The most disturbing part of the issue is the fact that this phenomenon is said to be condoned by some parents, who even pay for their children to be smuggled into the kingdom so that the kids can earn some money by working or, in most cases, begging for money.

“The issue has reached a point where parents pay money to smugglers to smuggle their wards into Saudi Arabia,” said Unicef Representative in Yemen, Ramesh Shrista, who pointed out that every smuggled Yemeni child sent home to his family between $200 to 500, which is big money in Yemen, where an average worker earns a little over $500 a year.

In an effort to address the issue, the Unicef, in collaboration with the Yemeni Ministry of Social Affairs, organised on this issue in January a conference, which is the first official admission that the problem does exist in the country. But Yemeni Prime Minister, Abdul Qadir Bajamal, tried to downplay the issue, saying that there were just some ‘isolated incidents’ which cannot be said to be in a large number. Other Yemeni officials blamed the issue on the 1991 Gulf war. They said Yemen’s official stance on the war angered Saudi Arabia which reacted by expelling Yemenis from the kingdom. Since then, it has become very difficult for Yemenis to get jobs in Saudi Arabia in a legal way, they said.

In the first quarter of last year, Saudi Arabia expelled more than 150,000 Yemenis, including 9,815 children, but the actual number of smuggled children among them is unknown. What is making it more difficult for the Unicef to bring the smugglers to book is that the Yemeni law does not address the issue of smuggling of children, and this has made it difficult to prosecute smugglers, who quickly gain their freedom whenever they are arrested in the act.