Human Trafficking and Torture Camps in Yemen
Growing tensions in the Middle East highlight the stark social and economic divisions between the wealthy Arab Gulf States and that of the failing states around Yemen and the Horn of Africa. Although recent studies reveal the effects of the ongoing civil war, coalition blockade, and humanitarian crisis in Yemen, little research has been conducted on the ways in which voluntary migrants from the Horn of Africa, traveling through Yemen to find work in the Gulf, are affected by various forms of human trafficking. With starvation, cholera, child soldiers, and lack of infrastructure, life in Yemen’s active war zone and adjacent humanitarian crisis is hard enough for its own citizens, let alone the migrant workers passing through to escape the horrors of their own countries. African migrant workers traveling through Yemen are subject to a wide array of human trafficking, including enslavement for sex and other jobs, having children fulfilling military roles, manipulation in a system of indentured labor, captivity in torture camps, mass killings, inadequate food and water, disease, and deportation back to their similarly conflict stricken countries. Insight on the plight of migrant workers and the situation in Yemen as a whole will help to better understand the ever-changing state of affairs in the Middle East and the ramifications on average citizens.
Yemen’s location and status as a failed state bridges the gap for migrants traveling from the Horn of Africa to the wealthy gulf states in search of work and safe haven from the conflicts existing in their home countries. For the past quarter of a century, the region consisting of the Middle East and North Africa has erupted with intertwining shifts in government and ensuing violence. While the oil rich nations of the gulf build technologically advanced super cities, places like Yemen, Eritrea, Somalia, and Ethiopia find themselves amidst humanitarian crises and war, with no feasible end in sight. Despite going on ten years of a bloody civil war and one of the largest humanitarian crises in the world, migrants continue to travel to Yemen. According to the International Organization of Migration, in 2019, close to 140,000 migrants entered Yemen, compared to 111,000 in 2016 and 107,500 in 2012 (IOM) (2019).
Due to Houthi Rebel control of the most common migrant route, the Eastern Route, since the outbreak of the civil war, as well as a defunct Yemeni Government ranked as one of the most corrupt in the world even prior to the war, little information is known about the situation for migrants. Recent events pertaining to the Houthi’s support of Hamas after the October seventh attacks in Israel, in the form of attacks on maritime trade in the Red Sea, and the United State’s airstrike intervention, has put Yemen back into the public eye amidst a seemingly forgotten humanitarian crisis. Information regarding the current state of human trafficking and migratory paths amidst the ever changing front lines of the civil war and nature of the humanitarian crisis in Yemen will help to more efficiently combat the problem and administer aid to victims and at-risk migrants.
Yemen’s lack of a functional government has made it difficult to combat the problem of human trafficking. North Yemen is run by the Houthis who, officially known as Ansarallah, have been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States in response to their recent attacks. South Yemen is “run” mainly from the confines of Saudi Arabia with a UN recognized government incapable of providing the infrastructure and resources needed to fix such a large scale humanitarian disaster, let alone the issue of human trafficking. Yemen’s government officials often work alongside traffickers and push aside claims of their widespread corruption. Various terrorist organizations and extremist militias historically known to disregard human rights (Al Qaeda, IS) have taken up sections of Yemen amidst the political void. With few organizations and resources to turn to in increasingly dire circumstances, migrants in Yemen live their lives in a world of conflict and uncertainty.
The complex history of Yemen and the region around it makes it difficult to understand the true extent of the migration and trafficking problem. The history is riddled with war and conflict, a massive humanitarian crisis, conflicts in home, transit, and destination countries, a widely corrupt government, and interconnected trafficking, smuggling, and violent actors, aiming to benefit from vulnerable people and a political void. Understanding how all these connect and play into one another is essential for understanding the problem at hand.
