Detained African Migrants Face Harsh Conditions In Yemen's Aden

Local Editor

Thousands of illegal African immigrants and asylum-seekers detained by security authorities in Yemen's southern port city of Aden are facing miserable humanitarian conditions.

The Yemeni security authorities continued with a detention campaign which began several days ago and succeeded in gathering about 4,700 illegal immigrants at a sports stadium in the neighborhood of Mansourah.

Local activists told Xinhua that the detained illegal African immigrants face harsh living conditions for lack of basic necessities such as water and food.

Ahmed Azany, an Aden-based youth activist, said local charity organizations are unable to provide the large numbers of detained African migrants with food, clean drinking water and other basic necessities.

"The number of detained migrants increases every day as the security authorities are continuing to arrest Africans entering the country illegally," he added.

"Thousands are now locked up at the temporary detention center suffering from hunger and diseases with no presence of international refugee agencies to support them," Azany noted.

Khalid Hazam, a health worker, said some illnesses were recorded among the migrants because of bad sanitary conditions at the sports stadium, which is scattered with rubbish and lacks toilets.

Aden's security chief Shalal Shalal Ali Shayea announced on Wednesday that African migrants and asylum seekers in detention centers in the city began a hunger strike.

He urged the UN migration agency and other refugee aid groups to help rescue the detained African migrants who are refusing food and water.

A source of Aden's local regime said active smugglers along the Yemeni coasts are the main reason behind the migrant crisis in Aden.

The recent proliferation of illegal immigrants from African countries will merely add fuel to the fire as Yemen is currently at a devastating war that has entered its fifth year, the regime source told Xinhua.

Meanwhile, residents living near Mansourah's sports stadium demanded the Interior Ministry in the resigned regime if former Yemeni President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi transfers the detained African migrants to specialized camps outside Aden.

"Fears are growing as the spread of diseases among the detained migrants might affect our residential neighborhood," they said in a statement.

Statistics show more than 36,000 African migrants arrived in Yemen during the first three months of 2019.

Thousands of African illegal immigrants looking for a better life were using Yemen as a transit point to their final destination: Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.

Notably, scores of illegal immigrants from Somalia and Ethiopia have died off the coast of Yemen in recent months.
Yemen has been plagued in a civil war between the Hadi resigned regime forces and the country’s popular Houthi Ansarullah revolutionaries since late 2014, which has killed tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians, in the impoverished Arab country.

The long-running conflict has caused the world's worst humanitarian crisis. Currently, some 24 million Yemenis, or 80 percent of the population, need humanitarian aid and protection, with some 20 million lacking security of food, according to the United Nations.

Source: Xinhua, Edited by Website Team