Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes

by Victoria Clark

  Perceiving it to be their urgent duty to spread the good Marxist word north, it was the PDRY that instigated the cross-border tensions that led to the mini-war of 1979 that so alarmed President Jimmy Carter’s administration. One of the PDRY’s leaders admitted as much to the Soviet ambassador in Aden at the time, ‘Yes, it’s us who’ve started the war. If we win, we’ll create Great Yemen. If we lose, you’ll intervene and save us.’44

  COLD WAR BENEFICIARIES

  The Soviet Union showed less inclination than the United States to fan the flames of war on a new Cold War front because, for all their different ideologies, by the start of 1979 there was little to choose between the two Yemens in the areas that really counted: finance and defence.

  First, the USSR was arming both countries; the YAR continued to buy Russian arms and to describe itself as non-aligned in the Cold War because it was the best way of claiming a little breathing space in Saudi Arabia’s ‘tight hug’.45 By the end of the decade both countries owed around 45 per cent of their entire national debt to the USSR, for military equipment.46 Second, both countries were recipients of large amounts of aid from Gulf countries as well as from the West, and were hugely reliant for the rest of their income on remittances from emigrant workers.

  In the YAR, the 1980s witnessed a steady process of centralisation that was greatly assisted by the aggrandisement of the army and the co-operation of powerful sheikhs. Favourites in the system of state patronage, the Zaydi tribes and the military and security forces in which they predominated became ever more closely identified with each other, and with commerce too. Prominent sheikhs were spending more and more time in Sanaa attending to business fortunes founded on lucrative monopolies acquired through licences for foreign imports (for Japanese bulldozers, or steel or lumber, for example) that they had been granted as rewards for their loyalty to the republic.

  The top echelons of the military - dominated by members of the president’s family and tribe - were permitted to expand their activities into the market-place too, under the umbrella of the Military Economic Corporation (MECO). From humble beginnings as the supplier of boots, uniforms and field rations to the army, MECO diversified into ‘such unmilitary items as shower curtains and bathroom fittings’.47 A member of the president’s Sanhan tribe became the head of MECO and built himself a more than usually luxurious residence in Sanaa. Once commercially viable quantities of oil had finally been discovered in the YAR’s Marib region in 1984, it was not long before MECO acquired 20,000 hectares in the area. MECO changed its shameless name to YECO but continued to expand into the real estate market, especially after the unification of the country in 1990 when there was land to be acquired in the former south. The proliferation of such dubious arrangements is what has led the leading American historian of Yemen, Robert D. Burrowes, to brand contemporary Yemen ‘a kleptocracy - i.e., government of, by and for the thieves’.48

  The Zaydi highlanders‘ strengthening grip on the country was most clearly seen in the fate of the Local Development Agencies (LDA) whose origins lay in Tihama and southern highlands of the country and whose promotion had secured President al-Hamdi’s popularity back in the mid-1970s. They worked reasonably efficiently to improve the YAR’s infrastructure until 1984 when the knock-on effects of the plunging price of oil meant that both the government and migrant workers’ contributions to projects plummeted. The following year they were merged with regional and local branches of the General People’s Congress (GPC) which, created by means of a thousand-man council in 1982, was soon shaping up into a ruling party to rival the south’s Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP). Consolidated into new ‘local development co-operative councils’, the old LDAs became directly responsible to the Ministry for Local Administration in Sanaa and were robbed of all their energy.

  A job, however menial, in the expanding government bureaucracy or the military or the president’s party, the GPC, became most people’s best hope of a steady income, however small, and a vital means of securing people’s loyalty to the regime. Often, these posts amounted to a stipend, requiring neither attendance nor work, let alone efficiency from the recipient. Other ways of favouring the northern highlanders were found so that by 1989 it was reckoned that the southern highlanders and Tihamans were paying as much as five times more tax than the highland provinces of Dhamar, Hajja, Saada and al-Mahweet.49 Small wonder that those over-exploited regions, especially the highly populated southern highland towns of Taiz and Ibb remained the focus of a political dissidence that had first surfaced in the year after the Egyptians left, when northern highland Zaydi Republicans battled with southern highland Sunni Republicans in order to retain their traditional supremacy.

