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Red Cross Repatriates More Than 700 POWS After Horn War
by Guebray Berhane
ADDIS ABABA (AFP) - The Red Cross at the weekend repatriated more than 700 sick and wounded prisoners of war (POWs) taken in two years of bloody border fighting between Ethiopia and Eritrea, airlifting the men back home.
A chartered Boeing 727 took off from Addis Ababa for Asmara early Saturday in the first official direct flight since the guns fell silent, carrying Eritrean troops who been bussed to the airport, many of them on crutches.
With medical staff on board, the plane returned with Ethiopian soldiers, police and customs officers, who were given a heroes' welcome with a brass band and full military honors, though some looked deeply weary.
In all, 359 Eritreans and 360 Ethiopians were flown across the border they had battled over as the Turkish Memphis Air jet shuttled back and forth, less than two weeks after the rival sides signed a comprehensive peace treaty.
As the ailing POWs went home for Christmas, clutching the few possessions they had brought from the camps, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) also repatriated more than 1,400 Ethiopian civilians who had been interned in Eritrea.
The return of civilians began before Ethiopian President Meles Zenawi and his Eritrean counterpart, Issaias Afeworki, signed the peace pact on December 12th, formally ending a war, which claimed tens of thousands of lives before both sides agreed to a ceasefire in June.
In all, the ICRC has visited some 2,600 Eritrean POWs in Ethiopia and a few more than 1,000 Ethiopians in Eritrea, but officials stressed that these figures fell short of the total.
"In international armed conflicts, some people turn up at the end of the fighting, so I will not be surprised" to see more prisoners, ICRC delegate in Ethiopia Alain Aeschlimann said. "We will see in coming weeks."
The Ethiopians were taken to the military hospital here.
A correspondent watched as some of the first to come home got off the plane and sought shelter from the scorching sun, sitting in the shade of the aircraft during the welcoming ceremonies.
"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, tuberculosis and arthritis had been noted.
The war between Ethiopia and its former Red Sea province in May 1988 broke out amid growing differences between governments whose armies had jointly toppled Marxist military dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam seven years earlier.
Before Ethiopia made a final push deep into Eritrea, wave upon wave of men died in pitched battles.
The battles were interspersed with long lulls in trenches along the ill-defined frontier created on Eritrean independence in May 1993.
The ICRC plans to discuss the repatriation of the remaining POWs with both governments as an independent and neutral intermediary under the terms of the Geneva Conventions.
"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 and Red Cross volunteers from both countries Sunday rode by truck with more than 1,400 civilians from the Ala internment camp a few kilometers (miles) south of Asmara to the Mereb River on the border, which the Ethiopians forded on foot.
The peace deal provided for the POW exchange, deployment of a 4,200-stong U.N. force on the border, compensation arrangements and the delineation by U.N. cartographers of the frontier.
At present, some 1,800 U.N. troops from the Netherlands, Canada, Denmark and Italy have begun a tour of duty, based mainly in Eritrea, where the U.N. mission is setting up a buffer zone some 25 kilometers (15 miles) deep.
Only about 100 personnel are currently in Ethiopia.
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