Conflict in Yemen leads to Djibouti refugee crisis

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0:07Hello, welcome to NewsHour from the BBC World Service. Coming to you from our studio in central London, I'm Celia Hatton. We've been speaking a lot on BBC News about the conflict that's been escalating in Yemen and how the rapid gains by the Houthi rebel group there have global implications. The Houthis now control much of Yemen's coastline, giving them the ability to threaten the Bab al-Mandab Strait that runs along there. If the Houthis exercised that power to stop oil and gas tankers to pass through the strait, it could have a huge effect on future global energy costs. The conflict in Yemen has already had an immediate effect for the people living there.

0:47More than 125 ,000 have been displaced in the last few weeks. Yemen lies on one side of the Arabian Peninsula below Saudi Arabia, and Djibouti lies right across the Bab al-Mandab Strait from Yemen. The proximity between the two, Yemen and Djibouti, has led tens of thousands of Yemenis to escape to safety there. Our security correspondent, the BBC's Frank Gardner, is in Djibouti for us. He spoke with us shortly before we came on air. I'm in a place called Obok, which is on Djibouti's Gulf of Tajura, just beyond the Babel-Mandeb Strait that separates Africa from the Arabian Peninsula. The reason I'm here is that this is where Yemeni refugees, thousands of them, have fled to to escape the fighting.

1:31And I've just been I've spent the morning in a refugee camp that's jointly administered by the Djibouti government and the UN High Commission for Refugees. And honestly, Celia, it's heartbreaking talking to people who in many cases have fled with just what they're standing up in. These are not economic refugees, migrants, anything like that. These are people fleeing desperately from war. And I spoke to one father who said, almost with tears in his eyes, he said, how could I just sit there when my children are shaking with fear from the bombs being dropped from the air?

2:11How could you sit when your kids are screaming and shaking, frightened? When the sound of the plane starts and the kids hear the planes, the kids start shouting, screaming. As parents, it is our responsibility. What can you do when you see this? That is why we fled. So save them.

2:31Most of the people here are in the worst condition, inside the tents here. I'm very touched. I'm crying for these people, for my people, for their suffering. I want our voices to be heard by the NGOs and the Djibouti government. and I'm thankful to them for accepting us. The overriding message I got is that it's not about people taking sides. They didn't take sides. They didn't say they were pro-Houthi, anti-Saudi, pro-Yemen government, none of that. This is about the danger. And they said the thing that terrifies them and their children more than anything are the explosions coming everywhere.

3:07But it's pretty clear that most of those will be coming from the Saudi airstrikes because the Houthis have done this lightning dash down the Red Sea coast of Yemen, taking over towns such as Al-Khoja and Dhubab, where a lot of the people I spoke to are from. And so these fishing communities have got in their boats and fled, often taking hours to get across this narrow strait in rough weather, braving winds and the risk of capsizing and braving pirates too, for that matter, to reach safety and shelter here in Djibouti, which is not a rich country, but there is this pre-established camp that's been here really since the fighting flared up in Yemen back in 2015.

3:47But in the last few days, over 3 ,000 Yemenis have arrived here. Frank, what are the conditions in the camp and are many more people expected to arrive there? Well, about 50 people have arrived in the last 24 hours, 50 plus. Usually they arrive either on foot from where they've made landfall or they make contact with the UN and the UN finds them there and they bring them in in trucks. The conditions, how can I put it? I mean, look, it's a camp, so it's going to be grim. You know, I needed to go to the toilet and people just pointed behind a shipping container and said, go there, a patch of waste ground up city covered in human excrement, just swarming the flies.

4:30So that wasn't good. But in terms of safety, it seems well guarded. The Djibouti army turned up. It seems to be perfectly safe. There's no threat to them from the war spilling over. And there is food and water distribution. I didn't see people going hungry. There was distribution that was underway. There is shelter, so there are tents there. And there is cover in a big warehouse for some of those 3 ,000-plus that have just arrived. They're sitting on tarpaulins with their families. There are goats there nudging around amongst discarded plastic bottles and gas canisters for cooking. But, you know, at the end of the day, it's a camp.

5:08They're displaced. This is not where they want to be. You know, if it was safe in their own country, they'd go back tomorrow. That's what some of them said to me. But I think the chances of that are pretty slim. Tell me more about that, Frank, and the Houthis' recent gains. Are they expected to continue? Well, the Houthis have surprised and shocked everybody, including the world community. by how quickly they have raced down that Red Sea coast, what's called the Tehama coast, because they now are within shelling range of ships passing through the vital strait, the Bab al-Mandeb, which in Arabic means the Gate of Tears or Gateway of Tears.