Yemen’s Civil War
Yemen’s Civil War is often wrongfully described as just a proxy war between the Shia and Sunni superpowers in the region. The Iranians backed the Shia Houthi Rebels in their fight for freedom against the Sunni dominated Yemeni government, backed by the coalition forces of Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. The war predates this simplistic perspective, going all the way back to when the State of Yemen was born in 1962, when a growing discrimination of the primarily tribal North Yemenis was formed by the societally developing South Yemenis. Ideas of revolution have festered within Yemen for half a century until the Yemeni Government killed the leader of the Houthi movement in 2004. The Houthis’ chance for success took place in 2011 as the protests of the greater Arab Spring in places like Egypt and Tunisia, took action against their own corrupt and autocratic governments (Orkaby, 2017; Cordesman, 2017). After being captured by the Houthis, Yemen’s president, Hadi escaped and fled to Saudi Arabia where he, for the past 10 years served as acting president and failed to administer much aid or resolve to Yemen. In 2022, he issued a presidential decree and transferred his power over to an eight member presidential leadership council, focused on finding a solution for Yemen (DOS, 2023). Since the war began, much of the media’s focus has been on the use of airstrikes, as ordinance has been dropped on non military targets like mosques, schools, and hospitals. Much of the fighting, however, happens on the ground. The data varies significantly regarding casualties and wounded for the war, with the UN estimating, in 2016, that there were 16,200 people dead including 10,000 civilians while in 2017, they put it at 10,000 dead and 40,000 wounded (Cordesman, 2017). Regardless of the discrepancies, it is clear that the war is far more serious on humanitarian terms than in terms of direct combat.
Yemen’s Humanitarian Crisis
Yemen’s civil war erupted an already impoverished and at risk country into one of the largest humanitarian crises of the modern day. Yemen sits on a vital stretch of water for maritime trade. The red sea connecting the Mediterranean with the Indian Ocean limits the long journey ships would otherwise be forced to travel, around the continent of Africa. A Saudi Emirati backed coalition has blockaded all air and sea ports into Yemen in retaliation to Houthi attacks, in turn depriving Yemenis of vital resources.
Water, medical supplies, food, and fuel are all scarce commodities in Yemen (Cordesman, 2017, Sprusanksy, 2012). One of the driest countries on earth, almost all the water in Yemen has to be brought in, leaving many drinking dirty water. Yemen experiences environmental disasters like tropical cyclones and flash floods, putting people at risk destroying the little resources they do have access to (Mena, Hillhorst, 2022; Cordesman, 2017, Sprusanksy, 2012). A resurgence in cholera cases has plagued the country, specifically children. As of march 2017, an estimated 17 million Yemenis (60 percent of the total population) are food insecure. Malnutrition has increased by 57 percent since the start of the war with 462,000 cases in children under five 5. About half of the population lives in areas directly affected by the conflict with 2.8 million Yemenis internally displaced (Cordesman, 2017; Sprusansky, 2012). 6 children have been killed every day since the start of the war with hundreds of cases of recruiting children as young as 10 to be child soldiers (Cordesman, 2017; DOL, 2022). 3600 schools are closed leaving half of the school age population in Yemen out of school. Over 50 known attacks on education facilities have been verified (Cordesman, 2017). With little access to current information on the state of the humanitarian crisis, it can only be estimated how much higher the toll is on the country today. This coupled with the effects of the Covid 19 Pandemic, which crippled countries with far more infrastructure and aid capabilities than Yemen, shows just how dire the situation has become.
Life in the Horn of Africa
Yemen’s location offers the shortest sea crossing for migrants at its Red Sea and Gulf of Aden choke point with Djibouti. In 2019, close to 140,000 migrants were estimated to have moved from the Horn of Africa into Yemen (IOM, 2019). The strong demand for unskilled laborers in the gulf states has enticed many Africans to leave their home countries in search of a better life. The Horn of Africa, consisting of Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, and Djibouti has been endlessly riddled with conflicts of its own. Most of the migrants traveling into Yemen are from Ethiopia, who leave as a result of economic conditions, discrimination of tribal and ethnic groups, and war. Somalis and Eritreans also tend to migrate as a result of war and famine. Even Djibouti, the relative best of all the Horn of Africa countries, is riddled with corruption and a long history of war. (Bariagaber, 2023; IOM, 2019). This situation exemplifies the worst case scenario for migrants, who leave one war zone humanitarian crisis for the next. It has been found that many of the migrants who find themselves stuck in Yemen did not even know about the civil war, humanitarian crisis, nor extreme dangers for migrants making the trek (HRW, 2014). It is clear migrants traveling from the Horn of Africa have little better option than to do so despite the imminent dangers that await them across the entirety of their journey from start to end, and of which many migrants have to repeat multiple times.
