Yemen is facing a refugee tide

About 20,000 Somalis seeking to escape violence in their country wait at a port to be ferried by smugglers to the Arabian mainland for $100 each.

Somali refugees break their fast.

SANA'A // It took Ibida Abdi Abdullah two months to make the journey from her home in Mogadishu through the hostile terrain of north Somalia into Djibouti, and then onto a fishing boat that took her across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen. She had arrived three days earlier but the exhaustion was still written on her face and she could barely speak more than a few words as she lay on a mattress in a cramped room in Sana'a which she shares with two other women from her tribe.

Ms Abdullah, 30, is among the first trickle of a tidal wave of refugees who are expected in the next few months to wash up on Yemen's shores from the Gulf of Aden as the annual smuggling season begins again. "The fighting was very bad and I left my five-month-old daughter with my mother," she said. "She is penniless. I feared we would all die. One of us had to leave to save the others." Somalia is in the grip of the worst humanitarian crisis it has experienced in the past 18 years, during which time the country has been in a state of continuous fighting. In May, two heavily armed insurgent groups began shelling Mogadishu, the capital, as part of a major operation to drive out the internationally backed government of the president Sheikh Sharif Ahmed. Since then approximately 250,000 civilians have lost their homes.

Tens of thousands have made their way to the northern port city of Bossaso, staying in cardboard shacks as they wait for the seasonal tide to fall and the sea to become more accessible to smugglers who can take them to Yemen in metal boats for US$100 (Dh368) a ticket. The smugglers, who moonlight as pirates, tell frightened passengers they are going to Dubai and when they reach Yemen they tell them Dubai lies just beyond the mountain ranges.

Yemen is braced for an arrival of up to 20,000 refugees in the coming months. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has opened a transit centre in Mayfa'a Hajar near the coast and established a presence through partners near the Bab al Mandab strait on the Red Sea. "We're expecting a lot of them because things are deteriorating more and more in Somalia," said Hisham Sharaf Abdalla, the vice minister of planning and international co-operation. "It's a big burden on our social services and security services. We don't get anything ... to spend on refugees. In the last five years the foreign minister has asked for direct support but nothing has been given. There is pressure on electricity and water which is scarce."

Yemen gives Somali refugees the right to attend state schools and receive medical attention at public hospitals. The estimates of how many Somalis are in Yemen vary wildly from 150,000, which is the official figure, to 800,000. Last year, 50,000 arrived, a 70 per cent increase from the previous year. Many do not stay for more than a few nights in refugee camps, the largest of which is in Kharaz, west of Aden, run by the UN.

"Most are using Yemen as a transit centre to other countries. The majority go to Saudi Arabia," said Yasser Mubarak of Oxfam. "They collect money and send it back. Most don't want to stay in refugee camps because they are running from war and if they go to a camp they will only get food." The vast majority of refugees end up in the urban centres, Sana'a in particular, to find jobs and send remittances home to relatives who are stranded with little help from aid organisations that are refusing to work in Somalia because of the violence.

"The refugee camps won't give me money so I arrived in Sana'a," said Ms Abdullah. "My little daughter is waiting for me, I must send her remittances so she can stay alive. I'm relying on Allah. I have nothing else. My husband divorced me." She hoped to get a job as a maid earning about $100 a month. The women do better than men who typically work as car washers or porters earning a few dollars a day.

There are very few organisations in Yemen to help the vulnerable but in July, a group of Somali community leaders opened a small centre in Sana'a, the first of its kind. "We don't have any budget, no wages," said Shuayb Sheikh Ibrahim, a volunteer, speaking by candlelight because there was no money for electricity. "It is desperate but we are happy to help our people whatever way we can. Right now we can only direct them to their own tribes to help them. And hope that they will."

Nearly every day since the beginning of September, Mohammed Ali Hersi, a Somali tribal elder, has received a knock on the steel gate of his house from refugees, most of them young people in search of food and shelter. During Ramadan the burden on Mr Hersi has been even greater as he has been providing the refugees with iftar and sohour meals. "The majority you see here live on money sent from their relatives living abroad in European countries and America. But I am also responsible for them and cannot send them away."

Half a dozen young men crowded around the tablecloth on the floor breaking the fast with spicy beef samosas and fruit juice as the maghreb call to prayer rang out. "I was a student back home and came here to continue my high school," said Mohammed Abdel Rahman, 26. "If I had the chance I would go to a western country; I don't want to stay here, I can't find a job." His friend Abdel Razak, 26, agreed. "It is hard in the West but I'd like to struggle and bring myself up," said Mr Razak, who is waiting for a smuggler to bring him to Europe. "I will come back with a western passport and be respected. They will say, 'You are British? A westerner?' And I will be an important person."

These young men and women like Ms Abdullah are the lucky ones. The cargoes of human misery that wash up on the long and lawless coast of Yemen have uncomfortable echoes of the slave ships, with men and women piled up on top of each other on two-metre long boats fitted with small engines. Many women are raped while others are thrown overboard by ruthless smugglers before reaching the coast to avoid being detected by Yemeni patrol boats.

In the last week of August two small vessels that tried to get a head start on the season were caught in high waves and capsized, killing 16 passengers. Yemen's coastguard cannot do much. It has about eight boats to patrol 2,500km of shoreline. "The smugglers are criminals in the full definition of the word criminal," said Samer Haddadin, a UNHCR protection officer. "A woman told the story of her child crying and the smuggler had a headache so he took the child and threw him into the sea. A man next to the woman said 'haram' [forbidden] and he was executed on the spot."

Many of the smugglers are the same pirates who attack the ships that traverse the Gulf of Aden, one of the world's busiest shipping corridors now protected by Operation Atalanta, the European Union's new antipiracy naval force, which is expanding every month. Switzerland is the latest country to join the operations. The European and American ships which are protecting commercial vessels from pirates - there have been 138 attacks so far this year of which 33 were successful - do not have a mandate to help the refugees. Instead they escort the World Food Programme ships on their way to Somalia to feed 1.5 million people there who are in need of food aid. Sadat Yousef Ghaish, a long-term refugee in Yemen, said he had learnt to expect nothing from the international community.

"There are three cases of pirating and the international community is angry for one sake, to protect its economic interests. But thousands of Somalis will die in the Gulf of Aden." Mr Hersi had a more cynical assessment of why more assistance was not forthcoming to Yemen. "In the Horn of Africa there are people starving. If they heard there is good assistance in Yemen by the UN, the government, whoever, that Red Sea would become a black sea, do you know what I mean? There would be a rush here. Millions will come, I know that. It is like a lock that cannot be opened."