Unreported World

Unreported World reveals an unseen human catastrophe unfolding in Yemen as thousands of desperate refugees fleeing the chaos and carnage in the Horn of Africa suffer terrible ill-treatment as they cross the Gulf of Aden on their way to the Promised Land of Arabia.

Reporter Aidan Hartley and Director Edward Watts begin their journey on a remote beach near the village of Husn Balayd in Yemen, where people smugglers have just dumped a fresh cargo of refugees. It's immediately clear to the team that the crossing has taken a terrible toll.

The body of a refugee who just died minutes before lies nearby. The survivors, still covered in sand and sea water from the journey, are terribly dehydrated and desperate for food and water.

Local villagers prepare the body of the dead refugee ready for burial. Officially, 1400 boat people died or went missing last yea - but nobody knows the real number. One local tells Hartley that he has buried ten or fifteen people and shows him several graves down the beach.

The team moves on to the town of Ahwar to meet more refugees. They tell Hartley that the boats are often so crammed with people that nobody is allowed to move for days on end. On arrival, some can barely walk and others are badly injured after brutal mistreatment at the hands of the smugglers.

One man says that his boat was cut adrift for about six days and six people died. Another says fifteen died on his boat. A woman says she was beaten by the smugglers and another man stabbed. Abdullai says he was stuffed in the tiny hold normally used for fish and it was so hot and close down there that his brother suffocated to death.

The team are informed that the boat Abdullai was travelling on has capsized and the smugglers on board have been arrested by Yemeni authorities. The team race to the isolated coastguard base where the smugglers are being held and secure the first television interview with the people responsible for this brutal trade.

The smugglers deny that they mistreat their passengers - but Hartley and Watts witness the appalling conditions on the stranded boat, its tiny hold awash with human excrement.

Moving on to the capital, Aden, the team finds the streets full of refugees doing menial jobs. They tell Unreported World that virtually all of the money they earn is spent on buying the narcotic plant qat, which staves off hunger and helps them forget their desperate situation.

On the outskirts of Aden is the slum of Basaatin, where many of the Somali boat-people end up. The slum's population is estimated at around 40,000 and thousands more arrive every month - many of whom have congregated around a large rubbish dump, searching for food and other goods to sell. Women in the slum tell Hartley that single mothers find it hard to get work and some of them are forced into prostitution to survive.

The team follows the route taken by migrants as they attempt to get through the "Empty Quarter" on their way to Saudi Arabia. Hartley and Watts find dozens of groups of men walking through one of the world's harshest environments, with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and small bottles of water. If they're caught, they risk being sent back to Africa by the Saudis.

As the team leave the country, it seems clear that until there is some resolution to the conflict and starvation in Ethiopia and Somalia, thousands more will attempt to cross the Gulf of Aden in a human tide of misery.