<\/p>\n
When Yordanos and her two young children slipped safely across the Mereb riverbed between Eritrea and Ethiopia late one recent night, they thought the worst of their journey into exile was over. The smuggler had done his job, and they were safely over the border.<\/p>\n
Then they heard the hyenas.<\/p>\n
Yordanos and her children began to yell for help, their panicked calls fading into the solid darkness. Suddenly, she saw a group of Ethiopian soldiers coming towards them. The men comforted the young families, and then escorted them to the nearby town of Badme. \u201cThey were like brothers to us,\u201d says Yordanos, who asked that her last name not be used for fear of reprisals from the Eritrean government against her relatives at home.<\/p>\n
In some regards, Ethiopia \u2013\u00a0and in particular this sliver of Ethiopia\u2019s arid north \u2013\u00a0is the last place you might expect an Eritrean refugee like Yordanos to receive a warm welcome. In 1998, after all, an Eritrean invasion of this sleepy border town touched off a two-year war between the two countries that cost tens of thousands of lives and more than $4.5 billion, along with destroying most of the then-flourishing network of trade between the two countries. And before that conflict, Eritreans fought a 30-year civil war for independence from Ethiopia, which ended only in 1991.<\/p>\n
Even today, the ashes of those conflicts still smolder. The internationally-brokered peace settlement ending the 1998-2000 war decreed that Ethiopia should give this region of the country back to Eritrea, which claims it as historical land. But Ethiopia never did, and border clashes between the two countries\u2019 militaries continue into the present.<\/p>\n
Still, Yordanos\u2019 story is not uncommon. Fleeing enforced, indefinite military service, illegal imprisonment, and torture, about 165,000 Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers currently live in Ethiopia<\/a>, according to the United Nations. Upon arrival and registration, they are automatically granted refugee status, and the country continues to welcome more. In February of this year alone, 3,367 new Eritrean refugees arrived in the country, according to Ethiopia\u2019s Administration for Refugee and Returnee Affairs (ARRA).<\/p>\n \u201cWe differentiate between the government and its people,\u201d says Estifanos Gebremedhin, the head of the legal and protection department at ARRA. \u201cWe are the same people, we share the same blood, even the same grandfathers.\u201d<\/p>\n The reasons for that openness, indeed, owe much to shared history.\u00a0<\/b>As in many parts of Africa, colonialism sliced much of this region apart in illogical ways (though Ethiopia itself was never colonized), sowing political conflicts between members of the same community that have persisted to the present day. <\/i>For much of the roughly 600-mile Ethiopian-Eritrean border, people on both sides share the same language \u2013 Tigrinya \u2013 as well as Orthodox religion and cultural traditions.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s only the Eritrean government creating problems, not the people,\u201d says Benyamin, a resident of Axum, a town in Ethiopia\u2019s northern Tigray region, who didn\u2019t give his last name. \u201cI haven\u2019t got relatives in Eritrea but many people here do. Some from the refugee camps go to the university here.\u201d<\/p>\n But there may also be more strategic reasons for Ethiopia\u2019s open-door policy, experts say.<\/p>\n \u201cEthiopia strongly believes that generous hosting of refugees will be good for regional relationships down the road,\u201d says Jennifer Riggan, an associate professor of international studies at Arcadia University in Pennsylvania, who studies Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also an increasing amount of money in hosting refugees, some highlight,\u00a0as the international community tries to block secondary migration to Europe. One recent example was the joint initiative<\/a> announced by Britain, the European Union, and the World Bank to fund the building of two industrial parks in Ethiopia to generate about 100,000 jobs, at a cost of $500 million, with Ethiopia required to grant employment rights to 30,000 refugees as part of the deal.<\/p>\n It might also be a way of countering international controversy about the Oromo protests<\/a>\u00a0and shoring up Ethiopia\u2019s standing in the world,\u00a0according to Milena Belloni, a researcher in the Department of Sociology at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, who is currently writing a book about Eritrean refugees. The protests, which roiled the country’s largest region throughout 2016, have prompted a government crackdown that left hundreds of Ethiopians dead and sharply curtailed basic freedoms, according to human rights groups<\/a>.