On the ground, covered in reddish earth, were remains of clothing and some slippers. Twenty-five bodies found in a mass grave in Malawi two weeks ago were exhumed by authorities a day later. Just two kilometers from that hole, four more bodies were found a couple of days later, a discovery that raised the number of fatalities to twenty-nine.
A group of locals came across the first bodies on their way to collect honey in a forest in the Mtangatanga Forest Reserve, in the Mzimba region, located more than 250 kilometers north of the capital, Lilongwe. They fell into the hole. They found the bodies. They then notified the police. Investigators found the rest of the bodies while searching the area, according to police spokesman Peter Kalaya.
The images published by the local media Times 360 Malawi through Twitter show moments after the exhumation, where members of the police, immigration agents and health officials were present. The authorities put the bodies, decomposing for a little less than a month, in white plastic bags.
The bodies were taken to the morgue for autopsy and an official version of the cause of death, according to Rodney Simwaka, president of the Mzimba district in Malawi's northern region. Although police said initial evidence suggested the men suffocated while riding in a van, a leading cause of death in human trafficking cases, according to the Missing Migrants Project.
Items found in the mass grave, including some identity documents, indicated that the victims were Ethiopian men between the ages of 25 and 40 who were most likely on a clandestine route to South Africa, police said.
Malawi's Minister of Internal Security, Jean Sendeza, traveled to Mzimba and declared that she was very surprised by the discovery of the mass grave, a fact that she considered macabre. But the discovery of bodies on the southern route is not an isolated event: in March 2020, 64 dead Ethiopians were found crammed into a cargo container in Mozambique.
Malawi is a transit country for people irregularly migrating from the Horn of Africa to the Republic of South Africa, a journey known as the southern route. Malawian authorities intercepted 221 migrants in the first nine months of this year, of whom 186 were Ethiopians, Kalaya reported.
"Some bodies identified in South Africa are repatriated to their country of origin, but many are still missing, especially those in transit countries," says Dereje Feyissa, a researcher at the Ethiopian Center for Peace and Development, who denounces that " protection services for immigrants should include the identification and return of remains to their families in cooperation with governments.”
“South Africa's liberal migration policy, which allowed freedom of movement and the right to work instead of being confined to a camp, attracted a lot of immigration,” says Feyissa. The South African government tightened its borders in 2011, just after the World Cup in South Africa, which attracted thousands of people looking for work. But those measures intensified irregular immigration that relies on a "very robust smuggling industry," according to the researcher.
The border security crisis in Ethiopia was aggravated by the war that the country has been going through for two years, since since then “the government has less capacity to ensure law and order in many areas of the country”, Feyissa declared.
The researcher hopes that the peace agreement reached on Wednesday between the Ethiopian government and the Tigray People's Liberation Front (FLPT) "results in a more stable government that carries out the agenda of bilateral agreements for migration with South Africa," as it has already done with some Gulf countries.
The active participation of South Africa in the Ethiopian peace process - the negotiations have taken place in the South African capital of Pretoria - should be, according to Dereje Feyissa, a boost for cooperation between governments that helps improve the protection of victims of trafficking in the Ethiopia-South Africa migration corridor.
