Our hope is the intellectuals of Eritrea and Ethiopia will rise above partisan emotional bickering and pave the way for peace, human rights, the rule of law and democratic governance to prevail in the region.

We do not in any way mean to underestimate the hardships suffered by the deportees or the legitimacy of their claims. There is little doubt that there are many instances where rights of people have been violated in connection with the deportation. It is important to emphasize that our rebuke of Professor Asmerom's exaggeration is by no means to deny human rights were violated nor to condone the actions of the EPRDF led Ethiopian government. To the contrary, we stand opposed to all the human rights violations that are perpetuated on the peoples of Eritrea and Ethiopia by the two dictatorial regimes in Addis Ababa and Asmara.

I.The Charge of Ethnic Cleansing

a)Eritrea is not an ethnic group:
Eritrea is not the name of an ethnic group, but of a multi-ethnic state. The major ethnic groups that make up Eritrea -the Tigrigna speaking highlanders, the Afar, the Kunama, the Saho -are also present in Ethiopia. In respect to their ethnic identity, highland Eritreans and Ethiopian Tigrayans ( it is worth to mention Eritrean President Isayas Afewerki has an Ethiopian mother while Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has an Eritrean mother) are closer to each other than any other ethnic groups that comprise their respective countries. The same holds for the other ethnic communities that live on both sides of the border -the Afar, the Kunama, the Saho and so on. Ethiopians are keenly aware of these ties of culture and ethnicity across political lines.

b)Ethnic cleansing vs. the deportations:
As Dr Samuel Assefa has put it in his response to Professor Asmerom's report The Uprooted: "To speak of ethnic cleansing in the present context is a red herring: "ethnic cleansing" connotes a dark, irrational, and morally odious aspiration to "sanitize" one's society-or in extreme cases, to "sanitize" the world-by radically altering its ethnic make-up. This is clearly not at play here. Ethiopia is not changing its ethnic make-up; there is no effort underway to bring about an ethnic transmutation of Ethiopian society. Nor could deportations of Eritreans be a means to this end. Given the ethnic overlap across the political divide, the deportations of Eritreans do nothing to alter Ethiopia's ethnic configuration."

There are close to 500,000 Eritreans in Ethiopia , 130,000 of these have voted in the 1993 referendum. The latest total of people deported from Ethiopia to Eritrea stands around 60,000. How would several hundred thousand people of Eritrean extraction remain in Ethiopia if they were really subject to a policy of ethnic cleansing?

II. Human Rights Violations by the Eritrean Regime

First we would like to raise the issue of nearly 350,000 Ethiopians and the same number of Eritreans that have been displaced as a result of this war. In May and June of 1998, Eritrean troops invaded and occupied numerous villages along the Ethio-Eritrean border. The Eritrean army also planted thousands of landmines, which have already caused incredible death, injury and destruction and threaten the lives and livelihood of thousands of more people.

II.1 Ethiopians Deported from Eritrea

"Compounding a problem of what to do with the old army is another wave of refugees. Tens of thousands of Ethiopian civilians who have been expelled by the new authorities in Eritrea have started to arrive in camps at the Eritrean border. About 30,000 wives and children of the Ethiopian soldiers stationed in Eritrea have been bused by the Eritrean People's Liberation Front across the border in the last two weeks and are crowded into camps here and in Adigrat, Aduwa and Aksum.

The Eritrean Front has told relief officials to expect 150,000 more Ethiopian civilians soon, apparently people who are being dismissed from their jobs in Eritrea, some of them long-time residents in Eritrea. Some military wives have made their way to Addis Ababa, where they remain stranded in camps, uncertain whether their husbands are dead or alive, and in many cases with no home to go to. "I have no idea where my husband is," said Abba Hailam Meskel, a 20-year-old Eritrean seven months pregnant and married to a lieutenant in the Ethiopian Army."

More than 130,000 persons were expelled to Ethiopia, stripped of their property some including their clothing and gold tooth by the end of July 1991. What is even saddening is tens of thousands of Eritreans like Abba Hailemeskel who were married to Ethiopians and have children from the marriage were deported with their children. Why did not Prof Asmerom etal scream of ethnic cleansing then? Since the conflict broke out several thousand Ethiopians were deported from Eritrea, moste of them deprived of their property and subjected to dangerous conditions. In March 1999, two thousand five hundred Ethiopians were deported from Eritrea through Humera - a dangerous path with mine fields.

II.2 Blocking international relief activities and diverting relief food shipments

"Bush administration officials say that in the aftermath of Ethiopia's civil war the new provisional government of the separatist province of Eritrea isplaying politics with food relief to assert its independence before a planned referendum to decide its sovereignty. The officials, who deal with aid programs said the Eritrean authorities had increased dock fees for some ships by more than tenfold, which they said could deter shipping companies under contract to deliver food. And they said Eritrean officials had diverted foreign relief aid for the rest of Ethiopia to their own people as a way of increasing their control and popular support.

