Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes

by Victoria Clark

  Displeased with this truce, alarmed by the prospect (however dim) of a union of all Yemenis in a single state to rival their own, the Saudis increased their financial and political pressure on al-Iryani by boosting the influence and confidence of the tribes and the army with generous gifts. Al-Iryani first left for Syria in the summer of 1973 but chose a permanent exile there the following summer, after the sputtering war with the Marxist south, just as soon as he learned of a plot to oust him. He had told the tribes they would not need to kill him in order to be rid of him, and he was as good as his word. The only civilian president Yemen has ever had died peacefully in Damascus in 1998, at the age of eighty-nine.

  Lieutenant Colonel Ibrahim al-Hamdi, a protege of General al-Amri, succeeded him. Al-Hamdi’s military status meant that he enjoyed crucial access to the country’s ‘means of coercion’ and he was of Zaydi highland stock, but educated and well travelled thanks to his family’s qadhi class origins. ‘Ibrahim’, as he was popularly called, possessed the kind of charisma Nasser had once had; his oratory was grand and he was dark and stocky, and dressed down in the same short-sleeved military style that Nasser had affected. Frequently spotted driving his own battered VW Beetle around Sanaa, he rejoiced in the common touch. Generally perceived as a sophisticated man of the modern world who could dream up a three-year economic plan and a Supreme Corrective Committee to tackle corruption, and embark on a thoroughgoing legal reform and even try to improve tax revenues which only accounted for 10 per cent of the budget when he took power, he was also gratifyingly emotional about the dream of Yemeni unity. But he was careful not to cross the Saudis, at least at first. Sharing their mistrust and fear of the south’s Marxist regime, he invited the Saudis to fund the spread of their Sunni Wahhabi schools as an ideological counter-influence, and appointed Abdul Majid al-Zindani - today branded a ‘Specially Designated Global Terrorist’ by the United Nations and the US Treasury Department - as the YAR’s spiritual ‘Guide’, or chief religious authority.

  Al-Hamdi was also sincerely interested in improving the condition of the countryside, having taken a lead in the emerging Co-operative Development Movement, al-taawun, the YAR’s most efficient engine of modernisation. Hundreds of new local development agencies were sensibly building on the mutual self-help traditions that had long been a feature of tribal culture. In the words of the British anthropologist Sheila Carapico, who cites them as crucial evidence in her defence of tribalism against the charge of inactive backwardness, the Local Development Associations (LDAs) became known among foreign aid organisations as ‘inclusive, non-government, non-profit, community-level services providers’.25 Attracting funds from residents, migrant workers and foreign donors as well as the government, they promoted and supervised the building of roads, schools, clinics and irrigation projects. But perhaps most importantly of all, al-Hamdi was lucky. His period of rule - 1974 to 1977 - coincided with three years of excellent rains and a swift rise in living standards thanks to the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of remittances earned by Yemeni migrant workers in Saudi Arabia.

  By the mid-1970s a spell of lucrative work in the Kingdom was almost a rite of passage for a huge number of Yemeni males. Unseen by their family and tribe, proud Yemeni tribesmen, for whom manual work was traditionally demeaning, could slave on building sites or in the oil industry or as a domestic servant for a couple of years and with the proceeds buy a gun, a cassette recorder, perhaps a diesel-powered water pump for irrigation as well as a car, loaded with gifts for all the family, and still be able to build a house. Those were halcyon days. Provincial towns gained electricity at last, the souks filled with imported foods, homes with basic household appliances and newly paved roads with pickup trucks. Hitherto an expensive delicacy whose enjoyment was largely confined to the urban elites, qat became ubiquitous, swiftly supplanting food crops. In 1975 a north Yemeni finance minister comfortably mused,

  Few nations are as dependent as we are on abroad for their development, but what enables us to survive, while waiting for our agriculture to revive and perhaps for some happy surprises beneath our earth [Yemeni oil did not come on stream until 1986], are our emigrants. From Chicago to Kuwait, from Marseilles to Jeddah, they are 1,235,000 and each one sends us, on average, about one dollar a day.26

