The outbreak of war between Eritrea and Ethiopia in the concluding years of the twentieth century is a truly tragic development. It qualifies as one of the most outstanding failures of the generation that fought for justice in both Eritrea and Ethiopia under the previous regimes and paid heavy sacrifices. These failures would only continue to compound unless something is done by all concerned parties to search and arrive at a lasting resolution of the conflict.
This makes soul-searching by all concerned of utmost importance. And soul-searching cannot succeed unless everyone concerned is willing to heed views that may be uncomfortable to some. The right place to start such an exercise would be by revisiting the mistakes committed by those who hastened to the scene in order to immediately resolve the conflict. The errors committed by the protagonists must also not escape scrutiny.
The protagonists attributed the conflict to contested territorial claims perhaps because they could not publicly state the real cause. But empirical data actually demonstrate that territorial dispute as the ultimate and sole cause of war is unconvincing. The analysis of incidents over a forty-year period (1950 – 1990), by Birger Heldt resulted in his conclusion “that a territorial dispute is a virtually necessary – but not sufficient – condition for interstate war.”[i] And in the views of another authority territorial disputes are not so much a source of war as an excuse.[ii]
What was the real pivotal cause of the Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict for which border dispute served as a surrogate? The difficulty to confidently answer this question is self-evident due to the secretive nature of the Fronts in the two countries. One can, however, hazard to retrospectively speculate based on what transpired within both parties in the aftermath of the 1998-2000 war.
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