By TesfaNews,
The UN Monitoring Group that normally accepts, at face value, any form of accusations against Eritrea as ‘evidence’ unusually dismissed Kenya’s allegation about planeloads of weapons from Eritrea to Al-Shabaab as ‘unfounded’.
The Monitoring Group in its December 2011 report to the Security Council explained that the Kenyan government’s allegations against Eritrea that “three planeloads of weapons from Eritrea had landed in the Al-Shabaab controlled town of Baidoa during the first week of November” are simply considered as ‘fairy tales’ as there exist no such activity during that period.
If it was not handled with prudence by the Eritrean side, the potentially explosive accusations were designed to turn the ostensibly Kenya’s domestic conflict into a larger, regional issue.
As if the accusations are not enough, the big-mouth, unfortunate foreign minister of Kenya, Moses Wotangula, summoned the Eritrean ambassador to a distinctly unfriendly and disrespectful meeting at his office accompanied by a threat of using ‘series of options’ to deal with Eritrea.
“I raised concerns about intelligence that we have and information available that there is a possibility that arms supplies are flowing from his country [Eritrea] to Al-Shabaab,” said Wetangula after the meeting.
An official visit made by the Eritrean Foreign minister to Nairobi doesn’t help either to resolve the misunderstanding in a bilateral way as Kenyans chose to go along tarnishing Eritrea’s image using their apologists in the media.
To check and expose Kenya’s ‘evidence’ and ‘empty bravado’ in the open, Eritrea formally requests the UN Security Council to launch an independent and impartial investigation into the serious and unfounded accusations.
Embarrassed by the sudden turn of events that includes the unexpected diplomatic tension with Sudan, the luck of progress in their invasion of Somalia and the call for investigation from Eritrea, Kenya later forced to scale down its rhetoric against Eritrea.
“The Kenyan government remains open to dialogue with Eritrea; we have not severed relations with Asmara. We still think that Eritrea is important in the stabilization of Somalia as well as the peace of the region,” said Lindsay Kipteness, Deputy Director at Foreign affairs division in charge of the Horn of Africa.
The Monitoring Group report, however, further decried that neighboring countries including Kenya are in constant violation of Resolution 1725 (2006) to enter Somalia uninvited.