  There was also plenty of aid from a West that had satisfied itself that the YAR was firmly in their Cold War camp, even if its army was entirely kitted out with Soviet-made weaponry thanks to Egyptian influence since 1962. Al-Hamdi, wrote the former American diplomat and historian of Yemen Robert W Stookey fulsomely, was giving ’Yemen by far the stablest [sic] and most effective government the country has had since the 1962 revolution. Its single-minded devotion to economic and social development has produced impressive results and growth seems likely to continue.’27

  Al-Hamdi is still remembered by Yemenis as a prince among presidents, as a real friend to the poor. In a Sanaa back street one afternoon in 2008, I came upon a battered old army jeep. Painted a startling gold, its bonnet adorned with a dented tin tea-pot sprouting flowers and its roof crowned with a megaphone, its back and sides were plastered with a collage of posters and yellowing newspaper cuttings covered in plastic to preserve them. Noting my puzzled interest, a passer-by pointed out the mobile number painted on the front of the vehicle and kindly offered to phone the owner of the vehicle whom he happened to know lived in the opposite apartment block. A rotund middle-aged man, his cheek bulging with qat and his eyes fiery, soon descended to street level to tell me that driving his mobile history class around the city for the past thirty-four years, since the year of al-Hamdi’s accession to power, was his favourite hobby. Leading me on a tour of the vehicle, he pointed out a fading photograph of the boggle-eyed Imam Ahmad and another of a beheading in 1955, and various martyr revolutionaries, and a poster of the late Yasser Arafat, and another of the recently deceased paramount sheikh of the Hashid tribes, Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar, until we reached a torn newspaper image of al-Hamdi - ‘Ah!’ he paused theatrically, turning to address the cluster of children who had gathered to enjoy his history lesson, ‘we all loved al-Hamdi best - he was so simple and honest.’

  But those who knew al-Hamdi rather better than the doting masses, had their doubts. Out of the public eye, he was hot-tempered, too fond of alcohol and had a boorish habit of stifling the flow of conversation at afternoon qat chews by playing music cassettes. Far more worry-ingly, he was as chronically suspicious as any imam had ever been of anyone he considered a rival, so it was not long before he alienated some important constituencies. Determined to curb the power and greed of the tribes and re-channel the stream of Saudi money that was flowing directly to Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar, for example, into development projects and arms purchases, he was soon surrounded by disgruntled enemies among the leading highland sheikhs, the Hashid and Bakil. While Robert Stookey was happily applauding al-Hamdi’s mission to ‘gradually take power from the traditional leaders [in order to] place it in the hands of the new elites possessing technical skills needed for modernisation and enhancement of the people’s material and cultural well-being’, those northern sheikhs believed al-Hamdi was stripping them of their influence and concentrating all power in his own hands, not just in order to promote technocrats but to elevate lesser sheikhs in their place, a mark of unforgivable disrespect - utterly ayb, shamefully dishonouring.

  The YAR’s most powerful sheikh, Abdullah al-Ahmar, was out of a job as the Speaker of the Consultative Assembly when al-Hamdi abruptly dissolved that body. Turning his back on the president he retreated from Sanaa to his tribal stronghold of Khamir and, in the spring of 1977, there were serious fears that his Hashid tribes would march on Sanaa to subject the capital to another great siege and sacking. Increasingly isolated, with only his closeness to the Saudis and his popularity with the masses and the army rank and file to boast of, al-Hamdi finally managed to alienate the Saudis too by making peaceful overtures towards south Yemen. This, and the fact that his old comrade-in-arms an
d Chief of Staff, the ambitious Ahmad al-Ghashmi, was egging him on in his ill-judged confrontations with the most powerful sheikhs, sealed his fate. But a peaceful retreat into exile like his predecessor was not an option. His popularity among the military rank and file meant that his removal from power was guaranteed to involve violence.

  On the day before he was due to fly down to Aden to meet his south Yemeni counterpart to advance the cause of unity, al-Hamdi and his brother Abdullah were murdered at his home in Sanaa. Two dead French women - some reports said they were Japanese - were also found at the scene but later revealed to have been planted there in a squalid little touch designed to confirm rumours about al-Hamdi’s louche lifestyle. Al-Ghashmi, possibly in cahoots with Saudis determined to scupper al-Hamdi’s rapprochement with the south, was reckoned to be the most likely perpetrator of the crime.

