ETHIOPIA: Ethiopians and Eritreans made conflicting claims of victory yesterday after an international panel ruled on the bitter border dispute that sparked a bloody, two-year war.
Tens of thousands of jubilant Ethiopians took to the streets of Addis Ababa in celebration as their government claimed the adjudication by experts based in The Hague fell squarely in its favour.
The decision received a more subdued welcome in the Eritrean capital, Asmara, where the government also claimed victory.
Over 220 Irish troops are stationed in Asmara as part of a UN peacekeeping mission to separate the two sides until a new frontier is demarcated.
An estimated 70,000 soldiers died - many in brutal, first World War style trench warfare - in the conflict that started in the remote Badme region in 1998.
Last weekend's adjudication, issued in private on Saturday and through the Internet yesterday, is intended to close the argument for once and for all.
"It is a victory of law over the rule of the jungle," a triumphalist Foreign Minister, Mr Seyoum Mesfin, told reporters afterwards.
"Eritrea lost the peace as well as the war." The Eritrean government issued a statement: "It is the Eritrean people who have emerged most victorious."
Analysts said Eritrea made significant gains at the western end of the border but Addis Ababa had been awarded symbolically important villages such as Zalambessa and Badme, the scenes of the heaviest fighting.
Ms Brikete Abraha, a woman from Zalambessa, kissed the ground when told her village would remain Ethiopian.
"I was praying the whole night that the decision would be in our favour. I am very glad," she said. The adjudication is sure to reopen painful wounds in both countries, whose impoverished peoples paid a heavy cost for their stubborn pursuit of the two-year war.
Also, both Ethiopian Prime Minister, Mr Meles Zenawi, and President Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea have been coming under strong pressure from domestic hardliners since the war ended.
Mr Zenawi has frequently been accused of being soft on Eritreans, who helped him depose the dictator Mengistu in 1991.
The Irish mission is due to end in June 2003.