Kidane Zekarias Habtemariam. DR
For East African migrants, the start of the year brought rare good news: the arrest of famed Eritrean trafficker Kidane Zekarias Habtemariam on January 5 in Khartoum, Sudan, during an international police operation conducted by the United Arab Emirates with Interpol. The man is “one of the most cruel smugglers in the world,” according to police in the Netherlands, where he was on the most wanted list.
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Within its vast network, which stretched from Somalia to Libya and in which thousands of young Ethiopians, Eritreans and Somalis roamed Europe every year, “Kidane” made life hell for the exiled candidates: torturing, raping and brutalizing young migrants in order to obtain funds blackmail from them. “He’s a demon,” said Meron Estefanos, a defender of the rights of Eritrean migrants.
Recognized on the streets of Addis Ababa by a migrant he himself had tortured, Kidane was arrested for the first time in Ethiopia in 2020. Accused of trafficking in human beings, he managed to escape from the federal court in Addis Ababa a year later. With the complicity of police officers, he had changed his outfit in the courthouse restrooms before exiting the building incognito. Months later, Ethiopia will sentence him to life imprisonment in absentia.
Exorbitant ransoms
For two years, the smuggler, although on the run, continued his traffic almost silently on the smuggling routes connecting the Sudanese and Libyan deserts. “He spent the smuggling season in Libya from April to September,” explains Meron Estefanos. The rest of the time he did business in the United Arab Emirates, where he was based. Kidane Zekarias, 39, was the subject of two Interpol Red Notices – the top priority for international policing. In his widespread blackmail network, he used the Emirates as a hub to withdraw exorbitant ransoms from migrant families to a local bank account. The Emirati judiciary is currently prosecuting him for embezzlement.
The Netherlands meanwhile demanded his extradition for human trafficking between Africa and Europe. “His arrest is a great victory for the Dutch and international judiciary, a breakthrough that we have been waiting for years,” assures anonymously a member of the Attorney General of the Netherlands, who is currently involved in the case of his companions. Because the trial against “Welid” (real name Tewelde Goitom), another smuggler from Eritrea, has just begun before the court in Zwolle, a town 80 km east of Amsterdam. The man faces criminal charges for involvement in a criminal organization, human trafficking, hostage-taking, extortion and violence, including sexual violence.
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In the Libyan desert, the two men have been reigning in terror for a long time. At their base in Bani Walid, south of Misrata, Welid and Kidane imprisoned the migrants whom they tricked into crossing the Mediterranean Sea so they could better blackmail their families. “Kidane was at the head of a camp in Libya through which thousands of migrants pass. Many don’t survive that,” said the Dutch police. The Bani Walid camp, which has been an epicenter of the migrant trade in recent years, has sometimes been called a “ghost town” because many exiles have died there under the rule of smugglers.
Selam* spent two years there, in 2017 and 2018. “Hell on earth,” she says on the phone from the USA, where she obtained refugee status. At the age of 15, the teenager wanted to escape the compulsory military service in Eritrea. In Asmara, his family then pays $6,000 in exchange for a promise to reach the Sicilian coast. But in Libya, young Selam’s path crosses that of her future torturer, Kidane, who will demand another $7,000 from his relatives for the passage. “I told him I couldn’t pay that my mother was dead, that all the family money had gone to the funeral, and he said, ‘If you don’t give the money, you’ll go soon,'” she recalls .
“A hyena that gets excited at the sight of blood”
Selam was Kidane’s sex slave for six months and is still undergoing reconstructive surgery in the United States. “He raped and tortured us every day and systematically stubbed out his cigarettes on our skin. The man showed boundless cruelty and filmed the torture with his phone to better scare the families and extort ransom from them. “It’s an animal, a hyena, that gets excited at the sight of blood,” Selam said.
This type of human trafficking in the Horn of Africa was the subject of a documentary, Voyage en barbarie (Albert Londres Prize 2015), which describes the ordeal of young exile candidates at the hands of smugglers, who are willing to do anything to blackmail them. Kidane, Welid and the network of Eritrean smugglers used the post-Gaddafi collapse of Libya to build their platform there. “Today there are 20 official and unofficial detention centers and secret prison networks allegedly controlled by armed militias,” said Mohamed Auajjar, rapporteur for the United Nations Human Rights Council fact-finding mission in Libya. Last year, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) estimated the number of migrants stranded in Libya at 600,000, including tens of thousands from the Horn of Africa, where they are trying to escape military service from Eritrea or the threat from Chabab jihadists in Somalia.
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“These two arrests send a strong signal to men who thought they were untouchable,” assures Meron Estefanos, hoping they will “put an end” to human trafficking from Eritrea. In Libya, on the other hand, traffic is benefiting from the drought of the civil war. New migration routes have opened up in Cyrenaica since last year.
* The first name has been changed.