  Scion of a sheikh’s family hailing from Hamdan, near the Saudi border well to the north of Sanaa, al-Ghashmi was an uneducated soldier-tribesman who had none of his predecessor’s charisma or way with words. Operating gloomily under a cloud of suspicion that he had killed the people’s beloved ‘Ibrahim’, he spent much of his eight-and-a-half months in office rooting out any vestiges of al-Hamdi support and socialist dissent by means of brutal purges and executions. He also embarked on a rationalisation and consolidation of the army, which at the time of his accession barely merited the name, being a loose grouping of units generally led by powerful and independent-minded sheikhs whose loyalty to the new state could not be relied upon.

  Otherwise, his accession to power caused few ripples and even brought some benefits. While he soon demonstrated little appetite or time for the great state-building and modernising project al-Hamdi had embarked upon, he understood that any dramatic change of al-Hamdi’s reforming course would be bound to halt the torrent of western aid that the country was beginning to rely on as much as Saudi aid. Like the twentieth-century imams and al-Hamdi before him, he solicited and accepted any aid, from any quarter, as long as it came without strings attached. From the Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc allies came military advisers and training and weapons, from the West and international agencies came development aid and technical know-how.

  With solid Saudi backing - he had immediately received $570 million in direct aid from the Saudis - al-Ghashmi had plenty of money to dispense. Shortly after a governor of Hajja turned down a job in his government and asked the president instead for the wherewithal to improve Hajja’s roads and bridges, he was startled to receive a suitcase ‘filled with several million dollars worth of Saudi riyal notes’28 from al-Ghashmi. Even a twelve-year-old school girl who had played a starring role in a ceremony held to welcome the president of Algeria on an official visit to the YAR, found herself summoned to al-Ghashmi’s home the following day to receive a Rolex watch and the equivalent of $1,200 for her pains. This kind of disarming open-handedness, plentiful largesse, dispensed in the traditional manner of a good sheikh, served to mollify many of his domestic opponents, but it could not shield him from becoming a pawn in the lethal domestic power game going on in the Marxist south.

  Despite Saudi opposition to the idea of uniting the two Yemens, the old ideal remained powerful and important enough to Yemenis to ensure that the leaders of both parts of Yemen continued to make time for six-monthly unity talks. So it was that towards the end of June 1978, al-Ghashmi prepared to receive an envoy from his Marxist counterpart, Salim Rubaya Ali, in Aden. The most colourful account of what ensued is to be found in Khadija al-Salami’s Tears of Sheba: Tales of Survival and Intrigue in Arabia (2003). Her version of al-Ghashmi’s assassination relies on the eyewitness report of a newspaper editor, a close friend of al-Ghashmi, who had been entrusted with the task of meeting the Adeni envoy at the airport and driving him to the president’s office. The editor noticed immediately that the southerner was nervous, distracted and very unwilling to be parted from his briefcase:

  I bent down to take the briefcase from him - just to be nice - and he jerked it away from me. But I was polite and insisted. I guess he felt confident I wasn’t going to open it and he finally handed it to me. It was a beautiful briefcase, brand new, and when he wasn’t looking, I tossed it up in the air, studied it in the light, spun it around to get a good look at the quality of the leather … I looked at the guy and smiled and told him ‘I’d like to have a case like this one.’ I had hoped he might promise to send me one when he got back to Aden. But he didn’t say anything; just stood there wiping the sweat from his forehead. I left him in the reception room and went to inform the President of his arrival.

  ‘He has a briefcase with him,’ I told al-Ghashmi, ‘Should I open it before he comes in?’

