African exodus
Aidan Hartley
Yemen For a fortnight our group has spent nights on the desert beaches east of Aden, looking out to sea. We strain to hear voices above the waves. At dawn the water’s surface is calm and dimpled with shoals of fish. The tide line is scattered with dead puffer fish, plastic rubbish, dolphin skulls. Fat yellow crabs gather behind your back and close in when you are not looking.
Each morning emaciated people emerge from the ocean in their dozens. They are Somalis fleeing war in Mogadishu, or Ethiopians escaping their overpopulated dustbowl.
Many die crossing the Gulf of Aden. The smugglers’ boats are crowded like slave ships. Passengers are beaten if they try to move in case the vessels capsize. Any trouble and the smugglers pitch them into the shark-infested depths. Boat people drown in storms, die of thirst, hunger or heat. They arrive like shipwreck survivors flayed by sun and caked in salt. Corpses wash up on the beaches and fishermen bury them hastily in graves so shallow you can see fingers poking out of the sand.
Near the beach where we have camped is a Yemeni fishing village with a mosque minaret shaped like a bell tower. The smugglers use it as a landmark and dump people in the waves a few hundred feet from shore.
The local Yemenis are very poor but, when a crowd of Africans tottered in like figures out of Belsen, I saw them give out food and water with delighted faces. The fishermen say the opportunity to give charity is a blessing from Allah. We saw an Ethiopian man who walked out of the sun and died under a tree. The villagers washed his body and buried him next to a Sufi saint’s shrine.
An Ethiopian survivor told me, ‘If I had even a single cow alive I would have stayed at home. There is nothing left.’ They were already starving when they began the long journey from mountains to the coast.
They get no food or water on the voyage from Somalia. By landfall all their money is spent, or it has been robbed from them.
The hour they hit shore, they pick themselves up and begin walking again. Charities patrolling the beach help them out with medicine, a meal, simple clothes and flip-flops. Others are scared of being picked up by the authorities so they immediately head north into the heat and swirling sands. We found one little group on the road. Some were children. One man wore a single shoe. The girls were strikingly beautiful in rags that billowed in the furnace wind. They had no possessions, no water and they spoke only African languages. Their hope was to cross the Empty Quarter desert. If they made it to Saudi Arabia they hoped for jobs as labourers or house cleaners and to make enough to eat.
We gave this group water and food. They sat down to eat on the edge of the tarmac. The second they finished they got up and started walking again. Out of the heat haze appeared another group, then another. We quickly ran out of supplies and had to just watch.
If the Saudis arrest the migrants they are slung on deportation flights back to Somalia and Ethiopia. On arrival back home many simply start walking again. I met a man who had repeated the terrible sea crossing five times already. On one trip he lasted two years before deportation. Another time he lasted a day. A woman had brought her eight children along for the ordeal and the youngest of them was two years old.
Those too scared to risk heading for the Kingdom remain in Yemen, which has armies of its own unemployed. Most refugees are youths who escaped home to avoid being press-ganged into the ranks of warring militias. In Aden they pass their days waiting for remittances from relatives in the West, sleeping in the dust surrounded by drifts of rubbish or chewing the leafy narcotic qat that kills all hunger.
Among the hordes of refugees on the street, I encountered a man with a strong American accent. ‘Sir, I do wash cars. On a good day I can make a dollar. I sleep here on the sidewalk at the back of the shops.’ He revealed that he had lived in Philadelphia for 27 years before being deported to Addis Ababa. Back in Ethiopia he had forgotten the language of his birth and he knew nobody, so he made the sea voyage to Arabia. ‘Even when misfortune happens to you, it may mean good will come from it. We are in the hands of God,’ he said. ❑ Aidan Hartley’s report on the boat people is part of Channel 4’s current series of Unreported World, on Fridays at 7.30 p.m.
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