Crossing the Border: Into Ethiopia, Sudan and Yemen
Seeking Refuge and Asylum
Crossing The Border
Into Ethiopia and Sudan
The largest numbers of Eritrean refugees have escaped by land. When they have first crossed an overland border, their experiences have differed, depending on whether they have fled to Ethiopia, Sudan or elsewhere. Each of those two countries, working in concert with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), for many years commonly accepted the arrivals as lawful, or at least as”prima facie,” refugees. But the refugees’ circumstances have remained fragile, and shifting.
Sudan
In recent years some refugees in Sudan were kidnapped en route to refugee camps, en route to or in major urban centers, or even within the camps themselves. The kidnappers were either traffickers who would sell the hostages for purposes of extortion and torture, or Eritrean agents who would drag the hostages back to Eritrea to be imprisoned, tortured or killed. In early 2015, UNHCR reported that almost all female survivors of the trafficking in Sudan whom it had identified in 2014 had been sexually assaulted or raped. Of great concern were reports, continuing through at least 2017, that the Sudanese government itself, sometimes through its notorious Janjaweed militias (later reconstituted and officially embraced by the government as the Rapid Security Forces [RSF]), had been arresting Eritrean refugees and refouling, or deporting, them back to Eritrea, where a dire fate awaited them. In mid-2017, reports of significant numbers of Eritreans so arrested and refouled arose repeatedly. In 2022 and early 2023 (if not before), Sudanese police frequently arrested, detained and extorted for cash Eritrean refugees living in the capital, Khartoum, and sometimes in eastern Sudan.
In mid-2023, when a horrific armed conflict between the RSF and Sudanese government troops (the Sudanese Armed Forces [SAF]) began, the police appeared to have stopped abusing the refugees. But the RSF – soon in control of Khartoum – picked up where the police had left off: robbing, raping and killing Eritrean refugees there. Many fled to Eastern Sudan, where Eritrean refugees had lived for several generations. But there Eritrean agents — with the apparent complicity of Sudanese authorities — began kidnapping the newly arriving Eritrean refugees (those from Khartoum) and abducting them to Eritrea, to meet an uncertain fate. Other Eritreans fled from Sudan to South Sudan, Uganda, Chad and Egypt. Many more fled to Ethiopia, where they (together with Sudanese refugees) were received in several new UNHCR camps near Sudan’s border. However, health and security conditions in those camps were appalling: cholera outbreaks were common and local residents frequently robbed and attacked the refugees. As a consequence, many Eritreans fled onward to Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa or to Kenya. But in Addis the Ethiopian government forbade them from enjoying UNHCR registration, support and protection; and Kenyan police often arrested and jailed them, sometimes colluding with smugglers. Meanwhile, by 2024, the Eritrean government had allied with the SAF against the RSF (described in this website at The Repression Avalanches: Eritrea in Sudan, Again) — to the point of establishing a military presence in and training pro-SAF troops within Eastern Sudan. There the Eritrean refugees that remained in Eastern Sudan became vulnerable to potential attacks by Eritrean forces such as had occurred, with devastating effect, at the Eritrean refugee camps in Tigray.
Ethiopia
In June 2018, Ethiopia and Eritrea embarked on a radically new and hopeful peace initiative between the two countries. In September 2018 their border was officially opened, which resulted in many thousands of Eritreans fleeing to Ethiopia. The border closed again, but it became more porous, and thousands have continued to flee. Many of those fleeing appeared to wish to stay in Ethiopia, while others seemed bound for neighboring countries and Europe. At least to an extent, the trafficking abuses occurring in Sudan have appeared to afflict those undertaking forward migration from Ethiopia as well.
Those who arrived in Ethiopia had long been relatively safe there. But following the rapprochement with Eritrea, many refugees came to fear that the Ethiopian government would refoule them to Eritrea through some arrangement with the Eritrean regime. In addition, beginning in January 2020, with some exceptions, Ethiopia stopped granting prima facie refugee status to newly arriving Eritreans. At least some of the new refugees did not have ready access to the refugee camps, and thus, reportedly, they had become homeless and destitute.