<\/p>\n Either way, Ethiopia\u2019s approach is in marked contrast to the strategies of reducing migrant flows that are being adopted in much of the West, Dr. Riggan says.<\/p>\n \u201cEthiopia’s response is to manage the gate, and figure out how it can benefit from these inevitable flows of people,\u201d she notes. \u201cI definitely think Ethiopia’s approach is the wiser and more realistic one.\u201d<\/p>\n After Yordanos, her children, and another mother and her two children who crossed with them were collected by the soldiers near Badme, they were taken into town and left at a so-called \u201centry point,\u201d a cluster of disheveled government buildings. From there, refugees join the bureaucratic and logistic conveyor belt that assigns them asylum status and moves them to one of four refugee camps in Ethiopia\u2019s northern Tigray region.<\/p>\n There, relationships between refugees and locals do sometimes grow strained, particularly as both groups compete for scarce shared resources like firewood and cattle pastures. And many Eritrean refugees regard Ethiopia as only a stopover point on their journey to the West. In 2013, there was unrest in all four camps, with riots in two camps, Adi Harush and Mai Aini, when refugees demanded more opportunities for international resettlement and protested authorities’ alleged corruption.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople recognize the shared culture and ethnic background, and that helps for many things, but there\u2019s still distrust because of the 30-year-war [for independence], and mostly due to 1998-2000 border conflict and related mass displacement,\u201d says Dr. Belloni. \u201cThere\u2019s a double narrative.\u201d<\/p>\n In addition to the camps, meanwhile, thousands more Eritreans live in Ethiopia outside the asylum system, both legally and illegally. About 650 miles south of the border, in the capital Addis Ababa, whole neighborhoods function as Eritrean enclaves, where the distinctive, guttural sounds of Tigrinya pour out of cafes with Italian-sounding names like Lattria Piccolo, a nod to Eritrea\u2019s history as an Italian colony.<\/p>\n But even here, homesickness sometimes creeps in.<\/p>\n \u201cLife is difficult here, it\u2019s expensive, and people\u2019s behavior changes here,\u201d says Yonathon, an Eritrean former journalist living in the Mebrat Hail suburb of Addis Ababa, an Eritrean area. \u201cYou can\u2019t replicate home<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n .James Jeffrey,<\/span>Christian Science Monitor<\/span>\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Yordanos and her two young children slipped safely across the Mereb riverbed between Eritrea and Ethiopia late one recent night, they thought the worst of their journey into exile was over. The smuggler had done his job, and they were safely over the border. Then they heard the hyenas. Yordanos and her children began […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"_ml_titleColor":"#000000","_ml_titleFont":"Roboto","_ml_titleFontSize":1.1359999999999998987476601541857235133647918701171875,"_ml_titleFontWeight":"400","_ml_titleLineHeight":1.3000000000000000444089209850062616169452667236328125,"_ml_metaColor":"#708090","_ml_metaFont":"Montserrat","_ml_metaFontSize":0.67849999999999999200639422269887290894985198974609375,"_ml_metaFontWeight":"400","_ml_metaLineHeight":0.92000000000000003996802888650563545525074005126953125,"_ml_bodyColor":"#a9a9a9","_ml_bodyFont":"Open Sans","_ml_bodyFontSize":0.84999999999999997779553950749686919152736663818359375,"_ml_bodyFontWeight":"400","_ml_bodyLineHeight":1.1999999999999999555910790149937383830547332763671875,"_ml_wooPriceColor":"#666","_ml_wooPriceFont":"Open Sans","_ml_wooPriceFontSize":0.90000000000000002220446049250313080847263336181640625,"_ml_wooPriceFontWeight":"400","_ml_wooPriceLineHeight":1.270000000000000017763568394002504646778106689453125,"_ml_headingColor":"#000","_ml_headingFont":"Merriweather","_ml_headingFontSize":2.020000000000000017763568394002504646778106689453125,"_ml_headingFontWeight":"700","_ml_headingLineHeight":1.4699999999999999733546474089962430298328399658203125,"_mlglobal_userfontcolors":{"headingColorUser":[],"titleColorUser":[],"metaColorUser":[],"bodyColorUser":[],"wooPriceColorUser":[]},"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n