Night after night, from September to May, Yemen’s wild, remote southern beaches provide the backdrop for a slow-burn humanitarian crisis.
Somali refugees stagger from the black sea in weak starlight. Some collapse on the sand flats, weak and exhausted. Others paddle in the silvery surf looking for plastic bags – thrown from the boat – containing their few belongings.
Shocked, hungry and dehydrated, these men and women are survivors of a gruelling and dangerous journey across the Gulf of Aden. They pay $100 to sail from Bossaso, on Somalia’s north coast, in tiny fishing vessels.
Passengers are loaded onto the boats like cattle and forced to squat for 36 hours on the open sea. They can only eat and drink what they can hold in their hands or carry in their pockets. If they move, they are beaten by brutal smuggling crews, who use random violence to control their human cargo.
Many passengers suffocate in the overcrowded hold or drown when they’re forced to jump from the boats and swim to the shoreline. Dead bodies wash up on the beaches and Yemeni fishermen bury the dead in the sand dunes.
