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Alert Article
This article is part of the Spring 2009 issue of Alert.
Yemen: Refugees Risk Everything to Leave Somalia
March 11, 2009
Some 533 people survived the dangerous journey from northern Somalia across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen on smugglers’ boats during one week in December 2008. At least 28 passengers did not survive the trip.
Desperate to escape the violence and hopelessness of Somalia, these passengers routinely arrive on Yemen’s southern coast after a two- to three-day journey. The risks they have taken to get there are huge: smugglers pack more than 100 people onto boats made for 30; and passengers arrive with reports of brutal treatment.
Contacts along the Yemen coast alert Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) when new arrivals appear on the beach and MSF responds with medical treatment, water, food, and basic mental health counseling. In 2008 MSF provided assistance to more than 7,000 arrivals.
The number of arrivals in January 2009 was 20 percent higher than at the same time last year.
Yemen 2008 © Michael Goldfarb/MSF
An MSF worker takes the pulse of a severely dehydrated woman just arrived at Yemen’s southern coast on December 5. She was with a group of about 30 who walked more than a mile from the beach to a road. MSF treated those with medical needs and distributed bottles of water, high-energy biscuits, and dates.
Yemen 2008 © Michael Goldfarb/MSF
Children eat food provided by MSF. Staff have heard survivors’ stories of smugglers throwing children overboard during the journey. Passengers are regularly forced to jump into deep waters far from shore so the boats won’t be detected. Many cannot swim and drown.
Yemen 2008 © Michael Goldfarb/MSF
“There were four smugglers: two treated us like humans; two treated us like goats—these two beat us,” one refugee said, adding that they used an iron bar to beat people who wouldn’t jump into deep water far from shore. He said that he and others left Mogadishu because it wasn’t safe anymore. “There were no nongovernmental organizations to help people there,” he said.
Yemen 2008 © MSF
A 24-year-old Ethiopian woman is treated by MSF medical staff in Ahwar after she survived alone at sea for seven hours on December 1. She had been forced overboard from a smuggler’s boat and was separated from her one-and-a-half- year-old son and her sister. They had walked the beach looking for her among the dead bodies washed ashore.
Yemen 2008 © Michael Goldfarb/MSF
Here a Somali man is examined by an MSF doctor in Ahwar. Before he boarded a smuggler’s boat for Yemen, he had fled to the outskirts of Mogadishu where hundreds of thousands of people have sought safety in camps, but the situation there was not much better. “We live under shelling everyday,” he said. “When I leave my house, I don’t know if I will return safely or if I will die. People are living in shelters that don’t provide protection against the rain and sand. We live a horrible life.”
Yemen 2008 © Michael Goldfarb/MSF
Refugees rest and receive assistance from MSF staff at the roadside. Some of the arrivals said they had no idea how brutal the passage on a smuggler’s boat would be. Others said they did know the risks and were willing to take them, even bringing their children along. “They’re just waiting for a bullet or someone to rob and kill them or, for a woman, to be raped. For them, anything is better than what’s at home,” said MSF head of mission in Yemen, Andreas Koutepas. “They consider themselves dead anyway.”
