The Tightening Dark

by Sam Farran

  However, as a testament to just how far-sighted and strong Ali Abdullah Saleh could be, even as he still smoldered, bleeding and uncertain of life, he looked ahead toward reconciliation and told Ahmed Ali, “Do not retaliate. Leave it alone. Let them look bad. I’ll be back.”

  Saleh was playing the long game—a much longer game than anyone knew he could. The bombing weakened him and his alliance and basically forced him to accept a UN-negotiated settlement that saw his deputy, Vice President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, take over as interim president while the country submitted to a UN-led constitutional reform process called the National Dialogue.

  Perhaps two months after this assassination attempt, I came to the regular monthly meeting of the Overseas Security Advisory Council at the embassy. There I met Elizabeth Richards, the new deputy chief of mission (DCM), whom I would get to know well in the coming years. She is now the US ambassador in Lebanon, but then she was brand-new to Yemen. She and I struck up a conversation, and she told me, “Saleh is in Saudi Arabia getting medical treatment, that’s it. He’ll never come back.” Gently, I corrected her, betting her a cup of coffee that he’d be back by New Year’s Day or even sooner.

  Even though Saleh stayed nominally behind the scenes, by that January he was indeed back in Sana’a, pulling the strings of his GPC party, reforging his many alliances, and skewing the outcome of the National Dialogue talks in favor of his return. It would take him, and the National Dialogue as a result, several years to solidify enough power so that Hadi could announce new constitutional terms that satisfied no one except the GPC and that basically preserved Saleh and his family and friends in their positions of power.

  Hadi’s actions pushing through this unbalanced National Dialogue Conference caused two primary rifts: one between the North and the South (a long-standing grievance, as the two had been separate countries, with the South losing and getting what they still see as a seriously raw deal in the merger), and the other between the Houthis and the rest of Yemen, as the newly redrawn regions isolated the Houthis and kept them landlocked.

  Saleh came back, way before the New Year. I got my cup of coffee from DCM Richards, but Saleh’s continuing political and personal influence spelled bad news for Yemen. He threw his lot in with the Houthis, and that really brought the country into chaos.

  Footnote

  1 Suspicion fell on the mosque’s caretaker, who later disappeared.

  CHAPTER 8

  NATIONAL DIALOGUE

  IN LATE NOVEMBER 2011 I decided to start my own security company, which I called Universal Eagles. It was a noble sounding name that combined my history with the Marine Corps (those eagles on every Marine’s collar!) with an aspiration to bring greater security and goodness to the world—universally. After parting ways with Griffin Group, and after missing out on a lucrative arrangement when commissions fell through with Control Risk, I decided—if I was going to continue to stick my neck out in Yemen—I might as well call the shots myself and be my own boss.

  Universal became my means for doing ongoing security consultation work, often still contracted through the bigger security players, like Control Risk, Pax Mondiale, Pilgrims Group, and a lot of the oil companies. Universal’s work focused mostly on Yemen but also took me, and my small but growing body of employees, to places throughout the region—sometimes to Somalia but mostly to the Gulf states and the Arabian Peninsula. For instance, immediately following the Arab Spring, I started to line up great jobs, like with the Australian government, taking its military and diplomatic attachés, perhaps seven or eight of them in total, all over the Gulf. I accompanied them as their security consultant as they traveled because they weren’t overly familiar with the region.

  Australia does not have embassies everywhere, just a main one in Saudi Arabia to cover all of the Gulf. It had embarked on a major assessment for its citizens living the region in case it needed to evacuate them in another Arab Spring–like situation. Control Risks helped the Australian delegation organize its security in Bahrain, Oman, and Kuwait and helped coordinate joint security agreements with local British and American embassies in the places where the Australians didn’t have a robust evacuation capability. It was a perfect gig for me, as the Aussies were super outgoing and fun to travel with, and I liked nothing better than good company in places where I could serve both as a hired gun and as a social and professional networker.

  One of the first people I hired for Universal was Yasmine, my goddaughter, who was now in her third year of college after completing the vocational school I had sent her to in record time. She finished her college studies that first year, then immediately launched into an MBA while working for me, first as one of two people in human resources, then after about a year as head of human resources and payroll, which expanded to eight employees—she was an amazingly talented person, my best employee.

  Universal—and I, personally, by extension—contributed somewhat to the lead-up to Yemen’s National Dialogue period, helping plan and certify the security procedures at the Moevenpick Hotel, where the conference would be located. We also helped provide security for high-level visitors from outside Yemen, who had come to check on and provide expert support for the democratizing ideals of the conference. These visitors needed local expertise as well as security, and Universal proudly supported them.

  Part of the National Dialogue involved a much-needed restructuring of the Yemeni army, which had broken into factions based on loyalties to various commanders. Even before the breaking apart of allegiances that occurred during the Arab Spring, the Yemeni army could not reliably and consistently extend its influence into tribal lands, and these areas—in the south and east—had long been supporting and abetting various incarnations of Islamic fundamentalism, most prominently al-Qaeda’s most virulent branch, called al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The United States, as its contribution to the process of reconciliation and restructuring, committed to leading the reformation of the Yemeni military. In similar fashion the British undertook a program of work to remedy Yemen’s various police entities. Both of these efforts moved forward in fits and starts throughout the duration of the National Dialogue but ultimately produced little in the way of true reformation before the Houthis came in and overthrew the government, with large factions of these forces—just like in the Arab Spring—either tacitly or directly supporting various sides in the conflict.

