By Will Brown, AFRICA CORRESPONDENT, NAIROBI and Zecharias Zelalem “Plenty of inmates are suicidal or suffering from mental illne...
By Will Brown, AFRICA
CORRESPONDENT, NAIROBI and Zecharias
Zelalem
“Plenty of inmates
are suicidal or suffering from mental illnesses as a result of living this for
five months,” said one prisoner
“Plenty of inmates are suicidal or suffering from mental
illnesses as a result of living this for five months,” said one prisoner CREDIT: Telegraph exclusive
Saudi Arabia, one of the wealthiest countries on earth, is
keeping hundreds if not thousands of African migrants locked in heinous
conditions reminiscent of Libya’s slave camps as part of a drive to stop the
spread of Covid-19, an investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has found.
Graphic mobile phone images sent to the newspaper by
migrants held inside the detention centres show dozens of emaciated men
crippled by the Arabian heat lying shirtless in tightly packed rows in small
rooms with barred windows.
One photo shows what appears to be a corpse swathed in a
purple and white blanket in their midst. They say it is the body of a migrant
who had died of heatstroke and that others are barely getting enough food and
water to survive.
Another image, too graphic to publish, shows a young African
man hanged from a window grate in an internal tiled wall. The adolescent killed
himself after losing hope, say his friends, many of whom have been held in
detention since April.
The migrants, several displaying scars on their backs, claim
they are beaten by guards who hurl racial abuse at them. “It’s hell in here. We
are treated like animals and beaten every day,” said Abebe, an Ethiopian who
has been held at one of the centres for more than four months.
“If I see that there
is no escape, I will take my own life. Others have already,” he added via an
intermediary who was able to communicate on a smuggled phone.
“My only crime is leaving my country in search of a better
life. But they beat us with whips and electric cords as if we were murderers.”
The images and testimony have sparked outrage among human
rights activists, and have particular resonance in light of the global Black
Lives Matter protests.
"Photos emerging from detention centres in southern
Saudi Arabia show that authorities there are subjecting Horn of Africa migrants
to squalid, crowded, and dehumanising conditions with no regard for their
safety or dignity,” said Adam Coogle, deputy director of Human Rights Watch in
the Middle East, after being shown the images by The Sunday Telegraph.
“The squalid detention centres in southern Saudi Arabia fall
well short of international standards. For a wealthy country like Saudi Arabia,
there’s no excuse for holding migrants in such deplorable conditions," Mr
Coogle added.
Oil-rich Saudi Arabia has long exploited migrant labour from
Africa and Asia. In June 2019, an estimated 6.6m foreign workers made up about
20 per cent of the Gulf nation’s population, most occupying low paid and often
physically arduous jobs.
The migrants work mainly in construction and manual domestic
roles that Saudi nationals prefer not to do themselves. Many are from South
Asia, but a large contingent come from the Horn of Africa, which lies across
the Red Sea.
The detention centres identified by The Sunday Telegraph
house mainly Ethiopian men and there are said to be others packed with women.
Over the last decade, tens of thousands of young Ethiopians
have made their way to the Gulf state, often aided by Saudi recruitment agents
and people traffickers, in a bid to escape poverty back home.
They have been trapped partly as a result of the pandemic
but also by the ‘Saudization’ of the kingdom’s workforce, a policy introduced
by Muhamad Bin Salman, the Crown Prince who took power three years ago.
The testimonies gathered by The Sunday Telegraph directly
from migrants on encrypted channels about the conditions they now find
themselves in are harrowing.
“Plenty of inmates are suicidal or suffering from mental
illnesses as a result of living this for five months,” said one. “The guards
mock us, they say ‘your government doesn’t care, what are we supposed to do
with you?”
“A young boy, about sixteen, managed to hang himself last
month. The guards just throw the bodies out back as if it was trash,” said
another.
When the pandemic struck in March, the Saudi government in
the capital Riyadh feared the migrants, who are often housed in overcrowded
conditions, would act as vectors for the virus.
Almost 3,000 Ethiopians were deported by the Saudi security
services back to Ethiopia in the first ten days of April and a leaked UN memo
said a further 200,000 were to follow. A
moratorium was then placed on the deportations after international pressure was
brought to bear on Riyadh.
The Sunday Telegraph has found many of the migrants who were
slated for deportation five months ago have been left to rot in disease-ridden
detention centres. “We have been left to
die here,” said one, who said he has been locked in a room the size of a school
classroom and not been outside since March.
“Covid19? Who knows?, he added, “There are a lot of diseases
here. Everyone is sick here; everyone has something.”
The images smuggled out show many of those held are plagued
by disfiguring skin infections. They claim they have received no medical
treatment.
“We eat a tiny piece of bread in the day and rice in the
evening. There’s almost no water, and the toilets are overflowing. It spills
over to where we eat. The smell, we grow accustomed to. But there’s over a
hundred of us in a room, and the heat is killing us,” said another young
Ethiopian man.
A short video clip smuggled out shows several rooms covered
with filth from an overflowing squat toilet. One Ethiopian man can be heard
shouting out: “The toilets are clogged. We tried unblocking them, but we’re
unable to. So we live in this filth, we sleep in it too.”
“To [the Saudis] or even to Abiy, it’s like we’re ants. When
we die, it’s as if an ant died, no one cares or pays attention,” the man added,
referring to Ethiopia’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning Prime Minister Abiy
Ahmed.
Saudi Arabia is deeply stratified by race and cast. African
migrants enjoy few legal rights and many complain of exploitation, sexual and
racial abuse from employers.
New laws further limiting the rights and employment
prospects of foreign labourers were introduced in 2013 and crackdowns have
continued under the rule of the young Crown Prince Muhamad Bin Salman, who took
power in 2017.
The Sunday Telegraph was able to geolocate two of the
centres. One is in Al Shumaisi, near the holy city of Mecca and one is in
Jazan, a port town near Yemen. There are believed to be others housing
thousands of Ethiopians.
Migrants in each of the centres said there were hundreds of
them in each room. Satellite imagery shows there are several buildings at both
centres, meaning there may be far more migrants in each centre who are
uncontactable.
Several of the migrants said they had been rounded up from
their homes in various Saudi Arabian cities before being placed in the camps.
Others are African refugees from war-torn Yemen.
Earlier this month, Human Rights Watch reported that Houthi
forces used Covid-19 as a pretext to expel thousands of Ethiopian migrants into
neighbouring Saudi Arabia.
Testimonies gathered by the NGO say that the Houthis killed
dozens of Ethiopians and forced others at gunpoint over the Saudi border. Saudi
border guards then fired on the fleeing migrants, killing dozens more.
“Saudi Arabia, a wealthy country, has long held undocumented
migrants including many from the Horn of Africa in conditions that are so
crowded, unsanitary, and appalling that migrants often emerge traumatised or
sick,” said Mr Coogle.
“It’s fair to question whether Saudi authorities are
purposefully allowing these detention conditions to exist in order to punish
migrants,” he added.
The Sunday Telegraph approached the Saudi Arabian embassy in
London for comment but had not received any at the time of going to press.
A representative of the Ethiopian government in the Middle
East was also unsuccessfully approached for comment.
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