ReportageTrying to rally Saudi Arabia, thousands of African candidates for exile find themselves stranded in Yemen. They survive in very precarious conditions, at the mercy of the smugglers and the Houthi rebels.
Scraps of plastic cling to the graves, eight piles of stones bristling with thorny branches. Some blocks of schist bear an inscription: lines of blue paint sprayed. This cemetery, Ahmad Dabissi had it dug for his unfortunate “clients”, below an immense plateau of limestone rock, away from the main road which runs far away, towards the port of Aden.
At 29, Mr. Dabissi is an important smuggler in his province, Chabwa, in the desert south of Yemen. Every year, he embarks thousands of migrants from the Horn of Africa at the Somali port of Bossasso. They cross from one continent to another, across the Gulf of Aden, and attempt to cross warring Yemen to reach Eden: neighboring Saudi Arabia.
Mr. Dabissi removed these eight bodies from the morgue and the Yemeni police to bury them in a discreet place. They are Ethiopians, Christians, from the Tigray region, according to the smuggler, who claims to have tried to have them identified by other clients. “I didn’t do it for the money, he insists, but not to lose their confidence. “ In his native village of Rafat, Mr. Dabissi maintains another, much larger cemetery.
According to a partial count by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), 139,000 people had taken this route in 2019. Nearly 90% come from Ethiopia, a state subject to multiple regional conflicts and threatened with dislocation. But, in 2020, this flow has almost dried up: the number of travelers has fallen to 37,000. Borders and checkpoints have been sealed off because of the Covid-19 pandemic. The various authorities in Yemen, in the grip of a civil war since 2015, accuse migrants of peddling the disease. This makes them suspects and targets. Cheated, confused, they wait in the outskirts of the big cities of Aden and Marib, or in Chabwa.
Many still hope to pass. Some are looking to return home. “If you still have enough money, you go back home to Ethiopia”, sighs Ahmad Omar, 29. Coming from the region of Wollo, in northeastern Ethiopia, he has lived for the past eight months in several hideouts in Chabwa. He dreams of paying, for 75 euros, a return ticket to Djibouti, the second transit country on the African coast. The crossing is dangerous: around twenty people drowned there in two shipwrecks at the end of 2020.
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