Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes

by Victoria Clark

  Following the 1986 events, the best vehicle for a rapprochement between the two Yemens turned out to be oil. Both regimes were equally anxious to extract as much of it as possible in as short a time as possible from the large and desert Marib-Shabwa region straddling their border. A joint committee whose work on the production of a geological map of the area had long been a rare oasis of transparency and trust between the two states served, in the words of a PDRY deputy oil minister, as ‘the guinea-pig for unification’. At a summit meeting in Sanaa in May 1988, after a bout of particularly serious cross-border skirmishing, Salih and al-Bidh seized on the new map and made it the basis for an agreement that 850 square miles of the Marib-Shabwa border area be demilitarised and declared a no-man’s-land. In addition, a consortium made up of Hunt Oil Inc., Tekhnoexport, France’s Total and Elf Aquitaine, and a Kuwaiti firm signed an exploration and production-sharing agreement with both governments.

  By the early spring of 1989 enough excitement about oil had fuelled enough confidence in a peaceful future for unification to be back on the agenda on both sides of the border. President Salih must have assessed the risk of diluting his power and that of his northern tribal Zaydi highlanders by adding two million-odd more southern Sunnis to the YAR’s already densely Sunni-populated southern highlands and Tihama. He certainly failed to convince either Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar, or the country’s leading religious authority, that unification with an impoverished atheist state was a good idea, but these domestic doubts paled into insignificance when weighed against the demands of living in a neighbourhood increasingly dominated by Iraq.

  Like Nasser before him, Saddam Hussein was dreaming the grand pan-Arab dream of uniting the entire peninsula under his rule. To that end he had set about promoting his country as the peninsula’s main rival to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)a by creating a rival economic union, the Arab Cooperation Council (ACC). Jordan and Egypt as well as the YAR, all friends and supporters of Iraq in its recent war against Iran, joined the new ACC in February 1989, but it seemed to Saddam that the more Yemenis he could muster under his flag for the coming confrontation with Saudi Arabia, the better. A swift eradication of the border between the two Yemens would suit him very well. From Salih’s point of view, Iraq looked like a far more attractive ally than Saudi Arabia. In the wake of Aden’s 1986 blood-bath, the Saudis had enraged him by suddenly staking a territorial claim to Hadhramaut and to some of the PDRY oil region in Shabwa and even to a sliver of the YAR, as well as distributing Saudi passports to Hadhramis. It seems likely that Saddam Hussein managed to persuade Salih that the PDRY’s Marxists were not nearly as serious a threat as he feared, and boosted his confidence by mentioning their common backgrounds (humble, tribal) and equally long hold on power (twenty years).

  Whatever the exact truth, there is no doubt that by November 1989 President Salih was entirely won over to the cause of unity. He therefore seized an opportunity to advance the matter on a trip to Aden to attend the PDRY’s anniversary celebrations of the British departure. According to his own account on his government website,3 Salih was politely received at the border crossing by three PDRY leaders who joined him in his car. Not having been exposed to Saddam Hussein’s pressure, they were not as convinced of the wisdom of unification as Salih. ‘When we entered Aden, I was greeting and waving to the public whilst all three men accompanying me in the car remained silent,’ Salih recalled. ‘They were in shock to see the overwhelming support for unity.’ Those PDRY leaders proceeded to erect every barrier they could think of to the merger Salih was asking for, even warning him that the Saudis would be so alarmed by the demographic threat of a united greater Yemen,b they would probably have him assassinated. A bullish Salih in turn warned them that they themselves might be slaughtered if they selfishly denied their people the chance to realise the noble dream of unity. Salih claims he insisted on union ‘at all costs, including our lives, and even if we only get to experience it for a few days’.

  Not until he and General Secretary Ali Salim al-Bidh reconvened later for a more private evening qat chew was any headway made towards Salih’s suddenly declared goal of signing an agreement on unity that very night. Bending over backwards to make unity seem attractive, Salih acknowledged al-Bidh’s fears that the PDRY, with a fraction of the YAR’s population,c would be swallowed up by promising him that there would be jobs for all southern civil servants, a quarter of the PDRY’s working population. In addition, the post of vice-president of the new state would not only be reserved for a southerner, for al-Bidh himself therefore, but would be equal in status and privilege to president. Furthermore, the prime minister of united Yemen would be a southerner and southerners would head the trade and oil ministries.

