Hundreds standing outside near an Addis Abeba Bole International Airport terminal anxiously awaited the news of the safe landing of an Ethiopian Airlines plane that took off from Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport. Elsewhere, such news might have been greeted with cheers and whoops of joy by ecstatic relatives of travelling loved ones. But flights out of Lebanon landing in Ethiopia often trigger far more grim reactions. Cargo flights set off on this route on increasingly frequent trips to offload the corpses of Ethiopian migrant workers, often victims of horrifying abuse at the hands of Lebanese employers turned captors. On this occasion, seven bodies were being flown home for burials. The sight of coffins being loaded onto the airport tarmac in Addis Abeba triggered wailing among heartbroken mothers and other loved ones. Most were clad in traditional black mourning attire.
Netsanet Mathewos was among those present. “I cried with people I had never met before. Our pain and loss are identical,” she told Addis Standard.
Her cousin Lediya Bekele had worked as a domestic worker in Lebanon for years, but had returned home to visit family in her hometown near Arbaminch as recently as September. Barely two months after returning to Lebanon, the 28-year old’s body was among the seven aboard the Ethiopian Airlines cargo flight. Lediya had spent the last two months of her life working at the home of a married couple and their two children. Netsanet says Lediya had previously told her that she feared her employers, in particular the husband, without specifying why. Netsanet has attempted to reach out to the employers to get some answers as to what led to the death of her cousin, unsuccessfully thus far. “They (the employers) blocked me on WhatsApp. I tried to call them to get information, but they are rejecting all phone calls from Ethiopian numbers. We still don’t know what happened.”
