Is sending the Eritrean army across the border spearheaded by 3 mechanized brigades to occupy a 400 square kilometer area trivial matter?  What is so secondary about it when it is known that Eritrea's aggression in violation of the UN and OAU charters is a threat to peace, or a breach of the peace?  How can the cause of the conflict be described as a diversion?  One can only conclude that only to an aggressor can such an action be considered trivial.  To the aggressed, it is aggression.  It is a crime violating international law on the inviolability of state sovereignty and territorial integrity.

What Eritrea is saying today is that, OK, may be Ethiopia did administer Badme prior to May 1998, but that the administration was illegal.  Even earlier Eritrean leaders had begun to hint that it was actually in 1997 that Ethiopia had encroached the Badme area and that it was only since then that the territory was in Ethiopian hands.

But this is the beginning of yet another lie and we suggest that Eritrea not waste time peddling it because, once again, the facts don't help.

-Was it because Badme was in Eritrean hands that a census was carried out by Ethiopia in 1994 registering 6,425 residents in the town and the surrounding localities?

-Was it because Badme was in Eritrean hands that no less than six Ethiopian elections were held in the Badme area between June 1992 and February 1996?

-Is it because Badme is in Eritrea that it elected a member to sit in the Ethiopian parliament?

-Is it because Badme was in Eritrea that it had an Ethiopian local, district and municipal government, a judiciary, peasants and local (Kebele) associations, police, a school and health center?

Why was the Ethiopian administration issuing trade licences for Badme businessmen?  Because Badme was Eritrean?

How can Eritrea explain the 28 or more letters written by local Eritrean official bodies across the border to the Ethiopian administration of Badme requesting cooperation on this or that matter?  Eritrean authorities have been communicating with the Badme administration, officially and in writing, since Eritrea's formal independence in 1993 and years before the aggression by Eritrea against Ethiopia, recognizing the administration as a legal local administration of Ethiopia.  It is these and other massive body of evidence that compelled the OAU fact finding Ambassadorial Committee to conclude that Badme was under Ethiopian administration until the Eritrean aggression.