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Yemen: travel safety

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Guidance on moving inside Yemen: what to settle before a journey, what to carry, how to handle a checkpoint, and who knows where the vehicle is.

Before the journey

• Establish whether the journey is necessary. In a context where road movement carries the largest share of the risk to staff, the cheapest security measure is a decision not to travel. Programmes that assume a visit is required should be asked to justify it.
• Check the route on the day. Road conditions, checkpoints and the location of fighting change faster than any standing assessment. A route approved last week is not an approved route.
• Confirm who controls each stretch. Which authority holds the checkpoint, which armed group operates in the area, and where the boundary between them lies. The answer determines how the vehicle and its occupants will be read.
• File a movement plan. Route, timings, occupants, vehicle, communications schedule and the point at which the office escalates. A plan that only records the destination is not a plan.
• Name the person watching the journey. One individual in the office is responsible for the movement for its whole duration, and knows what to do at the missed-check-in time.

Vehicle and documents

The vehicle should be appropriate to the road and unremarkable, with no organisational markings where markings attract attention rather than protect. Fuel, water, a spare wheel and a means of self-recovery are carried as a matter of course. Documents are prepared before departure: identification for every occupant, vehicle registration, and the permissions the authorities along the route expect to see. Copies are held by the office as well, so that an occupant separated from the vehicle is not separated from their identity.

At a checkpoint

Approach slowly, stop where indicated, and keep hands visible. One person speaks for the vehicle. The tone is courteous and the answers are short. Nobody offers information that was not asked for, and nobody volunteers the destination, the purpose or the identity of other occupants beyond what the documents state.

Where a demand is made for payment, for a lift, for a passenger or for the vehicle, the position is decided by the office rather than improvised at the barrier. Staff need to know in advance what they are authorised to agree to and what they must refuse, and they need a telephone number that answers.

Communications

• Scheduled check-ins. At fixed intervals, with a stated action if one is missed. The interval should be short enough that a missed check-in is useful and long enough that it is not routinely missed for trivial reasons.
• Assume the channel is overheard. Telephones and radios in much of the country are monitored. Details of movement, of staff and of programme locations are conveyed in terms that are useful to the office and of limited value to a listener.
• Keep the language neutral. Names of locations and of people are the parts of a conversation that carry the most risk if repeated.
• Have a fallback. A second number, a second network, and an agreed time at which the office acts without waiting to hear from the traveller.

Women travelling

Movement constraints in Yemen fall unevenly, and the guidance records it plainly. Women on a team are frequently subject to restrictions on travelling unaccompanied, on travelling with a male driver who is not a relative, on overnight stays and on the hours in which they may be on the road. These constraints are imposed by the community and by the authorities rather than by the employer, and the employer's tendency is to treat them as an unchangeable feature of the context. Treating them that way converts a manageable risk into a permanent limit on who can do the work, and it places the cost of the constraint on the individual rather than on the organisation.