An island prison?

A SMALL island in the Indian Ocean some 400km (250 miles) south-east of Yemen’s mainland, Socotra is a picture of tranquillity. Unspoilt beaches of snow-white sand are lapped by turquoise water, home to leaping dolphins and coral reefs. Hundreds of unique species of flora and fauna edge its mountain trails. The island’s 55,000 people retain ancestral traditions, and speak their own unwritten language.

But Socotra’s remoteness may be its curse, if rumours in Yemen prove correct. If the American administration does close its prison for terrorist suspects in Guantánamo, as Barack Obama again promised this week, it must find a place to move the inmates. Of the 155 prisoners still there, 90 are Yemeni, including 56 of the 77 already “approved for transfer”. America has close security relations with Yemen, where American drones frequently hit al-Qaeda groups in the country’s south and east. It could make sense to move those prisoners to Socotra.

Yemen’s foreign minister, Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, acknowledged in October that his government was thinking of building a “rehabilitation facility” for Yemeni detainees released from Guantánamo, though the White House later refused to comment on reports of discussions on the matter.

Americans would have to monitor the place if it did provide a prison. In November a Yemeni newspaper, el-Ule, ran a story about a “new Guantánamo” to be set up on Socotra; a cartoon mixed the island’s dragon-blood tree (pictured above) with the Guantánamo inmates’ orange uniform. “It would be rejected by the people of Socotra,” Faham Saleem Kafayan, a local politician, told a Yemeni outlet, alMasdarOnline. “Tourism would be finished, the environment too,” says Abduljameel Muhammad, who runs Socotra Eco Tours, a local travel agency. “We would all have to be evacuated.”