An exodus in torment

Somali refugees who risk their lives to flee the country's civil war arrive in Yemen after an ordeal with cold-blooded smugglers.

The journey from Somalia ends and begins anew in Bir Ali, Yemen. Along the Yemeni coast near this ramshackle fishing village, where as many as 100 people a day are arriving across the Gulf of Aden in a sprawling and largely unnoticed exodus from Africa. 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 UN High Commission for Refugees. "What is not simple is the risk these people are taking. They are leaving their lives to fate."

By virtue of geography and a relatively lenient government, Yemen has emerged as the pit stop from East Africa to Saudi Arabia, other wealthy Gulf states and Europe. Passage on rickety fishing boats costs $50 to $120 for a 180-mile trip that lasts two, three or sometimes four days.

By every account, the smugglers are brutal: unruly refugees are thrown overboard in shark-infested waters; others are shot. 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. UN officials cite a variety of ordeals on board, from rape to stabbing to dehydration.

Hardship and hope

Once here, the survivors — by the UN count, at least 8,000 already this year, aboard more than 70 boats — are left to navigate the fringes of a country mired in its own poverty and unrest, in a passage of desperation and determination.

Ruqiya Abdullah, a 22-year-old Somali who swam to shore at Bir Ali recently was less awed. "We ran away," she said.

Abdullah fled Mogadishu in January after Ethiopian troops backing Somalia's transitional government seized the lawless capital from the Muslim extremists who had taken control six months earlier. She bided her time in Bosaso, a Somali port that the UN says has become the world's busiest smuggling city. Then, 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, just to stretch, they beat you," she said. Her face was framed in a black veil that fell across her brown skirt. "It is their nature. They beat everybody — men, women and children."

Many of the journeys take two days, but some have been far longer.

In one of the worst episodes last year, a boat drifted in the Gulf of Aden for six days after its engine failed. Smugglers allow passengers to take little or nothing with them and refugees soon became dehydrated. Passengers said six threw themselves into the sea, delirious from thirst. Some survivors had bite marks from fellow passengers crazed with hunger, the officials said.

Abdullah's boat arrived in Bir Ali after 58 hours. Abdullah collapsed on the beach, near a volcanic hill called the Crow's Fortress that smugglers use as a landmark, and slept till the morning, when UN officials arrived. She never found her belongings. "I have only these," she said, running her hands over her clothes, "and they were wet until a little while ago." That morning, she borrowed a cellphone and called her sister-in-law Laila in Sanaa. "We arrived last night," Abdullah shouted. "I want to come to Sanaa, but we don't have any money to get there." Her sister-in-law promised to meet her halfway.

"Before I was hopeless," Abdullah said afterwards, with a wan smile. "I didn't think I could go on living. I have hope now."

A disaster at sea

Six hours from Mayfaah, on the outskirts of the port of Aden, is a vast Somali shantytown called Basatin. To residents arriving from the coast, it is Little Mogadishu. Through its warren of alleys, infused with the stench of sewage, a calamity still reverberates, haunting a tailor, Sulaiman Ali.

In May 2005, Ali's wife, Lul and his five children — Abdul Rahman, 10, Majida, 9, Esmail, 8, Zeinab, 4 and Walid, 1 — had travelled across the Gulf of Aden to his wife's village to visit her ailing father. They arrived in Bosaso last October, waiting for money for the trip back.

"Whatever I got from sewing in Aden, I sent it to her," Ali said.

He asked her to wait. When he called again four days later, he was told the family had already left, departing on Christmas. In all, four fishing boats carried 515 people, many of them fleeing fighting in Somalia.

He then called friends in Bir Ali.

"They told me the boat had arrived, but that the voyage was a disaster," Ali said.

Refugees managed to get off two of the boats when a Yemeni coast guard patrol, for unclear reasons, opened fire. Passengers were terrified and in the tumult, one of the boats capsized. The last vessel was driven back to shore by Yemeni forces. But 300 yards from the coast, it capsized in heavy seas. One of the survivors told Ali that his wife had drifted with four others on debris for four hours in the dark. In all, UN officials said, more than 150 people drowned.

As he recalled the story, Ali sat on the single mattress in a room he rents for the equivalent of $40 a month. His children used to sleep in an adjacent cinder-block room, but he now leaves it dark.

"It was written by God, and there is nothing I can do about it," he said. "I have to rely on God." He turned silent for a moment. "But the memories keep coming back," he said, "over and over."