Monday November 5, 2018
The UN Security Council is preparing to lift sanctions on Eritrea on November 14 after US national security adviser John Bolton decided to drop US position of prolonging it.
The UN Security Council is preparing to lift sanctions on Eritrea
after the United States dropped its insistence on prolonging the
measures despite a peace deal with Ethiopia, diplomats said on Friday.
Britain
circulated a draft resolution to the council on Thursday that calls for
lifting the arms embargo and all travel bans, asset freezes and
targeted sanctions on Eritrea, according to the text seen by AFP.
The
council is to vote on the proposed resolution on November 14. Diplomats
said they expected the measure to be adopted after the US change in
position.Eritrea and Ethiopia signed a peace deal in July, but
the United States, backed by France and Britain, insisted that Eritrea
would first have to show progress on respect for human rights before
sanctions could be lifted.
That
position however recently changed - a shift some diplomats said was
decided by US national security adviser John Bolton, who dealt with the
Eritrea-Ethiopia conflict when he served as UN ambassador.
The
council slapped sanctions on Eritrea in 2009 for its alleged support to
Al-Shabaab jihadists in Somalia but the draft resolution acknowledged
that UN monitors had "not found conclusive evidence that Eritrea
supports Al-Shabaab."
The Eritrean government had long denied
backing the group and Foreign Minister Osman Mohammed Saleh slammed the
sanctions as "unwarranted" in his address to the General Assembly in
September.
The sanctions and arms embargo will end on the day of the adoption of the resolution, according to the text.
Stabler Horn of Africa
The
peace declaration signed in July by the prime ministers of Eritrea and
Ethiopia ended two decades of hostility and triggered a thaw in
relations with Djibouti and Somalia that shored up stability in the Horn
of Africa.
In his UN address, Eritrea's foreign minister said
it was "astounding" that some countries at the Security Council wanted
to prolong sanctions "in light of the widely acclaimed peace."
The
sanctions caused "considerable economic damage" to Eritrea and
"unnecessary hardships," said the foreign minister, who called for their
immediate end.
Ethiopia and Somalia had backed Eritrea's call to end sanctions.
The
draft resolution calls on Eritrea and Djibouti to continue to improve
relations after the leaders met in Saudi Arabia in September to resolve a
border dispute.
It urges Eritrea to make available information
on the whereabouts of Djiboutian soldiers missing since clashes in 2008,
which has been a sore point in ties.
The draft resolution would maintain the arms embargo on Somalia, imposed in 1992.
Eritrea gained its independence from Ethiopia in the early 1990s, and war broke out later that decade over a border dispute.
A 2002 UN-backed boundary demarcation was meant to settle the dispute for good, but Ethiopia refused to abide by it.
A
turnaround began in June when Ethiopia announced it would hand back to
Eritrea disputed areas including the flashpoint town of Badme where the
first shots of the border war were fired.