And then, in November, came the war in Tigray – when the Ethiopian government encouraged Eritrean forces to enter that Ethiopian region, wage barbaric war on the Tigrayans, and horrifically abuse the Eritrean refugees there and elsewhere in Ethiopia. The devastating impact on Eritrean refugees is described by The America Team here and below on this page under “The Trying Life in a Refugee Camp.” During the war and since then, Ethiopia has stopped granting refugee status to newly arrived Eritreans. In addition, Eritrean refugees who had fled from Tigray to a UNHCR facility in the Amhara Region called Alemwach continued to suffer kidnapping, extortion, theft, assault and murder at the hands of Amhara residents and even their government-supplied guards, as described here. The Ethiopian government proposed in November to move an unspecified number of Eritrean refugees to a new camp to be built in the inhospitable and insecure Afar Region, as described here. And following weeks of increasing government harassment of Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa by way of detention and extortion as described here, in December 2024 the government reportedly began rounding up large numbers of Eritreans in Addis and sending them north, possibly to Eritrea. (Eritrea had been facilitating Eritrean deportations from Ethiopia since the beginning of the Tigray war and at times after the war’s conclusion.)
Djibouti and Saudi Arabia
Indeterminate numbers of Eritreans have escaped their country into Djibouti. Reportedly tens of thousands of Eritreans have migrated to Saudi Arabia, where they were initially able to subsist and some flourished as guest workers. But thousands have now been subjected to punitive taxes there and have become either trapped in or forced out of the country, with many fleeing to Egypt, Uganda, Ethiopia and Sudan.
Into Yemen
Some Eritreans have escaped their country by boat, across the Red Sea, to Yemen. In the spring of 2015, as the security of Yemen disintegrated due to that country’s sectarian civil war, Eritrean refugees came to be stranded there, at great peril to their lives. Many were and remain without work, without adequate food, endangered by the military hostilities, and unable to leave the country. Many are afraid to walk on the streets, for fear of kidnapping or of injury from military actions.
Rescue by the United Nations
In many parts of the world, UNHCR administers — or it helps the governments of countries of refuge to administer — sizable camps for refugees fleeing from nearby countries in turmoil. UNHCR does that in Ethiopia and Sudan, and several of the camps in those two countries are populated mainly or entirely by Eritreans. UNHCR conducts a number of operations in the camps and elsewhere in those countries of refuge. First, it seeks to provide physical shelter to the refugees, to protect them from harm, and to otherwise provide for their social welfare there. Second, it processes their claims to being legitimate “refugees” – individuals who, according to international law, have a “well-founded fear” of harm or persecution in their home countries for political or social reasons. Third, it seeks to achieve for those whom it has officially determined to be “refugees” one of three ultimate outcomes: having them fully absorbed in the country of first refuge, finding a third country that will absorb them, or eventually returning them to their home country when security conditions there permit.
The Trying Life in a Refugee Camp
The resources of both UNHCR and the host countries have been severely stretched. At the refugee camps in Ethiopia and Sudan, living and security facilities have been rudimentary. Nutrition has been basic, sporadic, and not always adequate; sanitation, health care and educational resources have been uneven; women have been vulnerable to sexual abuse. While some refugees have sometimes been able to work in-camp within medical, construction, educational, commercial and other professions, most spend their days idly, endlessly, in what are typically bleak landscapes. As a consequence, camp residents have often been despondent – unable to work at a profession, restricted from or fearful of traveling outside of the camp, and feeling no hope for any of the three long-term resettlement outcomes that UNHCR seeks to achieve for them. Still, until 2020 their lives had been relatively secure.
But beginning in November 2020 with the onset of the war in Tigray, as described on this page under “Ethiopia,” all of that was upended in the four UNHCR camps Tigray Province and one of the camps in its Afar Province. Hunger and massacre were rife. In Tigray, Eritrean forces destroyed two of the camps, and almost all of the Eritrean refugees there eventually fled to Sudan, to a new UNHCR facility south of Tigray in Amhara Province, to Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa, or elsewhere. In Afar, as Tigrayan forces invaded, refugees fled the fighting and were scattered throughout the province, with the whereabouts of many of them long unknown.
