Migrants

a journey in Yemen

January 2025

A rise in the popularity of right wing parties throughout Europe is associated with demonisation and hatred for immigrants. The leader of Germany's far right AfD party, Alice Weidel, is 'interviewed' by Elon Musk. Musk grew up in apartheid South Africa and remigrated to Canada at the age of 17 before moving on again to the USA. Weidel is the granddaughter of Hans Weidel, a Nazi judge appointed by Adolf Hitler. He joined the SS in 1939. Alice is a migrant too. She lives in Switzerland with her lesbian Sri Lankan partner. The AfD are opposed to same-sex marriage, the display of rainbow symbols on government buildings and immigration.

In 1996 I travelled through Ethiopia, Djibouti and Yemen. By November I had landed in Aden on the southern tip of Arabia, arriving by ship from Djibouti. From there I wanted to go north into the remote mountains of Yafa and start walking. But finding information about Yafa proved tricky. I was spending my time chewing qat (sometimes written khat), the leaves of a small tree native to Ethiopia, collecting experiences that would become my first book, Eating the Flowers of Paradise. The journey to Yafa is covered by that book in detail, but looking back through my notebooks I find events and fragments of conversations that I left out. Now they seem more poignant than three decades ago.

Aden

In one qat session I ask the men about Yafa.

"It's high mountains to the north," says one, "And very cold."

I don't attach much significance to this opinion. The average Adeni suffers frost bite when you put an ice cube in their Seven Up.

"I have a Yafa'i friend," says another man, delicately picking a few tiny qat leaves from a short stem and nibbling at them. "In the war he stole a Russian tank from the al-Anad military base and drove it back to Yafa. Eventually he reached a military checkpoint between Lower Yafa and Upper Yafa. The guards stepped forward and asked him, 'Any weapons?' He said, 'No.' And they waved him through."

The room rocks with laughter. Yemenis love stories about ignorant tribesmen almost as much as they like tales of truculent rascals who steal weapons and escape to the mountains. One favourite is that a couple of friends with a Toyota pickup truck stole a Mig-27 fighter jet and towed it into the mountains where it became playground equipment for the village kids. Of all the truculent mountain rascals in Yemen, the Yafa people have the greatest reputation. No one I speak to can agree on where Yafa actually might be located, but all are unanimous on the fact that Yafa fought hard against the British and the communists, except when they didn't. There is no doubt either, that they are famously hospitable, although sometimes hostile and unfriendly. And there can be absolutely no question that they are trustworthy, as long as you never turn your back on them. After all my investigations into Yafa and its people, I feel as ignorant as when I started.

The best solution, I reckon, is to go and see for myself, but I've just come by boat from Africa and I am physically knackered. I have a split lip, a sore foot and an infected eye. It takes a fortnight of soporific qat sessions and lazing on sweaty mattresses before I can summon up the energy, and courage, to set off for Yafa.

I first get a bus to Sheikh Othman, a town at the end of the causeway that leads to Aden. There I ask and am directed to a battered old Landcruiser, gathering dust in the corner of the bus station. This, apparently, is the transport to Yafa. After all the talk of mystery and remoteness, this seems a bit too easy. I am the last passenger required by the shared taxi, so as soon as I settle into the back seat, we set off.

It is only after some time that I realise the man sitting next to me is not Yemeni. He's wearing Yemeni clothes and sports a fine beard, but Sergei is Russian. "What are you doing, going to Yafa?" he asks in halting English, "In one year I never saw a another foreigner in Yafa." He's a surgeon working at the hospital in Labus, our destination.

We are soon bouncing up stony tracks. The landscape is a dessicated corpse, its ribs sticking out. Sergei tells me how he had been sent by the Soviet authorities to tend the sick in their political and military allies, first Tunisia, then Niger, and finally, The People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, the official name for communist South Yemen. But when he arrived, totally unprepared, the Yemenis decided they didn't want a Russian anywhere near a major population centre and sent him to Yafa where he was the only foreigner. It was the Yemeni equivalent of Siberian exile. Only no one told Sergei. For two weeks he thought he was working in the major Yemeni city of Lahej, and only later discovered that he was in a forgotten backwater called Yafa. The journey up to this mountain fastness had been a baffling series of car changes so he really had no idea where he was.

