Ethiopians crossing the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden toward Saudi Arabia faced torture by traffickers in Yemen and abusive Saudi detention before summary deportation, Human Rights Watch said on Aug. 15, 2019.
The Bab el-Mandeb Strait between Djibouti and Yemen, a crossing on the migration route from the Horn of Africa to Yemen, seen by NASA’s ASTER instrument on April 10, 2017. (NASA/METI/AIST/Japan Space Systems and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team via Wikimedia Commons, public domain) [file photo]
Human Rights Watch interviewed 12 Ethiopians in Addis Ababa who had been deported from Saudi Arabia between December 2018 and May 2019, as well as humanitarian workers and diplomats. Eleven of them had used smuggling and trafficking networks linked across Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia’s Puntland state, Somaliland, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, the group said.
The International Organization for Migration estimated that as many as 500,000 Ethiopians were in Saudi Arabia when the Saudi government began a deportation campaign in November 2017. About 260,000 Ethiopians, an average of 10,000 a month, were deported between May 2017 and March 2019, according to IOM figures cited by Human Rights Watch.
Interviewees described boat crossings of four to 24 hours from Djibouti, Somaliland or Puntland, in overcrowded boats with no food or water. “There were 180 people on the boat, but 25 died,” one man said. He said the smugglers threw about 25 people into the sea when the overloaded boat was about to sink.
Traffickers met many migrants on arrival in Yemen and held them in camps, beating them to extort ransom from relatives, Human Rights Watch said. The camps were run by Yemenis, but Ethiopians often carried out the abuse, and relatives sold homes or land to pay. One man said his father sold his farmland to raise 10,000 birr, about $349, before the traffickers demanded 20,000 birr.
Most crossings into Saudi Arabia were near the Yemeni mountain villages of Souq al-Ragu and Izlat Al Thabit, between Yemen’s Saada governorate and Saudi Arabia’s Jizan province. Four of the 11 who crossed on foot said Saudi border guards shot at them. “At the border there are many bodies rotting, decomposing,” a 26-year-old man said. “It is like a graveyard.”
Former detainees described overcrowding, chains, overflowing toilets, too little food and beatings at a center near al-Dayer in Jizan, at Jizan Central Prison and at the Shmeisi Detention Center east of Jeddah. Some said they were beaten when they asked for medical care, and detainees with tuberculosis symptoms were not isolated. None was given a chance to challenge deportation; Saudi Arabia is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, the report said.
Deportees often landed at the cargo or domestic terminal of Bole International Airport with no money for food, transport or shelter, aid workers said. Much of donors’ migration funding for Ethiopia was earmarked for the route to Europe, leaving little for returnees from Saudi Arabia, Human Rights Watch said.
“Saudi Arabia has summarily returned hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians to Addis Ababa who have little to show for their journey except debts and trauma,” said Felix Horne, senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. The group said it wrote to the Ethiopian and Saudi governments, and neither had responded at the time of publication.
The Guardian reported on Aug. 16, 2019 that deportee Tayib Mohammed, 45, said Saudi police burned his phone, clothes and money at the border. “They’ve systematised the deportation machine now,” Adam Coogle of Human Rights Watch told the newspaper. A Saudi official denied the allegations and said “no offender is deported by force.”
Berhanu Aberra, director for overseas employment at Ethiopia’s labor ministry, told the Guardian the government was working “with the respective Saudi bodies to respect and protect the dignity, rights and safety of our citizens.” The report came the same month Ethiopia resumed legally sending trained domestic workers to Saudi Arabia under a 2017 labor agreement.
Danielle Botti of the Mixed Migration Centre told the Guardian that at least 18,000 migrants a month arrived in Yemen in April and May 2019, the highest numbers recorded since 2006. IOM estimated that $23.8 million was needed to help returnees reintegrate, the newspaper said.
On Aug. 21, 2023, Human Rights Watch published a further report, “They Fired on Us Like Rain,” saying Saudi border guards had killed at least hundreds of Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers who tried to cross the Yemen-Saudi border between March 2022 and June 2023. Saudi Arabia had previously rejected allegations of systematic killings, the BBC reported.
Sources: Human Rights Watch: “Ethiopians Abused on Gulf Migration Route” (2019), The Guardian (2019), Human Rights Watch: “They Fired on Us Like Rain” (2023), BBC News (2023)