Sophie: Just a heads-up: this episode talks about some difficult subjects, including rape and murder.

Host: Human Rights Watch issues a lot of reports. Like, up to 20 a month. Some of the recent ones are on mass relocations in Tibet, crimes against humanity in West Darfur, and another one’s on migrants crossing Darien Gap.

Human Rights Watch rigorously investigates and fact-checks all these reports. The goal being to shine a light on human rights abuses across the planet. But also, to get accountability for the folks doing these abuses, to help make things right for those affected. And, ultimately to help stop human rights abuses from happening.

Deutsche Welle: Human Rights watch has accused Saudi Arabian border guards of killing hundreds of Ethiopians since March, 2022. [fade under]

Host: But a report from Human Rights Watch can only do so much on its own. Media outlets have to pick it up and amplify it. It’s gotta reach as many eyeballs and ears as possible, so that people and their governments will care. This podcast is about one of those reports and how it got made.

Reuters: [fade up] Saudi Arabian border guards have killed at least hundreds of Ethiopian migrants who’ve attempted to enter the kingdom. [fade under]

Host: So, August 2023. Human Rights Watch publishes a report called “They Fired on Us Like Rain: Saudi Arabian Mass Killings of Ethiopian Migrants at the Yemen-Saudi Border.”

It gets a lot of attention and coverage from news outlets around the world...

Nadia: None of us expected the kind of reception we got. It was extraordinary.

France 24: This rare footage captures the hell faced by those trying to cross from Yemen to Saudi Arabia, as filmed by the migrants themselves. This man has serious injuries in the legs and in the back…

Host: Lemme just pause righthere. This story is wild. When I’ve told friends about it, they usually just get really silent as they listen. Human Rights Watch accused the government of Saudi Arabia, not just of human rights abuses, but of possible crimes against humanity -- mass killings. Systematically murdering unarmed migrants trying to migrate into Saudi Arabia through Yemen. I mean, it’s wild. It’s as if the U.S. government were shooting Latino immigrants coming across the Rio Grand.

There was video. There was satellite imagery. There were statements from survivors. But that kind of evidence? It's pretty common in Human Rights Watch reports. So what was it about this particular story that grabbed the world’s attention?

[theme music]

This is Rights and Wrongs, a podcast from Human Rights Watch.

I'm Ngofeen Mputubwele. I’m a writer, a lawyer, and a radio producer.

Human Rights Watch asked me, as a journalist concerned with human rights, to look at human rights hotspots around the world through the eyes and ears of the people on the frontlines of history.

On this episode, what’s been happening on the Saudi Yemen border? Why, in a media saturated era, did this story break through? That’s what you’re about to find out. Because finding out will tell you a lot about the practical side of human rights work.

***************

Ngofeen: Hello, who are you?

Nadia: So, who are you? Um, I am Nadia. Nadia Hardman. I am a migrant rights researcher here at Human Rights Watch.

Host: Nadia Hardman. She’s the principal author of the report. For a few years, she’d been working on what’s called the “eastern migration route.”

Nadia: Which is people trying to leave, from the Horn of Africa, but predominantly Ethiopia, traveling through war torn Yemen, to Saudi Arabia. And I've done a number of reports over the years because the route is long and there are abuses all along the way.

Host: One of Nadia’s colleagues at Human Rights Watch had reported on “infrequent” killings on the border. But then, Nadia was in her apartment…

Nadia: I was working in my bedroom. Yeah, I remember I was working at my desk, which is right by a window. It was the morning, and I was like flicking through my emails, and my colleague sent me these UN letters.

Host: The letter were by some folks called “special rapporteurs” or special experts. There were two of them. One addressed to the Saudi government. The other to Houthi rebels, who control the north of Yemen…

Nadia: And I remember opening, like scanning them. And I’m thinking, uh huh, and then as I read it I got more alarmed but also had this disbelief reaction of like, ‘oh wow, this is wild, this level of abuse potentially taking place is massive’. And one of the things that I think jumped out at me was that there was, I think this paragraph or the sentence which basically said that there was potentially a mass grave of up to 10,000 people.

The numbers of deaths, basically that were cited in these letters was just like high, like nothing I'd ever read before. But for one reason or another, these letters didn't make any headline.

