An exclusive report by The Sunday Telegraph revealed the dire conditions that African migrants in Saudi Arabia have been forced to live in during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. In a bid to quell the spread of the infectious disease, Saudi authorities are holding at least hundreds, if not thousands, of migrants in tightly-packed detention centers.
Leaked images from the center show migrants crammed together in small rooms with barred windows, with corpses of those who died from heatstroke, hunger, thirst, and disease strewn about. Will Brown, the Telegraph’s Africa correspondent, says that one image, which was “too graphic to publish”, showed a young man, no older than 16, who had hung himself from the window grate after “losing hope” that he would ever be released, given that many of the inmates have been in detention since April. One of the inmates remarked, “We have been left to die here.”
Those who do survive are “beaten every day” with “whips and electric cords” and “treated like animals”, according to one of the inmates who has been there for more than four months. The deputy director of Human Rights Watch, Adam Coogle, described the conditions as “squalid”, “crowded”, “dehumanizing”, “deplorable”, and “well short of international standards”.
One of the migrants said that there are a number of diseases going about, they are barely fed, there is “almost no water”, and the “toilets are overflowing”. In fact, the toilet water, he says, “spills over to where we eat,” adding, “We live in this filth, we sleep in it too.”
The mistreatment of migrant labour has become a common occurrence in the oil-rich country, where foreign workers make up roughly 20% of the population, generally working in low-paid physically taxing jobs in the construction industry.
For instance, it has been reported that tens of thousands of Ethiopians have fled poverty and violence at home to seek a better life in Saudi Arabia, and Saudi “recruitment agents” and “people traffickers” are only too eager to facilitate a renewed cycle of poverty and subjugation for these desperate migrants.
Upon reaching Saudi Arabia, these migrants essentially forfeit their legal rights and are subjected to “exploitation, [and] sexual and racial abuse”.
Amidst the worldwide anti-racism Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, it is hoped that this exposé by the Sunday Telegraph will force Saudi Arabia to respond to these allegations of mistreatment and racism. The images published have conjured painful memories of the ongoing slave trade in Libya, where Black Africans are sold into slavery by Arab slave-traders.