Somalis overwhelm Yemen

KHARAZ CAMP, Yemen

Six-year-old Samira said she, her mother and her two brothers had spent the past week sleeping outside the door of an office waiting their turn to register as refugees.

Her father was shot and killed in the Somali civil war. She and her family were smuggled from Somalia to Yemen in a fishing boat. At the camp, they are hoping to get a tent and some food rations.

“Every day I feel hungry in this country,” Samira said.

There are already more than 160,000 African refugees in Yemen, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Most, like Samira, are among the half million people who have fled the 18-year-old civil war in Somalia.

This year, the number of new arrivals has increased 40 percent. Families are fleeing not only war, but also drought in East Africa and political turmoil in the run-up to 2010 Ethiopian elections.

They pay as much as $150 for the journey and come packed onto small fishing boats by smugglers, who beat passengers if they move even slightly, to prevent the boats from capsizing. In only a few days in early September, the United Nations reported 65 people either died or were presumed dead after three separate boats capsized.

More than a dozen died after being beaten by smugglers, and the rest drowned. Refugees say that many more die along the way and that the bodies are tossed overboard. “Let the fish eat them,” smugglers often say, according to Mohammad Noor Adam, a refugee from Somalia.

Sometimes the boats drop refugees on remote Yemeni beaches surrounded by desert. But often the smugglers don’t want to risk landing and order the refugees to swim to shore. Those that don’t jump are pushed.

Burham Wallow Barihu, an Eritrean refugee, made the journey across the Gulf of Aden with 140 other passengers about six months ago. Twelve died along they way, and their bodies were thrown into the gulf. When shots were fired at smugglers near the shore, an elderly woman, who was afraid to jump, was hit on the shoulder.

“I was the last off the boat because I forgot my documents,” he said. “She couldn’t drop off the boat.” Smugglers pushed the woman overboard, and Mr. Barihu wrangled her to shore. With no medicine to treat the wound, she died on the beach.

Bodies of refugees regularly wash up on the Yemeni shore and are buried in mass graves by UNHCR. So far this year, almost 300 people have drowned trying to cross the Gulf of Aden to Yemen. More than 150 are missing and presumed dead.

After landing, Somalis, who have automatic refugee status in Yemen, are picked up by the international organizations or the Yemeni police and brought to the closest U.N. registration center or refugee camp.

However, refugees from Ethiopia and Eritrea do not have automatic refugee status, which would allow them to stay in the country legally without a UNHCR interview, and often face arrest and deportation when they land. Those who speak the Somali language sometimes fake another nationality. Others flee the beaches. Many are caught and deported without the chance to plead their case to UNHCR.

The Yemeni government says the arrests are a justified defensive move. Officials say that African refugees are draining the country’s already limited resources. Yemen, one of the world’s poorest and least developed countries, is deeply embroiled in a civil war in the north that has forced 175,000 people from their homes.

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