Wild life | 25 October 2008

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.