PRESS CONFERENCE BY ERITREA

Press Briefing

PRESS CONFERENCE BY ERITREA

Mass deportations had been taking place in Ethiopia, in which between 500 and 1,800 people were deported at once, Asmaron Legesse, Director of Research of the non-governmental organization Citizens for Peace in Eritrea told correspondents at a press conference at Headquarters on Thursday.

The press conference, sponsored by the Eritrean mission to the United Nations, was held to announce publication of a report on deportees from Ethiopia prepared by Mr. Legesse entitled "The Uprooted". The Permanent Representative of Eritrea to the United Nations, Haile Menkereios, and the Chairman of Citizens for Peace in Eritrea, Petros Tesfagiorgis, also attended the briefing.

The report, on the plight of urban Eritreans and Ethiopians of Eritrean origin who suffered as victims of Ethiopia's violations of human rights, was put together on behalf of Citizens for Peace in Eritrea, Mr. Menkereios explained. The organization was an independent voluntary association of concerned citizens who had formed to collect and disseminate information about the human consequences of the Ethiopian/Eritrean conflict.

Mr. Legesse said that his association was entirely devoted to the study of the impact of the war on the civilian population and examined the issue from the perspective of the covenants and conventions of the United Nations and the Geneva Conventions. They had been studied in some detail, with the advice and counsel of legal scholars, and those articles that he thought were directly relevant to the activities now in progress had been extracted.

Since the conflict began, 53,000 Eritreans had been deported, he continued. Subsequent to preparing the report, he had been to the site of the conflict at Badme and the surrounding areas, and had looked at another pattern of deportations -- the deportation of rural populations formally living inside Tigray who were deported just as the present round of conflict began. Fifty-six villages, which had been in Tigray for more than a century, had been deported. The people of those villages were uprooted and were now living under very difficult circumstances in the Badme region. While his report only covered urban deportees from Ethiopia, he would also comment on the situation of the rural deportees.

The deportees came to the border in fleets of as many as 25 buses, he continued. They were picked up from their homes, usually in the dead of night between 4 and 5 a.m. by armed officers who rummaged through their homes. The assumption was that entire populations were a security risk to the Government of Ethiopia. Nuns, monks, very old people, sick people -- and people who were on the operating table when they were picked up -- had been sent on the bus to Eritrea. One elderly gentleman, 74 years old, had been taken immediately after an operation and put on a bus. On the three day trip to the

border the sutures came apart. Those atrocities were an integral part of what was going on in the area.

Initially, the Ethiopian Government claimed that it had every right to throw those people out, he said, as it claimed they were not Ethiopian citizens and a country had the right to throw out "enemy aliens" who were a threat to its security. In fact, 83 per cent of the people who were now being deported were citizens of Ethiopia. They were citizens prior to Eritrea's independence, because the two countries were one and the same country, and they never ceased to be Ethiopian citizens. They bore identification cards and passports that said they were Ethiopian citizens.

So, in effect, Ethiopia was deporting its own citizens on a massive scale, he continued, and that was prohibited by the Ethiopian constitution and by international conventions, he said.

Another cruel aspect of the deportations was the confiscation of property, Mr. Legesse added. Homes that people had saved all their lives to build were taken away. While they were in detention, people were asked to sign a power of attorney document, which presumably was intended to allow whoever remained behind from their family, or their agents, to sell the properties. Most people chose their wives or relatives as agents. Those relatives were then deported within a week or two.

The whole framework that had been created to make it look like there was some legality to the process was a hoax, he said. It had no legal basis, nor did it achieve what it was purportedly intended to achieve; to facilitate the sale of those homes. Not a single individual surveyed had actually been able to sell property using a power of attorney document prepared in jail.

Arbitrary detentions and deprivations of various kinds also occurred, he said. Those were prohibited by the Geneva Conventions. Detainees had a right to food, to shelter, to clothing, to water, to access to toilet facilities and so on. Deportees had been deprived of all those rights. People had been deprived of food and access to toilets for five days on the trip from the remotest parts of Ethiopia to the border, which could take as long as 11 days, and some had died as a result.

In his view, the cruellest aspect of the deportations was the break-up of families, he said. Husbands were separated from wives and parents from children. His survey revealed that approximately 4,000 under-age children had been left behind after their parents had been deported. Among these, 1,200 children were left without anyone to care for them. That had been brought to the attention of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), which had so far done nothing. He hoped to work with UNICEF to get some relief for those children. They also fell within the domain of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), as they were non-belligerent civilians who had suffered from war, and he hoped they, too, would provide assistance.

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Recent bombardments had been aimed at civilian populations, he said. Six such populations had been bombarded, two of which he had visited just before coming to New York. In one, deportees from Tigray were living in white tents clearly marked UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). Antonov bombers arrived in the area, lit flares, and then proceeded to bomb the tents. A number of families were wiped out.

He added that he had also visited Badme -- the bone of contention between Ethiopia and Eritrea. It had been bombed with cluster bombs, he said, something the press had not yet reported. Cluster bombs were a heinous instrument of war that had been condemned worldwide. Along with a specialist in war crimes and genocide, who had previously been invited by Ethiopia to study the bombardment of a school by the Eritrean Air Force, he had investigated the area. The expert knew a great deal about cluster bombs and had identified them without difficulty.

There had been an escalation in the degree of cruelty that was being committed in this entire process, he said. It had ranged from initially exposing people to harm without actually doing the deed oneself to the new practice of bombing communities that were clearly civilian. In the latest bombing yesterday, in which 150 homes were burnt, it was quite likely that napalm had been used.

