In his memoir, John Bolton, former US Ambassador to the UN, exposes how UNMEE, The UN Peacekeeping Mission to Ethiopia and Eritrea, was badly misused by the State Department and Kofi Anan’s UN Secretariat to conceal Ethiopia’s intransigence and UN’s failure. Instead of forcing Ethiopia to comply with the 2002 Eritrea Ethiopia Boundary Commission’s decision and demarcate the border and bringing UNMEE home, the Africa Bureau of the State Department  and Kofi Anan found it more convenient to blame Eritrea, thus providing cover for Ethiopia.

When Ethiopia refused to comply with the “final and binding” decision of the impartial UN mandated Tribunal, the thing to do, according to Bolton was to remove UNMEE from the area. But to do so, argues Bolton, would mean to admit the Security Council had failed to force Ethiopia to abide by the decision. By keeping UNMEE the Security Council has managed to avoid responsibility, while simultaneously making Eritrea look bad, although Bolton said Eritrea was right in its insistence that the 2002 decision had to be implemented in full.

When Eritrea questioned UNMEE’s usefulness, Kofi Anan, according to Bolton, vented his anger at Eritrea. But what is Eritrea to do? Bolton agreed with Eritrea that UNMEE was part of the problem, not the solution. Boton writes,

To me, this was simply further proof that UNMEE was now part of the problem, a pawn in the Ethiopia-Eritrea dispute, not an effective tool in resolving that dispute. Still lost in the capillaries, however, Annan again vented against Eritrea. … If Eritrea was effectively withdrawing its consent to the peacekeeping operation, it was entitled to do so, especially since Ethiopia had already effectively withdrawn its consent for three years by obdurately refusing to comply with its freely undertaken obligation on border demarcation. Pg. 346

Instead of placing the blame for UNMEE’s ineffectiveness squarely where it belongs, on Ethiopia, Bolton charged that Anan pinned the blame, unfairly on Eritrea when, out of frustration, Eritrea began to restrict UNMEE’s helicopter flights.

“Instead, Annan proposed that UNMEE operate only on the Ethiopian side of the border, which would have effectively rewarded Ethiopia’s three years of intransigence by implicitly placing all the responsibility for the current flap on Eritrea.” Pg. 346.

The UN has been maintaining UNMEE, the United Nations Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea, for about seven years at a cost of a quarter billion US dollars a year. UNMEE’s current strength (as of 10 October 2007) is 2083 people (1463 troops, 216 military observers, 139 international civilians, 205 local civilians and 60 UN Volunteers.) But is there anything UNMEE has done that is worthy of notice?  There is nothing; nada! Some might argue that UNMEE has some deterrent value, but no serious person would believe that. Here is how John Bolton puts it:

 ”The idea that UNMEE in its present parlous condition was a deterrent to either Ethiopia’s or Eritrea’s resorting to force, if they deemed it in their interest to do so, was obviously misplaced…. I had, rejected the idea that UNMEE’s continued presence some how amounted to a ‘preventative deployment’ that would deter hostilities.” Pg. 346-7

John Bolton never liked the idea of expensive peace keeping mission. He never believed it was in America’s interest to fund mission’s that did not directly affect America’s national or strategic interest. In UNMEE he saw the embodiment of waste and irrelevance:

 “The thought of terminating UNMEE was as heretical to AF [State Department’s Africa bureau] as it was to other governments, since UNMEE’s existence enabled them to say that someone was addressing the problem, even if ineffectively, thus laying off responsibility elsewhere. In fact, AF’s attitude was highly typical of State’s bureaucracy, which usually considered its own country or regional issues more important than larger policy questions such as UN reform or WMD proliferation. UNMEE, like many other UN operations, was a substitute for real action, a crutch, and my talk of kicking away the crutch was not greeted enthusiastically at first.” Pg. 345-6.

Ambassador Bolton also saw UNMEEE essentially for what it was: a way of covering Ethiopia’s violation of international law.

"[I]t seemed to me that Eritrea had a point: Ethiopia had agreed on a mechanism to resolve the border dispute in 2000 and was now welching on the deal. I thought the Security Council, after over three years of watching the grass grow, should now determine whether both parties were still prepared to adhere to their commitments. If so, then demarcation should proceed, or if not, it was time to terminate UNMEE, which was simply propping up Ethiopia’s flat violation of its commitments. That, of course, was not the way Annan and the Secretariat saw the situation. Neither did many Council members, who focused like laser beams on Eritrea’s interference with UNMEE’s operations rather than on the underlying dispute. Eritrea was unquestionably interfering improperly in UNMEE’s operations, but as a way to get our collective attention in the only manner a small, impoverished country knew how, by biting the UN’s ankles. So, instead of dealing with the real problem, Annan and the Secretariat wanted to bite Eritrea back, but only with words, of course." Pg. 344-5.

One has to admire Ambassador Bolton’s candor in laying bare the shameless hypocrisy of the African Bureau of the State Department as well as Kofi Anan’s UN Secretariat, although in doing so he is scoring an ideological point. Still the degree to which Eritrea has been abused to appease an intransigent Ethiopia is here for everyone to see. If war breaks out, there is not enough water in the Red Sea to wash the blood from the hands of those who have made the looming carnage inevitable.