  The speedy and unregulated expansion of Sanaa in the 1980s was another reflection of the growing centralisation of power in a highland area that lacked sufficient resources - jobs and homes, let alone water -to sustain its exploding population for long. In the 1980s Sanaa overtook Aden as Yemen’s largest city and, by the second half of the decade, it had spread as far south as the leafy Hadda whose trees made way for the high-walled palace fortresses of the newly enriched, adorned with lawns and swimming pools, buildings of the kind one sees in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia but would not expect to see in a country as generally impoverished as Yemen. With the discovery of oil these residences were joined by the equally grand headquarters of foreign oil companies and a luxury hotel. Sanaa was no longer among the hardest of hardship postings for any of the foreigners stationed there.

  Konstantin Eggert, a Russian military translator stationed in the city in the mid-1980s, recalled for me the extent to which President Salih was succeeding, just like the imams before him, in welcoming assistance from whatever quarter as long as it had material rather than political strings attached.

  Sanaa was the Vienna of the Middle East - there were us [Soviets], and the Americans and the Iraqis, all there watching each other and advising Yemen’s military. We Russians had to wear Yemeni uniforms, but without any insignia because we didn’t want the Americans knowing who was a colonel, for example, but Yemenis respected the Americans more than us; there was a problem when we gave them a consignment of SAM missiles equipped with heating for Siberia instead of air-conditioning, and I remember a Sanaani shopkeeper once saying to me, ’You know what the problem is with you Russians? - you have no authorised dealers here to repair your Zil cars and your refrigerators, and when are you going to get round to producing screw top lids for your jars? Is that beyond the capacity of a superpower?’

  Yemenis, he recalled, were always asking him why the USSR didn’t nuclear-bomb America’s main ally in the region, the source of the Arab world’s humiliation, Israel.

  Although most of Eggert’s time in Sanaa was tediously spent translating into Arabic letters requesting immediate payment for weaponry delivered, he counted himself lucky to be posted to Sanaa, rather than Aden. ‘I was paid in Yemeni riyals so I could buy things like jeans and cosmetics that I couldn’t get back home. We’d all do anything to be allowed to stay there and get on with getting hold of stuff we wanted.’ The one and only advantage of a posting to comradely Marxist south Yemen was far freer access to alcohol. The product of the Sira beer factory, a kind donation from East German comrades, was excellent.

  The PDRY struggled on into the 1980s, mercifully rid of its most doctrinaire Soviet Marxist leader, Abdul Fattah Ismail, who retired in disgrace to Moscow in 1980, and the more pragmatic Ali Nasir Muhammad proceeded to concentrate all important state powers in his own person in order to preside over a loosening-up. Even the Kremlin, itself feeling the pinch, applauded his moves towards establishing better relations with the oil-rich Arab states and there was no more trying to export Marxism at gunpoint, either to the YAR or to neighbouring Oman. Ali Nasir, as he was known, also permitted the construction of private housing, issued farmers with certificates of title to their land and even invited an Italian company, Agip, to come and prospect for oil, while encouraging private enterprise and the appointment of e
ducated, urban technocrats - whatever their ideology - to positions of influence.

  Competence, not ideology, was now the order of the day, but before long he was facing mounting hard-liner hostility over his deviation from the Marxist path. His alleged fostering of a ’bureaucratic and bourgeois layer which has allied itself with the parasitic layers in society‘ was backed up by reports of the indecent wealth he and his cronies were enjoying largely thanks to ’making personal gains in dealings with foreign capitalist companies’.50 He had, his foes complained, built himself ‘a palace with gardens, swimming pool and satellite television’ and a hotel that was a ‘fortress of capitalism’, and he was wasting precious water on a pond and fountain in Aden’s public park.51 One of his closest allies, the governor of Abyan, had squandered funds earmarked for social housing on building a bowling alley.

