Ethiopian migrants disembark onto shores of Yemen on their journey to Saudi Arabia, July 2019. Photo: AP
Heavily armed forces of the U.S.-backed regime in Saudi Arabia have cold-bloodedly murdered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of migrants and refugees—including children—in recent years. Most of these migrants came from Ethiopia in East Africa. They had made the dangerous trek hundreds of miles over water and land, in desperate flight from reactionary violence and crushing poverty, seeking asylum or to eke out a living as exploited workers in oil-rich Saudi Arabia.
The full scale and horrors of this have recently come to public light, but the U.S. government has known about this for over a year—a year in which these murders have continued at an increased rate.
Why has the U.S. not only covered this up, but continued to funnel billions of dollars in military aid to Saudi Arabia's brutal regime? We'll get into this later. But first, let's talk about what happened.
“They Fired on Us Like Rain”
Ethiopian migrants tell of the terror they went through:
** They were shot at by rifle-wielding Saudi troops and fired on by rocket launchers or mortars mounted on trucks.
** A 14-year-old girl woke up after passing out during a Saudi attack and thinking there were fellow migrants sleeping around her, only to discover they were dead bodies.
** A 17-year-old survived a Saudi rocket attack but then was forced, at threat of death by the border troops, to rape two other survivors, 15-year-old girls.
These and other survivor testimonies are in a recent report from Human Rights Watch, “They Fired on Us Like Rain.1
Hadiya, 20 years old, recalled the nightmare: “I was with 170 people. Most of them were women, and there were kids also. The Saudi [border guards] were firing at us from the back of a car… When they fired at us people lost their hands and legs and we couldn’t help them because we had to help ourselves. I saw people killed with my own eyes. I saw 20 people dead while I was walking.” (See sidebar for more testimonies from survivors.)
This video illustrates some of the report—it’s hard to watch, but everyone must watch it, and confront the reality of what is happening to our sisters and brothers with the sponsorship of your government:
VIDEO: Saudi Arabia Border Guards Commit Mass Killings of Migrants at Yemen Border
For decades, people from Ethiopia have been making the trek to Saudi Arabia, where an estimated 750,000 Ethiopians live. These are mostly undocumented migrants working low-wage and abusive jobs in the “domestic” industry, agriculture, and other areas. The trek is known as the Eastern Route—from the Horn of Africa across the Gulf of Aden, often in flimsy boats constantly in danger of capsizing and throwing passengers into the sea. The migrants trek across Yemen—a country torn by bloody war between Saudi Arabia, which is backed by the U.S., and Houthi fighting forces, which are backed by Iran. They struggle through the rocky mountain paths of the border between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, with little else but the clothes on their backs and in constant mortal danger from the armed Saudi thugs.2
There have been reports of Saudi violence against migrants at the border over the years. But the flow of humanity over the Eastern Route has increased recently because of intensifying wars in Ethiopia as well as drought and other devastating effects of climate change. Many more women, along with children, are making this perilous trek. And along with this, the vicious, sadistic violence of the Saudis against these defenseless people has spiked.
American Silence—And Support
The U.S. government LIED about when they knew of these mass killings by Saudi Arabia. They first said they learned of this in December after a UN report. But, pressed by reporters, the State Department admitted that they knew about this in the summer of 2022—over a year ago!
Over a year ago! When Biden was giving speeches and writing op-eds to pull your heartstrings about the suffering of the Ukrainian people at the hands of the U.S.'s Russian imperialist rivals, when he brayed about “fighting autocracy,” the U.S. knew that their Saudi allies were slaughtering migrants in cold blood. And they said and did nothing!
Why?!
On one level, the answer is simple. As the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian, has put it:
The essence of what exists in the U.S. is not democracy but capitalism-imperialism and political structures to enforce that capitalism-imperialism. What the U.S. spreads around the world is not democracy, but imperialism and political structures to enforce that imperialism. (BAsics 1:3)
But let's get deeper into this by looking at this specific case of Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia has been an essential and subordinate part of the U.S. empire for decades. It has the world’s second largest reserves of oil, accounting for more than 16 percent of the global total. The U.S. sends billions of dollars in American aid to Saudi Arabia, mainly in the form of arms sales and training. As of May 2022, there was $100 billion worth of active U.S. “foreign military sales” to Saudi Arabia. And in August 2022, Biden approved $3 billion in new missile sales to Saudi Arabia. The U.S. has used Saudi Arabia—along with the brutal apartheid state Israel—to maintain control of the region and its resources3. And like any gangster, the U.S. knows if it doesn't maintain control of these resources one of their imperialist rivals will, which would jeopardize its overall global control.
What has Saudi Arabia used all this military power for?