Life in the Gulf States
If migrants successfully escape the horrors of their home countries, their journey through Yemen, and successfully end up in one of the gulf states in search of work, they are faced with new problems. Saudi border guards have been found to shoot migrants passing over the border. Granted, many parts of the Saudi-Yemeni border exist as a front line of the civil war but this doesn’t account for the hundreds of Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers, killed at the border between 2022 and 2023, nevertheless those killed in years prior (DOS,2023; TNS, 2023). As a result of their desperation for opportunity, migrants are exploited for their labor. They may sign a contract, unknowingly placing them into a system of indentured labor, unable to leave or send money home until their contract is fulfilled. The Gulf States are run almost entirely by foreign migrant workers and have huge populations of migrants in respect to their total populations (Vlieger, 2012; Blaydes, 2023). Very little aid is given to migrants who work long hours for very little pay, which often amounts to much less than they were promised they’d be paid. In some cases, migrant workers have been worked to death doing strenuous tasks in extreme heat. Certain sectors like domestic work fall under the private sector and in turn workers are not subject to the same laws and granted the same rights as other workers. Domestic workers are almost entirely women who are subject to violence and forced sexual acts (Vlieger, 2012; Blaydes, 2023). In an attempt to source more labor internally, as well as from fears of the pandemic, Saudi Arabia has begun to deport migrant workers. Instead of being deported back to their home countries, often these migrants are just deported back to Yemen, where they initially crossed the border into Saudi Arabia (Vlieger, 2012; Blaydes, 2023; IOM, 2019). This perpetuates the hardship of life for the migrants and increases the risk of being trafficked.
Migration
Migrants tend to make the sea crossing into Yemen from Djibouti, the point of land closest to Yemen. Once in Yemen, many try to make it to South Yemen, which is in the opposite direction of Saudi Arabia though not run by the Houthis. Smuggling trails are variable in Yemen with ever changing front lines and impassable terrain, though the general direction taken by migrants is the Eastern Route, which snakes through North Yemen along the coast, and through the smuggling town of Haradh near the Saudi border (HRW, 2014; IOM, 2019). Taking the trip from the Horn of Africa, through Yemen, and into Saudi Arabia costs anywhere between $2000 USD and $5000 USD. Traffickers and smugglers often entice migrants by offering to do the trip for free if they can gather more migrants though they are met instead with various fees throughout the length of their journey. This doesn’t include ransom fees they must fork up in the case they are held by traffickers (IOM, 2019). In many cases, migrants know little of what they’re getting into before making the journey. The dangers that await them are unknown to the largely uneducated population of migrants. Migrants who tend to lack shelter are at greater risk from airstrikes. In 2019, three airstrikes killed 60 migrants (IOM, 2019). Many migrants travel throughout Yemen as internally displaced people (IDPs) who must do so to avoid the front lines and regional supply shortages.
Human Trafficking
The phrase “Human Trafficking’’ is often associated solely with women being forced into prostitution. Though this is applicable in many cases, the Palermo Protocol, a 2003 supplement to the UN convention against transnational organized crime defines it in much broader terms. “Trafficking in persons’’ is described as follows: The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. (Vlieger, 2012).
Willing and voluntary migrants become trapped in a system of bondage to their smugglers and traffickers when they fail to pay the fees, known and unbeknownst to them. Migrants are subjected to sex trafficking, forced labor, physical and sexual abuse, abduction for ransom, and targeted shootings. Women are often exploited for sex trafficking to wealthy Yemeni clients, while other women and men unable to pay must work as domestic workers, on Khat farms, construction sites, and ports for no pay. Others are forced to make dangerous, repeated crossings into Saudi Arabia to smuggle weapons and drugs for criminal and extremist groups. Undocumented migrants face trafficking at much higher rates and are at higher risk of deportation from Saudi Arabia, back to Yemen where they are likely faced with famine, extreme violence, and increased vulnerability to exploitation (DOS, 2023). Migrants are often forced against their will to join armed groups and engage in the combat of a war unrelated to them. They are often given the more dangerous jobs such as clearing and laying minefields. As many migrants who make the journey are children on their own, they are frequently recruited as child soldiers. The Houthis are known to have various indoctrination camps and schools to lead children into a life of soldering for their cause. Various militias backed by the Saudi coalition also do the same thing, so child soldiers are not limited to just the Houthis (DOL, 2022; DOS, 2023; IOM, 2019). The powerless nature of migrants with few savings and connections making a rugged journey through one of the most dangerous journeys in the world leaves them in a very vulnerable situation.