  Judging Ali Nasir to be straying too far from the Marxist straight and narrow for comfort, Moscow encouraged Abd al-Fattah Ismail to make a comeback. In late 1984 the chief ideologist of the PDRY returned to Aden to wrest back control of the YSP and accuse Ali Nasir of being ‘ideologically impotent’.52 A lethal power struggle ensued, with Ali Nasir at the head of the less ideologically rigid tendency against Abd al-Fattah and the last remaining purist stalwarts of the original NLF leadership. As the two heavyweights confronted each other and tension mounted, each side hastened to organise support in the army, at last revealing that the split in the leadership was tribal, not ideological. Suddenly, all the structures of the modern state counted for nothing. The ‘rightist’ Ali Nasir, a member of the Dathina tribe in Abyan, looked to the Dathinis, the Fadhlis, the Aulaqis and Audhalis who had dominated the military in British times for his support. Abd al-Fattah and his purist ‘leftists’ was backed by the Lahej area, and Radfani, Yafai and Dhali tribes who had been well represented in the army since independence, as well as to Hadhramaut.

  The president was the first to resort to violence. Declaring that his opponents were plotting to topple him, he seized the initiative on the morning of 13 January 1986 by sending his bodyguard to stand in for him at a meeting with members of his Politburo, the majority of whom were his opponents. According to a KGB officer serving in Aden at the time, the bodyguard entered the room, set a briefcase down on a chair, opened it, took out a machine gun and began shooting. Four corpses soon slumped to the floor. Others were wounded but survived. One of them, the man who would be the PDRY’s last leader, Ali Salim al-Bidh, feigned death by dropping onto the floor and later escaped out of window down a rope made of curtains. Abd al-Fattah Ismail also managed to make a getaway, but his subsequent fate, according to his old friend Professor Naumkin, remains a mystery: ‘It is most likely that friends tried to evacuate him in a tank and then, on the road from Tawahi [often called Steamer Point] to Crater it was shelled and he was completely burnt - no part of him was ever found.’

  The event unleashed ten days of the bloodiest, over-armed, infighting either half of Yemen had ever seen. ‘People behaved just like beasts in the field,’ recalled Farook al-Hakimi, a supporter of Ali Nasir and a diplomat. ‘There were pilots killing each other at the airport and shoot-outs in the corridors of the Defence Ministry, but our opponents, the “leftists”, always had the advantage because they had the support of the tank brigade. Rockets fired from way outside the city, from the British forces cemetery in Silent Valley, blew up the weapons store in the Maalla district. By the end, there were so many dead they had to be cleared from the streets by bulldozers,’ he remembered. A minor casualty was Aden’s famous clock, the Hogg Clock Tower or Little Big Ben, a potent reminder of British times; its hands froze stopped at 10.20 on the morning of the first day of fighting.

  Although suspected by western governments of stirring up trouble against pragmatic President Ali Nasir, the Kremlin - about to be swept up in Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika - was genuinely surprised and embarrassed by the grisly goings on in Aden. Thousands of Soviet diplomats evacuated their wives and children and, holed up in their beachside embassy by the fourth day of fighting, tried their best to mediate a peace. Without success. ‘Four of our embassy buildings were shot at - it was like a message to stay neutral,’ remembered one Soviet official who also recalled merrily raiding the embassy shop for drink and tobacco, dodging snipers on his way to the lavatory, seeing corpses littering the nearby beach and a Georgian colonel being peppered with seventy bullets while begging fighters not to fire rockets on the city. It later transpired that the Soviet Embassy was located on an important tribal fault-line.

  Four days in, with the fighting escalating and the Soviet ambassador to Aden proving incapable of mediating a peace, the time had come to evacuate all foreign nationals. The Kremlin agreed that the situation was serious enough to merit a loosening of the usual restrictions on western craft entering what were effectively their territorial waters. The royal yacht Britannia, sailing nearby at the time, recommended itself for the task of evacuation because she could easily be converted into a hospital ship. By 18 January she had removed 450 people, including many Soviet citizens, to safety. Beating a hasty retreat under shellfire, she sailed on up the coast and collected 200 more.53

  Realising that his cause was lost without the support of the tank brigade, Ali Nasir first begged President Salih in the north for support, luring him with the promise of speedy unification and then, when no help was forthcoming, fled to the YARf with some 30,000 of his supporters, which was a blessing in disguise since it meant that the clashes lacked fuel to spread outside Aden and become a full-blown civil war. But ten days were more than enough. Officially the death toll was reckoned to be 4,330, but unofficially it was put at far higher than that run up during the struggle for independence twenty years earlier. Officially the cost in damage to property and loss of military hardware was set at $120 million, but unofficially it was reckoned at nearer $140 million, a figure that matched the total amount of foreign aid received by the PDRY since independence.54

