40 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021
Yemen. When Saudi Arabia entered
the conflict, it predicted that fighting
would last six weeks; instead, it has en-
dured for more than six years. During
the war, other regional actors, such as
the U.A.E., have flexed their military
muscle. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Pen-
insula has maintained a foothold in the
south of the country. A secessionist
group called the Southern Transitional
Council holds Aden. It is extremely un-
likely that the Yemen of 2014 will ever
be put back together.
The consequences for civilians have
been devastating. Both the Houthis
and the Saudi-led coalition are alleged
to have committed many war crimes.
The Saudi air campaign has been reck-
lessly conducted, and has killed thou-
sands of civilians, including children.
The Houthi regime has used child sol-
diers, deployed banned antipersonnel
mines, and fired indiscriminately into
civilian areas. Meanwhile, a sea-and-
land blockade of Houthi-controlled
areas by the coalition has contributed
to life-threatening shortages of food,
medicine, and fuel.
Recently, the outlook for Yemen has
deteriorated further. Although fierce
fighting continues—particularly in
Marib, one of Yemen’s largest oil
fields—foreign-aid donations have
proved unreliable, partly because the
pandemic has strained resources. In
March, Britain halved its contributions
to Yemen. Andrew Mitch-
ell, a former minister for
international development,
said that the reduction in
spending would “condemn
hundreds of thousands of
children to starvation.”
T
he crew of the Safer has
watched the unfolding
catastrophe in Yemen with
mounting despair. Chemie-
Tech’s onshore facility has been aban-
doned, and soldiers plundered much of
the machinery and materials at the ter-
minal. The Houthi capture of Sana’a also
grievously wounded sepoc. According
to Alobaly, the accountant, the Houthis
appropriated the company’s entire oper-
ating budget—about a hundred and ten
million dollars. The annual sum spent
on the Safer dropped from twenty mil-
lion dollars to zero.
By the end of 2015, all but one of the
expatriate workers on the ship had evac-
uated. Tugboats, helicopters, and other
vessels that serviced the Safer were with-
drawn, and a team of divers who spe-
cialized in underwater repairs returned
to their base city of Dubai. sepoc hired
a local fishing boat to transport a Ye-
meni crew to and from the ship. Once
the war started, the American Bureau
of Shipping could no longer access the
vessel for inspections. According to
Lloyd ’s List, the ship has been uninsured
since September, 2016.
The fuel oil for the boilers soon began
to run low. sepoc had normally spent
five million to eight million dollars on
boiler fuel every year. The company no
longer had the budget for this, and in
any case the type of fuel used to run the
boilers was in short supply amid the
war. The crew began to use the boilers
only intermittently, to maintain the
inert-gas and fire-response systems.
By 2017, the boiler system’s fuel sup-
ply had been exhausted. The crew con-
sidered using crude from the Safer’s
own tanks but decided that the risk of
an explosion was too high, because the
crude might emit dangerous gas. They
also understood that once the boilers
stopped they would probably not func-
tion safely again without significant
repairs. The normal process for “lay-
ing up” boilers of such a size requires
preservatives, known as oxygen scav-
engers, to be placed in the
tank, in order to prevent
corrosion. The sepoc em-
ployees on the Safer had
no scavengers.
sepoc, which was in
debt to ChemieTech for the
abandoned onshore-termi-
nal project, grew financially
desperate, and attempted to
sell the Safer for sixty mil-
lion dollars. But nobody was
interested in a forty-year-old, uninsur-
able rust bucket anchored in the world’s
hottest conflict zone.
By 2018, with the vessel now a dead
ship and the area around Hodeidah
overwhelmed by vicious fighting, vir-
tually nobody was left on board the
Safer except for a chief engineer, an
electrician, two mechanics, a cook, and
a cleaner. The team was swapped out
with another one every month or so—if travel to Ras Issa was feasible. The
million barrels of oil were stored in the
ship’s central tanks, along its spine, and
sepoc managers had filled the ship’s
outside tanks with seawater, to miti-
gate the threat of a bullet piercing the
hull and causing an explosion. If there
were a fire on the ship, it would be im-
possible to control, because the Safer’s
water pumps had been powered by the
boiler system. In any case, there was
now insufficient manpower to operate
the ship’s fire stations.I
n early 2018, the official government
of Yemen and the Houthi leadership
wrote separately to the U.N. Secretary-
General, asking for assistance with solv-
ing the Safer crisis. The problem fell
outside the U.N.’s normal remit. Resolv-
ing the issue required arcane technical
knowledge, and the Safer was part of
Yemen’s private sector. The U.N. does
not like to become too entangled with
commercial entities.
Nevertheless, the U.N. passed along
the task to John Ratcliffe, the Yemen
specialist who works in the Office for
the Coordination of Humanitarian Af-
fairs. He told me that his division is “very
good at setting up in-country humani-
tarian operations, mobilizing funding,
and all of these kinds of things,” adding,
“ We ’re not experts on oil tankers.” Nev-
ertheless, Ratcliffe’s office began work-
ing with the U.N. Office for Project Ser-
vices, which could procure necessary
hardware and expertise, and with the
U.N.’s special envoy to Yemen, a Brit
named Martin Griffiths.
In December, 2018, the warring par-
ties in Yemen met in Stockholm to sign
a partial deal, which Griffiths had bro-
kered. A key breakthrough of the Stock-
holm Agreement, as the accord was called,
concerned the Hodeidah port. In the
months before the summit, there had
been a brutal fight for control of the city.
Given the dire ramifications for the whole
country if the port was closed, both sides
agreed to a ceasefire in Hodeidah, and
at the nearby ports of Salif and Ras Issa.
The warring parties have since discarded
many provisions of the Stockholm Agree-
ment, but the port of Hodeidah has stayed
open, averting a nationwide famine.
The relative peace near Hodeidah
seemed to present the U.N. with an op-
portunity to solve the Safer crisis. The