ADDIS ABABA, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Job-seeking and ill-informed Ethiopian youth remain vulnerable to human trafficking amid government efforts to repatriate victims of the scourge from the Middle East, experts have warned.
Young Ethiopians continue to be trafficked by smugglers from different towns of the East African nation to Europe, the Middle East and South Africa, said experts whom Xinhua spoke to recently at a workshop on a draft strategy to prevent human trafficking in Ethiopia.
"It is very difficult to come by accurate figures about the number of irregular Ethiopian migrants who fall victims of human trafficking but there are estimates that hundreds of thousands of irregular migrants cross the Ethiopian border annually," Dereje Tegyebelu, chief executive for Prevention of Trafficking in Person within the Ethiopian Ministry of Women, Children and Youth, told Xinhua.
Tegyebelu attributed the increase in the magnitude of human trafficking in the country to false promises of smugglers given to victims and low awareness of the youth in rural areas. He cited poverty, unemployment, and depletion of resources as the core reasons for Ethiopian irregular migrants to fall into the hands of human traffickers.
The reputation that the rural community offers to returnees who managed to change their lives for the better is another contributing factor for migrants to take risks via illegal routes of migration, said Tegyebelu, citing instances that elders give blessings for the young people, wishing them going abroad.
Accordingly, parents in rural areas consider sending as many children as possible to Arab countries or Europe as a success no matter the fate of their children remains unknown, he said.
The Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) early last week said close to 131,000 Ethiopian nationals have been repatriated from Saudi Arabia in a one-year period.
According to the executive officer, out of 7,099 female returnees from Saudi Arabia, 6,717 of them have come back with their newborn babies.
The safety and lives of smuggled migrants are often put at risk, said the chief executive, highlighting that the majority of the irregular migrants from Ethiopia end up with all sorts of abuses, exploitation, detention and body injuries and often cases of death.
Tegyebelu further noted that mass graves of irregular migrants from Ethiopia are common along the "dangerous" route to South Africa. He reiterated that the majority of the returnees do not want to go back to their localities and families because they feel failed lives and their dreams and their families' expectations are completely shattered.
According to the official, the MoFA estimates that there are 300,000 irregular Ethiopian migrants in South Africa and more than 500,000 others in the Middle East.
Genene Asefa, the national project coordinator of the International Labor Organization (ILO), told Xinhua that drought and conflict remain the major contributing factors for irregular migrants from Ethiopia falling victim to human trafficking.
"The fact that there are a huge number of internally displaced people in Ethiopia and the country hosts large numbers of refugees and the Horn of Africa region being affected by drought, war and conflict... all these contribute to large numbers of people becoming vulnerable to human trafficking," Asefa said.
Asefa said the ILO supports governments to put in place an effective and functional overseas employment structure in a bid to help them promote decent work and avoid people from falling victim to human trafficking.
Abrham Ayalew, head of the National Partnership Coalition for Migration Secretariat, which is engaged in combating human trafficking in Ethiopia, said that the government needs to properly manage regular migration to prevent, reduce and combat irregular migration in Ethiopia.
"Human trafficking by its nature is a transboundary crime and it is not only affecting those victims of irregular migration but also has a spillover effect on their families, national economy and image of a country," Ayalew told Xinhua.
Ayalew also said the irregular migrants from Ethiopia are subjected to all sorts of human violations and very few of them arrive at target destinations where they could be jailed indefinitely.
According to Ayalew, the draft strategy aims at effectively countering the crimes of trafficking in persons and smuggling of migrants across and beyond Ethiopia, a country of origin, transit and destination for illicit cross-border migration. ■