By Christian Chaise

SANAA, Mar 11, 2009 (AFP) - Half of them don't know how to swim and they don't have enough boats, leaving Yemen's coastguards struggling to meet the enormous maritime challenges facing one of the world's poorest nations.

The international community has taken charge of the battle against Somali pirates roaming the seas in the Gulf of Aden, a task for which the Yemeni Coastguard is ill-equipped.

Yemen is also having to fight on another front, against people smugglers who ferry refugees daily across the Gulf of Aden from Horn of Africa nations such as Somalia and Ethiopia or from as far afield as Pakistan.

However, the Yemeni Coastguard, created just seven years ago with US help in the wake of dramatic Al-Qaeda attacks against US and French vessels, considers it has so far achieved what it says is its primary goal.

"We've achieved securing the ports... This has been achieved. The ports have been secured," coastguard chief Brigadier Ali A. Rasa told AFP on the sidelines of a maritime conference in the Yemeni capital Sanaa.

In other foreign involvement, an Italian company is due to complete by the end of the year a radar system along the southern coast around Aden, the first phase of a project to give Yemen the means to protect its territorial waters.

Despite its poor resources, Yemen is considered to have a strategic role to play in the international battle against piracy on the high seas, which rose to unprecedented levels in 2008.

The United States, several European nations, Russia and Asian states including China have sent warships to the region to safeguard major shipping lanes after piracy attacks rose by nearly 200 percent to 111 last year.

Yemen announced in December it was creating a regional anti-piracy centre to act as a hub for the exchange of information and coordination of multi-national naval forces, with 10 Red Sea and Gulf of Aden nations taking part.

Last month, Yemen also struck a deal with France to build a floating pier on an island in the strategic strait of Bab El-Mandab (Gate of Tears), which links the Gulf of Aden with the Red Sea.

But a more pressing problem that directly affects the impoverished Arabian peninsula republic and its economy is the relentless flood of refugees from the Horn of Africa, many fleeing conflict in Somalia.

More than 50,000 refugees reached the Yemeni coast in 2008, the UN refugee agency said, despite the hazardous journey and the risk of being thrown overboard by human traffickers even before they reach their destination.

This year alone, almost 9,500 refugees have landed, it said.

According to various estimates, several hundred thousand refugees, mainly Somalis, live in southern Yemen, with longstanding personal relations that date back centuries.

Yemen -- the ancestral homeland of Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden -- was called in to join the US-led "war on terror" after the October 2000 attack on the American destroyer the USS Cole.

A small boat packed with explosives rammed the destroyer when it was moored off the southern port of Aden, killing 17 crew members and wounding 38 others.

Two years later, a similar attack against the French tanker Limburg off the coast of Yemen killed a Bulgarian marine, highlighting the extreme vulnerability of the country's ports.

Asked whether a repeat of the Cole attack was now impossible, Rasa responded cautiously, saying: "The risk has been dramatically reduced."

The United States, leaving Yemen no choice but to join its "war on terror", donated seven boats to Sanaa at the end of 2002, leading to the birth of the Yemeni coastguard.

With just 60 vessels, many of them old, the coastguard has a tough task policing the 2,500 kilometres (1,550 miles) of coastline with its largely unprotected vast desert hinterland.

One delegate at the conference also said that just half of the coastguard force of 3,000 can actually swim.

The maritime liaison officer at the British embassy in Yemen said the coastguards needed at least a dozen more motor launches but that "with the financial crisis, this is currently on hold."

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Copyright AFP 2009.