Yemen getting tougher with Somalis on Qaeda fears

ADEN, Yemen (Reuters) - Somalis fleeing war have long found refuge in Yemen, seen as a way station to Saudi Arabia, but fear of al Qaeda infiltration has cooled their welcome."Because we are Somali refugees, we're suspicious," complained Ali Mohamed Othman, an unemployed man in the dusty Basateen slum in Yemen's southern port city of Aden.Yemeni authorities have been on alert since Somalia's hardline Islamist rebel group al-Shabaab, already battling an interim Somali government at home, said last month it was ready to send fighters to help al Qaeda in Yemen."After the (Shabaab) remarks we've taken several measures such as to limit refugees' movements to other provinces," said Major Ahmed al-Humaiqani, head of Basateen police station.Refugees now get fingerprinted and their pictures registered in a central computer to help track their movements.A failed December 25 attempt to blow up a U.S. airliner, claimed by an al Qaeda group in Yemen, heightened Western and Saudi fears that militants will exploit state weakness in the impoverished southern Arabian country to prepare new attacks.Yemen, which has traditionally had close ties with Somalia, has given prima facie refugee status to all Somalis escaping the clan strife and famine that engulfed the Horn of Africa country after warlords toppled President Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991.
It has offered no such favors to a growing influx of Ethiopians and Eritreans, often detaining them on arrival and deporting them, according to the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR.Yemen hosts 171,000 registered refugees, mostly Somalis, according to UNHCR figures for December, up from 140,300 a year earlier. Many more unregistered Somalis are thought to roam there, most of them hoping to move to richer Gulf countries.
After surviving a two-day voyage across the Gulf of Aden in a small boat, Shafir Abdullah dreams only of work in Saudi Arabia, which shares a 1,500 km (937 mile) border with Yemen."I don't have a job, but I wash cars sometimes," said the 25-year-old from the anarchic Somali capital Mogadishu, as he sat with friends in Basateen. "I am saving for Saudi."Yemen itself is mired in poverty. With more than 40 percent of its 23 million people living on below $2 a day, it has few resources to cope with the human tide from the Horn of Africa.

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