Host: Nadia told me the Saudi government denied everything, saying that in the UN letters there were no dates and locations of the alleged killings. But one thing bugs Nadia. In her experience the UN tends to be cautious and conservative in their claims, so she thought the UN would not have sent those letters if they weren’t sure of their facts. So she set about trying to gather more information and she knew this would not be easy…

Nadia: I mean, this area is out of bounds for anyone to go and investigate the border between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, it’s just impossible right? And so, I knew we had to rely on entirely remote methodology, and the first thing I did is I've been working with a fixer, in country, in Yemen, in Sana. He's an Ethiopian himself, he’s an elder, I guess, in his community there. And I basically messaged him and said, ‘Hey brother’, that’s how we speak to each other. A he was like, ‘Hey sister’. And I said, you know, ‘what's happening on the border?’ And he responded, that there were mass killings on the border, and then he started to inundate me with videos and photographs, and they were graphic.

[audio from one of those initial videos]

You know, those images are shocking, you know they were of people who had clearly suffered explosive weapons attacks, like what, I mean, I'm not trained in any of that. But to the, you know, naked, untrained eye, blast wounds, gunshot wounds, dead bodies, videos from the trail. Which is how I knew immediately we need the digital investigations team to help.

Sam: My name is Sam Dubberly, I'm the director of Human Rights Watchers Digital Investigations Lab.

Host: Nadia got in touch with Sam, who works from his home in Berlin.

Sam: So at first I was like, ‘yeah, yeah, sure, Nadia, of course, we'll help you. You know, I love we love working together’, to, ‘Oh my god, this is something huge that we need to invest a lot of time and resources in and get right’.

Host: One of the things that Nadia needed was for Sam and his team to verify the authenticity of the photos and videos. So how do they do that? Well, as Sam explained to me, there is a whole process…

Sam: So the first thing we always do with a video or photograph is we do what's called reverse image search. You take a video or a photograph and you put it into either google image search or bing image search and you see if it's been indexed on their search engines before. Often that's what you'll see like in in especially in a war - in the first few days of the war people will take videos from a previous conflict and say ‘this is awful, such and such an army has done this to such and such a people’. But actually it was in a different country five years earlier.

So once we've done that, once we’ve done the reverse image research and we get no results, that doesn't mean it's real, you know, it’s just kind of the front lines. Like, okay we can dismiss that or no we can’t, we have to carry on.

Host: The photos and videos Nadia provided passed the reverse image search test, but a whole lot more needed to be done to verify them. Sam brought in someone on his team…

Devon: My name is Devin Lum. I am an open source researcher who used to work in the Digital Investigations Lab at Human Rights Watch, and I'm going to be the Visual Investigations Fellow at the New York Times this coming year.

Ngofeen: What does open source researcher mean for the dumb ones, i.e. me?

Devon: It means a lot of different things. In the human rights space generally, it means a researcher who uses visual information that's shared online in places like TikTok and Facebook, to determine where human rights abuses have happened around the world and get more information in hard to reach areas.

Host: So, at the time Devon was living and working in Hawaii. Devon showed me the view outside his window. If you ever watched the television show ‘LOST’, it looks exactly like that. And in this beautiful setting, he started to watch the horrific videos that that Nadia had provided. He didn’t know it at first, but he would end up spending many months on this project…

Devon: There's one video that I remember. It's a large group of people, I forgot how many, maybe around 40 or 50, that are walking down this hillside, super steep and it's, it's all shale, so people are slipping, um, and you can hear screaming. Which I think is maybe why it's stuck in my head so much because of the, the auditory part of it, but you can hear screaming before you see a woman, uh, being carried down the hillside and she has blood all over her legs and is crying and, you know, that, that part of it is awful, but then the camera spins around and you can see people, more migrants looking onward at this scene and their faces are just blank. Like they've seen it before and they don't have anything left to give at this point emotionally because of just how much they've experienced and yeah, that one will definitely stick with me.

Host: Devon watched videos like that again and again and again. Because to verify them, he had to locate them in time and in space. If Human Rights Watch was going to say that this video took place on the Saudi side of the border, they had to prove it. The problem was that many of these videos came from TikTok and Facebook, and social media companies, they strip out most of the metadata that our phones record for us when we take a picture or video. That metadata will usually tell you when and where it was taken. So, easiest way to solve this problem: find the person who posted the video and ask them to send the original, which still has that metadata embedded in it.

But if you can’t find that person, you aren’t quite out of luck. At least not yet. There are other techniques…

Devon: We generally start with a process that's called geolocation. We need to compare landmarks in it to things like satellite imagery and topographic maps. Those features in this case, instead of buildings or you know, street signs, were things like mountain peaks, river beds, footpaths, things like that.

