A Desperate Voyage of Hope and Peril

By Anthony Shadid

Washington Post Foreign Service

Thursday, May 31, 2007 

 

The Kharaz camp, in the Yemeni desert near the port of Aden, is home to nearly 9,000 Somali refugees as well as several hundred Ethiopians. (Photos By Khaled Al-mahdi For The Washington Post)

BIR ALI, Yemen -- The journey from Somalia ends and begins anew in Bir Ali.

 

Along the Yemeni coast near this ramshackle fishing village, where white sandy beaches wash over a stark volcanic plateau, as many as 100 people a day are arriving across the Gulf of Aden in a sprawling and largely unnoticed exodus from Africa to the Middle East. Tens of thousands have made the trek, forced by war and misery from a failed state to a failing one. Since last year, more than 1,000 of them have died, their decaying corpses often washing ashore and buried in unmarked mass graves near Bir Ali.

 

"The problem is simple," said Theophilus Vodounou, head of the Aden office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. "What's not simple is the risk these people are taking. They're leaving their lives to fate."

 

By virtue of geography and a relatively lenient government, Yemen has emerged as the way station from East Africa to Saudi Arabia, other wealthy Persian Gulf states and occasionally Europe. Passage on rickety fishing boats costs $50 to $120 for a 180-mile trip that lasts two, three or sometimes four days.

 

By virtually every account, the smugglers are brutal: Unruly refugees are thrown overboard in shark-infested waters; others are shot, sometimes to teach the rest of the passengers a lesson. Some refugees are shoved into the sea a half-mile or more from shore so the boats can make a quick getaway, and residents have seen corpses wash up with their hands and legs bound. U.N. officials cite a variety of ordeals on board, from rape to stabbing to dehydration.

 

Once here, the survivors -- by the United Nations' count, at least 8,000 already this year, aboard more than 70 boats -- are left to navigate the fringes of a country mired in its own poverty and unrest, in a passage of desperation and determination.

 

"When people are so desperate, it's amazing what they can do," said Firas Kayal, a UNHCR official in Sanaa, Yemen's capital.

 

Ruqiya Abdullah, a 22-year-old Somali who swam to shore at Bir Ali last week, was less awed.

 

"We ran away," she said simply.

 

Hardship and Hope

 

Abdullah fled Mogadishu in January after Ethiopian troops backing Somalia's transitional government seized the notoriously lawless capital from an Islamic group that had taken control six months earlier. She bided her time in Bosaso, a Somali port that the United Nations says has become the world's busiest smuggling city. On Wednesday of last week, she found room on a boat with 75 others and took what she had: dates and water for the trip, two shirts, two shawls, shoes and $100 for life in Yemen.

 

"The smugglers told us not to move. If you tried to move one inch either side, just to stretch, they beat you," she said. Her face was framed in a black veil that fell across her brown skirt. "It's their nature. They beat everybody -- men, women and children."

 

Last October, smugglers beat five Ethiopians, then threw them overboard, U.N. officials said. Passengers watched as sharks in the warm water attacked them. In February, smugglers forced 137 passengers into deep water off Yemen's coast. More than 50 drowned, many unable to swim.

 

Many of the journeys take two days, but some have been far longer.

 

In one of the worst episodes last year, a boat drifted in the Gulf of Aden for six days after its engine failed. Smugglers allow passengers to take little or nothing with them, and refugees soon became dehydrated. Passengers said six threw themselves into the sea, delirious from thirst. Eight others died of dehydration, and their bodies were thrown overboard, U.N. officials said. When the boat reached shore, six more were dead. Some survivors had bite marks from fellow passengers crazed with hunger, the officials said.

 

Abdullah's boat arrived in Bir Ali after 58 hours. The refugees jumped into neck-deep water, then swam ashore at 10 p.m. Abdullah collapsed on the beach, near a volcanic hill called the Crow's Fortress that smugglers use as a landmark, and slept till the next morning, when U.N. officials arrived. She never found her belongings, which the smugglers threw into the sea after her.

 

"I have only these," she said, running her hands over her clothes, "and they were wet until a little while ago."

 

That morning, she borrowed a cellphone and called her sister-in-law Laila in Sanaa.

 

"We arrived last night," Abdullah shouted over the phone. "I want to come to Sanaa, but we don't have any money to get there."

 

Her sister-in-law promised to meet her halfway.

 

"Before I was hopeless," Abdullah said afterward, with a wan smile. "I didn't think I could go on living. I have hope now."

 

'We'll Find a Way'

 

Fifteen people on Abdullah's boat were taken to Mayfaah, an hour inland, where the United Nations receives refugees. Abdel-Fattah Ibrahim was among them, sprawled out with nine other men on bare mattresses in the courtyard, shielded from the sun by a plastic roof held up with wooden beams. The men received water and rice on arrival. Most were sleeping, exhausted from the trip.

 

"I'm strong and I'm healthy," said Ibrahim, 30, sitting next to a tan canvas bag he had recovered from the sea, still fastened with a small gold-colored padlock. In it were his possessions: an opened bag of cookies, jeans, two shirts and pictures of his family in Mogadishu, tightly wrapped in a blue bag. "We'll work, then we'll find a way, and we'll ask God," he said. "Everything depends on God."

 

A compound of cinder-block huts painted blue and white, Mayfaah is no more than a stopping point for Somalis, who are recognized by the Yemeni government, without exception, as refugees. The United Nations estimates there are nearly 100,000 Somalis in Yemen; Yemeni officials put the number anywhere between 300,000 and 800,000, estimates admittedly based more on speculation than statistics.

 

Many of the refugees try to find work washing cars or harvesting khat, a mild stimulant leaf chewed by many Yemenis. Others head to Aden, a refugee camp or on to Sanaa. Perhaps a third try to travel farther, to Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries across the porous, lightly guarded northern border.

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