The ten-month war in the Horn of Africa fueled the expulsion of more than 53,000 ethnic Eritreans from Ethiopia, many of whom were Ethiopian citizens, according to a new report by an Eritrean rights group.

The report, the second edition of ‘The Uprooted’, presented to the United Nations this week by the Asmara-based Citizens for Peace in Eritrea (CPE), argued that deportations of ethnic Eritreans from Ethiopia had averaged 7000 people a month since hostilities began in May 1998.

In an earlier edition of the report, produced last July, CPE research director Asmarom Legesse detailed what he claimed was “a common pattern of deception” in which Eritreans were taken from their homes to answer questions for Ethiopian authorities, and then were promptly compelled to leave for Eritrea.

“They went on a 1200-to-1300 km trip out of their adopted country into the country of their birth, the land of their fathers and forefathers, without saying ‘goodbye’ to their families,” he contended.

Deportees went without food and access to sanitation during their days-long trek to Eritrea, a process which he claimed violated their human rights.

Legesse, who was in New York this week to present the latest edition of ‘The Uprooted’, argued that 83 percent of deportees were citizens of Ethiopia who possessed valid Ethiopian identity cards.

The latest CPE survey found that more than one-fifth of the deportees surveyed were Ethiopian passport holders, although many reported having their identity cards and passports confiscated upon their departure from Ethiopia.

Some 45 percent of ethnic Eritreans who stayed on in Ethiopia following Eritrea’s 1993 independence from the larger nation had even voted in Ethiopian elections, Legesse said. “You can’t have it both ways,” he argued, adding if Eritrean votes could be respected, so should their Ethiopian citizenship.

The deportees, Legesse told reporters, faced the confiscation of their homes, the freezing of their bank assets in Ethiopia and the break-up of their families as their children stayed in Ethiopia. Among those left behind, he added, are “1,400 children who are there without any caretaken of any kind”.

Since the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea flared up last year over the disputed region of Badme – seized by Ethiopia in heavy fighting last week – UN officials have tried to prevent both sides from expelling each other’s ethnic groups.

(All Eritreans were Ethiopian citizens prior to independence in 1993; many of those defined as ‘Eritrean’ by Addis Ababa simply are political supporters of Eritrean groups.)

Ethiopia has drawn the bulk of the blame, as when UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson last July complained about “the violation of human rights of Eritrean nationals being expelled from Ethiopia, and particularly…the fact that their passports are being stamped, ‘expelled, never to return’.”

Despite such pleas, Ethiopian President Meles Zenawi last year made a clear distinction between the rights of Ethiopian nationals and those of foreign nationals.

“We cannot expel a citizen of Ethiopia from Ethiopia; we cannot expel him whatever he does,” Meles said.”But we can expel a non-citizen of Ethiopia for any reason, whatever the reason.

“This has no connection with human rights. Does not the United States round up many Mexicans who cross the border right and left and return them because they say, ‘You are not wanted’?”

Eritreans have not been the only ones to accuse the Addis Ababa government of expelling legitimate Ethiopian citizens.

“The majority (of deportees) are Ethiopian citizens and the remainder are Eritrean citizens who were legally present in Ethiopia,” declared Natalie Klein, an Australian lawyer and current Yale Law School student, in her recent paper ‘Mass Expulsion from Ethiopia’.

“The Ethiopian government has not differentiated in any way between these two groups, nor has it allowed individuals wishing to prove their legal Ethiopian citizenship the opportunity to do so,” she added.

The UN Security Council had pushed both for an end to the fighting and to any further expulsions. It made some headway when the Eritrean government on Feb 27 declared its acceptance of a UN cease-fire accord already backed by Ethiopia.

However, both sides admitted that fighting has continued after that breakthrough.

“Nothing is stopping the fighting so far,” said an Asian diplomat, who spoke to IPS on condition of anonymity. “Since (Ethiopian forces) already have Badme, one wonders what they really want. Perhaps they want access to the sea.”

The diplomat’s reference was to the fact that, after Eritrea broke away from Ethiopia, the larger nation lost its access to ports along the Red Sea.

Eritrean officials declared that Addis Ababa’s motive in the conflict was to push toward one of Eritrea’s ports, a charge the Ethiopian government denied.