Rape, torture await migrants upon arrival
RAS ALARA, Yemen — Zahra struggled in the blue waters of the Gulf of Aden, grasping for the hands of fellow migrants. Hundreds of men, women and teenagers clambered out of a boat and through the surf emerging, exhausted, on the shores of Yemen.
The 20yearold Ethiopian saw men armed with automatic rifles waiting for them on the beach and she clenched in terror. She had heard migrants’ stories of brutal traffickers, lurking like monsters in a nightmare. They are known by the Arabic nickname AbdulQawi — which means Worshiper of the Strong.
“What will they do to us?” Zahra thought.
She and 300 other Africans had just endured six hours crammed in a wooden smuggling boat to cross the narrow strait between the Red Sea and the gulf. When they landed, the traffickers loaded them into trucks and drove them to ramshackle compounds in the desert outside the coastal village of Ras alAra.
There was Zahra’s answer. She was imprisoned for a month in a tinroofed hut, broiling and hungry, ordered to call home each day to beseech her family to wire $2,000. She said she did not have family she could ask for money and pleaded for her freedom.
Instead, her captors raped her. And they raped the 20 other women with her — for weeks, different men all the time.
“They used each of the girls,” she said. “Every night there was rape.”
With its systematic torture, Ras alAra is a particular hell on the arduous, 900mile journey from the Horn of Africa to oilrich Saudi Arabia. Migrants leave home on sandaled feet with dreams of escaping poverty. They trek through mountains and deserts, sandstorms and 113degree temperatures, surviving on crumbs of bread and salty water from ancient wells.
Some are stranded in Yemen’s nightmare — in some measure because Europe has been shutting its doors, outsourcing migrants to other countries.
More than 150,000 migrants landed in Yemen in 2018, a 50% increase from the year before, according to the International Organization for Migration.
The imprisonment and torture are largely ignored by Yemeni authorities.
“The traffickers move freely, in public, giving bribes at the checkpoints,” said Mohammed Said, a former coast guard officer who now runs a gas station in the center of town.