'Saudi Arabian border guards killing hundreds of Ethiopians trying to enter country'

Saudi Arabian border guards have been accused by Human Rights Watch of deploying “explosive devices” against Ethiopian migrants attempting to cross from Yemen into the affluent Gulf nation, resulting in hundreds of fatalities since the previous year.

The claims, which have not yet elicited a response from Riyadh, suggest a notable surge in transgressions along the treacherous “Eastern Route,” linking countries in the Horn of Africa to Saudi Arabia, where hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians reside and labor.

Nadia Hardman, a researcher within HRW’s Division for Refugee and Migrant Rights, highlighted that “Saudi border guards have ended the lives of no less than hundreds of Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers who endeavored to traverse the Yemen-Saudi border between March 2022 and June 2023,” in a report presented in English.

Hardman also noted that Saudi Arabia has, in recent times, invested heavily in diverting attention away from its deeply problematic human rights track record, both domestically and internationally, allocating vast sums of money towards hosting major entertainment, cultural, and sporting events.

While Human Rights Watch had previously documented migrant fatalities at the Yemen-Saudi border since 2014, the latest report delineates a purposeful intensification in the volume and modus operandi of targeted killings. The report explicates the metamorphosis in abuse patterns from sporadic shootings and mass detentions to extensive and systematic executions – acts that could qualify as crimes against humanity if they are both pervasive and organized, constituting a governmental strategy of intentional murder of a civilian populace.

UN experts had raised “disturbing allegations” last year regarding “artillery bombardments and small arms fire supposedly by Saudi security forces, resulting in the demise of up to 430 and injuries to 650 migrants, including refugees and asylum seekers,” during the initial four months of 2022.

HRW disclosed that no replies had been received to the correspondences it dispatched to the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Defence, Human Rights Commission, and the Houthi authorities who control northern Yemen.

In 2015, Saudi Arabia forged a military coalition with the aim of displacing the Houthi rebels, who had wrested control of Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, from the internationally recognized government the preceding year.

The Yemeni conflict has given rise to what the United Nations deems one of the gravest humanitarian crises globally.

However, several of the violations spotlighted by HRW might have materialized during the truce initiated in April 2022, which has, for the most part, endured despite lapsing in October.

HRW’s report hinged on dialogues with 38 Ethiopian migrants who sought to cross into Saudi Arabia from Yemen, in addition to satellite imagery and visual content posted on social media or “compiled from alternate sources.”

Of the interviewed individuals, 28 recounted encounters involving “explosive devices,” including instances of mortar attacks.

Certain survivors depicted close-quarter assaults, recounting instances where Saudi border guards purportedly inquired which body part the Ethiopians preferred to be shot before executing the chosen limb. The report underlined scenes of horror: women, men, and children strewn across the rugged terrain, severely injured, dismembered, or lifeless.

A 20-year-old woman from Ethiopia’s Oromia region recounted an incident where Saudi border guards opened fire on a group of recently released migrants.

“They rained bullets on us. The memory makes me weep,” she recounted, adding, “I witnessed a man pleading for aid; he had lost both his legs. He screamed, ‘Are you abandoning me? Please don’t leave me.’ We couldn’t assist as we were running for our lives.”

Human Rights Watch has urged Riyadh to “promptly and urgently retract any policy, whether explicit or implicit, that targets migrants with explosive devices and employs close-range assaults against civilian migrants along the Yemen border.”