Safe harbor (page 1 of 3)

By Karen Thomas ADEN
Bustling, cosmopolitan and beautiful, there is something about Aden that is indefinably reminiscent of Lebanon's coastal cities - the hills that rise sharply above the sea, the heaving souks filled with chattering shoppers, the ubiquitous military roadblocks - all faintly reminiscent of early 1990's Beirut.
Aden was once the most prosperous trading post in Arabia, a hub for trade routes spanning the Far East, the Red Sea and southern Africa. Depending on whom you ask, the city was the original site of the Garden of Eden, the burial place of Cain and Abel, and the launch-port for Noah's legendary ark.

Shipping out. It is true that Aden is one of the oldest ports and trading posts in the world. The port city lay at the heart of trade routes between India and Europe, until Vasco da Gama discovered the sea route around Africa in 1497. Under British control until 1967, Aden was one of the world's largest ports in the 1960s - a must-see for cruise and passenger travelers en route between northern Europe and Asia.

Today, however, Aden is notorious for its troubles - a major casualty in the brief 1994 civil war and now a target for sporadic Islamist insurgency, such as last October's bombing of the USS Cole and a New Year mortar attack on one of the city's last remaining churches.

Before the 1991 unification of North and South Yemen, Aden was the capital of the southern republic. By the mid-1990s, it seemed that the city was the commercial capital of united Yemen only in name - run down and desperately in need of new infrastructure and investment. Now, there are moves to revive the city's fortunes, reprising its former role as an international trading hub and upgrading Aden's transport and industrial infrastructure - the question is whether these moves offer too little, too late.

Like the smaller Yemeni ports of Hodeidah and Mukalla, the Port of Aden had fallen into steady decline. Yemen has failed to keep pace with global trends in port investment and development. During the 1990s, the government-owned Port of Aden became notorious for its inefficiency, its lack of equipment and factors such as silting.

The international shipping community wrote Aden off as a shadow of its former glories that had lost ground to newer rivals, players such as Dubai Ports Authority (DPA) presiding over upstart Jebel Ali, now Arabia's leading transshipment hub.
Central to the bid to revive Aden's fortunes is Aden Container Terminal (ACT), the fledgling container port developed by Yeminvest. Yeminvest is a partnership between Singapore's PSA Corp., which holds a 60 percent equity stake, and Yemen Holdings Ltd., owned by the mighty Saudi Bin Mahfouz conglomerate. Launched in September 1999, ACT handled around 250,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (teu) during 2000 - a lightweight performance compared with DPA's 2.8 million teu, but an impressive start.

Yemen's prime minister, Abdul Karim al-Iryani, is robustly confident in ACT. "We expect Aden Container Terminal to expand to up to 12 berths," al-Iryani says. To say that Yemen has pinned its hopes on the terminal is an understatement. Aden is under intense pressure to match the successes of Oman's Port of Salalah, Arabia's other new container port. Salalah handled 1.3 million teu during 2000 - though, in fairness, the Omani port has a captive market. Maersk-Sealand, the world's biggest shipping line, is a shareholder, and Salalah has yet to win any third-party traffic.

Late last year, the New World Alliance - one of the most powerful international shipping consortia, whose members include the Japanese carrier MOL and Korea's Hyundai Shipping - chose ACT over Jeddah as its regional hub for the key China Express Service between northern Europe and the Far East.