A chartered flight left Aden on 20 June 2019 with 96 migrants bound for Addis Ababa, the latest in a rapid airlift of Ethiopians stuck in Yemen. It was the 18th flight under the International Organization for Migration’s voluntary humanitarian return programme since 28 May. Together the flights had carried 2,133 people home, including 570 children. Nearly 150 of those helped were women and girls.
The rush followed detentions that began on 21 April, when authorities in Aden started holding irregular migrants in large numbers. At the peak, from 27 April to 3 May, the migration organisation estimated that more than 5,000 people were held at three sites. Most of those now flying home had been kept, many for nearly two months, at a makeshift site in the 22nd of May Stadium. Since April the organisation had coordinated food, water, sanitation, and round-the-clock health care there. It also opened a diarrhoea treatment centre at Ibn Khaldoon Hospital for migrants with acute watery diarrhoea.
More than 2,000 people had gone home, and about 2,000 were still in the stadium, many of them children. The organisation said it would help the remaining children leave voluntarily in the coming week. Mohammed Abdiker, its director of operations and emergencies, said return assistance for detained migrants was a last resort, and that the agency did not support further detention, especially of children, women, and other vulnerable people. He said governments must protect everyone inside their borders, including migrants in custody, with food, water, sanitation, health care, and safe shelter. Even with Yemen at war, people seeking work in the Gulf were still crossing by land and sea. The June flights were an emergency exit for thousands who had been held in a stadium while that route stayed open.