Word: yemen
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...throughout transit in order to keep the boat stable. Then, fearing the Yemeni coast guard, smugglers often dump their passengers overboard as the boats approach Yemeni territorial waters, forcing the refugees to swim the remaining distance to shore - sometimes well over a mile, according to UNHCR. (See pictures of Yemen's northern insurgency crisis...
...about 100 miles west of Aden, and in the urban slum of Bassatine. "They leave Somalia because of war and money troubles," says Abdel Kadir Hassan, a Somali community leader in Bassatine, who left Mogidishu in 1995 with 16 members of his family. "There is a government here in Yemen; in Somalia there is no government. We can have our farms and get what we need in our country, but there is no government...
...irony however, is that the Somalis who make up Hassan's community are fleeing one basket case country for what is increasingly another. "Yemen isn't a state - it's never been a fully functioning state in terms of a central government that actually provides services to its people," says one foreign aid official who wished to remain anonymous due the sensitivity of his job. For that reason, the residents of Bassatine say they're forced to rely on the generosity of community members and local NGOs to make ends meet; the government - though relatively welcoming, they say - simply...
Many others have, in the past, tried to journey on to the more lucrative promise of menial labor in neighboring Saudi Arabia. But an intensifying war on Yemen's Saudi border in recent months has made that option increasingly difficult. "Somalis used to smuggle themselves into Saudi Arabia," says Zakaria Omar, a Somali counselor for the international aid agency Doctors Without Borders. "But now there are a lot of armies on the border. People are searching for a better life here. When they arrive, they find the opposite of what they heard. But they have no choice - they have...
...Being a refugee in Yemen is a very unlucky situation," says Rocco Nuri, a UNHCR official in Aden. "Yemen is the poorest country in the region, one of the poorest countries in the world . . . [And] refugees are not even legally allowed to work in Yemen even though Yemen signed the 1961 refugee convention...