• 1 UNESCO, Nature and People in the Socotra Archipelago, Paris 2022, p.9, https://unesdoc.unesco.org/a (...)

1An afternoon on the edge of Dîṭuwâḥ Lagoon on the north-western shore of the Indian Ocean island of Soqotra is a contemplative affair for the increasing number of tourists attracted by the Yemeni island’s allure as the “Galapagos of the Indian Ocean”. Part of the “Socotran Biosphere Reserve and World Heritage” site, the Lagoon is also declared a Wetland of International Importance.1 More importantly for its development, it is easily accessible by a tarmac road from the main town of Ḥâdîbû, and it offers basic camping facilities to tourists shying away from the more remote campsites which do not offer any sanitary installations and are sometimes only reachable by foot. Thus, it is one of the most popular and leisurely destinations of the island, which is the largest and most populous part of the archipelago which is located 350 km south of Yemen, while its westernmost tip (the island of Abdel Kuri) is only 110 km east of Cape Guardafui in Somalia.

• 2 All names have been changed.

5However, our guide, Muḥammad, engaged him in an Arabic conversation which was aided by the visitor using electronic translation. I overheard the mention of al-Mukalla, Say’ûn and Ḥaḍramût, and, having myself visited that region some 25 years ago, became curious. We invited the stranger for tea which he accepted. It turned out that Ali was a surgeon at the hospital of Qalansiya.2 The picturesque village of mostly one and two storey stone buildings nestles near the mouth of a small stream, colourful fishing boats sit on the white beach. Upon closer look, the stream is littered with plastic bags and other waste, while women wash clothes, children play in the shallow water and a few large birds pick their way through the water. Further inland, the modern part of Qalansiya manifests itself with some higher buildings: it is a local administrative centre, featuring government buildings including a school for health workers and the hospital where Ali works, as well as a few buildings housing staff from outside the village.

• 3 Bandaev, Ilhom; Kurbonova, Rukhshona; Samuilova, Marya, “Tajik healthcare workers on the move: caus (...)
• 4 „Tajikistan: Migration of doctors grows“, Central Asian Bureau for Analytical Reporting, 22.9.2022 (...)
• 5 Bandaev et.al, para 24, incidentally, an interviewee of “Tajikistan: Migration of doctors grows” al (...)
• 6 Ryantsev, Rakhmonov, p. 1763-4.

6Our conversation was conducted in a wild mixture of English, Arabic and google translate from Russian - Ali’s native language - into English. ‘Alî was a doctor from the northwestern Tajik city of Istaravshan (almost 300.000 inhabitants) who told us that he had studied in Ukraine. There, he had made friends with colleagues from many different countries. While in Ukraine, Ali had already explored migratory routes. A friend of his, he told us jealously, worked in Germany. However, this required more papers and knowledge of the German language than Ali could muster. Therefore, he returned to Tajikistan after graduation. However, he found it impossible to obtain good employment. The senior doctors, Ali complained, did not allow the young people to participate in the earnings. Presumably, this referred to additional payments made in the slowly growing private health sector3. After 2021, the number of Tajik doctors leaving the country has quadrupled.4 With Russia being a preferred destination, Arab countries rank second among the places where employment can realistically be found. Interestingly, Yemen was rarely mentioned by doctors as a destination, while quite a few seem to have found jobs there in practice.5 While the remittances might benefit Tajikistan, the outward emigration causes not only the loss of investment in the education and training of the doctors, but also a shortage, and hence decline in medical provisions, in the country itself.6

• 7 https://worldsalaries.com/average-doctor-salary-in-yemen/ , 23.3.2024. These online figures are the (...)
• 8 https://worldsalaries.com/average-doctor-salary-in-tajikistan/, 23.3.2024.

7Ali told us how he had managed to find work abroad. This seemed to work through contacts who in turn had directed him at an agency, which had offered him a contract in Yemen. Before coming to Soqotra a month ago, he had spent three months in Wâdî Ḥaḍramût. There he had been transferred from one hospital to the next, finally staying a month in a town where the entire hospital was defunct. Hence he had requested a transfer, and had been sent to Qalansiya. Ali told us that conditions in Yemen were decent in comparison to Tajikistan, as he now earns around between two and three thousand dollar per month. This must be some kind of internationally subsidised salary, possibly through the UN, Saudi Arabia or aid organisations, as an average Yemeni doctor’s salary seems to reach about 300 dollar per month.7 So Ali was a privileged expatriate doctor, earning about double the starting salary of Tajik doctors, which is around 1079 dollars a month.8 However, he expressed his ambition of eventually reaching a better paid contract issued by the United Arab Emirates.

• 9 On the military rivalry between the UAE and Saudi Arabia in Soqotra, which is reflected in competin (...)
• 10 „Yemeni separatists seize island of Socotra from Saudi-backed government”, The Guardian, 21.6.2020, (...)
• 11 “Emirati-Saudi conflict renews in Yemeni island of Socotra”, Yemen Press Agency6.12.2023, https://e (...)
• 12 Nathalie Peutz, Islands of Heritage: Conservation and Transformation in Yemen, Stanford: Stanford U (...)