His salary was supposed to be $1,000 a month, but it had never been paid in full, sometimes not at all. During his years of foreign service the Soviet Union had disappeared, South Yemen had disappeared and communism had disappeared, but Sergei remains. He got a letter telling him that his wife back in Moscow had left him. He never hears from his daughter. He would like to visit Russia, but there is a problem. He shows me his passport. No stamps. Officially, he is not even here.

We stop at a restaurant, eat lunch and buy qat. Now the entire car settles down to enjoy the afternoon, the landscape unfolding before us. One man, loves that I am British because he gets to tell all his anti-British stories. "When we were fighting the British in Aden there was one regiment we called The Bastards. They wore a cap with a string hanging down behind."

I think he means the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders whose notoriously violent behaviour did a lot to foster anti-British sentiment during the independence struggle of the 1960s.

"One morning they lined us all up along the Causeway with our hands on our heads. One man was chewing paan (betel nut) and when he reached into his pocket for more, they shot him dead."

We pass a Landcruiser pickup, lurching its way up to the pass, its cab covered in a vast load of straw, the back packed with sheep and goats stoically waiting for their ordeal to end. The mountainsides get so steep that the terraces are only a couple feet wide. The soil has taken generations to gather and in it stand qat and coffee trees.

The driver, Omar, has a fine Arab face with green eyes. He points out a side track to his village and a particular rock standing over a bend in the road. "When I was a boy, we were at war with the tribe on this side. Cross the boundary and you could be shot."

The track really starts to climb and Omar slips the car into four-wheel drive, a rare event in Yemen despite many roads being outrageously rough and steep. Eventually we lurch out on to a high plateau where there's a shabby roadside settlement called 'Chance'. Then we arrive in Labus, our destination.

I ask about a hotel and they all laugh. There is no hotel. "You will stay with me," says Sergei.

He has a three-room apartment attached to the hospital. The sink is full of dirty pots. There is a sofa, an armchair and television. I chew my qat while Sergei polishes off a few cans of Heineken that he's smuggled up from Aden. He does not chew qat. He likes vodka and cognac but rarely gets it.

"This is a country within a country," he says, "They have Kalashnikovs but no work."

He fetches a stack of blankets. "Later it will get cold." I'm already shivering.

At eight Sergei is up, making date sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs with strong coffee. By nine we are on his ward round at the hospital, pushing through a crowd of people at the gate all demanding his attention.

There is a man whose knee has been shot off. He's making excellent progress. There are so many gunshot and shrapnel injuries that it seems like a warzone. Once, Sergei tells me, a stock of explosives went off in a shop and he had to do ten amputations. One man lost both legs but a week later he left hospital alive. "When a bomb goes off, there are so many rocks that a lot of my work is to remove rock shrapnel."

We are interrupted by a youth brandishing two X-rays. Sergei examines them, muttering in Russian, holding the plates up to the light. "Terrible. Double fracture. Bring her quickly or I will have to amputate."

He has two operations to do this afternoon: shrapnel removal and a hernia. There are two women accompanying the old man with the hernia. Both women are completely veiled in black. One waves a gloved hand at me, "Are you British?" Her accent is filled with the soft soupy glumness of the West Midlands.

I am astonished. "You're a Brummie!"

"No way. Wolverhampton me."

Yafa exports people, and they remit money. They rarely come back. She had been sent for marriage. Not all the women are so drab in their dress. One stooping old woman shuffles in, escorted by her son. She's dressed in a bright yellow and green dress tied at the waist with a red chiffon scarf whose ends touch the ground. She wears gloves trimmed with fake fur and a head-scarf topped with a tiara of Christmas tinsel. Her face is a vivid yellow, painted with a traditional concoction to protect it from the sun. When she looks up at me, it's like seeing a full moon rise. An old man arrives wearing a black and yellow striped blazer, white shirt, purple checked futa (sarong) fringed with yellow pom-poms, orange long johns and white trainers. He points a finger at me and makes machine gun noises, grinning widely. Later I'm told he is dumb, but he is trying to tell me how his village was bombed by a British warplane during the independence war.

