Thousands of Tigrayans are being deported from Saudi Arabia and held in secret detention sites in Ethiopia, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).
The international rights organization said in a report that it has identified two detention sites where thousands of people from the war-torn Tigray region of Ethiopia are being mistreated and forcibly disappeared.
The sites, identified by satellite imagery, videos and witness accounts, in the towns of Semera and Shone are most likely used to detain Tigrayan deportees, it said.
Photo: AP
The report also includes testimony from returnees who claim that they were abused and beaten while in custody in Saudi Arabia.
“Tigrayan migrants who have experienced horrific abuse in Saudi custody are being locked up in detention facilities upon returning to Ethiopia,” HRW refugee and migrant rights researcher Nadia Hardman said.
“Saudi Arabia should offer protection to Tigrayans at risk, while Ethiopia should release all arbitrarily detained Tigrayan deportees,” she said.
Hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians have migrated over the past decade, traveling by boat across the Red Sea and then by land through Yemen to Saudi Arabia. The causes of this migration include conflict, economic hardship, drought and human rights abuses.
In January last year, the Ethiopian government announced it would cooperate in the repatriation of 40,000 of its nationals detained in Saudi Arabia.
About 40 percent of the returnees from Saudi Arabia between November 2020 and June last year were Tigrayan, HRW said.
The 23 Tigrayans interviewed for the report are undocumented migrant workers who were rounded up in Saudi Arabia and say they were also subjected to abuses there, including beatings and overcrowding. Many spent up to six years in formal and informal detention facilities in the kingdom.
After being deported to Ethiopia, they were held in facilities throughout the country in centers across Addis Ababa, in Semera, in Shone and in Jimma, the report said.
Trhas, a 33-year-old Tigrayan woman who was deported from Saudi Arabia in December 2020, told HRW that Ethiopian federal police stopped her at a checkpoint at Awash Sebat, Afar, and put her on a bus to what she described as a “military camp” in Shone.
“We asked the federal police for food and water and the toilet, but we were beaten if we left our seats,” said Trhas, whose name was changed in the report to protect her identity, describing the 36-hour bus ride to the camp. “They said: ‘Bandits don’t need food.’”
A Guardian report last year revealed Saudi Arabia’s mass mistreatment of undocumented African migrants, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, at al-Shumaisi detention center near Jeddah.
Detainees interviewed at the time said they were subjected to a litany of abuses including insufficient food and water, unsanitary conditions, denial of medical care and extortion by guards.
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