Later than the Crisis:

What the Government Should Have Done to Safeguard Unprotected Ethiopians in the Middle East

Following the expiry of the seven month period given by the government of Saudi Arabia, for illegal immigrants to be legal or leave the country voluntarily, the public security apparatus of the Islamic kingdom was in full swing. This has led to the arrest and detention of hundreds of thousands of immigrants for eventual deportation. The operation has been violent in some instances. The police crackdown was more brutal in places like Manfouha, a district of Riyadh, known for high concentration of immigrants from East Africa especially from Ethiopia. Hooligan citizens of the Arab state were part of the show, thanks to the blind eye given by the police. Different media out lets have reported that unnecessary force has been used by the police against the immigrants. And following this three people were killed and all three are reported to be Ethiopians. One of the deceased was said to be killed run over by a police car during a chase. To date close to 120,000 Ethiopians have been deported from Saudi Arabia, with many incidences of rape and sexual harassment, physical and psychological abuses and inhuman treatments.

Following this there has been uproar from Ethiopians all over the world. The government was also vocal in expressing its sadness and shock by the treatment of its citizens by the Kingdom. Tedros Adhanom(PhD), the hyperactive minister on facebook and twitter, and his ministry, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA), were visibly busy handling the crisis and sending the returnees to their respective localities. The minister was also emotional when he talks about the situation during the third international conference on family planning, held in Addis Ababa and even went on telling how Ethiopia was a good host for the family and relatives of the Prophet Mohammad who came to Ethiopia in the 7th century as persecution in the Kingdom was so vast at the time. But what could the government have done to avoid this in the first place? What should have been done to protect Ethiopian migrant workers in the Middle East and make them and their country benefit more from their labor, rather than trying to garner sympathy by giving history lessons, after things went terribly wrong?

Ethiopian migrant workers in the Middle East have never been safe. It has been decades since it has been a public knowledge that Ethiopians have mournful incidences in the Middle East. These countries are known for having reservations in ratifying International Human Right Conventions. In most of these Middle Eastern countries with conservative societal values, there is almost no legal framework which protects immigrant workers and work permit is only availed through a sponsorship system called ‘‘kafala’’. This system enables the sponsors usually employers to hold immigrants’ legal and travel documents as a pretext of taking responsibility of that worker.

Workers should serve for the agreed time before changing another employer. According to International Labor Organization study, Tricked and Trapped Human Trafficking in the Middle East, 2013, this law is practiced in many Middle Eastern countries.

Under these conditions the migrant workers are completely vulnerable to countless disadvantages. They are banned from any kind of communication so there will be no way of exposing any physical and physiological abuses as well as sexual harassment including rape. Though the migrant workers finished their contract of service, in which many can’t due to work overload and all kinds of abuses, they are under the mercy of that person who holds their legal documents. They just can’t say I have had enough. If so they will end up in deportation after detention for a certain time. If a worker ran away the sponsors will file for cancellation of their sponsorship and police will immediately issue order of detention.

In addition to this unsafe working environment, Ethiopians are more prone to be abused and harassed and earn lower wage compared with other migrant worker such as Filipinos, Indonesians, Pakistanis or a Bangladeshis, because they don’t have proper trainings, are new to the modern way of life and don’t speak Arabic or English, says a migrant workers Agent in Saudi Arabia in a documentary film televised by Ethiopian Television in July 2012.
According to Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (MoLSA), 459,810 Ethiopians traveled to the Middle East and Gulf Countries, from 2009-2012 alone. This number is only of those who get legally recorded as immigrants, and out of this number 433,817 are female where as only 7,224 of them have received college and university level training.

Significant number of Ethiopians toiling in the Middle East left the country through illegal channels and dangerous Sea routs. In a recent BBC documentary more than 80,000 Ethiopians are said to have crossed the red sea and Yemeni deserts to reach Saudi Arabia every year.

Generally, making a living as a foreigner in countries like Saudi Arabia, with deeply conservative society is thorny. And incompetency of the Ethiopian government has not made it any easier for Ethiopians residing in the Middle East. When we look at the government’s effort to combat human trafficking and keep the safety of its citizens in these countries so far, there is nothing concrete besides meetings and conferences and a whole lot of propaganda. In 1998 there was a national conference following the increasing number of reports of abuses of Ethiopian women in the Middle East. But this committee ceased to exist after authoring Employment Agencies proclamation No.104/98. In 2004 Inter-Ministerial taskforce on trafficking hosted by Ministry of Justice was established. The task force was unable to achieve anything tangible.

In 2010, MoLSA organized a National conference on human trafficking and illegal migration and it come out with the recommendation to have a national action plan on human trafficking and illegal migration. Though Employment Exchange proclamation No.632/2009 provides the establishment of a National Committee on the issue, there is no information on its formation let alone the contribution and progress of the committee.

