Much of the work that is being done in Eritrea by international organizations, non-governmental organizations and Eritrean institutions focuses on the deportees, expellees and internally displaced populations who are in free Eritrea with a view to giving them the food, shelter, clothing, sanitary and medical services, which they so badly need. At the same time, however, very little has been done to determine the plight of the Eritreans who remained in the territories recently occupied by the Ethiopian army. CPE has taken up this matter as its special responsibility with a view to alerting international organizations of their obligations to protect these populations. People in occupied territories are protected by the Fourth Geneva Convention. It is worth remembering that all the crimes reported in this document took place after the withdrawal of Eritrean forces and cannot, therefore, be regarded as "collateral damage" or "destruction rendered absolutely necessary by military operations." (Geneva Convention, IV, 53)

The Third Invasion, Mid-May 2000
The Ethiopian army has invaded large tracts of sovereign Eritrean territory, far beyond the contested areas along the border. The "border war" was simply an occasion for a much larger scheme. The human rights violations committed by the Ethiopian army in the occupied territories are singularly egregious. The regime has totally failed to discipline its soldiers as they went on a vicious rampage.

Two patterns of displacement: terror and expulsion
In the newly occupied Upper Gash region people are being expelled en masse: 15,000 have been so treated during the last three months. After they were deprived of all their earthly possessions, they were made to walk for several days over mined battlefields and across the Mereb river when it was swollen and dangerous.

In another region, in south-central Eritrea, in and around Senafe town, most homes have been looted, farms destroyed, grain stores taken away, livestock slaughtered, water resources commandeered leaving communities without any means of survival.

CPE's appeal to the International Committee of the Red Cross
CPE appealed to ICRC Geneva about the desperate situation of these populations and presented its preliminary findings to the Asmara office of ICRC. We are gratified to learn that ICRC president, Kellenberger, secured the consent of both nations to allow an ICRC delegation to enter Senafe town and its environs and begin immediate relief operations. If they maintain the relief work, we believe that the atrocities will subside. CPE will compile a full and detailed record of the atrocities that include crimes against women, crimes against children, and crimes against the elderly. Below, we present a preliminary overview of these crimes.

Broken families and separated children: urban victims
The expulsion of Eritreans from urban Ethiopia and from the then occupied territories -Badime and Alitena -- and the break-up of families during the expulsion process has been going on unabated since June 1998, when the Ethiopian-Eritrean war broke out. CPE has studied the urban deportations in some detail and presented them in Uprooted II, pp. 27-30, Uprooted III, pp. 19-20. Both ICRC and UNICEF were alerted about the fact that 2600 children were forcibly separated from their parents during deportation. A complete listing of the parents and their former addresses in Ethiopia was submitted to these organizations. Both institutions then conducted some research on the matter. In practical terms, however, this activity has not made any significant contribution toward the reunification of the broken families and the return of the children to their parents. Of the many young children who were forcibly separated from their families! , many are now surviving in Ethiopian cities and towns as beggars and street children, beyond the purview of the officialdom, including those of ICRC and UNICEF. These unfortunate children urgently need the protection of humanitarian organizations concerned with children who are victims of wars.

Recent deportation from rural Tigrai
The mass deportations of Eritreans from rural Tigrai have gone on for two years without much attention from international organizations, mainly because Ethiopia has never informed ICRC or the Government of Eritrea when or where the deportations were due to occur. Some 20, 000 people have been so deported in repeated violations of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. There are no organizations on the Eritrean side to receive these victims as they cross the border, no one to give them first aid, food, water, and guidance on how to avoid the mined areas and get to the refugee or IDP camps.

People are pushed across the border suddenly and ruthlessly without informing the relevant Eritrean or international institutions. They are called to a "public meeting" in the middle of the day and are told to clear out of Ethiopia and cross the Mereb River into Eritrea. Typically they are given a few hours to pick up and go. They are warned that if they failed to meet the deadline, the consequences would be grave. All their pleas to be given a chance to gather their livestock are ignored. The livestock are then captured and taken into Tigrai, after the army has feasted on the fattest animals.

The displacement of populations inside Eritrea has occurred as a result of three different tactics employed by the Ethiopian forces against the civilian population of Eritrea. First, they used artillery shelling of civilian communities to uproot nearly all the population who lived within about 25 kilometers of the border. These communities were terrorized by sustained shelling, until the population fled to more secure areas further north. Secondly, aerial bombardment was used much more extensively deep inside Eritrean territory to kill and maim the families, destroy their homes, their schools, clinics, churches, water reservoirs, food stores and crops. That too had the effect of displacing more people in a generally northerly direction. Following the Third Invasion, there was a deliberate attempt to empty the occupied territories of people by driving the population out or their towns and villages into the areas that were still l under the control of the Eritrean forces.

The pattern was the same throughout the occupied territories, with minor variations. It began, during the occupation process, with the shelling, the looting, the arson and the wanton destruction of public and private property. In the subsequent weeks and months the horror continued in the form of disappearances, gang raping of women and abductions of adolescent girls. There was a steady stream of young mothers, young brides, adolescent girls, and even pre-pubescent girls fleeing from the occupied lands and showing up in the Zula, Alba and Harena camps in central Eritrea. The horrors were daily occurrences in Senafe and its environs and they continued until early September 2000, when ICRC entered the territory.

In Western Eritrea yet another kind of cruelty and vandalism is under way. People are being expelled from sovereign Eritrean territory, now under occupation. They are pushed across Gash River and told that the boundary of their country is not the Setit, but the Gash. These lands have never been claimed by Ethiopia and are, therefore, not "contested." The victims expelled from these areas walk for days on foot and walk through mined battlefields and across the swollen Mereb river. These rural expulsions have never been reported to ICRC or the Eritrean Government in advance. That has not happened in the recent war or at any time during the past two years. These expulsions are committed in violation of the Geneva Conventions, Articles IV, 49, which reads:

Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.