  As a good example of the difficulties faced by the Yemenis, not to mention the Western countries attempting to encourage reform, for a long while the main prison in Sana’a had been more or less taken over from the inside by some al-Qaeda members imprisoned there. They couldn’t leave the prison due to an agreement between the Yemeni government and their tribes that they would stay there. Tribal influence and shelter carried more weight in their remaining than any punishment the civil authorities could mete out. Therefore, though able to escape whenever they wanted, these prisoners had nowhere to go and would even be subject to active tribal persecution if they didn’t uphold the arrangement their elders had come to with the government.

  As a result, the al-Qaeda personnel were stuck in a prison, held in not by the walls or the guards or even of the penalties of law but by force of custom. And so they stayed put, but they took over, running the day-to-day life on their floor to such an extent that they even took the doors off the hinges and turned them around so that the handles were on the inside. The guards could not come in and had to knock and ask permission to enter.

  While this is an extreme case, the reformation of all sectors of the Yemeni government and military structure entailed situations much like this: tribal issues, graft, corruption, nepotism, and strange alliances that most Western agencies and personnel just weren’t prepared to understand, let alone explain to bureaucrats and politicians back home, who were accustomed to and comfortable only with Western notions of the rule of law.

  As much as I love Yemen and her people, I noted during these reformation processes how adept the Yemenis proved at turn
ing the efforts of the Western countries into cold, hard cash to line their own pockets. I brought this up at one of the Overseas Security Advisory Council (OSAC) meetings when these efforts kicked off. Deputy Chief of Mission (DCM) Elizabeth Richards was giving the group a briefing about how well the initial military restructuring efforts were going and how everyone was coming to the table and providing their inputs, wish lists, and needs.

  I brought to DCM Richards’s attention how adept the Yemenis would be at “repurposing” the funds we earmarked for these purposes. While they were coming to the table now with the right words and promises on the tips of their tongues, once the gear and funds arrived in Yemen, how would we ensure their proper employment? How would we ensure that their requests for more wouldn’t go on indefinitely?

  I went to her afterward and said, “Do you really think the Yemenis are going to spend the money you give them to do the things they’re saying?” She remained confident that the embassy’s Office of Military Cooperation would be able to review the funded programs and certify that any equipment or dollars were being used appropriately.

  I said, “The Yemenis will certainly come to the table now, but they’ll find a way to pocket the money. You watch. They’ll say all the right things, agree to all the monitoring. They’ll give you all the yeses you need to get those dollars flowing. But when it comes to action and execution, they won’t be ready for it, and you’ll find their requests become a bottomless pit.”

  The difficulties weren’t only financial when it came to forcing change. A societal and status issue also interfered, in which many personnel who obtained rank, power, or any semblance of position assumed that they were untouchable, viewing such positions as sinecures. Of course, dollar signs also attached to any position of authority, as commanders and ministers commonly skimmed from their own budgets. But the concept of wasta—the importance of authority for authority’s sake—also played a part. When, for instance, attempts at structural change in the Yemeni army were made, the Ministry of Defense sent a new commander to one of the outlying bases. The previous commander—who was being relieved for graft or disloyalty or who knows what—refused to step down. The soldiers under him, to whom he personally doled out pay (often keeping parts of their salaries for himself in the time-honored way), would not let the new commander on base. In fact they fired on him and his retinue, and he had to give up and return to Sana’a. The troops were loyal to the individual, not to the organization or even to the idea of the nation.

  This was but one among many such issues, each of which seemed to get only more complicated the deeper the National Dialogue conferees dug into them:

  • Redistricting the political divisions

  • Reconfiguring wealth and economic issues since certain parts of the country contained oil and others did not, putting the latter at risk of increasing disparity in services and development compared to their neighbors

  • Reparations to military members who had been furloughed several decades earlier during the civil wars between the North and the South

  • Infiltration by al-Qaeda not just of certain military units but also of whole agencies and departments in the government, which necessitated disentangling the legitimate political party of the radical Sunni Islahi movement from its almost imperceptible blending with and succor of al-Qaeda

  • Alignment with other military units and government bodies

  • Plain old corruption that spread throughout even the most respected Yemeni institutions, such as the coast guard, which were supplied with new ships, weapons, gear, and training by the United States in order to interdict smuggling from Somalia and Djibouti and, while demonstrating success via metric tons of interdicted materiel, would thereafter mysteriously lose accountability for the interdicted goods, only to have them show up wholesale down the street in one of a host of nearby semilegal, grayish-black markets1

  The meetings of the National Dialogue Conference (NDC) mirrored the chaos of Yemeni society. Everyone would come and sit down for the regular daily sessions in the big Moevenpick ballroom. Groups from all over Yemen attended: from the South, North, East, and West, all of Hadramawt, Shabwa, various factions and political parties, some wearing dishdashas, some in suits, some in more colorful tribal gear. Each came with grievances from the civil wars, from the reunification of the northern and southern parts of Yemen, which had once been separate countries.

