Saudi Arabian border guards showered Ethiopian migrants with gunfire as they tried to cross via Yemen into the Gulf kingdom, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report Monday (21/8).
This New York-based human rights organization (HAM) revealed that hundreds of Ethiopians have died as a result of Saudi action since last year.
The allegations, which were described as “baseless” by a Saudi Government source, point to a significant escalation of abuses along the dangerous “Eastern Route” from the Horn of Africa to Saudi Arabia, where hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians live and work.
“These Saudi border officers killed hundreds of migrants and asylum seekers in this remote border area without the knowledge of the world community,” HRW researcher Nadia Hardman said in a statement.
“Spending billions of dollars investing in professional golf, football clubs and major entertainment events to enhance Saudi’s image should not distract the world’s attention from this horrendous crime,” he added.
Ethiopian migrant workers seeking work in Saudi Arabia were returned to a city in western Yemen near the site where the Saudi government was building a fence along the border. (Photo: Reuters).
A Saudi Government source told AFP: “The allegations contained in a Human Rights Watch report about Saudi border guards shooting Ethiopians as they crossed the Saudi-Yemeni border are unfounded and not based on a reliable source.”
HRW has spent nearly a decade documenting abuses against Ethiopian migrants in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, but these recently uncovered killings appear to be “widespread and systematic” and may amount to crimes against humanity, it said.
Last year, UN experts reported “alarming allegations” that “cross-border artillery shelling and small arms fire by Saudi security forces killed about 430 migrants” in southern Saudi Arabia and northern Yemen during the first four months of 2022.
The HRW report said there had been no response to letters they sent to the Saudi Ministry of Interior and Defense, the human rights commission and the Houthi rebels who rule northern Yemen.
In 2015, Saudi officials mobilized a military coalition in a bid to halt the advance of the Iran-backed Houthis, who had seized the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, from the internationally recognized government the previous year.
The Yemen war has created what the UN describes as one of the world’s worst humanitarian situations.
HRW’s report is based on interviews with 38 Ethiopian migrants trying to cross into Saudi Arabia from Yemen, as well as from satellite imagery and videos and photos posted to social media “or collected from other sources”.
The few survivors described the attacks they faced as being at close range. Saudi border guards even asked Ethiopians “which part of their body they would prefer to be shot at”, the report said.
“Everyone interviewed described scenes of horror: women, men and children scattered in the mountains badly injured, mutilated or already dead,” he said. (ab/uh)