robow, a.k.a. Abu Mansur, the former deputy defense minister of the ICU who fought with the Taliban in Afghanistan; Issa Osman Issa, another al-Qaeda member wanted for his role in the East Africa embassy bombings; Ahmad Abdi Godane, an al-Shabaab [“the youth,” an armed radical Somali Islamist group] leader trained by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan wanted for his role in the murders of Western aid workers in the Republic of Somaliland; and Ibrahim Haji Jama, a.k.a. “al-Afghani,” another al-Shabaab leader who trained with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and is a veteran of terrorist campaigns there as well as in Kashmir and in Somaliland. While the Ethiopian intervention last year disrupted al Qaeda’s effort to establish a base of operations in Somalia, renewed conflict could give the terrorists another go-around.

 

And there are already indications that the terrorists are spreading out across the sub region. 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, U.S. 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. In June, the U.S. Department of Defense acknowledged that that a “dangerous terror suspect” by the name of Abdullahi Sudi Arale had been transferred to the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Arale, who served as a courier between the al Qaeda network in Pakistan and what intelligence officials have dubbed “East Africa Al Qaeda” (EAAQ), was captured presumably with the involvement with personnel from the Djibouti-based Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA). The newest enemy combatant detainee had, since his return to the Horn sub region from South Asia a year ago, had been part of the leadership of the al Qaeda-linked Islamic Courts Union. According to Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman, “there is significant information available indicating that Arale has been assisting various EAAQ-affiliated extremists in acquiring weapons and explosives, and has facilitated terrorist travel by providing false documents for [al Qaeda] and EAAQ-affiliates and foreign fighters traveling into Somalia.”

 

What was Arale up to? As I reported in a column over a year ago, a remarkable Jihadi strategy document entitled “Al Qaeda is Moving to Africa” candidly outlined how the terrorists were increasingly setting their sights on Africa as the venue of choice for future operational bases, especially as they continue to be rooted out of their havens by increasingly successful counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and parts of the Arabian peninsula. 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.

 

 

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