  Especially potent divides existed in two directions: between the Zaydi-Houthi groups, who are Shi’a and had ruled the northern Yemeni imamate for centuries, and the southern—eastern—coastal Sunni groups, which outnumbered the Shi’a but, until recently under President Ali Abdullah Saleh, had not wielded comparable power or influence. These groups got along remarkably well in peacetime, with many members of one or another sect praying at each other’s mosques and most strife focusing on intertribal rather than sectarian disputes. But the increasing partisan and sectarian issues at stake during the National Dialogue, exacerbated by al-Qaeda’s propaganda, really began to drive a wedge into Yemen’s traditional modes of compromise and habits of tolerance.

  A second and even trickier divide existed between the North and South, sometimes accentuated by Shi’a-Sunni cleavages. This divide went back to the North-South unification in the mid-twentieth century. The North not only won the civil wars that resulted in unification of Yemen but did so with the help of a large number of defectors from a previous brief but extremely bloody intra-South civil war between two factions called the Tuqma and Zumra. The Tuqma prevailed, and about 30,000 Zumra fled to the country of North Yemen. The Zumra members then helped the North conquer the South when war between the two Yemens erupted.

  Saleh emerged at this time as the driving force in the North. He rewarded Zumra members for their support by granting them high places in government, as well as large tracts of desirable land in the (former) South. Subsequently, the Zumra were seen by their brethren in the South as traitors, as carpetbaggers of a sort. In the North the Zumra did not have an organic tribal support structure, which tended to be critical for any individual leader’s political and military aspirations, especially under Saleh, as can be seen by the way Abdulghani Jamil skyrocketed to prominence due to the tribal support his family could muster. More importantly, once the ties of loyalty to Saleh became less important, the Zumra did not have an organic base of power in the North to resort to.

  While all this infighting may sound academic, easily relegated to the history books, it was a significant factor during the National Dialogue and during the chaos afterward when the Houthis ran the interim Yemeni government out of town. Both President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi and then defense minister Ali Nasser Muhammad were Zumra, as were many of their key staff. Through some sort of misguided understanding of Yemeni power structures, the United Nations and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) pinned their hopes for reconciliation on these particular Zumra-affiliated individuals. This meant that the NDC process was, from the beginning, fraught with one of Yemen’s most contentious internal rifts and represented by its living embodiments. It did not require much work for the Houthis to claim that the process of Hadi taking power through the National Dialogue was illegitimate and that they (or at least the Zaydi minority as represented by more illustrious clans like that of Muhammad Sharafuddin) represented a more time-honored, traditionally successful power structure, one that had lasted for centuries under the imamate.

  The National Dialogue Conference faithfully reproduced many of the rifts prevalent in Yemeni society as a whole. The various factions all came armed with their issues. They all wanted old slights and injustices remedied in the most exacting ways.

  None of these groups came with solutions.

  One time when I was talking to Tawakkol Karman, the recent Nobel Peace laureate, I said, “You always oppose what someone is doing, or saying, but you never come in with a solution or a new idea.” And that same thing happened over and over again, day after day. It became, especially at the end, much more about pe
rsonal or provincial grievances than about national reconstruction and unity.

  I remember talking to one of the delegates, asking him how he felt about the progress they were making. He said, “Yeah, I go every day, but only because they pay me a per diem stipend to be there and they feed me free lunch.” That’s where things stood after the first few months.

  The Saudi and Qatari embassies wielded the most influence at the National Dialogue Conference. After all, they had signed up to pay not just for the conference itself but also for massive investment and rebuilding plans. The entire GCC was involved, and so were the Western embassies. But the interesting and somewhat damning aspect of Saudi and Qatari participation was that they chose to back different sides, both of which were deeply flawed.

  The Saudis wanted to see Hadi stay in power, and—a point of contention with the official US perspective here—Hadi had aligned himself, through Ali Muhsin, more and more strongly with Islah and other radical Sunni elements. Hadi didn’t have a powerbase of his own (being Zumra and alienated from his own tribal structure in the South), so he didn’t have much choice. Islah was the only group who accepted him with open arms.

  The Qataris, on the other hand, while elsewhere supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, also a deeply radicalized Sunni movement, changed tactics in Yemen and started out by throwing their support behind the Houthis and the General People’s Congress, which was Saleh’s group. Qatar, I believe, did this mostly to counter Saudi influence.

  All of this jockeying played out publicly in the Moevenpick ballroom, but the decisions and alliances were forged privately, at qat chews and dinners, down in Hadda and at the key players’ walled mansion compounds—places where, increasingly, US diplomats could not go. The security situation put the Americans behind walls of their own making, leaving them to understand Yemen only through the talking points of the elites they met in formal settings or through the eyes of the few people like me who still lived and worked out in town.