5:47And that matters because the Houthis have said, don't worry, to global shipping, you can pass through, but any Saudi flag tankers, we're not going to let through. Well, that's pretty important because the Saudis have been able to circumvent the constrictions on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula, on the Strait of Hormuz, due to the Iran-US war. They've been pumping millions of barrels of oil across a trans-Arabia pipeline, the east-west pipeline, loading it onto terminals at Yanbur on the Red Sea. And then some of that in the smaller ships is able to go through the Red Sea. But the big VLCCs, the very large crude carriers, they head south down the Red Sea and out through the Babal Nandeb Strait to markets in Asia like China and India and elsewhere.

6:34Well, that's not now possible unless they want to risk being shot at, shelled and droned by the Houthis. So it's impacting the global economy, driving oil prices up, leading to future shortages. So the big question is, does this war escalate or de-escalate. And China is amongst those countries that have tried to de-escalate. And the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, has recently received his Iranian counterpart, because Iran is a part of this. Iran is an ally of the Houthis. They're sometimes called an Iranian proxy, but I think that's misleading, because the Houthis don't necessarily do what Iran wants them to do, but they are trained, armed, funded, and very much allied to Iran.

7:19So you can see the way this is working for Iran. Iran is under huge economic pressure from the American blockade in the Arabian Sea, which has choked off the exports from Iran to world markets. And Iran has said, fine, you want to play that game? Well, we're going to make it difficult for you. So Saudi Arabia, being a big ally of the US, is not able to get all its oil exports out. And that's what's happening there. Question is, is what can Saudi do to reverse this very damaging state of affairs for it, not to mention the huge humanitarian cost for all those Yemeni refugees I've just been speaking to.

7:55Frank Gardner reporting from Obok on the coast of Djibouti.

8:08We're coming off a terrible weekend for Germany's governing CDU party. In state elections, the party failed to reach the minimum 5 % threshold to enter Parliament. It's the worst ever result in that area, with the far-right AfD party coming out on top. And in Berlin, the CDU's former stronghold, the party came second to a left-wing rival. Here's what the chairman of the CDU, the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, had to say in a press conference a little earlier.

8:42Ladies and gentlemen, this election marks a profound turning point. It is a dramatic and unprecedented result for the CDU in Germany that we are unable to clear the 5 % threshold and that an entire parliamentary group has been voted out of the state parliament. This is a severe blow, and its repercussions will be felt by us for a long time to come. We will have to discuss the consequences of this for a long time to come. So what now for the CDU? Its leader, Friedrich Merz, has described the elections as a disaster, but so far he's holding on to his job. Tanik Koch is a journalist writing for German and European publications.

9:19She used to be a communications advisor for the Christian Democrat administration. Tanik, with these election results now known, will Friedrich Merz have to resign? Well, that's the basically million euro question, but it's tricky. So he's for a while now basically lost authority, most importantly among his own rank and file, his Christian Democrats. Also, if you consider the polls, he's the most unpopular chancellor since the beginning of polling. So that really, really doesn't help. On the other hand, for a German chancellor to resign, It's not half as easy as for a British prime minister to get changed and replaced.

10:07So at the moment, there is a fight within the CDU. But there's no real crown prince that could sort of take over immediately. So it would cost time. Actually, right now, nobody knows whether he's going to survive the next days or weeks. Even yesterday on election night, the heads of state or the German states run by CDU You had a meeting after meeting in the party headquarters without Friedrich Metz for hours. And it's sort of slowly now what was there. There are basically two wings, one, the more stable one, let's keep him. And the other one, we need to change at the top leadership. But again, sort of changing a German chancellor midway or not even midway, he's in office for only a year and a half, isn't as easy as it sounds.

10:58He's been urging patience to allow for time for the CDU's economic reform policies to unfold and to show some results. Do you think that strategy might work to win over voters? Well, he may have sort of taken a page out of Angela Merkel's sort of his inner party competitor, the reason he left politics 20 years ago, out of her playbook. because Merkel, when she was under pressure because of the refugee crisis, told her party leadership, give me time. I need to get the deal done with Erdogan to lower the numbers. Just give me time, give me two weeks, give me three weeks, etc. So this would work if in two weeks' time, three weeks' time, two months' time, Merkel had anything to show for.

11:50The really, really risky thing at the moment is that the reforms, that's the pension reforms, which is overdue for three decades, they're trying to push through with the Social Democrats, is now because of the elections, because of the Social Democrats sort of fearing even further losses among their electorate, may not be as sort of reform as it should be. And if the CDU sort of recoils from what they had planned, because it's going to be tough on society and on their electorate. If they're required, then the CDU may be, I mean, they're already up in arms, but it may get even worse. Okay, Tana, we'll have to leave it there.

12:34Tana Krohe is a journalist writing for German and European publications. And more information on the German election results and the fate of the governing CDU party on the BBC News website.

