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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Separated Ethiopians and Eritreans reunite

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When Jerusalem Aregay fled Eritrea in 2001, she was sure she would never again see her friends, her uncles and the aunt who had raised her like a daughter. Yet, escape was her only option.


Eritrea was locked in a tense standoff with Ethiopia. And after two years of fighting on their border, the people of the capital Asmara had grown hostile to Ethiopians like her.


So she fled south to a country that was technically her own but that she had never called home. She believed she was saying goodbye forever to everything and everyone in Eritrea that she had loved.


Seventeen years later, she stepped off an Ethiopian Airlines flight in Asmara and into the arms of her aunt.


“We are so happy. Thank God!” Jerusalem said shortly after she was reunited with her relative Tinseu Nigusse.


The extraordinary reunion was made possible by the stunning thaw in relations between the two countries who have called off their decades-long conflict.


The resumption of flights between Asmara and the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa has brought families separated by the war back together in emotional scenes.


Day after day at Asmara’s airport, a crowd has gathered, waiting for relatives that have not been seen in years. Similar scenes have played out at Addis Ababa’s airport.


At the sight of their loved ones, men and women dressed in their finest suits and dresses have rushed forward, sobbing and embracing family members separated by war.


For some, the reunions came just in time. “I’m so happy to see her. It’s been 20 years,” Girmay Solomon said after he was reunited with his 87-year-old mother Lemlem Kahsai.


Girmay, an Ethiopian, had only met his frail mother in Khartoum once since they were separated — but the rapprochement has brought them together again, perhaps for the final time.


“I’ll take him to Mareba,” said Lemlem of her village in the country’s south. Eritreans remained closely linked to Ethiopia even after they voted in 1993 to become an independent country following a decades-long liberation struggle.


But after a border dispute erupted into two years of devastating war in 1998, the countries were driven apart. The estrangement worsened after Ethiopia rejected a 2002 United Nations ruling meant to demarcate the frontier with Eritrea.


During pauses in the brutal trench warfare, both countries deported thousands of each others’ citizens. Eritrea’s years as a province of Ethiopia meant many families had members of both nationalities and the deportations tore households apart.


Born in Eritrea, Jerusalem was an Ethiopian citizen through her parents, but after their death her aunt Tinseu, an Eritrean, raised her. By 2001, Asmara was a hostile place for people like her.


A peace treaty had ended the border fighting a year earlier, but Ethiopians and Eritreans had stopped socialising at school, she said.


Every six months, the Eritrean government would force Ethiopians who had not been deported to pay a steep fee to renew their residency permits. “We didn’t have any space to live,” she said.


The decision to leave was not easy, but eventually, it became the only choice. With the help of the UN, Jerusalem crossed the border with her little sister Lewan Aregay and reached a refugee camp in northern Ethiopia.


Two weeks later, she was in Addis Ababa, where she could not even speak the national language Amharic.


“It was so difficult for us. We didn’t know the environment, we didn’t know the society,” said Jerusalem, who eventually found work as a technician at a television station. For years, little changed along the tense frontier between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Troops remained in their trenches and separated families remained apart. Jerusalem stayed in touch with her aunt using social media. Some relatives met up in Dubai or the Sudanese capital Khartoum, countries that had flights to both Eritrea and Ethiopia. — AFP


Chris Stein


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