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5 June 2024 | By Chris Horwood and Bram Frouws
Indifference and impunity: 10 months on, Saudi border killings of migrants continue
Almost 10 months after damning human rights reports and global publicity exposed Saudi Arabian state-driven border killings of migrants – labelled by Human Rights Watch as possible crimes against humanity – the deaths and injuries continue. New evidence appears to indicate that the Saudi border authorities at their southern border with Yemen are continuing to use live weapons to fire indiscriminately at Ethiopians and Yemenis crossing the border irregularly. This update report argues that while the crimes being committed are murderous and grievous, the level of inaction and impunity in the face of global exposure and condemnation should also disturb us all.
Indifference and impunity: 10 months on, Saudi border killings of migrants continue
Almost 10 months after damning human rights reports and global publicity exposed Saudi Arabian state-driven border killings of migrants – labelled by Human Rights Watch as possible crimes against humanity – the deaths and injuries continue. New evidence appears to indicate that the Saudi border authorities at their southern border with Yemen are continuing to use live weapons to fire indiscriminately at Ethiopians and Yemenis crossing the border irregularly. This update report argues that while the crimes being committed are murderous and grievous, the level of inaction and impunity in the face of global exposure and condemnation should also disturb us all.
In this article
• Since the Saudi border killings were exposed in 2022 and 2023 there has been widespread but short-lived media coverage and apparent outrage.
• International follow-up and or censure of Saudi Arabia has been limited, restrained and short-lived.
• It appears there have been no promised investigations and no processes of accountability.
• 10 months on, nothing has changed: migrants are still killed and injured on a significant scale.
• Overall, Saudi treatment of migrants at the border, in detention and during deportation attracts deep concern from human rights organisations.
• The cynical dynamics of geopolitical strategic interests and Realpolitik appear again to trump human rights.
Alarming revelations – background
Agencies like the Mixed Migration Centre (MMC) and others monitoring violations against migrants using the ‘Eastern route’ from the Horn of Africa (primarily Ethiopia) to Saudi Arabia have been aware, for some years, that migrants’ encounters with Saudi border authorities could involve beatings, sexual violations, detention and eventually deportation[1]. But research indicated an alarming change in recent years.
While conducting research with returnee migrants in Ethiopia in 2022 to establish how many migrants went missing and the prevalence of human trafficking along the Eastern route, mention of deaths and injuries along the Saudi/Yemen border appeared repeatedly in migrants’ testimonies. Deaths, disappearances, ill health and accidents often linked to neglect, extortion and exploitation at the hands of smugglers and traffickers as well as armed forces is endemic to the Eastern route.
Recent reports such as Captive Commodities (2023) and Transit in Hell (2023) document the unending, harrowing experiences of Ethiopian migrants in transit along this route in detail, as did reports going back more than a decade, like the 2019 Human Rights Watch report Hostile Shores and the 2012 RMMS (MMC’s predecessor) report Desperate Choices. But death and maiming from deliberate and direct explosive fire from high calibre weapons fired by Saudi border guards is an extraordinary and, up to 2022, an unreported and unique abuse along the Eastern route.
While such extreme revelations were new to many, the Yemen-based Mwatana for Human Rights had been collecting similar testimony of deliberate Saudi firing and bombardment of migrant collection areas inside Yemen, but close to the border, since 2019. A dedicated chapter (Chapter 1) in their 2023 report documents multiple eyewitness reports of indiscriminate attacks by ‘Saudi border guards and Saudi/United Arab Emirates (UAE)-led coalition forces’ on migrants while still inside Yemen between 2019-2023. However, the border-crossing migrants who were killed were not only Ethiopians but many were Yemeni. In some cases, forensic reports on Yemeni bodies returned by Saudi authorities to Yemeni morgues documented extensive torture before death.