June 17, 2007
All about Badme
This has been the strangest story.
Associated Press came out with an apparent scoop early on Friday:
Ethiopia agrees to give town to EritreaUNITED NATIONS - After years of conflict and a tense border dispute, Ethiopia has accepted a U.N. commission's ruling to turn over a disputed town to Eritrea.
"I believe it's good news ... that was one of the bottlenecks in the situation," U.N. associate spokesman Yves Sorokobi said Thursday. "If they do agree, it should move the process forward a bit more quickly."
No one else followed up on it. The general consensus among the other hacks was that it was at best old news, at worst inaccurate ... or worse still "it was an Eritrean plant, a plot," one local correspondent told me. Then later in the day, the Ethiopian government came out with a pretty brutal response to the story:
Foreign Affairs Ministry described AP's report about Ethio-Eritrea border demarcation as "gross distortion"Addis Ababa, June 15, 2007 (Addis Ababa) - The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has said the report circulated by the Associated Press (AP) on Friday concerning Ethio-Eritrea border demarcation is a "gross distortion"...
The thrust of the foreign minister's letter is in fact not demarcation but rather a call on the Security Council to take measures against Eritrea as provided for in Article 14 of the Agreement on Cessation of Hostilities for its violations of the Algiers Agreement, he said.
"Thus, unless one insisted on reading what one wanted to read in the letter, the message of the letter is clear. The urgent matter now is to restore the Algiers Agreements which are in tatters now; not demarcation," he noted.
This is what is underlined in the letter, he said. " The rest is misrepresentation. We trust that the distortion by the AP is not malicious."
But the story kept on going. Eritrea went on to dismiss the new announcement from Ethiopia, the announcement that Ethiopia said it had not made.
Posted by aheavens at June 17, 2007 7:04 AM