Rammah Al-Jubari

SANA’A, The Passport Authority says they are working on the case of around 60 Ethiopian migrants who having been sitting outside the authority’s building for about a week, asking to be repatriated to their home country.

“I don’t have [enough] money to pay for a smuggler to take me to Saudi Arabia, and I didn’t find work in Yemen,” said one of the protestors who asked not to be named.

Like the estimated 25,000 Ethiopians who have entered Yemen this year in order to cross to other Gulf nations to look for jobs and ended up stranded, the young man was unable to complete his journey.

Last week, Yemeni authorities deported more than 700 Ethiopians back to their home country via a Defense Ministry airplane.

But Colonel Abdulla Al-Zorka, the director of the Deportation Department at the Immigration and Passports Authority said they cannot keep up with the influx of migrants.

He described the process of repatriating people as complicated and drawn out.  Because of this he could provide no timeframe as to when the group of migrants outside his authority would be returned home.

The Yemeni government and the International Organization of Migration (IOM), a subsidy of the United Nations, are paying for the repatriation of Ethiopian migrants.  They work with the Ethiopian embassy to first confirm the nationality of migrants and then go about purchasing plane tickets to return them home.

The operations director for the IOM, Saba Al-Mo’lmi, said migrants are often subject to harsh conditions.

“They have been cheated, beaten up and raped,” said a source at the Ethiopian Embassy, who asked to remain anonymous.

The smuggling of migrants is a very serious problem, he added.

Last week, Yemen’s Interior Ministry announced they recovered 210 African migrants, the majority of whom were women and children from a smuggling ring located near the city of  Haradh in Hajja governorate which borders Saudi Arabia.

The victims are slotted to be repatriated to their home countries, the Interior Ministry said.

Source: Yemen Times