THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021 43
iment remained on the Saudi shore-
line. One of the two senior Saudi offi-
cials, Mohammed Qurban, who heads
a government group called the National
Center for Wildlife, told me that his
organization continues to chronicle the
toxic effects of the 1991 spill.
Faqeeha sounded fatalistic when he
talked about the Safer. He said that it
would be much better to address the
problem before a spill occurred, but added
that he was basically powerless to do
so. “We hope for the best, and prepare
for the worst,” he said.
I
f every party were committed to a
resolution of the crisis, all the oil could
be removed from the Safer within a
month or so. Another tanker could berth
next to the ship and—while pumping
inert gas into the Safer’s oil tanks—
suck out its Marib crude. After that, a
decision on the fate of the Safer could
be made without fears of a spill, a fire,
or an explosion. There are many scrap
yards where the ship could be disas-
sembled, so that its parts could be sold.
Yet the Houthis have frustrated the
U.N.’s attempts to take any steps to-
ward removing the oil, despite having
begged the organization for help in
- What do the Houthis want, then?
In July, I spoke to Ebrahim Alser-
aji, who had led the Houthis’ technical
negotiations with the U.N., until the
talks were cancelled in the spring. He
said that the Houthis were anxious to
resolve the standoff, but not at any cost.
They wished to “maintain the economic
value” currently in place in the Ho-
deidah region. In other words, they
wanted to keep using the Safer as an
offshore terminal—or at least to have
another ship moored in the same po-
sition, with the same volume of oil on
board. The estimated worth of the Saf-
er’s current payload of oil is about sixty
million dollars. While we spoke, the
Houthis were fighting the coalition for
control of the oil fields in Marib. Als-
eraji could imagine a future in which a
de-facto Houthi state in northern
Yemen could generate significant rev-
enue by exporting oil from Ras Issa.
Nevertheless, he said, the Houthis were
“open to all solutions” from any party—
except Israel.
I asked Alseraji why it had not been
possible to arrange an inspection of the
Safer. U.N. sources told me that the
Houthis had made unreasonable de-
mands, such as asking for their own
divers to accompany those hired by the
U.N., and that they had wanted more
and more maintenance to be performed
on a ship that appears to be unsalvage-
able. Alseraji claimed that the U.N. had
reneged on several promises, and had
“not been transparent.”
Around the time that the most re-
cent set of talks was cancelled, one of
the clan’s leaders, Mohammed Ali al-
Houthi, tweeted, in Arabic, “If, God
forbid, an environmental catastrophe
occurred with the explosion of the Safer,
the world will stop not for a week, as
it did in Suez, but will stop for a long
time. And it will stop the navigation of
Navy vessels and others. We hold the
U.N. accountable.”
Ratcliffe, of the U.N., admitted to
me, “It’s very discouraging to read those
kinds of comments.” He explained that
the U.N. would keep trying to find a
solution, but that he wasn’t sure how to
end the impasse with the Houthis over
their demand that any inspection be
accompanied by extensive repairs. “They
would like to see something that’s closer
to essentially a renovation of the ves-
sel,” Ratcliffe said. “You can understand
why that’s their perspective. But what
we have been trying to say to them over
these many months is that we don’t
even know what the conditions are like
on board. And it’s a very dangerous
site.... We don’t feel like we can offer
that kind of solution reliably without
knowing what we’re dealing with.”
Ratcliffe framed the tension between
the Houthis and the U.N. negotiators
primarily in terms of safety. But, through
other sources close to the negotiations,
I learned that the U.N. does not have
enough money to refurbish the ship.
The U.N.’s response to the Safer crisis
has been funded by a consortium of
donor nations: the Netherlands, the
U.K., France, Germany, Norway, and
Sweden. An assessment mission would
likely cost about ten million dollars. A
thorough renovation of the ship would
cost upward of fifty million dollars.
Finding a supertanker to replace the
Safer, and converting it into a floating
storage-and-off-loading unit, could cost
even more. The consortium of donors
has so far been unwilling to commit to
these higher sums. Their reluctance is
understandable: it’s impossible to know
if the Houthis would accept this solu-
tion, even if the donor nations found
the money.
T
his summer, in Riyadh, I met with
Mohammed al-Jaber, the Saudi
Ambassador to Yemen. Jaber is fifty-
one, with a gap-toothed smile and a
direct manner. He has spent consider-
able time in Yemen, first as the Saudi
defense attaché. He insisted repeatedly
that Houthi leaders took their cues
from Iran, and that their obstruction
in the Safer crisis was nothing more
than a callous power play. He said of
the port, “Hodeidah is being treated
as a hostage.” (When I mentioned
Saudi Arabia’s many lethal incursions
into Yemen, he looked resigned and
said, “We don’t want to fight.”)
Many people involved with the
U.N.’s attempt to solve the Safer crisis
took similar, if more nuanced, positions
against the Houthi leadership. None,
apart from Ratcliffe, were permitted to
speak on the record. One view was
that the more the international com-
munity fixated on protecting the Safer
the more strategically valuable the
ship became to the Houthis. Yemen
was a failed state. At some point, the
Houthis and the Saudi-led coalition
would need to reach a peace agreement.
Until then, the Safer was an ace up the
Houthis’ sleeve.
The Houthi leadership seemed per-
versely indifferent about an ecological
disaster, even though civilians in Houthi-
held territory would be by far the most
harmed by a major spill. It was as if the
Houthis were holding guns to their own
heads. Ratcliffe put it more diplomat-
ically: “They do seem to take it seri-
ously. But I get the impression that, at
times, they may have a different under-
standing of how likely a disaster is, or
how imminent it is.”
When I relayed Ratcliffe’s words to
Alseraji, he responded that he was
well aware the situation was urgent.
This was at odds with other public
proclamations by the Houthis. Last
year, Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, the
clan leader, tweeted disparagingly about
the rising international concern for the
Safer’s plight: “The life of the shrimps
is more precious than the life of Yemeni
