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Ethiopia And Eritrea Start Repatriating Prisoners Of War
by Guebray Berhane
ADDIS ABABA (AFP) - Ethiopia and Eritrea on Saturday began repatriating prisoners of war on the first direct flights between the Horn of Africa nations' capitals since the end of a bloody border conflict in June.
A first group to leave Addis Ababa, on a jet chartered by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), consisted of 97 Eritrean soldiers who had been wounded in the two-year war for disputed territory or were sick.
Dozens of the Eritreans were on crutches when they boarded the Boeing 727 leased by the Turkish company Memphis Air, and one was on a stretcher.
They were brought to the airport on coaches under police escort.
The plane took off for Asmara at 9:40 am (0640 GMT), making the first official flight between the two cities since both countries closed their airspace after the war a humanitarian one.
"This is a very positive step," ICRC delegate in Ethiopia Alain Aeschlimann said. "We hope we can go on with the repatriation of all the POWs."
Four hours later, 90 Ethiopians arrived on a return flight. A government official said they included 52 regular soldiers and 38 police officers and militiamen captured more than 18 months ago.
Looking haggard and dressed in white shirts and grey or brown trousers, some of them went to sit in the shade of the plane after disembarking to stay out of a scorching sun.
"For Ethiopia, they are our heroes, but they arrived physically very weak," government spokesman Hailekiros Guessesse told journalists as the group was taken off to the military hospital.
"There was a lack of medical treatment and they were in harsh conditions," he added, saying that apart from malnutrition, cases of dysentery, arthritis and tuberculosis had been noted among the returnees.
Two more flights were due in the afternoon and the ICRC planned in all to repatriate between 700 and 750 ailing POWs at the weekend.
The ICRC has counted 2,600 Eritrean POWs in Ethiopia and 1,000 Ethiopians in Eritrea but stressed this was not the total number.
"In international armed conflicts, some people turn up at the end of the fighting, so I will not be surprised" to see more POWs, Aeschlimann said on Friday. "We will see in coming weeks."
Tens of thousands of soldiers died in pitched battles during the war that erupted between Ethiopia and its former Red Sea province in May 1988, amid growing differences between governments whose armies had jointly toppled Marxist military dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1991.
Both sides kept to a ceasefire they reached in June this year, but a full peace agreement, brokered mainly by the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and the United States, was not signed until December 12th.
The deal provided for the POW exchange, the deployment of a U.N. buffer force on the border, compensation arrangements and the delineation by U.N. cartographers of the frontier, which was ill-defined when Eritrea gained its independence in 1993.
The prisoner exchange had been due to start on Friday, but was delayed because of engine trouble with the plane.
The ICRC is organizing the operation as an independent and neutral intermediary under the terms of the Geneva Conventions on POWs. Red Cross doctors are taking part.
"Before each flight, ICRC delegates talk to each prisoner in private to make certain that they are going back to their respective countries of their own free will," an ICRC statement issued in Geneva said Saturday.
ICRC officials here kept the local and international press away from the soldiers, stressing that one article of the Geneva Conventions provides for them to be spared the curiosity of the public.
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