U.S. to mediate

last updated 8 January 2015

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

The U.S. will send a team of mediators to help resolve a border dispute between Ethiopia and Eritrea, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton said this week. Last month, Eritrea, which split from Ethiopia in 1993, ordered U.N. peacekeepers to leave the buffer zone, raising fears of a renewed conflict. The dispute is over the town of Badme. A deal that ended the two countries’ 1998–2000 war awarded Badme to Eritrea, but Ethiopia has yet to pull its troops out. Jean-Marie Guehenno, head of U.N. peacekeeping, said that only the U.S. had “the clout, the credibility to move the process forward.”