The purpose of his investigation was to take a body of evidence to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, to UNICEF and to the ICRC, he said, with the hope that they would do something to stop the deportations or at least to help the most helpless.

Asked how the problem of the deportations could be solved, he answered that it could be done by bringing the deportations and the cruel and inhuman conduct associated with them to the attention of the world community. That could be done through the press, through agencies of the United Nations, through UNICEF and the ICRC. He singled out the last bodies because it was within their mandates to help maternity cases, of which there were many, hospital cases, elderly people with chronic illnesses and children. Those organizations ought to be able to do something to alleviate the pain of those classes of people.

The larger issue was to stop the deportations, he continued, because they were illegal under international law and illegal under national law.

In response to a correspondent who asked if they could be stopped, he said that it depended on the response of the international community. It was certainly possible for the agencies he had mentioned to take action.

Asked if a reversal of the deportations was being sought, he explained that the normal procedure when one country became two countries was to give people the choice of citizenship. That was what had happened when Suriname

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became independent of the Netherlands. Thousands of people who chose to remain Dutch citizens came to the Netherlands from Suriname. That should have been done in the case of Eritrea and Ethiopia.

People had not even been informed that they were about to be deprived of their citizenship, he said. It was an entirely arbitrary act. They were asked to show their documents as they were being deported. Those documents were taken away from them. That was State-sponsored vandalism. He did not know of any legal procedure whereby a citizen could be deprived of his citizenship. That was forbidden in international law.

In response to a question about action taken by the Security Council on the human rights issues, Eritrea's Permanent Representative, Mr. Menkereios, said that the Council had called on both sides to stop human rights violations.

He added that, after the referendum in 1993, Eritrean citizenship had been open to all those people now being deported. They did not choose to be Eritrean citizens, but chose to remain in Ethiopia and to continue their Ethiopian citizenship. The majority had businesses registered as Ethiopian citizens. Some of them did not even know where Eritrea was, as they had lived in Ethiopia for two or three generations. He would not expect them to suddenly, now, chose Eritrean citizenship. They had chosen Ethiopian citizenship.

Mr. Legesse added that he had a record of how many of those people had actually voted in Ethiopian elections during the three years after Eritrea's independence referendum. Thirty-five per cent of them had voted in national elections, including in the 1996 election by which the present Ethiopian Government came to power. Ethiopia could not have it both ways. It could not say they were not citizens because they had voted in the referendum, but allow them to vote for three years after that. Indeed, that would cast doubt on the legitimacy of the present government.

Asked how he could be critical of the press for not reporting such abuses, when the press was not permitted to enter the war zone, Mr. Legesse said that the press should be criticized because they continued to say both countries had done this or that, without discriminating between them, when their policies and actions were different. For example, the Secretary-General had been critical of the expulsion of United Nations staffers of Eritrean origin from Ethiopia, but the press had said that both countries should stop expelling United Nations staff. No United Nations staff had been expelled from Eritrea. Truth and falsehood were not two sides of the same coin and did not have equal merit.

Regarding access, the press had been allowed in on a massive scale during this round of the conflict, he said. Dozens of members of the press corps had been present in Eritrea, while Ethiopia had closed its doors to

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them. They had reported bombardments. It was true that when the war had become truly intense in the last few weeks, both countries had closed their doors to the press corps. The press could influence the outcome of a war, and the pros and cons of allowing access had to be weighed.

Asked how he could be critical of the international community for not responding to events that were invisible to them because of the absence of the press, he said there were two ways the attention of the world community could be drawn to war crimes. One was via the press, and the other was to go directly to the decision-makers. He was doing both. He believed the press should be there, but understood there were strong reasons why they may not be allowed.

Mr. Menkereios added that the policy of the Eritrean Government towards access to the press was that there should be 100 per cent free access. The only time Eritrea had chosen not to allow access was during this last offensive. Fighting had been intense and the only way the media could have reached it was by means of the Government, which meant the Government would have been responsible for their safety.

Asked why the fighting was continuing, Mr. Menkereios said Eritrea was sure that Ethiopia had designs beyond the border. If Ethiopia was just concerned with the area around Badme, when Eritrea had fully accepted the Organization of African Unity (OAU) proposals -- of which the first condition was a ceasefire -- Ethiopia would have accepted.

There were no border claim around Assab, he added. That Ethiopia had been trying to push towards Assab showed they had designs against the sovereignty of Eritrea. One of their designs, and they had said it openly, was to capture Assab. He had documents that had been with Ethiopian soldiers that said they planned to march to Asmara. The intended to change the Eritrean Government to one more amenable to Ethiopian dictates. They had said they had other territorial claims, but had not delineated those claims. Eritrea had requested such a delineation from Ethiopia through the OAU, but they had not provided it. So, he believed they had both political aims -- of changing the Eritrean government -- and territorial aims. It was an attack on the sovereignty of Eritrea, not just a border issue.

Asked about the number of the cluster bomb attacks and whether there was independent verification, Mr. Legesse said he had been accompanied by two people who had no difficulty identifying the Soviet-made cluster bombs. However, he would also be seeking specific information about them from military experts. What he had seen was three cluster bombs dropped in three different locations, and many fragments.

Asked if there had been fighting since the weekend, Mr. Menkereios said fighting continued even today, deep in Eritrean territory, about 15 kilometres from Badme.

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