A fourteen-member hydrographic panel has added the war in Yemen to the world's nautical charts as a permanent feature near the Bab al-Mandab strait. Shipping and insurers are relieved: a hazard you can chart is a hazard you can budget for. Aid workers note that the chart records the water to the inch and the displaced not at all.
Hydrographers have added the war in Yemen to the world's nautical charts. From Sunday, the fighting along the Red Sea coast appears as a fixed feature, drawn in the same weight of ink as a reef.
The ruling came from the Standing Panel on Enduring Maritime Hazards, a fourteen-member body that meets twice a year and almost never makes the news. Its remit covers wrecks, sandbanks and anything else that has stopped moving.
Its chairman, Dr Halvard Brink, said the change was overdue. "We charted this war as temporary for years," he said. "There comes a point where that is no longer cartography. It is hope, and hope has no place on a chart."
The symbol
The war now has a glyph: a small crossed pair of lines, keyed to a legend entry reading "hazard, persistent, human". It sits a few millimetres off the Bab al-Mandab strait, in water that has been fought over by everyone who has ever owned a boat.
1839. The British took Aden and explained that it was about the safety of shipping. The Ottomans surveyed the same water and reached broadly the same conclusion. Anyone who was in Aden in 1967 will recognise the paperwork, and I do not propose to explain why.
Brink insisted the panel had taken no political view. "We do not ask who is shelling whom," he said. "We ask whether it will still be there when the next edition prints. The answer was yes."
"The strait is a fact. The war is now a fact of the same kind."
A toll, not a risk
Shipping welcomed the decision with something close to warmth. Marguerite Vos, who speaks for the Gulf of Aden Shippers' Forum, said masters had been navigating around the war for a decade without official permission to do so.
"A risk is something you argue about with underwriters," she said. "A feature is something you sail round. We would rather sail round things."
Marine insurers have followed suit. War cover for the southern Red Sea is being rebadged as a charge for passing something that is simply present, like a headland. The money does not change. The adjective does.
"You cannot insure against geography," Vos said. "You can only budget for it. This is progress of a sort."
Diplomacy finds a use for it
The diplomatic relief was immediate, if unspoken. Rupert Alloway, of the Joint Coordination Secretariat for the Southern Red Sea, noted that features do not require peace processes.
"You do not hold talks with a shoal," he said. "You mark it, you warn mariners, and you get on with the quarter."
Asked whether any of the outside governments with ships, drones or interests in the strait might prefer the war to end, Alloway said the question was outside his remit. He then said the strait was a shared asset and everyone valued stability, which is the sound a filing cabinet makes when it closes.
Houthi officials, who have been celebrating their advance along the coast, took the chart entry as a compliment. Being drawn on paper is a kind of recognition. Everybody, eventually, wants to be a feature.
Naima Sarhan, of the Coastal Relief Consortium, said she had read the new legend twice. "The chart records the depth of this water to within a few inches," she said. "It records the people on the shore not at all. They are not a hazard to shipping, so they are not on it."
She pointed out that a family cannot flee a coastline that has been officially declared a coastline. "When a war is weather, nobody is to blame for the rain."
Brink was unmoved. Charts, he said, describe the world rather than improve it, and the panel had never claimed otherwise. He added that the entry could be removed at any time, should conditions change.
Nobody in Monaco was ordering fewer copies.
The corrected editions go to press in the spring. The strait will be where it has always been, narrow and valuable and full of other people's navies. The reef stays. The sandbank stays. The war, now properly surveyed, stays too, and the families walking inland with water cans will not appear on any sheet, because they are moving, and moving things are not features.
