Yemen: The grass isn’t greener across the sea
Red Sea migrants are landing in Yemen’s cholera crisis – and then being blamed for it.
Haitham Alqaoud in Aden
After a 10-hour journey at sea, crammed into a boat with 40 others, a 16-year-old Oromo boy arrived feverish and utterly exhausted on Yemen’s shores. His sea journey had started in Djibouti, his land journey in Ethiopia.
The boat crew and owners abandoned their passengers at the coast and disappeared back into the sea, leaving them to walk inland into southwestern Yemen until they reached an area called Albasateen. There, “I became violently ill with diarrhea and vomiting,” the boy said.
A Yemeni man found the boy collapsed, and took him to a hospital in the port city of Aden, where he was diagnosed with cholera and placed in isolation until he recovered.
Battered by civil war since September 2014, The country’s health and sanitation services have collapsed, triggering multiple cholera outbreaks.
About 2.5-million people were infected with cholera in Yemen between 2016 and 2021, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Then, in the last three months of 2023, the disease surged in southern and eastern Yemen.
This part of the country is on the increasingly busy migration route used by people making the journey from the Horn of Africa to the Gulf ’s petrostates in search of a better life. The International Organisation for Migration says 97,210 African immigrants arrived in Yemen by boat in 2023. Many walked into southern Yemen’s cholera surge. By the end of 2023, migrants were estimated to constitute about 80% of the people catching cholera in that part of the country.
Scapegoats for ravages of war
But in Yemen, where anti-Black prejudice is commonplace, authorities and other citizens see the cholera-migration dynamic, or at least speak of it, the other way round: they say migrants aren’t catching cholera in Yemen, they’re bringing it in.
“Predictably, a pattern of scapegoating and stigma towards migrants has emerged,” said Lola Ibrahim, executive director of the Migrant, Immigrant and Refugee Rights Alliance.
Dr Ahmed Al-Bishi, who heads Aden’s health and population office, said that “the outbreak began with the arrival of African migrants from Lahj and Byan province in late 2023”.
It’s difficult to distinguish anti-migrant anxieties or prejudice from reliable public health analyses. While cholera outbreaks have been common in Yemen since 2016, none have been reported in Djibouti, the last port of departure for many of the migrants. At the same time, many start their journeys in Ethiopia which has faced sporadic outbreaks since August 2022.
But associating migrants with cholera colours how migrants are treated in hospitals and elsewhere.
“We frequently receive reports of harassment and discrimination from [the refugee] community. This can manifest in different ways such as being deprioritised for basic services,” said the UN Refugee Agency’s representative in Yemen, Maya Ameratunga.
“The health centre I went to offered inadequate care and treatment. The doctors displayed an aversion towards me, seemingly due to my Ethiopian origin,” said Hamza Adis, who left Ethiopia in November 2023 and was overwhelmed by cholera symptoms during his trek from Bab al-Mandab to Aden.
Adis was so frustrated by the care at the hospital that after receiving intravenous fluids he left for a friend’s home in Aden’s Al-Basateen area, enduring a difficult recovery. He survived his ordeal in Yemen – not all African migrants are so lucky.