7 November -- The head of the new United Nations Mission in Eritrea and Ethiopia (UNMEE) today said he believed the UN peace operation would succeed because the two countries "have signed an agreement that they are determined to implement."
The comments by UNMEE chief Legwaila Joseph P. Legwaila were made during a press briefing at UN Headquarters in New York, during which Secretary-General Kofi Annan formally introduced his new Special Representative to Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Calling Mr. Legwaila "a seasoned peacekeeper," the Secretary-General highlighted his role in the UN peacekeeping operation in Namibia and his work on the Security Council. He said the Organization was fortunate to have Mr. Legwaila as a UN representative in the Eritrean-Ethiopian operation, which he said was going "quite well."
"The peace process and the talks are going very well," the Secretary-General said. "We have good offers for troops. We are not having, fortunately, the problems we are having in Sierra Leone. I think we have a full complement of troops and observers."
Mr. Legwaila, who leaves for the region tomorrow, was confident that the peace process would bear fruit. "After so much bloodshed, they want peace between them," he said, noting that his approach to helping the two countries will be to monitor their ceasefire while they are negotiating the delineation and delimitation of their common border. "So far they have been very successful in maintaining the ceasefire," he noted. "It is one of the few ceasefires that has been holding so well."
The UNMEE chief also plans to cooperate closely with all UN agencies working in Eritrea and Ethiopia "to make sure that we know exactly what they are doing, [and] to do anything that we can do to help them."
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