THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021 45
meni parties on what to do with the oil,
as the settlement of this issue by the Ye-
meni parties will be left to a later stage
when the current risks are controlled.”
It was puzzling that the Iranians had
not made such an offer earlier, and in
any case it seemed unlikely that the Sau-
dis, or other members of the coalition,
would welcome such a solution, given
the role Iran is playing in the Yemen
confict. Alseraji, the Houthi negotia-
tor, told me that he welcomed new ideas
but that Iran’s offer had been made to
diplomats, not to the Houthi commit-
tee itself. It was, he said, idle talk.
Another group looking to solve the
Safer crisis has quietly suggested what
has become known as the Commercial
Option. The combined worth of the
ship’s oil and its scrap metal is approx-
imately a hundred million dollars; the
idea is to sell enough of these assets to
pay for the transfer of fuel to another
ship, and for the Safer’s removal from
the Red Sea. No agreement has been
reached about the profits that might
be generated by this process, but the
Houthis expect that any remaining
funds would be relayed to their gov-
ernment in Sana’a.
The proposal has been championed
by a successful Yemeni grain-trading
firm, the Fahem Group, whose finan-
cial interest is self-evident: a spill would
knock out grain imports for months,
ruining its business. Fahem has part-
nered with the Yemen Safe Passage
Group, a collection of former diplo-
mats, humanitarian experts, and ana-
lysts, mostly based in the U.K., who are
interested in Yemen. Dutch and Brit-
ish diplomats are also involved in the
discussions. Fahem has engaged Smit,
a Dutch marine-salvage firm, to un-
dertake the oil-transfer work, if it be-
comes feasible.
Nobody from Fahem or Yemen Safe
Passage wanted to be quoted in this ar-
ticle, but representatives for the Com-
mercial Option met with Houthi ne-
gotiators in Sana’a in July. The Houthis
have subsequently displayed shifting
levels of engagement with the group’s
proposal. In July, Alseraji, the Houthi
negotiator, told me that the talks in
Sana’a amounted to nothing but “chit-
chat”; a few weeks later, he character-
ized the same talks as “positive.” Dis-
cussions between the two parties continue,
and the Commercial Option now seems
the most probable path forward. Like
all potential remedies, it is fraught with
difficulties. The Houthis, for example,
appear to be concerned about possible
liabilities arising from the mission, and
want a neutral organization to oversee
it. To everyone’s surprise, the Houthis
now say that they want the U.N. to take
up the task.T
he Safer is not sinking. It is not on
fire. It has not exploded. It is not
leaking oil. Yet the crew of the ship, and
every informed observer, expects disas-
ter to occur soon. But how soon? A
year? Six months? Two weeks? Tomor-
row? In May, Ahmed Kulaib, the for-
mer executive at sepoc, told me that
“it could be after five minutes.” Then
five minutes passed, and then another.
The tension surrounding the Safer
crisis is generated as much by different
calibrations of time as by different as-
sessments of risk. In an instant, a leak,
a crack, or a spark could cause a disas-
ter, and even in the best-case scenario
any solution would take months to ex-
ecute. If the U.N. were given permis-
sion to inspect the vessel tomorrow, it
would need up to eight weeks to as-
semble a team and to reach the Safer.
As for the military, commercial, or Ira-
nian solutions, who knows how long
they’d require? A spare supertanker
cannot be summoned like a taxi. Un-
expected things can hap-
pen in a war zone. Because
of all these conficting sce-
narios with unclear time
frames, the Safer crisis feels
at once urgent and endless.
Each passing day seems like
proof to one side that the
worries about the ship are
overblown, and to the other
that one more inch on a
bomb’s fuse has burned.
The crisis unfolds at the speed of rust.
These days in Yemen, the smart
money fows to the pessimists. The war
has already taken so much from the
country. This summer, I crossed from
Saudi Arabia into northern Yemen with
a convoy of Saudi soldiers. The border
control was in a concrete shack with a
tin roof, next to a creaky iron gate sur-
rounded by barbed-wire fencing. A Ye-
meni fag waved atop a pole a few yardsfrom the fence. We drove south, along
dirt roads, through coalition-controlled
territory, to the coastal town of Midi.
Sudanese soldiers from the coalition
walked past the convoy in the opposite
direction, in the midday heat. The front
line with the Houthi militia was ten
miles to the south. The Safer was an-
other sixty miles south of that.
We arrived at a bombed-out sea-
side promenade. A carpet of discarded
plastic bottles fringed the walkway,
and every shelter was marked with the
dents of gunfire. Ali Seraj, the gover-
nor of Midi, met me at the prome-
nade, with a white baseball cap, rect-
angular sunglasses, and a defeated air.
He showed me the sights, such as they
were. He said that in 2015 the area had
been a front line of the war. Houthi
soldiers had destroyed hundreds of
boats, and the local fishing industry—
the main livelihood of workingmen in
his region—had collapsed, just as it
had in many other parts of littoral
Yemen. Later, we drove down the coast,
where hundreds of bullet-riddled fish-
ing boats lay stranded in rows at the
water’s edge. Seraj hoped that the fish-
ermen could eventually mend their
vessels and return to work. But a major
leak from the Safer would extinguish
that hope, blanketing the coastline
with Marib crude.
We walked along a wooden board-
walk through clusters of mangroves,
toward the Red Sea. Chil-
dren were playing in the
gray-blue shallows, shriek-
ing and giggling. The pre-
vious day, I had received
a briefing from a Saudi
Army officer about how
many sea mines were in
the water, and I asked the
governor if it was safe to
swim in this spot. Seraj
did not directly answer the
question, but noted that the area had
been swept for explosives.
The commanding officer in our con-
voy was anxious to keep our time out-
side of military vehicles short, in case
of an attack, and he ordered us to re-
turn to our trucks. Before we walked
back along the boardwalk, I asked Seraj
what an oil spill would mean for his re-
gion. Turning from the sea, he said, with-
out emotion, “A huge catastrophe.”