In the same report, the Director of the Office of the United States Foreign Disaster Assistance, Mr. Andrew Natsios is quoted as saying "as they try to cut links between Eritrea and Ethiopia, kids are dying. They are using the relief programme to make a political statement."

At another time, Mr. Andrew Natsios, voicing US disappointment, said to an Eritrean representative in Washington at the time, Mr. Tesfai Gehrmatsion, with an unusually caustic insult "you have taken lessons from Mengistu: using food as a political weapon."

In The Washington Times, of 25 January 2000 it was reported:

A third of a million Eritrean refugees are in desperate need of food and clothing, but U.S. laws block direct American aid until Eritrea returns tons of U.S. grain it stole from neighboring Ethiopia, according to U.S. officials.

Eritrea confiscated 45,000 tons of U.S. grain that was in an Eritrean port en route to Ethiopia when the two Africa neighbors went to war in 1998, said an official at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

"We have a problem with U.S. food aid that was caught at the port of Assab when the conflict started," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. Shortly after Eritrea's invasion of Ethiopia in May 1998, Eritrean authorities at the port of Assab confiscated 45,000 tons of U.S. grain that was bound for Ethiopia.

The food, which was worth approximately $4.5 million, was supposed to augment Ethiopia's food reserves for use during times of drought. One and a half years later, the Eritrean government has still failed to pay the U.S. for the value of the stolen grain, which the Eritreans apparently used. Consequently, the United States has blocked direct bilateral food aid to Eritrea until the latter compensates the U.S. for the theft.

The stolen grain was only part of a larger Eritrean seizure of goods consigned to Ethiopia at the ports of Massawa and Assab. Eritrean authorities seized the goods, which were worth more than $133 million, in contravention of international laws.

II.3. VICTIMS OF THE ERITREAN REGIME AIR RAID ON MEKELE

The Washington Post writes on June 8, 1998:

On Friday, there was nothing to protect the children when a small warplane from neighboring Eritrea appeared over the eucalyptus trees near the elementary school and dropped a cluster bomb, only to return from the opposite direction and drop another one. It was the deadliest incident since the crisis began in May over a disputed 160-square-mile territory that both of these countries in the Horn of Africa have claimed since 1993. The second bomb cut down the fathers, mothers and neighbors who had rushed to the playground upon hearing the children's screams."

Despite the high casuality level of the incident and its being a clear act of human rights violation Prof Asmerom et al were not heard then or now criticizing the Eritrean Regime. So much for integrity!!

II.4 Human Right Violations on Eritreans

Indeed, Eritrea has become just another country where fundamental human rights remain systematically violated and openly ridiculed with all the arrogance and callousness that a typically tyrannical regime as the one established by Mr. Isayas could summon. As if this did not suffice, still more crimes have all along been perpetrated by the regime to stem the leakage of information about those violations to the outside world.

We have always called for the attention of all concerned to the gross human rights violations that have become the regime's trademark and the order of the day in Eritrea, violations systematically perpetrated and taken up as instruments of governance and ways and means of eliminating the opposition and terrorizing the people into absolute submission. Most of what the regime runs as important sites of detention are for the most part underground buildings in remote corners of the country, including islets in the Red Sea.

Professor Asmerom's report labors a lot to present the cases of the deportees as an act of ethnic cleansing and Deprivation of Citizenship of Ethiopian Nationals by the government there. But what Professor Asmerom does not mention is the fact that Eritrean government has committed the same act of depriving citizenship rights on Eritrean Nationals. We wonder if their silence translates to condoning this very serious human rights violation. We can substantiate this by citing two outstanding examples:

a)Refuges in the Sudan :
The Eritrean regime has adamantly refused to repatriate its own nationals who are living in the Sudan as refugees and who are very eager to come home. By this act the Eritrean regime has chosen to deny the citizenship rights of the refugees which is both illegal and inhuman. According to the Reuters News Agency report of 3 May 1997, Mr. Albert Alain Peters, UNHCR Director of Operations for Central, East and West Africa, stated "we are totally behind them (Meaning the Eritrean Government) and we would be more behind them if they would take part in the repatriation programme. They achieved independence five years ago. But still more refugees are outside the borders. They have no more reason to be in exile."

b)Jehovah's Witnesses
Eritrean Jehovah's Witnesses are deprived of their citizenship for the mere fact of their being conscientious objectors. Hundreds of Jehovah's Witnesses were stripped of their citizenship, tortured, bitten and driven out of the county. Others still languish in Eritrean prisons. According to the Presidential Directive issued on 25 October 1994, concerning Jehovah's Witnesses in Eritrea, the following reason was given for denying their citizenship "Jehovah's Witnesses in Eritrea relinquished their rights to citizenship by categorically and repeatedly refusing to recognise the state of Eritrea and its laws."