Police began nightmarish arrest campaign last June, which targeted Ethiopian immigrants and their neighborhoods with no distinction between those with or without legal documents.
Saudi Arabian authorities have been on a nightmarish campaign to arrest and imprison Ethiopian immigrants, including thousands of Oromos, throughout the Kingdom. This isn’t a new development, but what is a recent development is that authorities are not differentiating between legal and illegal immigrants.
The Euro-Med Monitor reported on June 24, 2021, that “Saudi police began an arrest campaign last June, which targeted Ethiopian immigrants and their neighborhoods. The Saudi authorities made no distinction between those with or without legal documents. They arrested hundreds from the streets, homes and cafés across the kingdom.” Upon arrest, Ethiopian citizens have been reported to have all of their personal property confiscated, including money, phones, and jewelry, as well as other personal possessions deemed valuable.
“We would like to reiterate that the only solution to this tragedy is to intensify peoples’ struggle for freedom and democracy by coordinating forces from both inside and outside the country and avoid these century long sufferings.”
Hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians, mostly Oromos, have fled their country, seeking “refuge from deteriorating humanitarian and economic conditions at home, which have been exacerbated by widespread human rights abuses,” reports Today News Africa. Middle East Eye states that this month, Ethiopians in Saudi Arabia have “described indiscriminate arrests and spoke of friends being grabbed off the streets by uniformed officers, or being woken up in the middle of the night by police raids on their homes.” Police crackdowns on migrants in Saudi Arabia isn’t unusual; what is unusual, however, is that “they are usually aimed at the country’s sizeable population of undocumented people…A similar crackdown in 2013 led to the arrest and deportation of some 100,000 Ethiopians.”
ABC News reports that “according to Ethiopia’s state minister at the foreign ministry, Tsion Teklu…up to 16,000 Ethiopians are estimated to be held in Saudi prisons. She said some 4,000 have been repatriated since April [2021].” Conditions within these Saudi prisons are horrific: the inhumane conditions have “led to many deaths due to lack of nutrition, overcrowding and extreme heat, and assaults and beatings.” In October 2020, the Associated Press described a report by Amnesty International that “describes widespread abuses in Saudi detention facilities, including beatings and electrocutions. Detainees described being chained together in pairs and being forced to use cell floors as toilets.”
One Ethiopian migrant, speaking to the Associated Press from a detention center outside of Riyadh, put it succinctly: “We are detained in a very inhumane condition, sleeping on waste overflowing from a nearby toilet. We really want to go back home but no one is assisting us, including Ethiopian officials…We are beaten every day, and our only crime was seeking a better life in a foreign land.” COVID-19 has been used as a scapegoat to keep prisoners in Saudi prisons, while the Saudis government uses them for ransom against the Ethiopian government who doesn’t actually want them back.
Teklu told the AP that Ethiopian authorities “are now working to repatriate 2,000 more migrants by bringing around 300 of them every week…The problem is compounded with the fact that some of our citizens that are repatriated are re-trafficked.” She added that Ethiopia has repatriated some 400,000 in recent years.
“We would like to reiterate that the only solution to this tragedy is to intensify peoples’ struggle for freedom and democracy by coordinating forces from both inside and outside the country and avoid these century long sufferings.”
A joint statement issued by the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) and Oromo Federalist Congress (OFC) detailed the inhumane living conditions being suffered by Oromo refugees in Saudi Arabia: “The people in detentions include children, pregnant women, [the elderly], and people with different sorts of disabilities who are susceptible to various type[s] of diseases and infections caused by overcrowded, unhygienic and suffocated detention conditions.”
The problem is complex. Ethiopian nationals immigrate to Saudi Arabia to seek a better life than they had in Ethiopia, where violence and famine run rampid, and political turmoil is rife. Yet, as Saudi authorities continue to imprison immigrants in squalid conditions, these immigrants are no better off. Amnesty International has “urged the Ethiopian government to urgently facilitate the voluntary repatriation of its nationals, while asking the Saudi authorities to improve detention conditions in the meantime.” The Ethiopian government needs to save the lives of its people. But the real answer is improvising the conditions on the ground within Ethiopia’s own borders so that its people don’t feel the need to trek hundreds of miles across Somalia and Yemen in search for some semblance of a better life.
Yet, for the imprisoned Oromo, there is little consolation: the Ethiopian government views “Oromo political refugees to be largely adversarial to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and his administration.” The OLF/OFC Statement surmises that “It seems that the Ethiopia Embassy in Saudi Arabia is intentionally silent while the Oromia refugees in detention are suffering and dying as obviously most of the refugees are oppositions to the ruling group.”
Further complicating the situation is the deep-seated economic connections between Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia, which the Ethiopian government is cautious to disrupt. According to ENA, “Ethiopia’s Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Abdulaziz Ahmed [said] that Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia have [a] very good relationship and there are many companies interested [in] investing[ing] in Ethiopia.” In 2019, Saudi Arabia “signed two loan agreements worth a total of $140 million with Ethiopia to support economic development.” With Saudi Arabia directly funding the Ethiopian government, and investment – especially in energy – ramping up, diplomacy regarding the hundreds of thousands of Ethiopian immigrants has been and will continue to be an afterthought.
The Oromo Legacy Leadership and Advocacy Association (OLLAA) joins the OLF and the OFC in support of the following: “We would like to reiterate that the only solution to this tragedy is to intensify peoples’ struggle for freedom and democracy by coordinating forces from both inside and outside the country and avoid these century long sufferings.”