The Al Raqw migrant camp, located close to the border, from where people try to enter Saudi Arabia. [photo credit: Maxar/HRW]
In addition to deaths at sea, the IOM’s missing migrants project found that in 2022, the Saudi border took a prominent place
in border crossing deaths: “of the 867 deaths recorded on the Horn of
Africa-Yemen crossing, at least 795 people, believed to be mostly
Ethiopians, lost their lives on the route between Yemen and Saudi
Arabia, predominantly in Yemen’s Sa’dah governorate at the northern
border.”
For close observers, these accounts are not new: HRW,
the UNHRC (Human Rights Council) Special Rapporteurs on a range of
human rights abuses, and others have been alerting the world to both
Saudi and Yemeni abuses of Africans. In March 2021,
Ethiopian prisoners demonstrating against unacceptably bad conditions
of their detention in the Immigration Centre in Sana’a died in a fire
caused by tear gas fired by Huthi guards [see our posting of 22 March, 2021].
Throughout the war, the Huthis have forcibly sent many Ethiopians and
other East Africans into areas under IRG control where they also suffer
abuse. IRG security personnel
have tortured, raped, robbed and threatened mostly Ethiopian asylum
seekers, sometimes putting them back on unsafe small boats to be
smuggled back across the sea. Migrants have been held in various
locations on the coast between Aden and the Bab al Mandab in detention
centres, whose management in some cases answered to Emirati, rather than
Yemeni authorities. Earlier HRW
and other reports detail the routes used and the role of joint teams of
Yemeni and Ethiopian [from the different language groups] smugglers,
working together and operating both on routes along the Red Sea coast
and in the interior, thus under the authority of different political
factions in the Yemeni war.
When not held by gangs, Ethiopians work their way through Yemen,
taking up any paid casual and seasonal labour: men work in agriculture,
fisheries and car cleaning while women are mostly domestics. Some end up
in Yemen for significant periods. Others, recognising the dangers of
their attempts have taken up IOM offers of repatriation, and a few
hundred have thus been returned in recent years. Most recently, clashes
in Aden between different Ethiopian ethnicities were caused by Ethiopian government restrictions of participants of the IOM repatriation programme on ethnic grounds.
Given these shocking stories, it is surprising how many Ethiopians
take these enormous risks to reach Saudi Arabia seeking low paid illegal
work while facing the constant threat of arrest and deportation or
worse. Among those interviewed by IOM in the second quarter of 2023,
98% stated they sought "any type of job" on successful arrival.
Following the interval of the COVID crisis, just over 67 000 Ethiopians
arrived in Yemen in 2022. In the first seven months of 2023
more than 85 000 reached Yemen heading for Saudi Arabia. In the same
period, 77 000 people returned to Yemen from Saudi Arabia, including 39
000 Ethiopians and 31 000 Yemenis, giving an idea of the scope of flows,
and the significance of the border killings. Many Yemenis return
legally. Although here we focus on Ethiopians, thousands of Yemenis are
also subject to abuse as they regularly cross the border in both
directions. Finally, remember that behind each of these numbers are
human beings who have suffered severe human rights abuses.