  ‘That won’t be necessary’ the President said, ‘Just show him in.’29

  Why would al-Ghashmi - as suspicious as al-Hamdi, to the extent that he would barely taste food outside his own home for fear it was poisoned - waive the most basic safety measures in this case? One explanation of the event has it that he was not expecting any vital communiqué about unity from Aden, only payment for a consignment of qat which he had been regularly purchasing for his opposite number in a gesture of Yemeni brotherliness. While easily available in the north, qat - judged an opium of the people - had been restricted to weekend usage in most of the Marxist south and banned altogether in Hadhramaut. Al-Ghashmi may have waived the usual search for the simple reason that he did not want his guards seeing a briefcase stuffed with cash30 and, putting two and two together and making five, spreading rumours that he was in the pay of southern Marxists. Noting that the envoy was not the southerner they had come to know on previous occasions, two of the president’s guards moved to search him and his beautiful briefcase, but the editor impatiently shooed them away. Ticking them off for insulting a visitor, he ushered the southerner straight into the president’s office and was still on his way out of the building when he heard the bomb go off. The booby-trapped briefcase killed both the president and the envoy.

  Al-Ghashmi’s demise was neither tragic nor noble. He was collateral damage in a war being waged among the leadership of the south. It seems that either the envoy or the briefcase, or possibly both, had been switched, probably at Aden airport, by supporters of Abdul Fattah Ismail - a fervently pro-Soviet Marxist - who was intent on first blackening the name of and then replacing the more Chinese Maoism-inclined party chief, Salim Rubaya Ali. The transfer of power was smooth. In spite of its brevity al-Ghashmi’s term of office could be seen as marking the consolidation of the tribal military republic; al-Iryani’s qadhi-run republic had failed and so had al-Hamdi’s qadhi and military-run republic. The experience of the YAR’s past thirty years has proved the winning formula to be the al-Ghashmi one, the military-tribal republic. In other words, the barely disguised traditional supremacy of Zaydi highland tribes in military costume.

  Within a week a tribesman army officer was installed as the YAR’s president. He was a member of the small Sanhan tribe belonging to the Hashid federation which paramount Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar headed, the man widely believed to have played an active part in al-Hamdi’s murder thanks to being a close friend and protégé of al-Ghashmi. A handsome, bull-necked thirty-five-year-old military commander of Taiz in the southern highlands, a man rumoured to be heavily involved in the lucrative business of smuggling alcohol over the border from the Marxist south, he was Lieutenant-Colonel Ali Abdullah Salih. Few believed Salih would last any longer than his predecessor. In the summer of 1978, a year in which the YAR rejoiced in no fewer than three presidents, a good black joke was doing the rounds of Sanaa’s afternoon qat chews: on arriving in heaven and meeting up with al-Hamdi, al-Ghashmi shrugs off his predecessor’s angry complaint that he has forgotten to bring any qat with him, saying, ‘President Salih has promised to take care of the qat - and he should be joining us any time now.’31

  More than thirty years later they are still waiting for that qat. Within two months of his accession to power in July 1978 Salih had proved his met
tle by scotching an attempt to assassinate him by die-hard al-Hamdi loyalists, and trying and executing its leaders within a matter of days. By early spring of the following year he had introduced compulsory military service and was fighting a war against the Marxist south. Because both Yemens had massed troops along their border in the wake of al-Ghashmi’s assassination, it had not taken long for border tensions to boil over again. The United States, hitherto only interested in the affairs of the Yemen Arab Republic in so far as they affected its relations with Saudi Arabia, was galvanised into action, terrified that this border skirmishing, when viewed alongside the recent toppling of the Shah in Iran, was a sure sign that, via its proxy, south Yemen, the USSR had grand designs on the entire Middle East. An American aircraft carrier steamed into the Gulf of Aden and gigantic cargo planes flew in and out of Sanaa loaded with tanks and anti-tank missiles, paid for by Saudi Arabia.

  For a couple of weeks it looked as if the line dividing the two Yemeni republics might be shaping up into an important Cold War front, but it was not long before the rest of the Arab world, desperate to maintain a show of unity after what they perceived to be Egypt’s treacherous defection to the West at Camp David, exerted themselves to lower the temperature. In the space of little more than a month the crisis had passed. Just as in 1972 - peace was restored with pious mutual declarations in favour of uniting all Yemenis in one country one day.