UN agency renews appeal to stop deadly smuggling of refugees from east Africa

With dozens of boats reaching Yemen this week, some of them bearing corpses and evidence of horrific struggles, the United Nations refugee agency today renewed its appeal for action to stem the flow of people who fall prey to smugglers in their flight from Somalia and Ethiopia.

“Once again, people are dying trying to reach Yemen aboard smuggler’s boats crossing the Gulf of Aden from Somalia,” William Spindler, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), said in Geneva.

A boat reached Yemeni shores on 16 January carrying 65 people and six dead bodies, UNHCR staff in Sana’a said. Another 14 people reportedly died during the voyage – six who threw themselves into the sea because they could not bear the thirst, and a further eight who died on board of thirst and hunger and whose bodies were thrown overboard.

UNHCR staff arranged medical assistance for survivors – some of whom had bite marks from crazed fellow passengers – and took 25 others to a transit centre.

That horrific voyage is not unusual, Mr. Spindler said. In the period from 12 to 17 January, 22 boats carrying an unknown number of Somalis and Ethiopians arrived in Yemen. Of those, the UNHCR transit centre registered 1,217 Somalis and 39 Ethiopians.

Last September, the agency called for international action to stem the flow of desperate people across the Gulf of Aden after at least 150 people died in a three-week period.

UNHCR has been working with the authorities in northeast Somalia to inform people about the dangers of using smugglers to cross the Gulf of Aden through videos, radio programmes and other media.

The agency reiterated that Yemen, one of the few countries in the region to have signed the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees, has been generous in receiving migrants and refugees. The Yemeni authorities automatically grant refugee status to Somali citizens arriving in Yemen.

There are currently over 80,000 registered refugees in Yemen, some 75,000 of whom are Somalis, with possibly hundreds of thousands more who have not yet registered, according to UNHCR.