Migrants ‘left to die’ inside hellish Saudi Covid camps
African workers trapped in squalid detention centres as oil-rich kingdom tries to prevent spread of virus
Saudi Arabia, one of the wealthiest countries on earth, is keeping hundreds if not thousands of African migrants locked in conditions reminiscent of Libya’s slave camps as part of a drive to stop the spread of Covid-19, an investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has found.
Graphic mobile phone images sent by migrants held inside the detention centres show dozens of emaciated men crippled by the Arabian heat lying shirtless in tightly packed rows in small rooms with barred windows.
One photo shows what appears to be a corpse swathed in a purple and white blanket in their midst. They say it is the body of a migrant who had died of heatstroke and that others are barely getting enough food and water to survive. Another image, too graphic to publish, shows a young African man hanged from a window grate in an internal tiled wall. The adolescent killed himself after losing hope, say his friends, many of whom have been held in detention since April.
The migrants, several displaying scars on their backs, claim they are beaten by guards who hurl racial abuse at them. “It’s hell in here. We are treated like animals and beaten every day,” said Abebe, an Ethiopian who has been held at one of the centres for more than four months.
“If I see that there is no escape, I will take my own life. Others have already,” he added via an intermediary who was able to communicate on a smuggled mobile phone.
“My only crime is leaving my country in search of a better life. But they beat us with whips and electric cords as if we were murderers.”
The images and testimony have sparked outrage among human rights activists, at the same time as Black Lives Matter protests cross the world.
“Photos emerging from detention centres in southern Saudi Arabia show that authorities there are subjecting
Horn of Africa migrants to squalid, crowded, and dehumanising conditions with no regard for their safety or dignity,” said Adam Coogle, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch in the Middle East, after being shown the images.
“The squalid detention centres in southern Saudi Arabia fall well short of international standards. For a wealthy country like Saudi Arabia, there’s no excuse for holding migrants in such deplorable conditions,” he added.
Oil-rich Saudi Arabia has long exploited migrant labour from Africa and Asia. In June 2019, an estimated 6.6million foreign workers made up about 20 per cent of the Gulf nation’s population, most occupying low paid and often physically arduous jobs.
The migrants work mainly in construction and manual domestic roles. Many are from South Asia, but a large contingent come from the Horn of Africa, which lies across the Red Sea. The detention centres identified by The Telegraph house mainly Ethiopian men and there are said to be others packed with women.
Over the last decade, tens of thousands of young Ethiopians have made their way to the Gulf state, often aided by Saudi recruitment agents and people traffickers, in a bid to escape poverty back home. They have been trapped partly as a result of Covid-19 but also by the “Saudization” of the kingdom’s workforce, a policy introduced by Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince, who took power three years ago.
The testimonies gathered directly from migrants on encrypted channels about the conditions they now find themselves in are harrowing.
“Plenty of inmates are suicidal or suffering from mental illnesses as a result of living this for five months,” said one. Another said: “A young boy, about 16, managed to hang himself last month. The guards just throw the bodies out back as if it was trash.”
When the pandemic struck in March, the Saudi government feared the migrants, who are often housed in overcrowded conditions, would act as vectors for the virus.
Almost 3,000 Ethiopians were deported by the Saudi security services back to Ethiopia in the first 10 days of April and a leaked United Nations memo said a further 200,000 were to follow. A moratorium was then placed on the deportations after international pressure on Riyadh.
The Telegraph has found many of the migrants who were slated for deportation five months ago have been left to rot in disease-ridden detention centres.
“We have been left to die here,” said one, who said he has been locked in a room the size of a school classroom and not been outside since March.
The images smuggled out show many of those held are plagued by skin infections. They claim they have received no medical treatment.
A short video clip smuggled out shows several rooms covered with filth from an overflowing squat toilet. One Ethiopian man can be heard shouting out: “The toilets are clogged. We tried unblocking them, but we’re unable to. So we live in this filth, we sleep in it too.”
The Telegraph was able to geolocate two of the centres. One is in Al Shumaisi, near Mecca, and one is in Jazan, a port town near Yemen.
Migrants in each of the centres said there were hundreds of them in each room. Satellite imagery shows there are several buildings at both centres, meaning there may be far more migrants in each centre who are uncontactable.
The Saudi Arabian embassy in London was approached for comment but The Telegraph had not received any at the time of going to press. A representative of the Ethiopian government in the Middle East was also unsuccessfully approached for comment.
‘A young boy, about 16, managed to hang himself last month. The guards just throw the bodies out back as if it was trash’