October 1992, Page 37, 83

Special Report

Yemen, Arabia's Poorest Nation, Swamped by One Million Refugees

By Hazel Strouts

On the Aden coast, in one of the poorest regions of one of the poorest countries in the world, about 55,000 refugees have arrived from Somalia. The flood began when former Somali president Siad Barre was overthrown in January 1991.

Since then, the victors over Barre fell out among themselves and civil war turned into countrywide anarchy. Where there was no possible land exit-to Kenya for example-the refugees took boats to cross the Gulf of Aden to Yemen.

When you walk through Hiswa or Madinat al Shaab, where some of these refugees have settled in two refugee tent cities west of Aden, you get an idea of how bad things are in Somalia.

Some 12,000 Somalis prefer to be in these camps under the care of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). The temperature soars past 140 degrees Fahrenheit. The humidity touches 100 percent. Sand blows everywhere. At Hiswa, which is on the beach, it is salt sand. Right now the monsoon winds are blowing strongly enough to knock over lamp posts in downtown Aden.

An average refugee complement in the 10-by-6-feet army tents is a family of 6, although some tents have as many as 10 occupants.

Ibrahim Mohammed Ali used to work for the UNHCR in Somalia. He is about 35 and is here with his wife and four children. A fifth was born on the Gob Wein, a forbidding hulk whose black hull is jammed onto the sandy beach 100 yards from the camp.

For two days and three nights, the boat was prevented from landing by Yemeni authorities. Then the desperate passengers, who had buried some 200 of their number at sea during a 20-day nightmare voyage from Somalia, forced the captain to run the ship aground. In the chaos of disembarking via one rickety wooden stairway and two rope ladders, many fell and some drowned or died, including Mohammad's baby.

He had paid U.S. $280 for the trip. The children were $20 each. There were 3,300 people on a cargo ship with only six lavatories. Food and water ran out during the last two days off the Aden coast, during which about 50 people died. With water selling on board at $50 for a half liter, many passengers drank sea water. This, according to Dr. Gamal Suleiman of Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), was the main cause of respiratory problems among survivors.

Mohammed's voice caught when he mentioned his baby, but the rest of his harrowing story was recounted with quiet detachment. The family left because "in Somalia, you could not be sure of living till tomorrow," he said. "At any time, people could come to your house and shoot you." They might be openly looking for money, or they might claim to be seeking revenge for some crime committed by a member of one clan against a member of another.

Dr. Hassan Sugulle, a Somali working with UNICEF in San'a, the capital of Yemen, said that although much of the fighting is on tribal lines, some Islamists, who are reported to be funded from abroad, look on the present chaos as punishment from God. They claim the right to restore religion and bring the people back to the true way by force.

The refugees in Hiswa and Madinat al Shaab are a very small part of the Somali refugee story in Yemen, and an even smaller part of the total displaced population bordering Yemen. The Somalis join 800,000 Yemenis uprooted from Saudi Arabia after the Gulf war and some 22,000 expelled from Kuwait. Most of these one million persons have been absorbed by their own families or tribes. But 80,000 people of Yemeni origin had been abroad for so long that they no longer had Yemeni connections. They now are in camps.

There also are Yemeni refugee camps for 3,000 Eritreans and Ethiopians. Overall, there are some 138,000 refugees in temporary shelters in Yemen.

Because Yemen and Somalia share a long history of trade and commerce, some Somalis can claim ancestors who left Yemen four to six centuries ago. In contrast to ethnic Somalis like Mohammed, refugees of Yemeni origin are allowed by the authorities to live outside the tent camps, build shantytowns for themselves and seek work. This, however, is no easy feat in a country with 46 percent unemployment.

Three thousand "Yemeni-ethnic" Somalis have gone to the capital, San'a, in the Yemen highlands, while more than 36,000 refugees have settled in sweltering shantytowns near the port of Aden, in shacks cobbled together from spare boards.

Yemenis, who only recently have begun producing petroleum, know what it is like to have next to nothing. Average GNP per capita is $520, and life expectancy is 46.3 years. Of every 1,000 children born, 190 die within five years. USAID officials in San'a say the Somali refugees' health is better than the average Yemeni's because they are monitored and offered free basic medical care.

However, the U.S. cut off the training and education components of its aid to Yemen following the Gulf war, in which the Yemeni government sided politically with Iraq. The European Community, on the other hand, has re-established links, and Germany and the Netherlands, Yemen's principal European aid donors, never suspended their existing arrangements.

In addition to poor sanitation and health care, Yemen is struggling politically with the consequences of the 1990 unification of the country, and with uneven but serious moves toward democratization. An important but potentially destabilizing moment in this process comes in November, when the first-ever free elections are scheduled.

Although UNHCR is coordinating the relief effort for Somali refugees in Yemen, and money is coming in from countries such as Germany and Canada, the quality of life for the Yemeni people themselves must be raised if they are ever to absorb the tens of thousands of extra people flooding their country.

Israel, where the GDP per capita is $10,586, has requested $10 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to help absorb some 400,000 Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union. By contrast, the U.S. has reduced its aid to Yemen, where the GDP per capita is $520, and which is faced with absorbing an influx of nearly one million returnees from both the Arabian Peninsula and southeast Africa.

Hazel Strouts, a free-lance writer from Toronto, Canada, prepared this report in Yemen.

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