Just to be clear, this means that more desperate people crossed the Red Sea into Yemen in 2018 than crossed the Mediterranean heading for Europe. 

While Brexit is giving UK residents a break from media focus on desperate people attempting to reach wealthy Europe by crossing the Mediterranean by sea, a few figures should help to put things in perspective, as the issue will surely soon re-emerge in the headlines.

Xenophobia remains a fundamental rallying cry of the right throughout Europe, including the UK, and is all too frequently manifested through Islamophobic populism. This has already led to the implementation of anti-migrant policies by most regimes but particularly the far right ones in Eastern Europe.

This last year, they have been joined by the new Italian regime’s rhetoric and action in turning away humanitarian ships rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean. The hostile environment for migrants in Europe has led to a massive drop in arrivals: while many more than one million people arrived in 2015, only 144,000 did so in 2018. A few migrants who had managed to reach northern France and in particular the Calais of ‘jungle’ notoriety took to small boats to reach the UK: about 500 did so in 2018, including 200 in the last two months of last year.  Some might wonder why this did not happen earlier, but this event gave the British government a temporary public relations respite from Brexit as Secretary of State Sajid Javid rushed to Dover to stem this terrifying influx!

A hidden migrant crisis in the Gulf of Aden

Meanwhile, more than 160,000 people arrived in Yemen in 2018 alone. Just to be clear this means that more desperate people crossed the Red Sea into Yemen than crossed the Mediterranean heading for Europe. 

Yemen is in the midst of an internationalised civil war and suffering from the world’s worst humanitarian crisis according to the UN’s Secretary General. There has been no outcry about a ‘migrant invasion’ from any Yemeni Minister of the Interior, whether from the internationally recognised government or the Huthi movement who control the capital Sana’a. Indeed Yemen has received and accepted close to a million Somali refugees since the 1990s, allowing them to work and live in the country, as Yemen is the only country in the Arabian Peninsula to recognise the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. Prior to the current war, the country’s authorities have been impressively hospitable to Somali refugees, though not to the thousands of Ethiopians and others who have crossed the Red Sea.

Migrants crossing into Yemen only make the headlines either when the Saudi-led Coalition planes bomb a boat crossing and kill its passengers (including people leaving on boats commissioned by UN agencies to repatriate them to the Horn of Africa) or when sufficiently large numbers of corpses wash up onto the Yemeni shores of the Arabian Sea. In both cases, they get little more than a few lines in obscure media.

The main route has also changed as a result of the war: while more than 70% of people crossed the Red Sea between 2010 and 2013, since then the figure has dropped to less than 20% with most heading for the Arabian Sea coast.

Who is heading for Yemen and why?

So why are more people still heading for Yemen than leaving?  Who are they? And why do thousands head for a country in the midst of an internationalised civil war where millions are starving?  Shouldn’t travel be in the other direction, with Yemenis trying to escape the disastrous conditions in their country?

Yemen is hardly ever the intended destination of these migrants. While travel to Saudi Arabia and the UAE via Oman used to be difficult in the past, travel conditions have become far more dangerous and expensive in recent years. At the beginning of the current decade, the Saudi regime built a fence along most of the border from the Red Sea coast eastwards to control immigration, and the situation has obviously worsened dramatically since the Saudi-led coalition has intervened in the civil war throughout the country since 2015. In 2018 the cost for getting from the southern Yemeni coast to Saudi Arabia was about USD 1200. But travelling to Saudi Arabia from east Africa via Yemen is significantly cheaper than reaching the southern coast of the Mediterranean, a trip costing at least USD 3000, a price which ignores possible ransoming and imprisonment by criminal gangs as well as the actual sea crossing.

AFP.