Champagne and roses on the first flight Ethiopia-Eritrea in two decades | News from the world

Pbadengers fastened their seatbelts and settled for the 80-minute morning flight. Ethiopian Airlines ET0312 took off, as did hundreds of other aircraft making short-haul flights between neighboring capitals.

But this was not an ordinary commercial flight: it was the first in two decades of Ethiopian Airlines in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea. According to the journalists on board, the champagne was served accompanied by red roses

The two countries were stuck in a tense military tension since the border war that began in 1998 and caused the death of some 70,000 people.

A new political order in Ethiopia caused a sharp thaw in the relationship between the fastest growing economy in Africa and its young, underdeveloped but self-sufficient neighbor.

Since taking office in April, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has released jail dissidents and liberalized parts of the economy. A minister told Reuters on Wednesday that the state-owned airline, telecommunications companies and energy companies could be sold to "unleash the potential of the private sector".

Ahmed landed in Asmara 10 days ago. was met by his Eritrean counterpart, longtime President Isaias Afwerki, with warm embraces and laughter. They agreed to implement a peace agreement signed in Algiers in 2000.

A week later, Afwerki spent three days in Addis Ababa.

On Monday, Eritrea reopened its embbady in Addis Ababa, which had been frozen formal floral chairs arranged around low tables, all covered with a thick layer of dust.

Family members of the former embbady staff still smiled at framed portraits on a vanity table, near which lay a crate of unopened 20-year-old beer bottles

. both countries

Ethiopian Airlines said that tickets for the flight were complete in less than an hour. There were 300 seats in the plane, and many pbadengers would have been separated from their families by the conflict.

"Family Reunion," tweeted Ethiopian Airlines, as well as a photo before the dawn of the pilots who were waiting. the badpit.

The Minister of Information of Eritrea tweeted the arrival of the flight to Asmara in a hot red

sipping a coffee, the former first Ethiopian Minister Hailemariam Desalegn and former Prime Minister Dame Roman Tesfaye. Desalegn told Reuters: "It's a sincere joy, there has been hatred between us over the past 20 years, and now it has been reversed."