The Financial Times
May 21, 1998
By Michela Wrong
"Two bald men fighting over a comb" was the way a novelist once described the Falklands war. The same might be said of Eritrea and Ethiopia, which in the past fortnight have been moving, to general bemusement, towards a military showdown over at triangle of border territory.
A year ago, the idea that these two former allies which together toppled Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, should be threatening to go to war over a 150-square mile area of land would have seemed absurd.
Both nations, many would have argued, had been scarred too deeply by conflict to dream of another military adventure. Both Administrations, regarded by the west as among the most enlightened in Africa, seemed too aware of the need to combat poverty to consider such costly outlay.
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Many Ethiopians still feel bereaved by the surrender of Eritrea and the Red Sea coastline and blame the loss on what they regard as overly friendly relations between the prime minister, Meles Zenawi, a Tigrayan, and the Eritrean leadership.
Their traders, they complain, are being overcharged at the inefficient port of Assab. They are also aware that while Ethiopian employees were deported from and remain unwelcome in the new Eritrea, 300,000-400,000 Eritreans still work in Ethiopia.
That resentment has been matched by anger in Asmara over the reception given the nakfa, the currency Eritrea launched last year. Eritrea had wanted an arrangement allowing the nakfa and Ethiopian birr to be accepted as legal tender in both countries, with both trading at parity.
After months of dithering, Ethiopia abruptly rejected that option, insisting Eritrea should be treated in the same way as any other sovereign state and be required to provide foreign exchange to cover all but the smallest transactions.
"In financial terms, the Ethiopians were right to do what they did. But the Eritreans assumed they would get what they wanted," says a local diplomat. "Foreign exchange is in very short supply in Eritrea and there is a huge amount of bitterness over what happened."
Adding to this heady cocktail is the character of the young government in Asmara. Hardened by a quarter of a century in the bush, determined to plow its own furrow, it is showing signs of suffering from "small man" syndrome.
A succession of frontier disputes with Sudan, Yemen and Djibouti have alternated with virulent attacks on the Organisation of African Unity and United Nations by President Issaias Afewerki.
The price of such belligerence comes high. State-owned Ethiopian Airlines has cancelled its flights to Asmara, removing a key link with the outside world for a country with no national airline. Ethiopia's central bank has ordered traders to boycott Assab and Massawa ports, providing Djibouti with an unexpected bonanza.
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