Saudi Arabian border guards systematically fire machine guns and mortars at Ethiopian migrants trying to cross into the kingdom from Yemen, killing hundreds of unarmed people in recent years, including scores of women and children, Human Rights Watch said in a report released Monday.
The human rights group cited eyewitness information about the attacks and images showing dead bodies and burial sites along migration routes, saying the death toll could even be “possibly in the thousands.” The “widespread and systematic” murder of Ethiopian immigrants could even constitute a crime against humanity, the NGO believes.
“Saudi authorities are killing hundreds of migrants and asylum seekers in this remote border area, far from the sight of the rest of the world,” HRW migration specialist Nadia Hardman said in a statement. The “billions spent” on sports and entertainment “to improve the image of Saudi Arabia” should not distract attention from “these horrible crimes,” she criticized.
The United Nations had previously questioned Saudi Arabia about whether its troops have opened fire on migrants in a growing pattern of attacks along its southern border with war-torn Yemen.
Some 750,000 Ethiopians live in Saudi Arabia, and as many as 450,000 are likely to have entered the kingdom without authorization, according to 2022 statistics from the International Organization for Migration.
The two-year civil war in the northern region of Tigray has displaced tens of thousands of Ethiopians. Saudi Arabia, which is fighting youth unemployment, has been returning thousands of people to Ethiopia in cooperation with Addis Ababa.
“While HRW has documented killings of migrants on the border with Yemen and Saudi Arabia since 2014, the killings appear to be a deliberate escalation in both the number and form of targeted killings,” the report denounced.
Human Rights Watch claims to have spoken to 38 Ethiopian migrants and four relatives of people who tried to cross the border between March 2022 and June 2023, who said they saw Saudi guards shoot the migrants at close range or throw explosives at groups of people. when they tried to cross the border.
The group has also analyzed more than 350 videos and photos posted on social media or collected from other sources filmed between May 12, 2021 and July 18, 2023. They also examined satellite images of the area captured between February 2022 and July of 2023.
“They show dead and injured migrants on trails, in camps, and at medical facilities, how burial sites grew near migrant camps, the expansion of Saudi Arabia’s border security infrastructure, and the routes they currently use. migrants to try to cross the border,” the report says.
People interviewed by HRW speak of “explosive weapons”, shots at point-blank range and Saudi border guards asking “what part of the body they would prefer to be shot at”.
There are stories of sheer terror: “women, men and children scattered across the mountainous landscape, severely injured, dismembered or already dead,” reports HRW.
“They were shooting at us, it was like a hail (of bullets),” testifies a 20-year-old woman from the Ethiopian region of Oromia, quoted by the NGO. “I saw a man calling for help, he had lost both legs,” but she, she says, “we couldn’t help him because we were running for our own lives.”
Hamdiya, a 14-year-old Ethiopian girl, explains that the guards shot them “repeatedly”. “I saw people killed in ways I never imagined. I saw 30 people killed. I pushed myself under a rock and slept there.”
Some survivors reported that the border guards would come down from their checkpoints and beat them. A 17-year-old boy said he and other survivors were forced to rape two girls after another migrant who refused to rape another survivor was executed.
The migrants said they crossed the Gulf of Aden in unseaworthy boats, then were taken by Yemeni smugglers to Saada Governorate, a stronghold of Houthi insurgents on the border with Saudi Arabia.
Many said the Houthis collaborated with smugglers and extorted them or transferred them to what they described as detention centers, where they were abused until they could pay an “exit fee” to the Saudi border.
The UN has denounced that the Houthi-controlled immigration office “collaborates with traffickers to systematically direct migrants” to Saudi Arabia, generating profits of about $50,000 a week.
The Houthis have controlled the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, since September 2014. A Saudi-led coalition has been fighting them since March 2015, failing to evict them from the capital.
In recent months, there has been growing concern from the UN human rights body about attacks by Saudi forces on migrants arriving from Yemen.
An October 3, 2022 letter sent by the UN to Riyadh said its investigators “had received allegations of cross-border artillery shelling and small arms fire allegedly by Saudi security forces that killed up to 430 migrants and they injured another 650.” “If migrants are caught, they are reportedly often subjected to torture,” the letter states. “Survivors of such attacks reported having to ‘play dead’ for a period of time in order to escape,” the letter states.
In response, Saudi Arabia’s mission to the UN said it “categorically refuted” allegations that the kingdom carries out “systematic” killings at the border. However, he also said the UN had provided “limited information” and was therefore unable to “confirm or corroborate the allegations.”