Torture Camps
A migrant exploitation method becoming more common in Yemen is the use of Torture camps. Many of these were known to exist even before the civil war around the smuggler’s town of Haradh. Migrants are taken captive and placed in remote and isolated camps, where they inflict severe pain and suffering on them to extort money from friends, family, and relatives in their home countries or in Saudi Arabia. The Hawala method is a money transfer system used in parts of the Middle East and North Africa to transfer money over long distances, outside the eyes of the law. It is used by terrorist groups, criminal enterprises, as well as the average person sending money back home or vice versa (HRW, 2014). The money is never physically transferred across borders but instead zero’d on the books of two Hawala facilitators. This is the primary method of acquiring a ransom from a migrant’s family.
For example, migrants are picked up immediately upon arriving on shore in Yemen by armed men. The men form a network of gangs, smugglers, and traffickers whose networks extend from Africa, through Yemen, and into the Gulf. One group gets what they want out of the migrants and then they are just sold over to the next.
In 2014, there were an estimated 200 torture camps in and around Haradh. The torture camps lack food, water, and are often exposed to the hot sun with little to no shade. Women are kept separate from the men and raped. Women are sometimes publicly raped and beaten in front of the rest of the camp, including children. Various methods are used to inflict pain on the captive migrants.
Traffickers have been known to give beatings with sticks, fists, kicks, and cables, gouge eyes out with water bottles, hang people by their thumbs to the ceiling with wire and tie a string to their genitals attached to a heavy water bottle, rape women and men, burn with cigarettes, melt plastic into ones eyes, rip off fingernails, burn the cartilage off ears, brand skin with scalding irons, break bones, cut off fingers and ears, and hack to death with hatchets sit on chairs with migrants hands under the legs, and constrict a penis with a rubber band making it impossible to urinate. The chief Doctor at Haradh hospital says they receive at least two African migrant bodies per week when the traffickers torture a person to near death and dump the body in front of the hospital for treatment. (HRW, 2014; IOM, 2019).
Torturing migrants is highly profitable compared to just smuggling them through the country for a set fee. Many migrants lose all their possessions and property in the process while some have so little to give, they have no other options than to stay in the camp. Upon their release, migrants face new perils such as navigating vast expanses of desert with little for clothing, shoes, food , and water. In many cases they are picked up by another group of traffickers where the whole torture camp process is repeated. One migrant escaped a torture camp, walked for 10 days and was stopped at a Yemeni checkpoint. The soldiers manning it made a few calls and shortly after, armed traffickers picked him up and took him to another torture camp. This is the horrible fate of many migrants in Yemen. They find themselves in a brutal cycle of torture, escape, and recapture amidst an already dangerous and unknown journey in search of a better life (HRW, 2014; IOM, 2019).
Lack of Government Intervention
The government of Yemen faces serious roadblocks to combating the issue of trafficking which include internal security threats, weak institutions and infrastructure, systemic corruption, economic deprivation, limited territorial control, and poor law enforcement capabilities. Yemen’s issues of corruption have been ongoing throughout its history, but with the civil war and widespread lack of resources, corruption is running far more rampantly with people in need of money and inadequate enforcement of the law to stop them (DOS, 2023; HRW, 2014).