Ngofeen: Okay, so, so you, you've got a video but in the video in the background, you see, for instance, like, oh, they're by this mountain peak that has like this bunch of trees or bushes next to it. So then you got to go to satellite imagery and be like, okay, so I think it's by that thing, so let's find that area. And then sort of like scour and be like, can we find that peak with bushes?

Devon: There’s a ton of trial and error especially when you’re working in more rural areas. So the amount of hours I spent deciding if a certain curve in a rock and its placement next to a bush matched what I was seeing in a video is, is kind of embarrassing to admit, but you need to be as exact as possible when you're doing that type of work in order to make a correct statement about where someone was when something happens and, you know, who, who's potentially responsible for anything that's shown in the video.

Host: While Devon was analyzing photos and videos, Nadia had begun the most crucial step in any Human Rights investigation. That’ll become a theme on this show. Say it with me: interviews. She started interviewing Ethiopian migrants who had returned from the Saudi border.

She found most of them through that fixer in Sanaa, the same one who’d forwarded her all the photos and videos. We’re going to call him Yusef, to protect his identity. He’s Ethiopian, but he’s been living in Yemen for decades.

Nadia: He basically knows about the migration route very well, and when people are injured or hurt along the way he effectively collects them and houses them. And this time as well, he was doing a similar thing, him and other elders, and other Ethiopian diaspora community members were trying to help the injured and the survivors of these attacks on the border. He kind of plays that unofficial humanitarian role with other people. So he had access to the community, it’s a tight knit community, I guess, as happens in lots of places when you have diaspora in need. You know he's an extraordinary figure. He's, I mean, to be honest, I feel like he's the hero in so many of the reports I do along the route, like nothing would happen without him.

Host: So Yusef helped Nadia arrange the interviews with survivors. But actually doing the interviews was kind of a logistical nightmare. Nadia was in Europe, her translator was Washington DC, a completely different time zone, and almost all of their interview subjects were in Yemen.

Nadia: We would spend hours just waiting for a telephone number because the networks in Yemen are so bad. And that’s how we collected the stories.

Actor testimony: The Saudi border guards were firing big things like mortar at us.

Host: Human Rights Watch had the interviews translated into English and translators read parts of them.

Actor testimony: They fired from the back of a truck. We lost 130 people that day. The majority were women and children.

Host: The stories Nadia gathered were grim.

Nadia: There's one, one girl, I think we call her Hamdiya in the report, I mean none of the names are real in the report, we, we use pseudonyms, but um, she's a fourteen year old.

Ngofeen: So you're on the phone with a 14-year-old.

Nadia: 14-year-old girl.

Ngofeen: Okay.

Nadia: She was migrating for economic reasons.

Hamdiya: I couldn’t continue my education – my family has 10 kids. They can only afford to send the older kids to school. Instead of school, I wanted to go and search for money.

Nadia: And you know, there are a lot of domestic workers in Saudi Arabia, I mean this something that’s kind of the context and the background. There are nearly a million people, Ethiopians that live and work in Saudi Arabia. There are economic opportunities, there is work. Anyway, and so she knew where to go in her town in Ethiopia to basically find smugglers. It was apparently just known. And so she went and she was taken in by a smuggler.

Hamdiya: In Djibouti, the smugglers asked us to pay for the boat by sea. I didn’t have any money.

Nadia: She said to me, I’ll never forget this, she said in the interview, ‘I didn’t have any money. That's why I did this’, right? She needed to make money, but it costs, you have to pay a smuggler to go on this route. And they basically said to her, ‘don’t worry, you can make money along the way’. And so she, you know, she had a treacherous journey crossing the Gulf of Aden. She said she thought she was going to die. It was the first time she had been on a boat. She was seasick. And when she gets to Yemen, she’s basically immediately taken off to a house and she didn't really understand what was going on, but she was basically tortured. They beat her and were trying to demand that she give the names of family members that the smugglers could contact to pay for the rest of her journey. I think she gave family members numbers, but they didn’t have the money that the smugglers were demanding.

Hamdiya: They said to me if you don’t pay I will be raped. But this didn’t happen to me.

Nadia: After five days of essentially being beaten and tortured she was allowed to go on her journey, and I guess the smugglers understood and, we'll find out later why and what they do with people who don’t have money, but she eventually got to the border. Now she told me that basically, she would cook and clean for some of the smugglers and traffickers in order to pay for her way. That's what they said to her, you can cook and clean for us, and then you will be allowed to go on the crossings. She did that for a period of time, and then eventually she was told that she would be trying to cross the border the following day. And she told me that basically people who can't afford, who don’t have the fees to pay to smugglers are put at the front of a group.