** A U.S.-backed Saudi war of aggression in Yemen—backed by Obama, Trump and Biden—has directly killed thousands of civilians, contributed to the deaths of over 400,000 people, and driven millions—including children—to the edge of starvation. They have bombed civilian centers, medical facilities, and blocked shipments of urgently needed medications!
** To militarize a brutal Dark Ages regime. Saudi Arabia is a highly repressive society where people are beheaded for everything from drug crimes or murder to being associated with a different brand of “Islamic fundamentalism.” Saudi Arabia is a theocracy where women are subordinate in every sphere without the unconditional right to divorce and where until very recently, women were not allowed to drive.
** In 2018, the political police in Saudi Arabia assassinated Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist and leading critic of the Saudi royal family. But Khashoggi wasn't just killed in cold blood, he was brutally dismembered with a bone saw. This was done as a warning to anyone who wouldn't stay in line. And it was done with the tacit approval, if not direction, of Saudi Arabia's leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (known as MBS).
Because this savage murder became publicly exposed, Biden made a promise during the last electoral campaign to treat Saudi Arabia like a “pariah.” But far from following through, last summer, Biden traveled to Saudi Arabia where he gave MBS a fist bump and a smile... in addition to sending more funds and weapons. In fact, while Biden says that he mentioned Khashoggi to MBS in a private meeting, his sharpest demand had to do with boosting oil production.
This was just months after Biden called Putin—the leader of Russia—a “war criminal” for Russia's unjust invasion of Ukraine. An invasion that the U.S. has mainly viewed as both a threat to their empire, and as an opportunity to step in, massively fund, train, equip and guide Ukrainian forces to weaken the U.S.'s imperialist rival Russia.
This explodes the hypocritical lie that the U.S. gives a fuck about “freedom and democracy.” Or that the war in Ukraine is part of a global battle of “democracy vs. autocracy.” The U.S. is perfectly willing to support the violent, people-killing, repressive regimes of Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, India, Egypt and more—if it serves American interests. So despite all of Biden's emotional hand-wringing about the suffering of the Ukranian people, it should be clear to anyone not blinded by American exceptionalism, that the U.S. wants you to only care about the victims of their enemies, while ignoring the victims of their allies.
Too many people are allowing their sympathies to be manipulated and weaponized by this blinding American chauvinism—the lie that America is a force for good in the world. Meanwhile, in America's proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, the Ukrainians are being used as cannon fodder. This is a war that could lead to direct confrontation between these rival imperialist powers, which holds the danger of spiraling out into nuclear war and the extinction of our species!
Those who are giving support to the U.S. are not just being played, but are contributing to this extremely dangerous dynamic.
If you are heartsick at what's being done to the Ukrainian people, you should be even more heartsick at what's been done to the Yemeni and Ethiopian people because this is being done in your name. Even more fundamentally, you need to recognize the cause of this global suffering: a system of capitalism-imperialism! And it is this system—not humanity—which needs to go extinct!
“They fired on a lot of people”
These are eyewitness accounts from some of the survivors of attacks by Saudi border troops (excerpted from the recent Human Rights Watch report).
Hamidya, 14-year-old girl:
I saw people killed in a way I have never imagined. I saw 30 killed people on the spot. [Hamdiya hid under a rock and at one point fell asleep. When she came to:] 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.
Dahabo, a 20-year-old woman:
In a group of 200 migrants only 50 people survived. The people who shot us were Saudi government military… It wasn’t a bullet they were shooting. It was thrown from the back of a car, like a bomb. It kills a lot of people. They fired on a lot of people.
Bilal, a 25-year-old man:
They [the Saudi border guards]… were firing big things like a mortar … We could see where the border guards were positioned. They were in four spots. We lost 130 people that day – the majority were women and there were children there too.
Juhur, a 17-year-old boy:
[When the firing stopped] they [Saudi border guards] took us. In my group there were seven people: five men and two girls. The border guards made us remove our clothes and told us to rape the girls. The girls were 15 years old. One of the [migrant] men refused. They [border guards] killed him on the spot… I participated in the rape, yes. To survive I did it. The girls both survived because they didn’t refuse. This happened at the same spot where the killings took place.
Munira, a 20-year-old woman, said the Saudis fired on them after they had detained the migrants and then released them, forcing them back toward Yemen:
There were 20 in our group and only 10 survived. Some of the mortars hit the rocks and then the [fragments of the] rock hit us… They fired on us like rain... I saw a guy calling for help, he lost both his legs. He was screaming; he was saying, “Are you leaving me here? Please don’t leave me.” We couldn’t help him because we were running for our lives. There are several people who lost their body parts.
Deadly Crossings
The Saudi Arabia-Yemen border is not the only deadly crossing for migrants and refugees around the world.
