Human Rights Watch has released a new report of keen interest to immprofs. The 73-page report is called “They Fired on Us Like Rain”: Saudi Arabian Mass Killings of Ethiopian Migrants at the Yemen-Saudi Border.
The HRW report opens with this quote from a 14 year old:
We were fired on repeatedly. I saw people killed in a way I have never imagined. I saw 30 killed people on the spot. I pushed myself under a rock and slept there. I could feel people sleeping around me. I realized what I thought were people sleeping around me were actually dead bodies. I woke up and I was alone.
The opening paragraph of the report itself is just as harrowing:
Saudi border guards have killed at least hundreds of Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers who tried to cross the Yemen-Saudi border between March 2022 and June 2023. Human Rights Watch research indicates that, at time of writing, the killings are continuing. Saudi border guards have used explosive weapons and shot people at close range, including women and children, in a pattern that is widespread and systematic. If committed as part of a Saudi government policy to murder migrants, these killings would be a crime against humanity. In some instances, Saudi border guards first asked survivors in which limb of their body they preferred to be shot, before shooting them at close range. Saudi border guards also fired explosive weapons at migrants who had just been released from temporary Saudi detention and were attempting to flee back to Yemen.
This point in the report is key:
The killings documented in this report appear to be a deliberate escalation in both the number and manner of targeted killings. This report shows how the pattern of abuses has changed from an apparent practice of occasional shootings and mass detentions to widespread and systematic killings. Such killings would be crimes against humanity if they are both widespread and systematic and part of a state policy of deliberate murder of a civilian population.
-KitJ