Risky trip [Archives:2006/927/Community]
Sadat Mohamed Geesh
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As we know, there is always some very hazardous trip for which only the Horn African refugees pay the price while crossing the 300km Gulf of Aden. In the latest one approximately 400 desperate refugees lost their lives, during the two months of the last year. It's running from Death and drowning to death that seems to be the day to day activity in that Sea of Death.
We have heard the calls of the International Human Rights organizations expressing their deep concern about that tragedy and as usual this does not change the ways or the reasons which causes the death of these desperate refugees. In 1992, the first was the Goobweyn Ship which was the first to sail from Somali to Yemen during the onset of the civil war in Somalia. The explanations given were in reference to the poor infrastructure of both the source (Somalia) and target (Yemen) countries making it impossible to contain that everlasting human tragedy on one hand, and the unwillingness of the International Community to effectively address the root cause of the problem on the other hand.
We believe as Somali refugee intellectuals in Yemen that if the International Community does not take preventive and responsive steps towards these desperate Horn African refugees there will be a real human disaster during the upcoming months.
This has a few explanations:
– The prolonged drought that hit the south west of Somalia has had a wide impact on the great new influx to Yemen predicated for the upcoming months. This is particularly true for the region of Gedo in Southern Somalia, hardest-hit by the regional drought that has also affected neighboring Ethiopia and its epicenter in northern Kenya
– People living mainly from rearing cattle sold to their Kenyan neighbors to buy grain; their animals had started dying by the hundred and thousands.
– Inter-ethnic clan fighting has worsened as rival clans battled for the few remaining water points in the barren region, just as aid workers said: The crisis was as much a water crisis as it was food crises
– Somalis are fed up and carry little hope that the current federal government will work out its differences, restoring law and order
I was told by one of the new arrivals that he fled from Somalia- in particular the south-west region of Gedo after he had seen all his cows killed by famine, “So I have determined instead of dying like the animals
