A Desperate Voyage of Hope and Peril

Fleeing Violence at Home, Africans En Route to Yemen Face Brutality at Sea

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 into 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, including rape, stabbings and dehydration.

Once here, the survivors -- at least 8,000 already this year arriving aboard more than 70 boats, by the U.N. count -- 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.