Hamdiya: I was one of these. They send you to walk in that place, that dangerous place they say go go and then they watch you. if you are successful and it is safe, they will follow you. They said go go go. We were fired at repeatedly. I saw people killed in a way I have never imagined. I saw 30 killed people on the spot. I pushed myself under a rock and slept there. 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.

Nadia: So this 14 year girl was put at the front of the group essentially to absorb whatever attack first that might come.

Host: Nadia says that other survivors eventually helped Hamdiya and she was taken back to Yemen, to Sana, where she remains to this day, severely traumatized.

Hamdiya: I can’t sleep now. During the night I am so scared. I prefer people to stay awake and talk to me.

Host: As Nadia told me this story in the studios of Human Rights Watch in the Empire State Building, my eyes welled up. I tried not to blink so the tears wouldn’t spill out.

Nadia: Um, I guess another one that sticks out is, It's a boy. I mean, he was 17. So, you know, an, um, an older, older boy, but still a child that I spoke to who, when he tried to cross the border in also a large group. He survived an explosive weapons attack. He described the confusion, the fear, seeing people around torn apart effectively by the impact of the strike. And, you know, he was kind of shocked that he survived.

Actor portrayal: When the firing stopped the Saudi border guards took us.

Nadia: And as was the case, in other instances, the Saudi border guards came to collect the survivors.

Actor portrayal: In my group there were 7 people – five men and the two girls.

Nadia: And the Saudi border guards forced this boy to rape one of the girl survivors.

Actor portrayal: The girls were 15 years old. One of the men refused. The border guards killed him on spot. I participated in the rape. Yes. To survive, I did it. The girls survived because they didn’t refuse. This happened at the same spot where the killings took place.

Nadia: And yeah, it was, um, you know, as he explained this he clearly had shame in what he expressed he’d done. But it was obviously something that he couldn’t avoid.

Host: The Saudis later released this young man and he managed to make his way back to Sana, where he is stranded, trying to scrape together enough money to return to Ethiopia. We don’t know what happened to the girls and women that were captured with him. For a lot of migrants from the Horn of Africa -- Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Djibouti -- returning home is not an economically viable option. Who can afford it?

Nadia: What is so shocking to me is that people who’ve done this journey, many of them are repeat crossers. They've done it once, they've done it again, and they’ve done it again. And sometimes even people who survived, you know and who were desperately injured, when I would ask them, what happens next at the end of an interview, they would say ‘I’m going to try and cross again’. Because their choices are zero.

Host: Ultimately, Nadia would conduct 42 interviews. Forty two! As the nature and the scale of the killings was becoming clearer, Nadia told me she drew various teams within Human Rights Watch into the investigation…

Nadia: You know we’re talking about weapons, right? So that's our arms division. We're talking about the Middle East, North Africa. So that's like our Yemen team, our Saudi team, the MENA team generally.

Ngofeen: Middle East, North Africa,

Nadia: Middle East, North Africa, our MENA people. People are injured and, you know, some people were amputees, et cetera. So immediately our disability rights team, our health team, our women's team, uh, the digital investigations team, because obviously we were going to need to look at satellite imagery and geospatial analysis…

[AD] Tirana Hassan: Hi. This is Tirana Hassan – the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch. At Human Rights Watch, we investigate and report on abuses happening in every corner of the world. We’re journalists, country experts, lawyers and other professionals who are doing everything we can to expose perpetrators and to help protect vulnerable people. We’re a nonprofit, but to keep our independence, we don’t take money from governments. That’s why we rely on support from people like you. If you value what we do, please donate. Go to hrw.org/podcast/donate. That’s hrw.org/podcast/donate. Thank you.

Host: Back to Sam Dubberly from the Digital Investigations team, Devon’s Boss. He, Sam, was hearing from Devon, who was finding more horrific videos, and from Nadia, with the harrowing stories she was getting in her interviews.

Sam: Oh, it's not just one incident. It's like a whole myriad of incidents and then I was like, ‘Okay, we've got to really invest resources in this” and then I think the one the real it wasn't a video or photograph actually the real thing that was like a slap in my face was the satellite imagery of the burial sites And how these are grown. You know, you could see the graves are grown, and the white headstones that, you know, are grown out over, over the period that this had been happening. So, you know, people were going to the border, bringing people back and burying them where they could by these camps. And seeing the growth of that on satellite imagery, I think was probably the most probably the most shocking part of it.

