ETHIOPIA: Migration, Despite the Risks

In Africa, a transit centre in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, is a temporary refuge for young men and women—many of them still boys and girls in their teens—who tried and failed to escape poverty by making a debilitating and dangerous trek by land and sea to Saudi Arabia, their vision of a land of opportunity.

Most of them in the shelter, being fed and given health care while they wait for UNICEF to reconnect them to their Ethiopian families, were found in Yemen and repatriated with the help of the IOM. They share the transit centre with Somalis who have fled their ravaged country.

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Company accused of abducting Filipinos to build U.S. Embassy in Iraq

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: August 3, 2007

MANILA: The Filipinos thought they were flying to Dubai. One of them told a fellow passenger how excited he was about his new job as a telephone repairman at a hotel in the emirate.

It was only after liftoff from Kuwait, when the captain made an announcement, that they learned their destination was, in fact, Baghdad.

“All you-know-what broke loose on that airplane. People started shouting,” said Rory Mayberry, an American passenger on the flight who had been hired to work in the Iraqi capital.

The Filipinos settled down only after a security guard from the company that had hired them waved a submachine gun, according to Mayberry. “They realized they had no other choice but to go to Baghdad,” he said. [Read more]

Bangladesh: Manhandling manpower

Between a lack of regulation on the part of the government, and unscrupulous and often criminal practices in the thriving underworld of unregulated labour export, Bangladeshi migrant workers are left quite unprotected.

By : Saad Hammadi

His organisation sends Bangladeshis out of the country by utilising fake passports, Hasan Fakir, a core member of a Dhaka-based manpower-trafficking syndicate, recently confessed. Fakir, who runs a labour-recruitment agency, was arrested by the authorities on 3 June. He was accused of illegally sending one Basir Uddin to Malaysia, and later demanding ransom from Basir’s family in exchange for his release from the syndicate’s custody. [Read more]