Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2014 21:33:21 +0100
Ethiopians return home to a bleak future
More than 150,000 Ethiopians have been deported from Saudi Arabia in recent
months.
<http://www.aljazeera.com/profile/rebecca-murray.html> Rebecca Murray Last
updated: 28 Feb 2014 13:50
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Addis Ababa, Ethiopia - Ahmed, 20 years old, weakly sits down in a chair
under the hot sun, dazed, as young men and women jostle in the yard around
him. He has just been deported from Saudi Arabia after a month-long
imprisonment, like the others at this crowded migrant transit center in
Ethiopia's capital.
But Ahmed's ordeal is unique. He bears fresh scars across his knees, down
his upper arms, and across his stomach. With a medical investigation by an
Ethiopian doctor still ongoing, preliminary results show so far that Ahmed
is missing his left kidney.
His short-term memory fails him. Ahmed, who comes from Ethiopia's central
Amhara region, does remember paying a couple hundred dollars to human
smugglers for the dangerous, illegal passage to Djibouti, across the sea to
Yemen, and north to Saudi Arabia.
He worked for a year and a half as a carpenter in Riyadh, living with other
Ethiopian migrants and sending home meagre wages to his impoverished family.
Three months ago Ahmed recalls waking up in a Riyadh hospital room with
jagged wounds crisscrossing his body, but with no recollection about how he
got them, or how he got there. Promptly transferred to an overcrowded Riyadh
prison because of his illegal immigration status, Ahmed was finally deported
home by plane a few weeks ago. He is waiting to hear the doctor's final
prognosis before he returns to his village, a sickly version of his former
self.
Saudi deports 'up to 150,000' Ethiopians
'Coming back empty-handed'
"It's not just the return, it's also the effect of what happens after,"
explained Sara Hamo, a protection officer with the International
Organisation of Migration (IOM) in Addis Ababa, about the thousands of
deportees. "They are coming back empty-handed. They used to supply money and
now they are a burden on the families they used to provide for. So the
return is just the beginning."
While accounts like Ahmed's missing kidney are rare, many Ethiopians at the
migrant transit centre talked about torture in ad-hoc detention centres run
by traffickers, most often for ransom, as well as beatings, sex abuse,
gruelling work hours and wages withheld by Saudi employers.
Bereket Feleke, a health ministry official, said respiratory tract
infections were the most common ailment returnees suffer, which they get
from being held for weeks in overcrowded and filthy detention centres before
deportation.
Ethiopian women and girls, often recruited by employment agencies as
domestic workers, fly to Saudi Arabia and are legally bound to their
employers, who withhold their passports. If the workers break their contract
- willingly or forced - their status becomes illegal. A similar system of
employee "sponsorship", known as kafala, exists across many of the Gulf
states. But many more Ethiopian migrants in Saudi Arabia are smuggled in,
further increasing their vulnerability for exploitation.
Travel ban
Because of widespread abuse, the Ethiopian government has issued a temporary
travel ban on domestic workers while it works on a protection law. Critics
say this could encourage more illegal migration.
Last November, the kingdom's authorities enforced strict labour laws
governing foreign workers after a seven-month reprieve, spurred partly by
the potential security threat of thousands of unemployed Saudi youth. And
Saudi Arabian vigilante groups in Riyadh, armed with clubs and machetes,
brutally attacked Ethiopian migrants in November, prompting tens of
thousands of the workers to turn themselves in to the kingdom's authorities
out of fear.
Unskilled labourers from neighbouring Yemen, the Horn of Africa and
southeast Asia have been particularly hard-hit by the deportations, which
the Saudi Arabian interior ministry claims have reached around a quarter of
a million. Adam Coogle, a Middle East researcher with Human Rights Watch,
suspects the number is much higher. "I think workers from different
nationalities are taking a wait-and-see approach to what is happening in
Saudi Arabia," Coogle said. "They will want to see if this is a labour
crackdown that is sustained, or if it is just to scare them, and will end up
being business as usual."
IOM in Addis Ababa estimates that nearly 160,000 Ethiopians have been
detained and deported from Saudi Arabia because of their irregular status.
The peak was in November, when 9,000 deportees arrived on planes to the
Ethiopian capital every day. These days, the numbers have dwindled to around
300 a day.
At nearly 92 million, Ethiopia has Africa's second-largest population after
Nigeria, and a rapidly growing economy. Agriculture is the country's leading
economic sector, but drought, poor cultivation practices, land-grabs and
mass displacement of rural populations have garnered headlines recently. The
youth unemployment rate is high. Many choose to seek work abroad and send
remittances home.
'They have been targeted'
Abigail is a 15-year-old orphan from an Amhara village who quit school when
she was in the second grade. Her seven-month trip to Saudi Arabia was
arduous. Her uncle paid an agency to find her work in the kingdom, and send
money home. With her passport withheld, she cleaned and took care of the
children in the household she was assigned to, as well as their relatives'
homes.
"When I asked for payment, and permission to call my family, the man of the
house said: 'You have no family, so why do you need money?'" she recalled.
"He tied my hands behind my back, put cloth in my mouth and beat me. He then
kicked me out of the house."
The police arrested Abigail. Without her passport and valid working papers,
she was imprisoned and deported. "There is an anger within the Ethiopian
population," said Temesgen Deressa, a guest scholar with the Africa Growth
Initiative at the Brookings Institute. "They have been targeted - killed, or
tortured and dehumanised."
"In terms of the whole economy, the remittances might not be significant,
but the returnees' families are going to be hard-hit," he said. "There is a
high level of poverty in Ethiopia, and I don't think the Ethiopian
government has the capacity for rehabilitation. Basically, the returnees
will have a very hard time."
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http://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/Images/2014/2/26/201422610119434734_20.jpg
Ahmed woke up in a Riyadh hospital with his kidney removed [Rebecca
Murray/Al Jazeera]
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