By Peter Olorunnisomo – News of unjustified and inhuman treatment of refugees has broken out once again. This time reports from the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) say that African migrants and asylum seekers in Yemen are being subjected to physical and sexual abuse in detention.
The Human Rights Watch accused Yemeni government employees of “torturing, raping and executing” migrants and asylum seekers from the Horn of Africa in a detention centre in the southern port city of Aden, as well as forcibly deporting them out to sea.
News in the last three years or so has maintained constancy with reports about African migrants and refugees encountering vicissitudes of nature, man, and circumstance intermittently.
The report also stated the response of the Yemeni Interior Ministry who had in response to an inquiry by saying they had dismissed the centre’s commander and begun transferring migrants to another location.
The statement further added that survivors have described to the UNHCR about their being shot at, regular beatings, rapes of adults and children, humiliations including forced nudity, being forced to witness summary executions and denial of food.”
It will be recalled in recent past that the CNN actually undertook an undercover mission of the situation of migrants being sold into slavery from the area of the horn of Africa to other lands. Not only were the people sold as slaves but were also sold as sex slaves while social media was awash with video reports that corroborated the spate of abuses.
The Human Rights group said in its statement on the matter late last Tuesday that the centre was under Yemeni state control but that migrants were being arrested and taken there by forces backed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which is a major component of a Saudi-led coalition that intervened in Yemen’s civil war in 2015.
UAE and Yemeni officials in Aden did not immediately respond to requests by Reuters reporters for comments. As it usually becomes characteristic in such circumstance, no statement emanated to state whether it was true or not.
Historically, migrant dispositions have been followed by people of all races indulged in trade activities from Africa to the middle and far east and respect for traders has always reflected the humanity of the enterprise and the economic impact the traders potentially and actually wield.
The UAE, and Yemeni officials and its Western-backed coalition has been fighting the Houthis in a three-year war to restore the internationally recognized government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi. His government has a presence in Aden, while Hadi lives in Saudi Arabia.
“Guards at the migrant detention centre in Aden have brutally beaten men, raped women and boys, and sent hundreds out to sea in overloaded boats,” said Bill Frelick, refugee rights director at HRW, calling on the government to hold those responsible to account.
The perennial degradation, de-humanisation, and possible loss of lives which are occasioned at every such instance pre-supposes that the ‘refugee’ status and migrant one confers a circumstance less than human on anyone who is predicated in such contexts.
The reasons why these must be protected according to the classification of their temporary situation are articulated in the UN charter for protection because of the attendant vulnerability and personal damage which can occur to people termed ‘refugees.’ Where the affected persons are congregated in a location, the prescribed strategy has been to domicile them in camps where they are, as best as possible, comfortably accommodated pending when better intervention is made to address their needs and status.
HRW said the detention centre in Aden’s Buraika area had since early 2017 held several hundred Ethiopian, Somali and Eritrean migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, but that only about 90 migrants remained, mostly Eritrean, as of this month.
In a separate report on Tuesday, UNHCR also said it has received reports of the detention, abuse and forcible deportation of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in Yemen, but did not specify where this was taking place.
“Survivors have described to UNHCR being shot at, regular beatings, rapes of adults and children, humiliations including forced nudity, being forced to witness summary executions, and denial of food,” it said.
It called on “state and non-state” actors effectively controlling detention facilities where new arrivals are being held to ensure those being detained are treated humanely.
The present occasion of Commonwealth Heads of Government holding in London should serve to make an agendum of the issue which affects quite a number of African states and can resolve to make better and stronger intervention to the United Nations, possibly with decisive repercussions, for state-orchestrated human rights abuse of these nature.
HRW accused the armed Houthi movement that controls northern Yemen of arbitrarily detaining migrants in poor conditions and failing to provide access to asylum and protection procedures in the port city of Hodeida.
Many migrants from desperately poor Horn of Africa countries risk the hazardous journey through Yemen in the hope of finding work in Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Gulf Arab states.
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