Absence of law criminalizing all forms of human trafficking has made it difficult to prosecute offenders of trafficking. Due to staff shortages, financial insecurity, weak law enforcement capacity, and a fragmented nature of authority in several parts of Yemen, the government was unable to ensure judicial institutions functioned fully across the country in 2023. (DOS, 2023). The government also did not report any investigations or prosecutions of government officials who were allegedly complicit in trafficking, nor any updates on trafficking cases since the 2022 reporting period. The government receives minimal training in regards to human trafficking and has a limited capacity to provide aid and assistance to victims and at risk groups. In comparison to Yemeni citizens, migrants are discriminated against by authorities when it comes down to giving aid and choosing which cases to investigate. The government has not made broad efforts to combat trafficking, and the National Committee to Combat Human Trafficking did not meet all during 2023 as a result of unstable conditions in the country, and the need to prioritize the ever worsening humanitarian crisis (DOS, 2023; HRW, 2014).
Government officials in Haradh often turn a blind eye or accept payments in return for complicity in trafficking. Cases are rarely investigated on the local level. Checkpoints and security forces are complicit in the trafficking and smuggling and in some cases, migrants are actually sold from government officials to traffickers. Migrants are robbed by security forces at checkpoints and in some cases just pay them directly. Out of the few raids conducted by Yemeni forces on traffickers camps, anyone apprehended was not kept in prison long, and the number of migrants allegedly freed by the raids had been seriously inflated. Many traffickers were allegedly warned of the raids prior to their execution to give enough time to relocate. Migrants rescued from these camps are kept in majorly overpopulated International Organization of Migration detention centers, far beyond their max capacities (DOS, 2023; HRW, 2014).
The Saudi government has made the situation worse by launching numerous campaigns to deport foreign workers. To meet new quotas for Saudi citizens employment, primarily undocumented foreign workers have been half haphazardly sent back to Yemen in unsafe ways. Buses are often filled switch migrants, sent to the border with Yemen and immediately traded off to traffickers who will bring the deportees to a nearby torture camp (HRW, 2014).
While institutions and infrastructure are spread thin throughout Yemen, a proper initiative to combat human trafficking looms out of sight of the near future. From an outsider’s perspective, it would seem as if trafficking is a priority issue to deal with. The complacency and direct involvement of government officials with what’s going inside and outside of the country in regard to trafficking of persons has kept it off of the agenda (DOS, 2023; HRW, 2014). In a failed state entirely existent as of the past 10 years on crime and avoidance of basic human rights and protective laws, trafficking is looked at by the everyday Yemeni citizen as a way to get by amidst times of extreme hardship.
Discrimination of migrant Africans in Yemen runs rampant. Many Yemenis associate migrants with some issues of the humanitarian crisis with the perspective that Yemen can’t support its citizens let alone millions of migrants coming into the country and depriving it of necessary resources (DOL, 2022; DOS, 2023; IOM, 2019). It will always be a Yemeni citizen helped before a migrant whether it’s person to person or mandated by the government.
Nothing can happen all at once but conjoined efforts must be made to slowly begin the process of building Yemen back up. Specificities of Yemens conflict like human trafficking though in need of an immediate fix, are impossible issues to combat without an accountable government capable of running institutions, rebuilding infrastructure, enforcing laws, and administering aid.
The imminent dangers of conducting research amidst a humanitarian crisis and active warzone will surely make it difficult to attain the needed large quantities of truthful information. The research pries into the criminal activities of known violent extremists backed by a corrupt government which makes it nearly impossible to collect. It is impressive that past studies have gotten as much data as they have but nonetheless, the few academic studies conducted were last completed over five years ago. It is essential that the void of accurate and current data on the trafficking of persons in Yemen is filled as the civil war goes on its tenth year and tensions in the Middle East escalate.
The Houthis retaliatory strikes in solidarity with Hamas are cause for concern in the region. Continued war and an ever worsening humanitarian crisis in Yemen will only work negatively for the plight of the migrants currently being trafficked and at risk of being trafficked. Conflicts in the region will only cause higher rates of migration and in turn higher rates of trafficking. While the Yemeni government works to grasp a hold of its country and restore any sort of control, extremist and militia groups, criminal enterprises, and human traffickers operate freely inside the failed state with little to stop them from going about their business. Because trafficking is a subsect of the larger humanitarian crisis at hand, efforts to limit it will largely be put aside until the crisis and civil war are under control. Even once things start to resume to normal, which may not be for a very long time, there will always be the memories of Yemen in its dark days. A state of violence, hunger, and uncertainty has enveloped the nation and the migrants who have chosen to journey through it on their own search for a better life.
References
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