Fleeing war, more than 500 Yemenis arrived earlier this year in an unlikely place — a tiny South Korean resort island. They’re hoping to…
Fleeing war, more than 500 Yemenis arrived earlier this year in an unlikely place — a tiny South Korean resort island. They’re hoping to be granted asylum so they can stay in South Korea, but as they wait on the island of Jeju, they’ve become the target of blistering backlash from South Koreans.
«I love Korea, really,» Ebrahim Qaid says. He is one of 561 Yemenis who arrived on Jeju earlier this year through the island’s policy of allowing most foreign nationals to enter without getting a visa in advance.
Qaid found work on a 29-ton boat in Hallim port, on Jeju’s northwestern shore. He’s taken to calling his Korean boss abogee, a term of endearment in Korean meaning «dad.»
«I was a student in Yemen,» Qaid says. «But because [of] the war, I need to work, help my family in Yemen.»
His work is helping abogee weld floorboards and make fixes before the ship heads back out to sea in a month. He and other Yemenis are doing the kind of jobs most Koreans don’t want.
«In Yemen, [we] don’t have work, don’t have anything. Don’t have hospital, don’t have lights. Four years, don’t have lights,» Qaid says.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights estimates that between March 2015 and August 2017, the war in Yemen killed more than 5,100 civilians and injured more than 8,700.
The country is teetering on the brink of famine. The U. N. has called it «the worst man-made humanitarian crisis of our time.»
Omar Al-wahaishi, another Yemeni in Jeju, says young men are being forced to choose sides and become conscripts. To avoid that, he fled.
«We refuse this kind of politics. We will not go fight, we don’t want to fight,» he says. «So if I go back to my city directly, I will be imprisoned or maybe executed.
