Eritrea, Sudan hold talks amidst tensions in Ethiopia
Eritrea’s President Isaias Afwerki is in Khartoum for talks with Sudanese officials, in a two-day visit taking place amid tensions between the governments of Ethiopia, a close ally of the Eritrean leader, and Sudan.
Accompanied by Foreign Minister Osman Saleh and presidential adviser Yemane Ghebreab, Isaias was received on Tuesday at the Sudanese capital’s international airport by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of Sudan’s ruling sovereign council.
According to a statement from the council, the two leaders held talks to discuss cooperation and the best ways of strengthening ties between their countries.
Eritrea’s information ministry said in a separate statement that Isaias and al-Burhan had “agreed to strengthen their efforts in the implementation of the Agreement of Cooperation reached between the two countries in the political, economic, social, security, and military sectors”.
President Isaias Afwerki & his delegation were accorded a warm welcome on their arrival at Khartoum International Airport by the President of Sudan’s Sovereign Council, Gen. Abdel Fatah al Burhan, Foreign Minister al-Sadiq al-Mahdi, & other senior Sudanese officials and dignitaries.
Isaias also held talks with Sudanese Prime Minister Abdallah Hamdok in which they stressed the importance of regional integration in the Horn of Africa and “agreed to focus on a few, concrete, projects to consolidate Eritrea-Sudan bilateral ties within the regional framework”.
The visit came in February after Sudan accused “a third party” of siding with Ethiopia in a decades-old border dispute with Sudan over contested farmlands in the fertile al-Fashaga region. It was likely referring to Eritrea, which has deployed troops to Ethiopia’s Tigray region to fight alongside Ethiopian federal forces in the conflict there.
Following Sudan’s accusation, Eritrea dispatched its foreign minister to Sudan to assure Khartoum that Eritrea was not part of the dispute between Sudan and Ethiopia. In late March, the United Nations reported that Eritrean forces were operating in the so-called al-Fashaga triangle.
The decades-long disagreement over al-Fashaga escalated in November after Sudan deployed troops to the territories it says are occupied by Ethiopian farmers and militias.
Sudan and Ethiopia have since held rounds of talks to try and settle the dispute, most recently in Khartoum in December, but have not made progress.
Sudan has said its forces have reclaimed most of its territory. But it called on Ethiopia to withdraw troops from at least two points it says are inside Sudan under an agreement that demarcated the borders between the two nations in the early 1900s.
Ethiopia, however, accused Sudan of taking advantage of the conflict in Tigray to enter Ethiopian territory and loot property, kill civilians and displace thousands of people. The Tigray fighting has sent more than 70,000 Ethiopian refugees into Sudan.
Isaia’s visit also comes as he faces growing pressure from the international community to withdraw Eritrean troops from Tigray.
Soldiers from Eritrea, have also been blamed for some of the worst human rights abuses in the Tigray conflict, including massacres of civilians and systematic rape.
Suzan O/AJZ
