First Published: 2010-12-20
Each year tens of thousands of Ethiopians and Somalis make perilous crossing to Yemen in hope of better life.
Middle East Online
By Otto Bakano - BOSASSO
Many of them die on the way
Her husband and four children drowned two years ago while crossing the Gulf of Aden to Yemen, but Binti Sheikh Abuka is determined to leave Somalia, saying everyone will die someday anyway.
Each year tens of thousands of Ethiopians and Somalis make the perilous crossing to Yemen in the hope of a better life away from home, where economic deprivation, persecution and conflict have devastated their lives.
Many of them die on the way on board the often overcrowded and rotten small boats, while others, already weakened by long journeys from the hinterland to the coast, die in the hands of ruthless smugglers.
"I am willing to go and I am not afraid. God is the one who gave me yesterday and he will give me tomorrow," said Abuka, looking sad and angry at her life in a filthy camp for the displaced in Bosasso, the capital of Somalia's semi-autonomous Puntland region.
Abuka fled the deadly fighting in the capital Mogadishu with her family in 2007, and a year later her husband and children were the first to attempt the hazardous onward journey to Yemen from Bosasso.
The misfortunes of Abuka's family however seem to have no effect on 25-year-old Jamila Ali Rashid, a mother-of-three who plans to cross to Yemen with her husband and children.
Squatting by Abuka's side, Rashid, who has lived in Bosasso for 11 years, recounts with a tinge of naive excitement her motivation to emigrate.
"Life here is very hard. My husband does not have enough money to support us. The reason I am leaving for Yemen is to get a better job. Our plan is to leave together," Rashid said.
But at a cost of 120 dollars per person and her meagre earning of 30 dollars a month from garbage collection, the plan appears too expensive for her means.
"This is our plan. Our plan is to leave, but I don't know whether we will be able to get to Yemen," she added, also dismissing the dangers of the trip. "We are all mortal, everyone is going to die one day."
Since 2010, Puntland authorities have intensified a crackdown on human smugglers and many have relocated to coastal villages further from Bosasso, while others operate from remote seaside locations in Djibouti.
Puntland's Information Minister Abdulhakim Guled also said their deportation of immigrants is to stop them from risking their lives on the smugglers' rickety boats and to banish the chimera of a better life across the sea.
"The reason we are deporting those who are trying to migrate to the Gulf states is to spare their lives," he said, adding that they were also wary that Shebab rebels may be trying to infiltrate the region.
Despite the efforts to stem the flow of immigrants, Somalia's persistent violence is driving hundreds from their homes, mainly from southern and central regions of the country where armed groups are fighting for territorial control.
But while unrest is uprooting families in Somalia, hundreds of others are fleeing from neighbouring Ethiopia due to economic hardship.
At the shores of the Gulf of Aden in Djibouti's northern Obok region, a clutch of lanky and weary Ethiopian men sit under a short acacia tree, awaiting the next word from smugglers.
But on this occasion, the UN refugee agency chief Antonio Guterres turned up to witness the human migration from this troubled Horn of Africa region.
After Guterres recounted to them the dangers of crossing and the illusion of economic reprieve in Yemen, the head of the group, Ali Muhdin, a chequered shawl on his head, told him: "We are aware of all that, but we want to try our chance. Staying home and crossing over present the same dangers."
"From here we are in the hands of the traffickers. We don't know when we will cross. For us it is over, we have left our country."
A few yards from the group, another team of men and women who had trekked for 15 days from Ethiopia's Oromo region was also waiting to take a boat from these shores where many would-be migrants have been buried after succumbing to exhaustion, thirst and hunger or washed from the high seas.
However, 17-year-old Hussein Mohamed and five others did change their minds at the last minute when Guterres arrived at the remote desert spot with a team of UN refugee agency officials and local administrators.
"I changed my mind because I was afraid (of the crossing)," Mohamed said, explaining that he deceived his father to give him 100 dollars to pay the traffickers. "My father will be happy to see me," he added.
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