‘Welcome to Hell:' African Migrants Held for Ransom in Yemen’s Torture Camps

African migrants traveling through Yemen are regularly held by human traffickers and tortured, sometimes fatally, until their families pay ransom for their freedom.

And Yemeni authorities are not only turning a blind eye to the abuse: they often actively work with traffickers for a share of the profits, a report released Sunday by Human Rights Watch (HRW) alleges.

Migrants — most of them fleeing poverty or conflict in the Horn of Africa to seek economic opportunities in Saudi Arabia — usually arrive in Yemen by boat.

There, they are picked up by traffickers or “bought” from security officers at checkpoints, and taken to squalid camps built in recent years — settlements they have started to call “torture camps” because of the violence and abuse that go on there.

“When we arrived, the trafficker said, ‘welcome to hell,’” an Ethiopian migrant identified only as Araya G. said in a video released by the human rights group.

Victims interviewed by HRW reported systematic beatings and rapes at the hands of traffickers. One migrant described watching another’s eyes being gauged out with a bottle, while another said traffickers would pour melted plastic on migrants’ skin.

Health workers said they frequently see migrants who have had their fingernails ripped off, their ears burnt, their skin branded with irons, and their bones broken. Migrants also described being hung from their thumbs and beaten.

A migrant reported watching traffickers tie a man’s penis with a string and beat him with a stick until he died, while another said two men in his groups were hacked to death with an axe.

“They would tie my hands behind my back and lay me down on the ground. Then they would beat me with sticks,” a migrant told HRW researchers, showing scars across his back. “I saw the guards kick the face of one man who was on the floor, breaking his teeth.”

In the Middle East’s poorest country, that abuse pays off — with traffickers often able to extort between $200 and 1,000 per migrant, researchers found.

“They hold them and torture them until these migrants are willing to give up a phone number and a name of a family member either in Ethiopia or already in Saudi Arabia, who will wire-transfer money to insure their relative’s release,” Belkis Wille, a Yemen researcher at HRW said in the video.

The group also interviewed traffickers — including one who boasted that he can extort up to $1,300 per migrant from worried relatives.

Yemeni authorities are doing little to curb the abuse.

Between March and May 2013, security officials raided some of the camps — but later stopped because they were unable to provide for the migrants they rescued there. Only one case related to abuse of migrants ever made it to a lower-level court, and HRW found no evidence of traffickers being investigated or prosecuted.

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Instead, local authorities seemed all too eager to help traffickers in exchange for a share in their profits.

Migrants described being held at checkpoints by security officers who would then proceed to call up traffickers and turn them over to them for money.

“Government officials are paid off by human traffickers in order to turn a blind eye and allow them to continue their business,” Wille said. “This human trafficking industry is not underground in the least. The Yemeni government as well as all the local officials know very well where to find the human traffickers and where these torture camps are.”

In the border town of Haradh, traffickers are regularly seen rounding up migrants and loading them onto trucks — making no attempt to hide from authorities.

Saudi border officials are also often complicit, the report charged, as they, too, regularly turn over apprehended migrants to traffickers.

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An anti-trafficking bill calling for the prosecution of traffickers and corrupt officials is currently on the table in Yemen’s parliament — but the country’s authorities need to do more, HRW said.

“People desperate for work who pay smugglers aren’t consenting to being tortured and robbed along the way,” Eric Goldstein, the group’s deputy Middle East and North Africa director said in a statement. “Yemen needs to show zero tolerance toward human traffickers who torture for profit and those who assist them.”

About 84,000 people from Horn of Africa countries — and especially Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia — flooded into Yemen in 2012, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Boats making the dangerous journey across the Gulf of Aden often capsize, and dozens of migrants have drowned this way.

Follow Alice Speri on Twitter: @alicesperi