The wretched people fleeing across the sea to East Africa are the most visible sign of the suffering that the escalation of the Yemen conflict is causing the population. There are reports of more than 3,000 boat refugees and, according to UN estimates, the number could rise to more than 10,000 in the coming months. One destination of the dangerous crossing is Djibouti.
The escape leads via the Bab al-Mandab Strait, which is threatened by the Houthi rebels and is the focus of concern, especially because of its strategic relevance for the global economy. The Yemenis who have fled have completely different concerns. Many were only able to take a few belongings with them, some only the clothes they were wearing.
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“How could I just sit there while my children scream and shake in fear?” a refugee fisherman from a Yemeni coastal town recently told the BBC. He fled from the falling bombs.
Shelter in already overcrowded camps
In total, more than 132,000 people have been displaced by violence in recent weeks, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The numbers are therefore constantly increasing. According to consistent reports, they are more or less exclusively fleeing the combat zone. The Houthi rebels and forces of the internationally recognized government are fighting each other on several fronts. The latter are part of a military alliance led by Saudi Arabia and receive support from the Saudi Air Force.
The armed confrontation flared up again at the beginning of September. The Houthis launched a campaign of conquest and brought the Yemeni west coast under their control. They also conquered islands in the Red Sea. The fighting is currently focused primarily on the remaining bastions of the Houthi opponents in the north: the strategically located population center of Taizz and Marib, where a large part of the modest oil reserves of desperately poor Yemen are located.
“Taizz remains the epicenter of the crisis,” says a recent report by the UN refugee agency UNHCR. More than 60 percent of all displaced people come from there. Many families are forced to remain within the province itself because they cannot reach safer places due to ongoing fighting, closed roads or lack of transport and fuel. The UN organization also warns that the situation of internally displaced people is becoming increasingly serious. They are forced to seek shelter in already overcrowded camps. Even before the current escalation of violence, there were more than 5.2 million internally displaced people in Yemen, according to the UN. Aid organizations and Western diplomats have long said that budgets are too tight to meet the humanitarian challenges.
“Now everything will be even more difficult and more expensive”
These are getting bigger and bigger. “Almost exclusively the frontline areas are still directly affected by the escalated violence - but it doesn't have to stay that way if the conflict continues,” warns a representative of the organization “Civilian Impact Monitoring Project” (CIMP), which deals with the effects of the conflict on the Yemeni population. The organization's interlocutors cannot be quoted by name; She has local sources and acts discreetly because her work is sometimes politically sensitive. “But the indirect effects on the population are also large, for example the consequences for the already devastated economy, which continues to come to a standstill,” explains the CIMP expert.
Prices would rise because transporting goods across the country had become even more difficult because of the war. The checkpoints on Yemen's internal borders in particular are becoming increasingly difficult to pass because it is no longer primarily about bribes, but rather about military control. Imports are also becoming more and more complicated. The freedom of movement of people themselves is also enormously restricted.
Need and poverty were already great in Yemen before the new escalation. The internationally recognized government, based in the southern Yemeni port city of Aden, has been unable to provide the population with basic services such as regular electricity. And there was also huge economic pressure to survive in the Houthi territory in northwest Yemen. “The threat of air strikes is manageable, but you can always hear drones in the sky,” says a businessman from the capital Sanaa, where the Iranian-backed rebel movement has ruled since September 2014. “People can still go about their daily business.”
Worry about indoctrinating an entire generation
But economic life in the Houthi territory was already in a severe crisis before the war. “Now everything will be even more difficult and more expensive.” The Houthis, who rule with a hard hand, don't like hearing things like that. According to several observers, the wars of the past few years have served them well because they distracted from this malaise, a weak point in their paranoid rule.
There does not appear to be an imminent end to the violence in sight, and Yemeni observers see forces at work on both sides that pay little attention to the suffering of the people. “The civilian population is trapped in plain sight in this conflict,” says the CIMP representative. A Yemeni from the country's educated circles, who also did not want to be quoted by name, sees a long-term risk of the never-ending war: the continued brutalization of society.
The Houthi rebels indoctrinated children and young people in summer camps with their radical, anti-Israel and anti-American ideology, the man says. And even in the ranks of their opponents, loyalty is preached instead of critical thinking. And hatred instead of reconciliation in the country's many old conflicts. “We risk losing an entire generation of young people who are being radicalized by ideas steeped in violence.”