"Does he hate the British?"

"Oh no, he loves the British."

At lunch Sergei and I head down to the market where we eat chips with tomato ketchup and drink milky tea out of cups and saucers. The cafe owner had worked in a steel factory in Sheffield. Outside men are selling guns and ammunition from the backs of trucks. I can hear steady gunfire plus a few loud explosions, but no one else seems to notice. Sergei shrugs it off. "That's normal here. They say the day begins when the Kalashnikov starts crying." At every possible excuse people fire their weapons. At weddings, he tells me, it's common to settle a few scores. "One wedding gave me four operations."

Sergei has to go and get ready for surgery now and I'm invited to chew qat with the hospital's director of nursing. The hospital guard joins us, leaving his AK47 in the corner. "I went to your country many years ago," he tells me. "It was very nice. I stayed with our sheikh who lives in a place called Birming Jam. The streets were clean and when you asked for directions people helped you."

What most impressed him, however, was the communications. "The sheikh's front door had a small door in it. Every day they would bring letters to his house and push them through that small door. Then the sheikh would open the envelopes and read the letters." He shakes his head in disbelief. "Such organisation!"

Next day I'm invited to chew qat in a village 15 km away. The car has an alarming tendency to leap to the left. The tyres are completely bald of tread, the canvas showing through in places. Our party grows. One man points out a house. "That was a Jewish house until 1948 We were all mixed up. There was no segregation. What fools they were to go to Israel when Yemen was their home."

After a long delay for a puncture - there is no spare tyre - we reach a village and enter the house of a local historian. "Aha!" he greets me enthusiastically, "Captain Haines! You have come. God be praised!"

Haines was the British officer who annexed Aden for the East India Company in 1839. The historian's father, a sprightly 70 year-old, arrives. "The last big event in Yemen was the bursting of the Mar'ib Dam 1500 years ago," he says, "That's when people came here to Yafa."

I tell him that I've visited the impressive ruins of the dam, out on the fringes of the Empty Quarter, perhaps 200 miles to the North-East of Yafa. Construction has been dated back to 1700 BC and its final collapse, brought on by failure to do repairs, is usually put at around 575 AD.

"The people came here and founded a Himyaritic kingdom," said the old man. "There are statues and relics that we know about, but we say nothing in case the extremists destroy them. We were Jews for a while, but then became Muslims."

I'm chuckling at this, the breezy demolition of the idea that Jews and Arabs are fundamentally separate peoples. He's shocked when I point it out.

"Oh no. We were all Jews once. I'm writing a history of our land and have over 200 pages finished."

The son is astonished. "What?! You never said a word to me!"

The other men are discussing the future of the country. One says. "There is a poet, al-Baradouni who is blind and his face scarred by smallpox. When people ask him about the future of Yemen, he says, 'It's written in my face.'"

When I get back to the hospital and Sergei's apartment, I find him drinking Cinzano on his own, watching an Egyptian soap on TV with the sound off. It is his daughter's birthday, but all he knows is that she is in Odessa. He pours me a drink. He's in maudlin mood. "Look at me. I'm old and my Russian diploma is worthless in Europe. In Russia now, only criminals are successful."

He pours more Cinzano. "My first teacher in surgery said a good surgeon can work after one litre of cognac."

He grew up on the Arctic Ocean island of Novoya Zemlya. "In summer it was beautiful. Birds would arrive from the south. Wonderful. But in winter, not so good."

His hope now is to save a bit of money and open a private clinic in Yafa. Maybe one day he can marry again. What does he think, I ask, of Yafa?

He considers the question for some time before answering. "They are good people." He pauses. "And sometimes not good. Like people everywhere. And I like them."

I ask how old he is and he answers: "I am very old," he says, "I'm forty-one."

At this we both start laughing.