Host: Using that satellite imagery, the photos and videos taken by the migrants, as well as information in the stories that Nadia had collected, Human Rights Watch was able to pinpoint the exact locations of where some of the killings took place…

Sam: for a report like this, we had to be able to say, it happened on this border, it happened, you know, a hundred meters from the border, 200 meters from the border, right? Because the allegations we're making are some of the most serious allegations you can make in under, under international law.

Host: Like I mentioned earlier, Human Rights Watch accused Saudi Arabia of mass killings and “possible” crimes against humanity. Which made my lawyer brain wonder…

Ngofeen: Um, what are crimes against humanity?

Nadia: Ok, yeah, yeah. I mean, so this is, yeah, this is not taking place at a time of war. So they're not war crimes. When, you know, an abuse, when a human rights abuse, and that would be like the excessive use of force and the extrajudicial killings that we're talking about here are widespread, and systematic, right? Those are the magic words.

Ngofeen: Widespread, systematic

Nadia: They're widespread and systematic and there is evidence of a state policy, i. e. that they are, you know, a directed, pattern of abuse that is, instructed by a, a centralized system, like a state effectively, then it's a crime against humanity. Once you have a crime against humanity, it means that senior perpetrators can be prosecuted under international criminal law.

Ngofeen: Once you’ve collected everything, what do you do, and how does the Saudi government respond?

Nadia: Yeah, yeah. So once we, you know, once I wrote the report, once the digital team had finished, um, you know, putting together all their digital evidence, you know, we roll it out and, I mean, part of the rollout was getting the media interested. Sending out embargoed versions of the reports and make sure that on the day of release we would get coverage in all of the important leading newspapers that, you know, Saudi Arabia would care about but more importantly countries like the U.S. would put pressure on Saudi Arabia to answer to these incredibly powerful findings. So that wasn't hard, right? Like you, you say mass killings, crime against humanity, murder, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopian migrants, border with Yemen, like people were interested. People understood pretty quickly this was a big story.

The Saudis, I mean, this, you know, Saudi Arabia is so good in not engaging with this kind of reporting, and almost giving, like, I think their tactic is were not going to give credibility by engaging with these allegations. And so it was through, it's never like an official statement but it was basically a spokesperson for or a kind of a, an official close to the kingdom said, um, they’re all lies. Blanketly denied our findings. Which is, you know, on brand for, for the Saudi authorities, definitely.

Ngofeen: Do you have any hope for accountability or, you know, or, or even image of what that would look like?

Nadia: I mean, I definitely have an image of what it would look like. Whether or not there’s hope is another question. I mean, there were some tangible impacts from the report. The U.S. and the Germans basically were funding and training the Saudi border guard and they both desisted in that kind of training, which is a good think.

We pushed for a UN backed independent investigation into the killings. We’re in NGO. It’s incredibly difficult for us to prove in a tribunal way or an independent investigation way that this is a crime against humanity, for sure this is a state policy. So we need, we need a, a proper investigation. Fortunately, in the wake of the report, you know, the world cared. There was tons of coverage and continuing coverage, and journalists did their own investigations. And I know journalists now that are continuing to investigate.

We know that senior officials have, from various countries, approached Saudi Arabia and demanded answers from our report. we do know that and a lot went on behind the scenes. But unless there's something public, I, I fear these killings will continue.

Ngofeen: how do you respond to the sort of, Why are we picking this thing when, you know, X country is doing that and other country is doing that. Why is it, why are we focused on this one? Like, how do you engage with that, um, argument or question?

Nadia: You know, I mean, I guess the answer is, you know, no one is. No one’s focussing on this. The world needs to care. This is devastating. These are brutal attacks. We probably talking about a crime against humanity here. And we need the world to care because people will keep on coming. This migration route is tried and tested. People will not stop. People are either desperate always to make a better life for themselves or fleeing conflict. And unless Saudi Arabia stops its border abuses people will keep on dying in the thousands. And I guess, you know, my main response to that would be, you know, to the question you asked would be, if not us, then who?

Host: That was Nadia Hardman, the lead investigator of the Human Rights Watch Report, “They Fired on Us Like Rain: Saudi Arabian Mass Killings of Ethiopian Migrants at the Yemen-Saudi Border.” You can read the report, watch a video and look through maps and other visualizations at hrw.org.

You’ve been listening to Rights and Wrongs, from Human Rights Watch. This episode was produced by me and Curtis Fox. Our associate producer is Sophie Soloway. Thanks also to Ifé Fatunase, Stacy Sullivan, Blaire Palmer and Anthony Gale. The news clips at the beginning of the episode are from Deutche Welle, Reuters and France 24.

I’m Ngofeen Mputubwele. See you next time.