According to a research conducted by ILO Country Office in Addis Ababa, Trafficking in persons overseas for labor purposes, the case of Ethiopian domestic workers, 2011; no single institution in the country has the overall mandate of planning, coordinating, implementing and monitoring the different activities to combat trafficking; therefore different government organ should coordinate on this regard. It is only last year, December 2012 that the government makes the issue part of its document, in its Diaspora Policy. Yet almost none of the things stated in the policy were put in to action. One example was the need to properly register citizens in different countries. This was embarrassingly revealed by the number of returnees that the ministry estimated, which was almost one-fifth of the actual number.

Countries like Philippines and Bangladesh has put in place practices that involve different segments of the government, to create a framework that protects their citizens abroad and make sure they get what they deserve and help their country in the process. These exemplary countries have signed labor agreements with countries that their citizens flock to in masses. They also give their citizens extensive training so that they can have at least the threshold amount of knowledge that will make them earn better. Safeguarding their citizens’ interests is the main reason for the establishment and existence of highly capacitated embassies and consulate offices in these countries.

In the case of Ethiopia, the government doesn’t even have a relatively close estimate of the number of its citizens in these places. Yifredew Getinet, director general of consulate office at MoFA told EBR, “the exact number of Ethiopian migrant workers in Middle East cannot be known unless Ethiopian emigrants, who went to Middle Eastern countries without proper registration of MoLSA, get recorded. Therefore whatever assistance embassies can give, it is when the emigrants came to them physically.”

According to the director general, consulate offices only prepare travel documents for those who want to return home and run some camps for those who have no place to stay at. But travel documents cannot substitute exit visa. Therefore if the immigrant ‘transgress’ the country’s law, travel documents will have no use except for the identification of that migrant as an Ethiopian national. “Bilateral agreements would have given us a legal framework to take legal measures but it is only with Kuwait and Jordan that the country has labour agreements.” said Yiferedew.

Regulation of foreign employment services of Ethiopians is a mandate given to MoLSA so that it should control who is and is not ready to work in a foreign land. But there is only a three hours pre departure orientation for those who finished legal procedures, before they fly abroad. The orientation is assumed to be informative about the law, culture and religion of country of destination and how the workers should act in the new atmosphere. The consequence of being illegal and what to do in case of problems are also part of the orientation. Yet this will not change anything. Meselech Assefa, team leader of Training and Document Authentication at MoLSA agrees with this, “The orientation is not enough and training facilities at technical and vocational schools is on the process of preparation in collaboration with Ministry of Education.”

The Ministry also facilitates legality of employees that goes to the Middle East through controlling and inspecting employment contracts of the employees. Employment contract should contain Salary, identity of the employer, agent in the country of destination, agent in the home country and identity of the employee should be specified with their respective signature. Visa and insurance should also be attached with the contract. That is when the Ministry considers the specific employee as legal and record as such. The contract is evidence for the legality of the specific employee.

When such employee gets in to trouble in the country of destination, the agent who facilitates the travel will be held responsible. Family of the employee or the employee himself/herself can file petition to MoLSA against such Agencies and last year alone 4,452 such petitions were registered, according to Foreign Employment regulation inspection and support desk at MoLSA. But this was to no avail. More than 255 bodies of Ethiopians who died in the Middle East were brought in to the country in 2012 alone. Three of these deaths are confirmed as murders, according to MoFA.

There are hundreds of thousands of unprotected Ethiopian citizens left for the mercy of their employers and host countries, in the Middle East. Significant number of these emigrants are illegal or even if legal they are untrained with minimum legal or systematic framework put in place to safeguard them from being abused, in the process losing what they and their country right fully deserves.

This calls for a strategic framework and clear policy with a responsible governmental body to coordinate activities on the area, which ranges from awareness creation and strict blocking of illegal migration to signing labour agreements that guarantees the safety and interest of its citizens with countries like Saudi Arabia, providing pre-departure trainings and empowering embassies and consulate offices in these countries, to safe guard its citizens from abuse. This may include sending labour attaches and enhancing the capacities of embassies in these countries and designing unorthodox way of registering and protecting citizens. Of course this is in addition to working to solve objective domestic economic reasons that forced these citizens in to desperation in the first place.

The government has put a seven month ban on travel to some Middle East countries, for reasons of securing their safety before letting them go. The government cannot prolong this ban indefinitely because the repercussions can be catastrophic. It will even further increase illegal migration. But in the mean time the government can take lesson from the present crisis and address the issue systematically.

The deportation of Ethiopians by the Saudi was not a sudden happening; it was a crisis in the making more than a year ago. But there was no one from the Ethiopian side ready to plan, shape and handle it well. Some reports indicate that other countries in the Middle East would likely follow the Saudi government measure, and Ethiopia should be ready for that as well. It is really time for the Ethiopian government not to allow the safety and interest of its citizens abroad rest upon the benevolence of their employers in the host countries. EBR

2nd Year • December 2013 • No 10