No calm waters for the Coast Guard
U.S. News senior writer Kevin Whitelaw recently visited Yemen, an impoverished Muslim nation on the Arabian Peninsula that became a surprising U.S. ally in the wake of September 11. The Yemeni government has made some impressive strides when it comes to fighting terrorism, despite a few serious lapses like an embarassing prison break last month when 23 al Qaeda prisoners escaped through a tunnel. But now, Yemen is facing questions about its own crisis, as mounting poverty, declining oil resources, and suffocating corruption combine to threaten the nation's democratic progress–and perhaps its very existence. Whitelaw spent time with Yemenis from all walks of life – those in government, security, business, and education, along with a few of Yemen's legion of unemployed.
ADEN, YEMEN—Trolling some of the world's wildest waterways, Yemen's nascent Coast Guard really has its work cut out for it.
First, there are the gunrunners. Then there are the immigrant smugglers, the drug traffickers, the illegal fishers, and the Somali pirates, not to mention any potential terrorists. Some sights are truly strange.
Maj. Shugaa al-Maadi, the Coast Guard's operations officer, recalls several dhows stuffed with illegal immigrants crossing the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden from Africa.
"They tried to hide the illegal immigrants in hiding places in the boats and store them with cattle or sheep," he says. "The smells of the animals cover the smells of the people."
The Coast Guard's reach, however, is still very limited. The two-year-old force has only about 1,000 people and 40 boats to cover some 1,500 miles of Yemen's coastline. (The U.S. Coast Guard has about 36,000 in uniform; the lower 48 states have 6,000 miles of coastline.)
"Unfortunately, the level of support from the United States, which is the most significant, is not in line with the scope of the problems facing the Coast Guard right now," says Brig. Gen. Ali Ahmed Rassea, the commander of the Coast Guard. "Because of the long coastline and limited number of forces and boats, we often can't reach a problem area quickly. We arrive too late." Their operations are largely confined to Aden harbor because they do not yet have large enough ships to operate comfortably on the open seas.
"We're not happy about it," says Col. Lotf al-Baraty, the Coast Guard's director in Aden. Still, in the harbor, their presence has helped reduce insurance premiums for ships using the port (imposed after the 2000 al Qaeda attack on the USS Cole), especially because they cooperate closely with the U.S. and other navies.
The Coast Guard is trying to expand, building several new bases spread out along the coastline. It's an ambitious plan, and it won't be easy. The sections of Yemen's coastline that smugglers use the most are usually the most remote parts of the country. These areas rarely have electricity or clean running water, meaning that all supplies would have to be trucked or shipped in from far away.
"We have a plan to ensure the security of the coastline in cooperation with the Americans to be completed by 2010," says Rashid Muhammad al-Alami, the interior minister.