The invasion, the aerial and artillery bombardment of civilian communities, the expulsions, the state-sponsored vandalism, the arson, the confiscation of property, the rape and terror have resulted in the displacement of 1.1 million people.

The jeopardy that women and children were facing in the south-central borderlands, under Ethiopian occupation, resulted from driving the Eritrean population out not by expulsion but by inflicting various forms of terror upon it. These include bombardment of civilian communities, confiscation or destruction of property, setting the communities on fire, gang-raping women and forcing their families to watch the crime. Some of the young women who fled to the Zula, Alba and Harena camps are so filled with horror and anger that they have great difficulty giving testimony. Many, however do testify and the story they tell is gruesome. Most often it is the middle-aged women nearing the end of their child bearing age who are willing to testify, hoping that such testimony might not be as damaging to them as it would be to younger women who have most of their child-bearing age ahead of them. The elderly women testify when they are persuaded that such testimony might bring the pressure of the international community upon the Ethiopian authorities and force them to bring some semblance of order and discipline into the ranks of the Ethiopian army of occupation. They hope too that some protection might be offered to the old people they left behind.

Rape in these occupied territories is so threatening to women, that young brides, young mothers and adolescent girls never move out of their homes except in groups of ten to fifteen. From the town of Senafe, thousands of women have fled on foot across half of Eritrea to reach the shelter at Mai Habar (Harena) near Asmara. When the Ethiopian army opens fire on the victims while they flee, the group scatters and some return to their town. The young women, however, never turn back because they know what is awaiting them in Senafe - a fate they consider worse than death.

In Senafe town and its environs, soldiers left their camps every night and descended upon the communities to gang-rape women. The rapists take turns in raping one woman throughout the night. They are never fewer than seven and may be as many as twelve. We presume that even rapists need a bodyguard as they commit their heinous crimes, lest an angry member of the family come after them with a hand axe. At least two women have died after being gang-raped for several days. One of them, in Senafe, bled to death. The other, in Awgaro, was released in a half-dazed state in the middle of the night and was told to go across the Gash River. She died on the way and her body was buried by Tigre herders. Many who resisted were stabbed and beaten into submission. If they screamed, their throats were choked and their mouths stifled until their faces were black and blue.

In Senafe town and some of the villages in its vicinity, rape is so common that it has become the principal means of terrorizing the population and driving them out of their own country.

One village, called Indele, near Senafe, was set on fire by the occupying forces. Since there was a river running through it, one half of the village was saved. In that community, we have primary testimony that indicates that every woman was raped.

This body of evidence and all the other very substantial testimony we have obtained should disabuse international organizations from coming to the rash conclusion that the rape episodes they hurriedly recorded were sporadic and that the general claims made by the victims were exaggerated. The fact that the researchers were unable to get ample testimony on rape results from deficits in their methodological approaches and should not be used to explain away the problem or to understate its magnitude. It is very widespread.

Separation
During the expulsions of Eritreans from their own territory -- now occupied -- rights of children were clearly violated. As indicated above, Ethiopian officers came into the communities and gave the adults a few hours to vacate their villages and cross the Gash River. In so doing, they forced the parents to leave behind children who were in school, often several hours walking distance away, and herders who daily take livestock out to pasture, but do not return home until after dark or after several days of absence. These children were violently separated from their parents and are now at the mercy of the occupying force, herding animals destined for slaughter to feed the Army. Once their animals are gone, the soldiers will have no further use for the boys. Unlike Senafe, where ICRC is present, the people of Upper Gash have no protection so far and urgently need of such protection.

Abduction
In some cases, young girls were abducted from towns and villages often within sight of their families. The girls were dragged away by several soldiers. They screamed for help but no members of their communities dared to intervene, since that would have been an excuse for shooting them. In other cases, eleven- to fifteen-year-old children were abducted by soldiers, taken into private houses, which they use as "detention centers," where their families cannot object to the horrors to which their little daughters are subjected. For young adolescents who witnessed these abductions of their peers, the experience was particularly disturbing, to say nothing about the effect of the abductions on the victims themselves.

When all is said and done and the occupying force settles down to reap the fruits of its atrocities, one of the most heinous aspects of the occupation comes to light. The terror tactics are very effective in driving out the population and putting all the youth and adults to flight. Those who remain behind are the old people, the weak, the sick, and the disabled. Since the flight out of the Senafe region is prohibited by the occupying force, all the methods of escape available to them are dangerous. They try to find their way through extremely mountainous regions -- such as the forbidding Ambasoyra mountain range. If soldiers detect any large movement of people in this area, they open fire. The crowd then scatters, some are captured and punished, some continue their dangerous trek and ultimately find their way into the Eritrean trenches and the IDP and refugee centers. Under these circumstances only the able-bodied and the strong escape.

The elderly people who remained, behind are almost invariably stripped of all their possessions and most of their clothing. Doors and windows were ripped off and taken away leaving the old people exposed to the elements. They were deprived of their food and prevented from using what little money they had to purchase anything because they were told that Eritrean currency has no value. The soldiers sometime took the Eritrean currency offering to exchange it for Ethiopian currency, but they never come back with the promised bills. In some cases the occupying army commanded their sources of water and prevented them from getting access to it. Under these circumstances, if no humanitarian organizations intervened, the old people would starve to death. Of the four people who remained in occupied Omhajer, three survived, one died. The survivors have testified and their stories are grim. Many more such testimonies will be forthcoming  from the town of Senafe when the Ethiopian Army withdraws and the UN Peace-keepers begin to exert their influence.