ERITREA AND THE EECC FINAL AWARD

C O N F I D E N T I A L ASMARA 000292 E.O. 12958: DECL: 08/21/2019 TAGS: PBTS PREL ER ET SUBJECT: ERITREA AND THE EECC FINAL AWARD Classified By: Ambassador Ronald K. McMullen for reason 1.4 (d) ¶1. (SBU) GSE DISAPPOINTED: The Government of Eritrea (GSE) is sorely disappointed at "losing" the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission (EECC) Final Award for Damages Claims arising from the 1998-2000 Border War. On August 17 the EECC awarded Eritrea and its citizens a total of $163,521,865 for damages caused by Ethiopia's illegal actions during the war. This amounts to just 2.7% of Eritrea's claim of some $6 billion. Moreover, as the EECC awarded Ethiopia $174 million (out of over $14 billion claimed) for Eritrea's illegal actions, Eritrea owes Ethiopia a net of about $10 million. ¶2. (C) ERITREA EXPECTED TO WIN $450 MILLION: A member of the Eritrean legal team revealed that the GSE expected to win a net $400 to $500 million. The awards were given in two groups, for Home Front damages and War Front damages. The Home Front claims tallied losses suffered by the tens of thousands of civilians expelled from the two countries during the war. Eritrea reckoned that because Eritreans expelled from Ethiopia were largely professionals and most Ethiopians chucked out of Eritrea were laborers, Eritrea would be awarded more in damages, because the Eritrean expellees were richer and lost more. The GSE further calculated that because most of the severe fighting in 2000 occurred on Eritrean territory ("systematically plundered by Ethiopia," GSE officials claim),Eritrea suffered more, and thus would be awarded more. The GSE was wrong on both counts. --Undocumented claims and grossly exaggerated damages were commonplace in Eritrea's (and probably Ethiopia's) claims. For example, Eritrea claimed its ambassador in Addis Ababa lost private art supposedly worth $95,000 when Ethiopians sacked his residence, yet did not provide any receipts or insurance inventories to substantiate this claim. Eritrea also sought punitive damages of $1 million for the "premeditated" nature of the looting of the residence. The Commission awarded Eritrea $2 million in damages for Ethiopia's failure to prevent the rape "of persons known and unknown." Ethiopia received a parallel award of the same amount. ¶3. (C) ERITREA GRIMLY ACCEPTS THE RULING: On August 18 the GSE announced that it "accepts the Award of the Claims Commission without any equivocation due to its final and binding nature under the Algiers Agreement." The last bit of that sentence is a clear reference to the "final and binding" nature of the Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission (EEBC) that in 2002 awarded Eritrea the disputed town of Badme, which Ethiopia still occupies. The deputy foreign minister told the ambassador August 20 that top Eritrean officials are seething and feeling self-righteously victimized by the international community. He said Eritrea has kept its word, win or lose, on international arbitration of the Hanish Islands (lost),the EEBC (won),and the EECC (lost),but Ethiopia has avoided international censure for its failure to comply with the EEBC ruling. "Does might make right?" he wondered. The ambassador asked if Eritrea would pay Ethiopia the $10 million. The (uncharacteristically) polite Eritrean official forced a smile and said, "We'll see." He may have been thinking, "We'll hand the check to the last Ethiopian soldier stepping back over the EEBC demarcation line." MCMULLEN