High Commissioner Guterres visits refugee camp in Yemen

News Stories, 15 May 2008

© UNHCR/A.Etefa
High Commissioner Guterres meets a family that recently arrived in Yemen from Somalia across the Gulf of Aden.

KHARAZ REFUGEE CAMP, Yemen, May 15 (UNHCR) – UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres on Thursday called on the international community to step up their assistance for Somali refugees in Yemen during a visit to Kharaz Refugee Camp.

Guterres, kicking off a five-day official visit to Yemen, spoke to several refugees, visited new arrival areas and looked at shelters built with the help of the European Commission (EC). He was accompanied to the camp, located 140 kilometres, west of Aden, by Michele Cervone D'Urso, the European Union's chargé d'affaires in Yemen, and Yemeni government officials.

Kharaz hosts some 10,500 refugees, most of them from Somalia, and the High Commissioner spent time in one tent with members of a Somali family who arrived days ago in Yemen by boat from the port of Bossaso after making the dangerous crossing of the Gulf of Aden.

He also spoke to a 35-year-old Somali woman who paid US$100 a head to make the trip with her two sons. "We knew it was a dangerous journey, but we had little alternative; either to die in the war in Somalia or to take our chances and to try to cross [the Gulf of Aden] to the other side," she told Guterres. "I now worry about the families that we left behind."

A 41-year-old Somali man revealed that he had been stuck in Yemen for 18 years. "I am tired of the word refugee," he said to the High Commissioner, adding: "Some children were born in these camps and are now teenagers."

"It is impossible to come to Kharaz Camp without feeling something very strong about the plight of Somali refugees. Many of them have been living in these conditions for 16 years and unfortunately the outflow is growing. This year, more than 18,000 people have arrived in Yemen through the Gulf of Aden. The majority of them are Somalis and 400 have died in this dangerous journey," Guterres said.

"I appeal to the international community to step up their assistance and help, so that we are able to cope with this challenge and to be able to support these people as well as the government of Yemen, which has been extremely generous in receiving Somali refugees despite their limited resources," he added.

Guterres will attend a regional conference on "Refugee Protection and International Migration in the Gulf of Aden" in the Yemen capital, Sana'a, on Monday and Tuesday.

The regional conference is being convened by UNHCR in cooperation with the Mixed Migration Task Force for Somalia, composed of international agencies working in Somalia and funded by the EC. The objectives of the conference include establishing a regional mechanism and longer-term plan of action on refugee protection and mixed migration in the Gulf of Aden region.

During the visit he will also visit UNHCR's offices in Sana'a and Aden. He will also meet with urban refugees in Basateen in Aden, and visit UNHCR's reception centres along the southern coastline of Yemen.

At each stop, the High Commissioner will meet with Yemeni officials as well as with some of the Somalis and Ethiopians who have recently made the voyage across the Gulf of Aden in search of protection or a better life.

By Abeer Etefa in Kharaz Refugee Camp, Yemen

• DONATE NOW •

 

• GET INVOLVED • • STAY INFORMED •

Related stories by:

UNHCR country pages

Yemen Internal Displacement Update

Yemen Operational Update Winter 2014

Yemen Mixed Migration Update

Yemen's National Dialogue: IDPs' Voices and Views

UNHCR Yemen Fact Sheet

New Arrivals in Yemen - Comparison 2011-2014

Yemen Statistical Update

Flash Appeal for Yemen - April-June 2015 - 17APR15


The High Commissioner

António Guterres, who joined UNHCR on June 15, 2005, is the UN refugee agency's 10th High Commissioner.

Crossing the Gulf of Aden

Every year thousands of people in the Horn of Africa - mainly Somalis and Ethiopians - leave their homes out of fear or pure despair, in search of safety or a better life. They make their way over dangerous Somali roads to Bossaso in the northern semi-autonomous region of Puntland.

In this lawless area, smuggler networks have free reign and innocent and desperate civilians pay up to US$150 to make the perilous trip across the Gulf of Aden.

Some stay weeks on end in safe houses or temporary homes in Bossaso before they can depart. A sudden call and a departure in the middle of the night, crammed in small unstable boats. At sea, anything can happen to them - they are at the whim of smugglers. Some people get beaten, stabbed, killed and thrown overboard. Others drown before arriving on the beaches of Yemen, which have become the burial ground for hundreds who many of those who died en route.

Crossing the Gulf of Aden

Somalia/Ethiopia

In February 2005, one of the last groups of Somalilander refugees to leave Aisha refugee camp in eastern Ethiopia boarded a UNHCR convoy and headed home to Harrirad in North-west Somalia - the self-declared independent state of Somaliland. Two years ago Harrirad was a tiny, sleepy village with only 67 buildings, but today more than 1,000 people live there, nearly all of whom are former refugees rebuilding their lives.

As the refugees flow back into Somalia, UNHCR plans to close Aisha camp by the middle of the year. The few remaining refugees in Aisha - who come from southern Somalia - will most likely be moved to the last eastern camp, Kebribeyah, already home to more than 10,000 refugees who cannot go home to Mogadishu and other areas in southern Somalia because of continuing lawlessness there. So far refugees have been returning to only two areas of the country - Somaliland and Puntland in the north-east.

Somalia/Ethiopia

Flood Airdrop in Kenya

Over the weekend, UNHCR with the help of the US military began an emergency airdrop of some 200 tonnes of relief supplies for thousands of refugees badly hit by massive flooding in the Dadaab refugee camps in northern Kenya.

In a spectacular sight, 16 tonnes of plastic sheeting, mosquito nets, tents and blankets, were dropped on each run from the C-130 transport plane onto a site cleared of animals and people. Refugees loaded the supplies on trucks to take to the camps.

Dadaab, a three-camp complex hosting some 160,000 refugees, mainly from Somalia, has been cut off from the world for a month by heavy rains that washed away the road connecting the remote camps to the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. Air transport is the only way to get supplies into the camps.

UNHCR has moved 7,000 refugees from Ifo camp, worst affected by the flooding, to Hagadera camp, some 20 km away. A further 7,000 refugees have been moved to higher ground at a new site, called Ifo 2.

Posted in December 2006

Flood Airdrop in Kenya

High Commissioner Guterres Remarks on the resettlement of Refugees from Bhutan in NepalPlay video

High Commissioner Guterres Remarks on the resettlement of Refugees from Bhutan in Nepal

The UN refugee agency and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) marked a major milestone: the resettlement of over 100,000 refugees from Bhutan in Nepal to third countries since the launch of the programme in 2007.
Return to SomaliaPlay video

Return to Somalia

Ali and his family are ready to return to Somalia after living in Dadaab refugee camp for the past five years. We follow their journey from packing up their home in the camp to settling into their new life back in Somalia.
Turkey: World Refugee Day visitsPlay video

Turkey: World Refugee Day visits

On World Refugee Day the UNHCR High Commissioner, António Guterres, along with Special Envoy Angelina Jolie, travelled to southeastern Turkey, the home of hundreds of thousands of refugees from conflicts in Syria and Iraq. They were in the midyat refugee camp to see conditions for these people and to issue a warning to the world.