ABSTRACT
At the end of 2004, the United States Committee for Refugees (USCR) estimated
that there were a total of approximately 217,500 Eritrean and Ethiopian refugees,
of which about 206,000 were in exile in Sudan. Of the latter, more than 190,000
were from Eritrea and the remaining 15,000 from Ethiopia (USCR 2005). Almost
all of the refugees from Eritrea have been in exile in Sudan for generations because
of the war of independence in Eritrea. Those from Ethiopia (excluding Eritrea) fled
because of multiple reasons. Some fled in the latter half of the 1970s because of
ethnic-based conflicts, others because of ideologically motivated conflicts, and yet
others because drought and conflict-induced famine of the mid-1980s. A few others
fled in the early 1980s to escape conscription into the military and forced settlement
in government constructed villages far away from their home areas. Therefore, they
have been in exile for a considerably shorter period of time. At present, therefore,
Eritreans in the hundreds of thousands and Ethiopians in the few thousands continue
their exile in Sudan, although the war in Eritrea and Ethiopia ended in 1991.1 Indeed,
Ethiopia, of which Eritrea was formally part until 1993, was ‘best known as Africa’s
largest refugee-producing country’, with conflicts spanning over a 30-year period
(USCR 1987, 38).
