According to the NGO Human Rights Watch, this ethnic profiling and ill-treatment occurred while the Tiger has been the scene of an armed conflict since November 2020.
Le Monde
Thousands of Ethiopians originating in the Northern Tiger War Region have been imprisoned and violent to their return to Ethiopia after being expelled from Saudi Arabia, affirms Human Rights Watch (HRW) in a report published Wednesday 5 January.
These tygrens were one of tens of thousands of Ethiopian immigrants looking for a job expelled for a year by Saudi Arabia.
This ethnic profiling within its expelled migrants and the ill-treatment occurred while the Tiger has been the theater since November 2020 of an armed conflict between the Ethiopian federal government and the rebels from the former regional authorities.
HRW interviewed Tygrans expelled from Saudi Arabia between December 2020 and September 2021, during which tens of thousands of migrants were returned to Ethiopia as part of an agreement between the two countries.
“Forced disappearances”
On their arrival, Tigreens have been isolated and detained affirms the human rights organization, others have been prevented from returning to Tiger after being identified during road checks or at airports, and then transferred to Detention structures.
“The Ethiopian authorities persecute Tygrens expelled from Saudi Arabia by holding them illegally and by proceeding with enforced disappearances,” says Nadia Hardman, researcher in charge of refugees and migrants at HRW.
Some of these tithes who have been detained have told that they have suffered violence and others have been accused of collusion with the People’s Liberation Front of the Tiger (TPLF), who directed the Tiger before the war and is now considered. as a terrorist group.
Two of them clarified HRW to have been taken by the police, with other men, in coffee plantations, where they had to work in terrible, without pay and nourished conditions.
violated international laws
Many have been prevented from contacting their families and feared that their loved ones always believe them in Saudi Arabia. “Detention by the Ethiopian authorities of thousands of tygrens expelled by Saudi Arabia without their families informed of their arrest or location equals forced disappearance, which also violates international law,” Point Human Rights Watch.
End 2021, the United States and their allies called on Ethiopia to terminate the arbitrary detentions of its citizens on the basis of ethnic considerations. The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC), an independent public body, itself reported arrests of large-scale Tigreens.
The Tiger conflict has made several thousand deaths, more than two million displaced and plunged hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians under conditions close to famine, according to the UN.