The deadly journey to the Gulf

In the beginning, before the desert and the sea, before the beatings and the body, all he had was a phone number. Abdro was working on a building site in Ethiopia when another labourer told him how to contact a dalala, a broker, who could get him to Saudi Arabia. He was 19 years old, with an ailing father, seven siblings and no prospects, so he made plans to leave.

Abdro (we are using just one name for his protection) followed the well-trodden trail from the Horn of Africa to the Arabian peninsula, dreaming of a better life. Last year the UN’s International Organisation for Migration (IOM) counted migrants crossing borders, generally irregularly, 380,000 times along this Eastern Corridor, including more than 96,000 arrivals on the Yemeni coast. (About 230,000 crossed the Mediterranean.) Migrants often encounter extraordinary levels of exploitation and violence, their quiet courage unnoticed.

The shortest crossing is through Djibouti and across the Bab al-Mandab. Lately the boats have been driven eastward by a Yemeni crackdown on smuggling and, perhaps, by the fear of Houthi missiles and American warships in the same narrow strait. Another branch runs from the Somali port of Bossaso across the Gulf of Aden, which means a longer and more perilous sea journey (see map). Either way, migrants must then travel 500km across Yemen just to reach the Saudi border.

Almost everyone taking the Eastern Corridor is Ethiopian, mostly young men, although around a fifth are women and a tenth are children. Many are fleeing from regions of Ethiopia where the army is fighting rebels. But most say they are going for economic reasons: the hope of earning enough money to build a house or start a business back home.

Abdro walked for a week through scrubland and desert to the border with Djibouti. There the dalala bound his hands with rope until he paid. In the summer, temperatures top 40°C and food and water are scarce; the bodies of those who do not make it are buried in the sand. Despite the dangers, last year 123,000 migrants crossed from Ethiopia to Djibouti, a statelet of just over a million people.

The boats cross under cover of darkness, departing from beaches marked with makeshift graves. There are stories of smugglers ordering their passengers, who come from a land without sea, to jump overboard and swim. On June 10th at least 49 people drowned and 140 were missing after their boat from Bossaso capsized. The IOM has counted about 2,000 deaths from drowning on the crossing over the past decade, but many more go unrecorded, the currents washing bodies north.

Once migrants reach Yemen, they are even more vulnerable to abuse. Traffickers round up new arrivals from the landing sites and hold them for ransom in compounds called “hosh”, or sometimes just “hawala houses”, after a traditional money-transfer system. Abdro says that five men beat him up. They phoned his father in Ethiopia to demand 150,000 birr ($2,600), letting his cries of pain filter down the line. His father sold land to set him free.

The onward journey through Yemen is a story of false starts and dead ends, as migrants cross a patchwork of rival fiefs. Women are forced to “marry” traffickers or are hired out to local men for sex. Others work for a pittance in menial jobs. All of Yemen’s factions commit abuses. In 2021 Houthi guards fired tear-gas at migrants in a detention centre in Sana’a, the capital, starting a fire that killed 45 detainees.

If, by some miracle, they reach the Saudi border, migrants are met with mortars and rockets. Human Rights Watch, an international monitor, said last August that Saudi border guards had killed hundreds, maybe thousands, of migrants in a little over a year. Sometimes the guards fire rifles at close range, first asking migrants which limb they prefer to lose. When Abdro got to the border, the guards captured him and gave him an ultimatum: go into detention, or help to carry the corpse of another man back into Yemen, so that it could be buried. He chose to move the body.

Abdro did not try to cross the border again. Those who do get into Saudi Arabia might find poorly paid work as shepherds or labourers, if they are men, or domestic workers, if they are women. But they live in fear of being forcibly returned to Ethiopia, as have been more than half a million migrants in the past seven years. Haftom, another migrant, says he was held for ten months in a Saudi detention centre and given electric shocks by his captors.

Why would anyone embark on such a journey? Some are certainly misinformed. In one study, half of returnees said they did not know the dangers before setting out. In another, half of first-time migrants did not know they would have to cross the sea, and less than a third had heard of Yemen’s civil war. Smugglers spin webs of lies.

But many migrants know the risks, and go anyway. “Since there is no hope at home, we will search for a better land,” says Shamshadin Ame Ibro, a leader in a village near Dire Dawa, in eastern Ethiopia. Residents there describe the struggle to eke out a living. Young people want to eat spaghetti, not maize, sighs one father who has just fetched his 17-year-old daughter from Somaliland after she ran out of money en route. The village chairman estimates that 200 residents left for Saudi Arabia last year, out of a population of 10,000.

On the African leg, where borders are porous, the smugglers tend to be “networked opportunists” rather than heavily-armed criminal enterprises, says Abebaw Minaye of Addis Ababa University. Gangs make $108m-156m a year from extortion along the entire route, estimates Ravenstone Consult, a British consultancy.

Compared with routes heading to Europe, the money spent by states to stop migrants moving is modest. But so is humanitarian help. The IOM’s response centres are full to bursting and its voluntary repatriation flights are too few to meet demand. In the Djiboutian fishing town of Obock, the last stop before the sea crossing, Ethiopians outnumber locals. “Everyone knows about Lampedusa, but nobody talks about here,” says Moussa Aden Migane, the prefect in charge of the area, comparing it to the Italian island which is an entry point to Europe.

The welfare of migrants is also subordinate to geopolitics. Saudi Arabia, which enjoys friendly relations with the West, has been given “carte blanche” to continue the abuses, says Nadia Hardman of Human Rights Watch. News of killings on its border drew little more than statements of concern from most foreign governments.

Djibouti, meanwhile, hosts America’s largest army base in Africa. Last year the American government downgraded Djibouti to the lowest tier in its ranking of countries’ efforts to combat human-trafficking, a move that would normally be followed by restrictions on American assistance. But President Joe Biden ruled that funding could continue. A State Department official says the waiver reflects the scale of the challenge that Djibouti faces in managing migration, not the presence of the base.

In 2021 Ethiopia counted at least 7,000 migrants who had gone missing while heading to Saudi Arabia. Those who do return often show signs of depression or anxiety; women who have survived sexual violence are burdened by shame. The Ethiopian government gives them little support. It is urging migrants to travel through licensed recruitment agencies, rather than on irregular routes.

After his experience at the Saudi border Abdro turned round. He worked for a few months as a porter in southern Yemen, then found a seat on a flight to Ethiopia organised by the IOM. More than a year after leaving, he returned home poorer than when he left. “Thanks to God,” he says, “I came back safe.”

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