13:03Coming up, we get a sneak preview of Star Wars creator George Lucas's new Museum of Narrative Art. I felt very, very strongly about in terms of honoring illustrators, artists, I think, who illustrate stories that are already written. In the beginning, especially for the few thousand years, that was the only way you could tell a story was with pictures. Some other stories we're tracking in our newsroom this hour. A huge Belgian-led international police operation targeting drugs gangs has seen nearly 500 people arrested, mainly in Latin America. And 1.6 million people have been urged to evacuate as the typhoon sweeps past eastern Japan, bringing heavy rainfall and high winds.

14:04you're listening to news hour we're going to look now at the latest research that's hoping to find a cure for alzheimer's disease it's a neurological condition that's often grouped together with dementia. More than 60 million people are living with dementia globally, and that's set to rise to 139 million in the next 25 years. The good news is that there are groundbreaking treatments in the works, but that could slow the progression of Alzheimer's and dementia and even lead to a cure. But today, research are saying that those breakthroughs have been delayed because there simply aren't enough people to take part in clinical trials for those treatments.

14:41First, I spoke with Bill Yeats from his home in Queensland, Australia. He's living with early onset Alzheimer's and he started by telling me about when he first discovered he had the disease. It came as a bit of a shock. I'd spent four years looking after my father who passed away of dementia. As a senior physics and chemistry teacher, I started to forget the names of the boys and girls who were in my class. I found that I couldn't remember the equations. It was just me. I just didn't understand. And then when it started to reflect in my role as a deputy principal in terms of administration of the school, tasks that would normally take me a couple of hours would take me days and if not weeks.

15:25So it was really very much that after that, going to seek some help and saying, what's actually going on? So once you received the diagnosis, I understand you took part in a clinical trial. How did that go? Well, I have an identical twin brother, and luckily for me, he shows no signs, but he was also involved in clinical research. And together we sat down, and both of us agreed that if there was a hope for me, then I needed to find a clinical trial, need to be able to get access to a novel treatment. And for that reason, I decided not to follow the amyloid hypothesis or the tau hypothesis. I actually chose to go really left field and I saw my Alzheimer's being caused by stress as my trigger.

16:17So I went for a clinical trial that involved neuroinflammation and reducing that in my brain. And the results for that have been quite encouraging. I've been now receiving that drug for just over four years. I understand, though, that the trial itself ended after a couple of years. Is that right? In my case, I was in a phase 1B, which is really just working out FSC, what dose would work. At that point, my results were quite encouraging, which then allowed me to make an application to the Australian government and say, based on my results, could I have what we call special access to this drug? And I was given it for two lots of two years.

16:57So that was really good. And when I went to phase 2, it didn't reach the expectations. and suddenly where I was using this drug, it was terminated. My future, I thought, was based on having this weekly injection and when it was suddenly removed, it really left me flat. Bill, when you hear that globally there's a severe shortage of patients who are able to take part in clinical trials for Alzheimer's disease, how does that make you feel? Because you've talked about the fact that you're pinning a ray of hope on some kind of medical breakthrough. I only knew about a clinical trial thinking that it was a possibility through my brother.

17:39People actually don't think of putting their hand up and saying, I could actually go into a clinical trial. There's a lot of selection criteria that you have to meet. And then you look at the methodology of how they're actually going to conduct it. And what I found and I saw in this report was that there was a real awakening in terms of if we're going to look at clinical trials and actually invite and get people to participate in clinical trials, then there's a lot of work that has to be done. Because at the moment, not only do you have a small percentage of people living with dementia going into the clinical trials, there's also a huge dropout rate.

18:22And with so much happening in this sector at the moment, to me it's pivotal. if we're going to make these advances happen as quickly as possible. How optimistic are you now that new medical breakthroughs might be able to help you? Years and years ago, I really, I dreamt of being that person, the first person to become a survivor of this condition. But for me now, my perception of the word survivor doesn't mean that. It means being able to live a more enjoyable life, a life that has meaning and purpose for me. So my involvement in clinical trial, I think, is really, it sits in that area where I know that it will be too late for me.

19:06That's actually not a problem. What's more important to me is that I can help be involved in a clinical trial and hopefully some very useful data comes out. So at some point in the future, we'll have a cure for this. Bill Yeats speaking to me from Coulomb on Australia's Sunshine Coast. Now, if dementia and Alzheimer's are so common, why is it increasingly difficult to find people to take part in clinical trials? Chris Lynch is acting chief executive of Alzheimer's Disease International. What are the challenges with getting trials underway and completed? We are in unprecedented waters, really, in terms of the science and research for Alzheimer's disease and other types of dementia as well.

