Part of the Balhaf gas liquefaction plant, shut down since the beginning of the war in 2015, was requisitioned by the United Arab Emirates.
On the coastal road linking eastern Yemen to the rest of the world, along the Gulf of Aden, the Balhaf factory looks like a spaceship on the beach. The French group Total is 39.6% shareholder of this huge gas complex, operated by the local company Yemen LNG. A gas liquefaction plant is attached to a port and a gas pipeline, which travels more than 300 km a desert plateau, to the production fields in the north of the country.
This industrial site was shut down in the spring of 2015, from the beginning of the war in Yemen. Total does not know when it will be able to relaunch exports to Asia of a factory that cost 4.3 billion euros, and which since 2009 has provided up to 45% of the budget revenue of the Yemeni state.
The surroundings are not safe: al-Qaeda jihadists have been there since 2015, then the United Arab Emirates army chased them, enlisting local tribal forces. Total and Yemen LNG want to be neutral, in this conflict which opposes many other actors and which has made 100,000 deaths since 2015, according to a count of the American NGO Acled. However, the war ended up interfering inside the industrial site itself, and by involving the French energy group.
For two years, testimonies collected by the organization Amnesty International, by the panel of experts on Yemen of the United Nations as well as by NGOs and activists Yemeni reported the existence of a place of detention in Balhaf administered by Emirati forces at a military base. It was built by the UAE in mid-2017 on part of Total's industrial site, requisitioned at the official request of the Yemeni government.
Settlements and arbitrary arrests
A report released Thursday (November 7th) by the Arms Observatory, SumOfUs and Friends of the Earth today supports this information, citing two new testimonies of prisoners, one of whom claims to have been beaten, denied treatment and threatened with death. in Balhaf. The world has collected two other concordant testimonies from an ex-prisoner and the family of a second, indicating that people were still locked in Balhaf in mid-2019.
The existence of a "Temporary detention cell" in the base is confirmed at World by an official of the Arab countries coalition led by Riyadh in Yemen. It would serve as an airlock for detainees transferred to Moukalla prison (east). It is part of a larger network. As early as 2017, the Associated Press and the NGO Human Rights Watch documented the existence of several unofficial places of detention in the hands of UAE forces and their Yemeni allies in the south of the country.
