Eritrea will stand by its decision to expel North American and European peacekeepers from the UN mission monitoring its tense border with Ethiopia despite the world body's insistence it back down, a senior Eritrean official said Thursday.
The official said Asmara had no intention of complying with forceful demands from UN chief Kofi Annan and the UN Security Council to rescind its order for US, Canadian, European and Russian peacekeepers to leave Eritrea in 10 days.
"We are a sovereign country, we have every right to expel some personnel within the law," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
"The UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE) is here at the invitation of both parties under Chapter Six of the UN charter," the official said, referring to provisions that make the hosting of such operations voluntary.
"It seems the UN doesn't even know the rules of the game," the official said.
On Wednesday, shortly after the Eritrean order was made public, Annan and the Security Council both issued strong condemnations of the move, calling it "unacceptable" and "inconsistent" with Asmara's UN obligations.
"The Security Council unequivocally demands that Eritrea immediately reverse its decision without preconditions," it said in a statement read by its current president, British UN envoy Emyr Jones Parry.
The order "contravenes Eritrea's obligation under the UN charter to respect the exclusively international character of United Nations staff," Annan said.
At the same time, UN officials in New York said the United Nations would not accept the order and had no plans to pull out the personnel affected by it, believed to number about 180.
In Asmara, UNMEE Force Commander Major General Rajender Singh, an Indian, said the consequences of following the order would be serious.
"The implications are going to be quite a lot, we have a total of 44 troop contributing countries, out of them 18 are being asked to go," he told reporters at a news conference. "The operational impact will be there."
Ninety-one out of 210 military observers are affected as are nearly 100 civilian staff and volunteers, UNMEE officials said.
The expulsions were ordered amid soaring tensions along the Ethiopian-Eritrean border and rising fears of a resumption in hostilities between the arch-rival Horn of Africa neighbours.
Ethiopia and Eritrea fought a bloody 1998-2000 war over the border that claimed some 80,000 lives and Asmara says new conflict is looming because Addis Ababa has rejected a binding frontier demarcation emanating from a peace deal.
Eritrea's order is the latest in a series of moves that diplomats say are intended to show its increasing anger and frustration with what it sees as a lack of international pressure on Ethiopia to accept the 2002 border ruling.
In October, Asmara slapped restrictions on UNMEE patrols inside its territory, after which the mission reported troop movements on both sides of the border that it now describes as being "tense and potentially volatile."
Last month, the UN Security Council unanimously passed a resolution threatening both Ethiopia and Eritrea with sanctions if they returned to war or fail to exercise maximum restraint.
The council also warned Eritrea alone that it could face punitive measures if it did not rescind a ban on UNMEE helicopter flights but did not threaten Ethiopia with specific sanctions for not accepting the border ruling.
The resolution sparked outrage in Asmara, which has long accused the world's major powers of coddling Ethiopia for political and economic reasons.
UNMEE has 3,794 peacekeepers and support staff on both sides of the 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) border, many of whom are based in Eritrea and patrol a 25-kilometer (15-mile) buffer zone inside Eritrean territory.
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