  The toll on the PDRY’s morale and international credibility was just as crippling. ‘When are you people going to stop killing each other?’ was all a weary Fidel Castro had to say to the ‘leftist’ al-Bidh, the Hadhrami who assumed the leadership of the YSP once the smoke of battle had cleared, once the bulldozers had done their gruesome work, and new posters of the ‘martyrs’ been plastered on the bullet-pocked walls of the city.

  The unification of the two Yemens had never looked less likely. With the hard-liners back in power in Aden, the project could be shelved and forgotten as far as the YAR was concerned. In that blood-soaked spring of 1986 no one could have dreamed that the two Yemeni republics would become one less than four years later.

  a After an approach by a British SAS officer, Mossad agreed to mount two operations - ‘Porcupine’ and ‘Gravy ’ - to supply fourteen planeloads of weaponry to Yemen’s Royalists between 1964 and 1966 (Ha’aretz, 20 October 2008).

  b Neil (Billy) Maclean MP; Julian Amery Minister for Aviation; Duncan Sandys, Secrretary of State for the Colonies and Commonwealth Realtions; David Stirling, founder of the SAS; Colonel David Smiley.

  c Some estimates put the figure as high as 70,000.

  d L. Paul Bremer headed the Coalition Provisional Authority in post-Saddam Iraq from 2003 until 2004.

  e The PRSY was renamed the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) in 1970.

  f Ali Nasir later chose exile in Damascus where he remains to this day, still taking an interest in south Yemeni affairs.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A SHOTGUN WEDDING (1990–2000)

  ESCAPING TO UNITY

  On 22 May 1990, after more than 150 years of separation and the sharp frost that descended on relations between the two Yemens in the wake of the PDRYs blood-letting in 1986, the noble dream of unity at last came true. The speedy coupling took everyone by surprise. Only a few months earlier the US ambassador to Aden had confidently opined that unification was at least fifty years away’.1

  Given the swift contract
ion of both political and economic Soviet influence in the region after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, the YAR looked by far the sturdier of the two Yemens. Like other collapsing eastern bloc states, the PDRY was suffering underemployment and chronic shortages of everyday items such as fresh fruit, ciga-rettes, cars and spare parts. Southerners knew that, although ruled in the interests of the Zaydi highland tribesmen, northerners were wealthier and freer and their society a lot more dynamic than their own. If both Yemens were able to rejoice in the news that, at last, economically viable quantities of oil had been discovered in their territories, it was the YAR - with an energetic Texan oil company named Hunt Oil Inc. on its team - that had got off to a quicker productive start in the Marib desert east of Sanaa, in 1986. South of the border, further to the east, in Shabwa, the USSR’s Tekhnoexport was begrudging investment and dragging its heels.

  But President Salih’s position was not as advantageous as it seemed. By the late 1980s he was sorely in need of a grand populist project to boost his support among almost everyone but the military and the bloated civil service. There had been a price to pay for the longed-for oil find; high hopes that Yemen might soon be as rich as neighbouring Saudi Arabia had excited the local tribes and led to flare-ups of feuding around the oil fields. Clumsy army interventions to protect the Hunt Oil installations and workers took dangerously little account of tribal custom, eroding Salih’s support among the tribes and his control over the region. In other words, Salih’s control over the all-important means of coercion was weaker than his counterpart’s over the PDRY Unlike the PDRY’s Marxists, the YAR’s military tribal republicans had never tried to disarm the tribes or to disabuse them of their belief in their sovereignty over their tribal territories. In effect, the northern tribes had been allowed to avoid explicitly signing up to the project of building a modern sovereign state. The anthropologist Sheila Carapico has argued that by the end of the 1980s the Yemens were ‘each in their own way so flimsy, flawed and illegitimate that merger [unity] was each leadership’s best option’.2 A former PDRY and Adeni historian recalled that the rulers of the two republics ‘escaped to unity’ to save their skins.