GENEVA (Reuters) – Saudi Arabia has expelled 17,000 Yemeni migrants so far this year, amidst fears that it could deport up to 700,000 back to war and misery in their homeland, deepening the crisis, the UN migration agency says.
The oil-rich kingdom has been imposing fines, jail time and deportation on migrants caught without valid identity documents in a push to reduce its abundant black market in labor.
"IOM can categorically say that between January and now 17,000 Yemenis have been turned back, simply because of their immigration status in Saudi Arabia,” Mohammed Abdiker, director of operations and emergencies at the International Organization for Migration (IOM), told Reuters.
This applied to irregular migrants being returned to countries including Bangladesh, the Philippines and Ethiopia.
"But our line is you cannot return people to a country like Yemen, particularly when you are bombing it yourself,” Abdiker said. "So is there any way the Saudis can waive this for the Yemenis until there is a country to go back to?”
Some 700,000 Yemeni migrants work in Saudi Arabia, he said, speaking in his office on Tuesday on return from Yemen.
Meanwhile, the IOM says many refugees arriving in Yemen from Africa continue to suffer from rampant abuse in the southern areas controlled by the Arab country’s ousted government.
The IOM, which is affiliated to the United Nations, said in a report that many refugees face torture, sexual abuse and death although some lucky ones find "irregular work” in the southern Yemeni province of Aden, where elements loyal to a government that was ousted from the capital Sana’a in 2014 still hold sway.
"Both en route and once in Yemen, many migrants suffer at the hands of cruel smugglers and other criminals, including physical and sexual abuse, torture for ransom, arbitrary detention for long periods of time, forced labor for no pay and even death,” said the IOM.
Yemen, the poorest country on the Arabian Peninsula, has been battered by what the UN describes as the world's worst humanitarian crisis, which has come as a result of a devastating campaign launched by Saudi Arabia since March 2015.
The war, which Riyadh says is meant to restore power to Yemen’s ousted government and push back the Houthi Ansarullah movement from Sana’a, has killed more than 14,000 people, mostly civilians, while it has inflicted huge losses on Yemen’s infrastructure.