19:52For the first time ever, we've got a really solid burgeoning even pipeline of clinical trials for Alzheimer's disease. There's currently over 150 in phase two and phase three trials, which is unprecedented. In terms of the treatments that are coming out of those trials, just in the last 18 months, we have the first ever disease modifying treatments that are now starting to get regulatory approval around the world. It's the first time ever that we've been able to see through treatments a slowing down in the progression of Alzheimer's disease. In terms of the trials that are currently taking place, they are focusing on a real breadth of areas around Alzheimer's disease, including how to modify the trajectory of the disease, but also symptomatic treatment trials as well.

20:45And those trials are also now starting to push into areas like risk reduction and prevention, which will certainly gain a huge amount of attention over the next decade. I mean, that all sounds quite positive. So what's holding up the completion of these trials? Why is it so difficult to find people to take part? The real challenge to this is a combination of the numbers of people that we need to come forward for trials. There are currently about 55 ,000 people participating in trials. But just to sustain that level of trial, we need 350 ,000 people around the world to volunteer for trials. And at the moment, there's extremely low awareness of clinical trials for Alzheimer's disease and for other types of dementia as well.

21:31That's, again, a combination of factors. certainly from the healthcare perspective. Healthcare practitioners, often at the point of diagnosis, they either don't have the time or their own awareness is extremely low of what clinical trials are available for Alzheimer's disease and dementia. And we really do need both government and the healthcare systems to increase that level of awareness to start to facilitate it. I think a lot of that is born out of the fact that people genuinely do want to participate. There is a number of reasons for that. You know, some of it is altruism, investment in the future, but sometimes it's also self-preservation and their thoughts about themselves and their own risk of the disease in the future.

22:15Is it one problem that perhaps Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia are often inflicted on people in later life? Could that also be a challenge in trying to reach out to older people in order to get them to participate in trials? Age is obviously a big risk factor for dementia. It often becomes symptomatic in the 70s, but we know that the pathology actually starts 20 years earlier than that in the 40s and the 50s. And the risk for that often starts much earlier in life as well. And that's why the recruitment really for clinical trials can be quite difficult, particularly if you're looking for people that are pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic to come forward to volunteer.

22:58Chris Lynch, Alzheimer's Disease International.

23:24And fans ready to add John Deere certified pre-owned equipment and more options to their lineup can shop at MachineFinder.com. Booyah! Can politicians improve our economic fortunes? Dave Ramsey says no. I'm Tristan Redmond from The Global Story, and I've been speaking to the massively popular U.S. money guru who says if there's a financial crisis, it's on us. When you borrow on credit cards and take out a$1 ,200 car payment on a freaking Range Rover, you've destroyed your life, not the president. For the full interview, listen to The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you listen.

24:05Welcome back to NewsHour. News today that Presley Gerber, the son of the supermodel Cindy Crawford, has died at the age of 27. He was a model in his own right, and his family had spoken before about his difficulties in dealing with his mental health. For more, let's speak to Jennifer Otter-Bickerdijk, who's an American cultural historian, writer and pop culture expert. Jennifer, tell us who Presley Gerber was and what's happened. Hi there. Thank you so much for having me. He was really best known, of course, for being the son of these two very famous people. and he followed in the footsteps of Cindy, started modeling when he was a teenager and he made his runway debut for Machino and then went on to do Dolce & Gabbana.

24:50So these weren't small contracts that he had. He was right up there in the big leagues for sure. And something that is really interesting, I think about him is that even though he grew up with extraordinary privilege, he talked a lot openly about the idea of his public identity and what it was and trying to find himself. And I think he really struggled with that. And so tell us more the circumstances around his death. What do we know? Well, we don't have a confirmed what exactly caused it. He was in a rehabilitation facility when he passed away. And he has, again, gone on the record and talked a lot, actually, about his struggles with mental health, having panic attacks, addiction issues, issues, depression, and how he was trying to manage all of those things.

25:40So while we don't know exactly what happened, he was definitely trying to get help for these things when, unfortunately, we lost him. Indeed. He's also spoken, and his family have spoken, about how they were quite a close family growing up. Yeah. And I mean, again, this is something that's a little bit of a contrast, is that he has talked about being from a loving family, getting on well with his parents, but then And he also has rejected the idea of that polished, perfect celebrity family image. And he has talked, I mean, I think this is really big, especially now when the whole idea is the Nepo baby.

26:17I never can say that word, Nepo Nepo. But the idea of if your parents can open the door for you, who are you away from that? What is it that you are actually doing yourself? And I think that that was a big thing for him that was problematic. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, even his sister has spoken as well about how close they were. He leaves behind a sister, Kaya Gerber, who's also kind of a well-known supermodel. And she's spoken as well, too, about how close the two were. Yeah, I mean, doing the same job and probably being on the road. And again, I could see there probably being the two of us against the world kind of vibe.