10:57 a.m. Jun 21, 1998 Eastern By Christophe Farah
DJIBOUTI, June 21 (Reuters) - The sun-baked Red Sea port of Djibouti is straining under the weight of Ethiopian shipping that once filled Eritrea's harbours before the border war between Djibouti's Horn of Africa neighbours.
Five weeks after Ethiopia ordered its shipping away from the Eritrean ports of Massawa and Assab, Djibouti port officials are struggling to cope with thousands of tonnes of extra cargo.
``It has reached saturation point,'' Aden Ahmed Doualeh, director general of Djibouti harbour, told Reuters.
The port is crammed with vehicles, chemicals, tractors, cement and food destined for Ethiopia. The storage yard is clogged with containers, forcing officials to hastily build a second storage area to handle the influx of Ethiopian goods.
The storage headache has been made worse by bureaucratic red tape at Ethiopia's customs office in Djibouti. Loaded trucks have to wait up to a week for clearance to begin the long journey to Addis Ababa.
``We keep prodding our Ethiopian partners to remove their goods from the port as quickly as possible,'' Aden said.
In the past month, Djibouti has handled 180,000 tonnes of goods destined for Ethiopia -- about 76 percent of the Ethiopian traffic that passed through the port in all of 1997.
Before a simmering border dispute degenerated into bloody fighting on May 6, Ethiopia used Eritrea's two major ports under preferential treatment clauses. This meant cargo destined for Ethiopia did not pay duty and could be stored for a period longer than others.
But Ethiopia has now stopped its own Ethiopian ships or vessels with Ethiopian cargo from docking in either Massawa or Assab, ordering them to Djibouti instead.
Ethiopian traffic formerly accounted for up to 15 percent of all cargo through Massawa and more than 50 percent at Assab.
Meanwhile, Djibouti officials are scrambling to handle the extra shipping.
At the container terminal, metal crates that would have been shipped to Assab are sprawled across the 13.5-hectare storage yard, encircling the terminal's twin gantry cranes.
Officials said maintenance downtime has been reduced to a minimum to ensure the cranes keep up with the rising level of Ethiopian traffic.
Port authorities are now planning to create a second storage area by cannibalising a nearby truck park where scores of Ethiopian lorries awaited customs clearance last week.
Djibouti officials have urged Ethiopian customs officers to resolve the bureaucratic logjam as quickly as possible. ``The trucks can be kept waiting for up to a whole week,'' one exasperated official said.
Despite the logistical headaches, the flood of traffic is a godsend for Djibouti's shipping agents, pilots and stevedores.
An estimated 1,200 extra dock workers have been hired to help the port's 2,500 existing workers handle to extra workload.
It also means plenty of overtime pay for harbour pilots who now guide up to 10 ships during an eight-hour shift. Before the war diverted Ethiopia's ships to Djibouti, a pilot would average three vessels a day.
Port director Aden said the increased traffic will also force Djibouti to speed up its neglected modernisation programme, which is two years behind schedule.
``We are negotiating with a Chinese manufacturer for the purchase of another two gantry cranes,'' Aden said, adding that it would be a year before the new equipment is installed.