8The UAE has for long been closely linked to Soqotra through trade, migration and remittances, as well as humanitarian aid. In 2017/2018, the UAE occupied Soqotra militarily in the context of Saudi-Emirati competition during the war in Yemen, which had started in 2014.9 Although still formally a Yemeni province, and spared much of the ravages of the war, Soqotra has witnessed its share of political strife. The main contenders are the Emirati-backed Southern Transitional Council whose emblems are visible everywhere on the island, and the Saudi-backed Yemeni government, which controlled the island until the summer of 2020.10 These tensions last escalated in late February 2024, with local protests against the Saudi forces, demonstrations in favour of Emirati rule, and an Emirati takeover of a marine base held by loyalists of the Saudi-backed government.11 The Emirati presence has evoked hopes of an economic boom. However, it also sparks local resentment. Locals linked this to the inflation caused by Emirati land acquisition. For quite a while, Emirati marriage to young women from Soqotra, who are often abandoned shortly thereafter, has also alienated the local population.12 On the geostrategic level, the role of the island in the ongoing confrontation between the northern Yemeni Houthi forces and Israel as well as the archipelago’s wider geostrategic position controlling the entrance to the Gulf of Aden is also highly controversial.

• 13 World Bank, Voices from Yemen, Washington 2023, p. 29-33, https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/ (...)
• 14 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?name_desc=true, 24.3.2024, all data for 2022.

10When we asked why he worked in Yemen, Ali speculated that Yemen did not train sufficient numbers of doctors. Our driver intervened and told us, that Yemeni doctors, quite sufficient in numbers, were themselves emigrating or leaving the profession to find employment elsewhere. While Yemen has long been among the poorest countries in the world, this has been exacerbated dramatically by the war since 2014, as a recent report by the World Bank confirms.13 This explains why a doctor from Tajikistan, which has an annual per capital GDB of 1.054,20 $, migrated to Yemen, where the annual per capita GDP is only 650,3 $.14

• 15 Zajonz, U., et al., “The coastal fishes and fisheries of the Socotra Archipelago, Yemen”, Marine Poll (...)
• 16 Samuli Schielke, Migrant Dreams: Egyptian Workers in the Gulf, Cairo: AUC Press 2020, p. x.

12In addition to the absence of his family, Qalansiya lacked all other sorts of entertainment, even a restaurant, and Ali had no functioning television. There are, he told us, only two other foreigners in Qalansiya. One was an Afghan truck driver, who worked for an Emirati company and hence also received an expatriate salary. As fish and crustaceans are one of the main exports of Soqotra and much of the produce is exported to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, the Afghan man was possibly a small link in this burgeoning international trade. Incidentally, the high demand for high quality seafood in the Gulf and beyond may well contribute to overfishing, and hence to the eventual threat to the local fishing industry.15 The second expatriate was a Syrian or Palestinian female teacher. Ali seemed to know much less about her, probably reflecting local norms of gender segregation and propriety. However, he assumed that she also worked on some kind of subsidised foreign salary. Thus, Ali’s story shows that Qalansiya has become one of the villages across the Global South which was connected with other such villages or, in the case of Ali, rather substantial cities, which “are in the process of being transformed into suburbs of the Gulf”, or perhaps, rather, into its satellites.16

• 17 The last census seems to have been held in 2004, when Hadibou listed 8.545 inhabitants according to (...)
• 18 This reliance on often ethnically based networks and middlemen is typical of Tajik (and probably ot (...)

13In the eyes of the lonely immigrant in Qalansiya, the town of Ḥâdîbû with its up to 25,000 people, its market, restaurants, coffeeshops and modest hotels was presented to us as a teeming metropolis. 17There even lived another Tajik doctor who was his friend and who might help him to obtain the transfer, in addition to probably scores of other expatriates. /Hâdîbû seemed to offer infinitely more entertainment than swimming, walking, sleeping or the internet, if and when it worked. And, most importantly to Ali, the hospital in Ḥâdîbû was seen as more functional. This would allow him to gain the practical experience needed to succeed with his long-term dream: emigration to Canada. He had another friend there, he told us, and hoped and expected that this friend would help him to reach his goal, just like other friends had helped him to obtain the contract with the company contracting doctors for Yemen.18 There he would earn more than 5,000 US$ per month, he told us. This required five years of practice, which Ali hoped to obtain in Yemen and, ideally thereafter, in the Emirates.

• 19 For details, based on the Indian, South Arabian and Palmyrene inscriptions in the Hoq cave on the n (...)

18Famous for its endemic species, Soqotra, has been difficult to access by sea due to strong winds notably during the summer monsoon. Regular flights to the island were inaugurated in 1999, while there had been tenuous military connections to Ḥâdîbû for some decades. However, even these flight connections can be somewhat irregular, both as a result of weather conditions, but also the political strife which has marked recent Yemeni history. In spite of the resulting reputation of being difficult to reach, Soqotra’s abundant water supplies as well as the existence of incense trees have made it an integral part of the Indian Ocean trade networks at least since the third or fourth pre-Christian centuries.19 Hence, we should not have been surprised by our small encounter with the tail-end of globalisation, even if it now extends to inner-Asian territories not traditionally linked to the maritime routes, due to novel means of transport and finance. The encounter described in this small piece testifies to the much intensified modes of global exchange, and their consequences, from the at times desperate and unlikely individual strife for prosperity and happiness to environmental destruction.