U.S.-Mexico Border
Every year, hundreds of immigrants die horrible deaths as they try to make the crossing from Mexico into the U.S. They battle against dehydration, intense heat of the border deserts, armed U.S. Border Patrol agents… and now, a floating razor wire barricade put up in the middle of the Rio Grande by Texas’s Christian fascist governor, Greg Abbott, as part of what he calls Operation Lone Star. Earlier this summer, one immigrant was found dead with his body torn in the razor wire, and another was found drifting in the river on the Mexico side.
With the rising flow north of desperate people in recent years trying to escape crushing poverty and the violence of gangs, drug cartels, and repressive government forces, the toll has risen dramatically. The overall figures for this year are not available yet, but the extreme heat waves in the South and Southwestern U.S. this summer, with temperatures topping 110 in many areas for days on end, have made conditions even more life-threatening for immigrants at the border. In fiscal year 2022, the U.S. Border Patrol officially reported 853 migrant deaths at the border—an all-time high that topped the previous record of 546 border deaths in 2021.
Mediterranean Sea
In June of this year, an overloaded fishing trawler carrying as many as 750 immigrants and bound for Italy sank off the coast of Greece. The immigrants were mostly from Pakistan, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, and some from other countries like Afghanistan. A little over 100 survivors were rescued, and 80 or so bodies were recovered—the rest who were on the boat were presumed drowned.
This was one of the worst disasters ever involving migrant deaths in the central Mediterranean Sea. Many of the overloaded and unsafe boats, carrying migrants and refugees from all over Africa as well as the Middle East and Asia, start from Libya or Tunisia on the North Africa coast, aiming to reach Europe.
So far in 2023, more than 1,800 migrant deaths have been reported in the central Mediterranean—up from about 1,400 for the whole of 2022. According to the International Organization for Migration, there are unrecorded sinking of boats carrying migrants, without any survivors—so that the real death toll is likely even higher. There have been reports of naval and coast guard forces from Italy, Greece and other European nations cold-bloodedly turning away ships filled with migrants or ignoring calls for help when the ships are in danger.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says that one in six migrants and refugees who take off from North Africa on small boats bound for Europe die on their attempt to cross the Mediterranean. Think about this: One in six lose their lives in this one crossing… for the “crime” of trying to escape poverty and violence and seeking a better life, in this world ruled by capitalism-imperialism.
And as revcom.us noted recently: “[I]f the desperate migrants make it to Europe, they have to cross numerous fortified borders of European countries. These borders have ‘[e]lectric fences, watchtowers, dog patrol units, helicopters and surveillance drones [which have] mushroomed across European frontiers … the EU (European Union) border agency Frontex … [is] the best-funded among all EU agencies.’ People by the thousands have died at every step of these journeys.”
English Channel
In August, at least six immigrants died when the boat they were on from France to England sank in the waters of the English Channel. Dozens of others were rescued. The migrants were mostly from Afghanistan. The English Channel is the last leg of a grueling journey for countless people fleeing poverty, persecution, war, and environmental devastation, mainly in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
According to a report published in 2020, there have been 297 known deaths of migrants trying to cross from France to England since 1999.
A Flood of Humanity on the Move
Watch the video of Ethiopian migrants trying to make their way to Saudi Arabia for a chance of survival. Think of the thousands of people hiking up those dangerous mountains after having already gone through death-defying journeys of hundreds of miles attempting to find work in Saudi Arabia only to be met with bullets and brutality, terror, torture and death.
Spin the globe from the Middle East to South America and you’ll see those same flows of desperation.
Tens of thousands of people hiking up the hills of the deadly jungle called the Darién Gap 4 fleeing their war-torn or drought-ridden homelands attempting to find work in the U.S. only to be met with barbed wire and brutality, walls and detention centers.
Right now, there are tens of millions of people on the move around the world. Refugees forced to abandon their homes, fleeing from reactionary violence or because they no longer have the basic means to live. They die of thirst in the desert, drowning in the seas, or from violence and brutality... and those that make it, are forced to live in the shadows, criminalized, and exploited.
As long as this system of capitalism-imperialism stands, all this will only get more dire with climate change intensifying and resource wars growing. As the droughts extend and water sources dry up, as the fires and storms become even more destructive—this massive flow of humanity will grow. And those who rule this system have no answers except a future of more walls, barriers and brutality—locking people out to drown or starve.
But this is not the only future that's possible! We need an actual revolution to bring a radically different and far better society into being. While dealing with the effects of capitalist-induced climate change will not be easy, with much of the damage potentially irreversible, only a socialist state on the road to real emancipation gives humanity a chance. A new socialist society based on the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, authored by Bob Avakian (BA), would welcome people coming from around the world who want to contribute to this new society and would enable humanity to become fit caretakers of the Earth.