  Reassured by these arrangements as well as by the promise of free democratic elections which he calculated his YSP could win with some support from the YAR’s southern highlanders and Tihamans, al-Bidh was won over. But many of his colleagues still hesitated, complaining that there was no need to rush into a union, suggesting that a federation might be a sensible first step. One member of the PDRYs polit-buro even threatened to slaughter all his fellows if they agreed to Salih’s plan. Another resorted to delaying tactics, claiming that there could be no signing ceremony that night because there was no hall available. President Salih stood his ground and issued a clinching ultimatum: ‘Either we sign tonight, or I leave to Taiz and publicly disclose to the people the reality of the situation as it stands.’

  Rushed and bullied was how many of the south’s leaders felt by the end of 1989, as much by their own reportedly ‘pig-headed’ al-Bidh as by President Salih. And the new year brought no relief. President Salih met al-Bidh in Taiz and together they agreed that the process of merging the two systems, scheduled to take only a year, needed to be speeded up - in fact, crammed into only six months. Neither dared allow the opponents of union, who included the powerful Saudis, time to organise a coherent challenge. Furthermore, it was hoped that the presentation of a united Yemen at an ACC summit in Baghdad at the end of May 1990 would both enhance the image of the new organisation and intensely irritate the Saudis who would find themselves suddenly encircled by a ring of more or less hostile ACC states.

  Unification was rushed, but it was also bungled. No merger was achieved in the most crucial area of all, defence, because neither side was prepared to relinquish control of its armed forces. The best they could agree on was a half-hearted exchange of units. Nor was there any true merger of the two civil services, only a vague and unfulfilled direction to institute whatever in either regime had proved ‘best practice’. A week before unification the lists of official appointees had only just been completed, while the constitutional committee had not finished its work. All this spoiled the excellent impression made by President Salih’s offer to share out the government ministries and establish a brand new two-chambered parliament. And behind delays and logjams lurked a dangerous complacency. Both sides were convinced that the nuts and bolts of a fair-minded amalgamation did not matter too much since their own side’s way of doing things would be bound to prevail in the long run. Real intentions to compromise and share and build anew were in desperately short supply, which meant that sooner rather than later all those high hopes for a harmonious future cushioned by oil wealth were bound to come to grief.

  THE PRICE OF FRIENDSHIP

  The Yemens had been wed for a little over two months when they were swept up in first regional and then global developments that placed a terrible strain on their marriage.

  On 2 August 1990, Saddam Hussein marched his army into Kuwait. An unprovoked invasion that would ignite the wrath of the western world - principally the United States, Britain, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States - it would result in the United Nations sanctioning an invasion of Iraq five months later. As the pressure to secure UN backing for a war dictated by the West’s determination to secure its oil supplies mounted, Yemen’s new relationship with Iraq was put to a terrible test. President
Salih neither applauded nor condoned Saddam’s aggression against Kuwait, but Yemenis were disgusted by the way Saudi Arabia, the keeper of Islam’s holy places, was impiously welcoming infidel American forces onto her soil in the build-up to invasion, and by the way Egypt -a fellow member of the ACC - was cravenly toeing the United States‘ line in exchange for some $14 billion of ’debt forgiveness’.4

  Salih favoured an ‘Arab solution’ rather than an international United Nations solution to the crisis which, in the circumstances, amounted to taking Iraq’s side. His position played very well at home. Yemenis stoned the Saudi and American embassies in Sanaa, marvelling at the way the latter’s bullet-proof windows hurled the stones straight back at them. Like most Arabs, they were outraged by what they perceived to be American injustice and hypocrisy. Washington’s apparent determination to crack down hard on Iraq for not doing the UN’s bidding by withdrawing from Kuwait glaringly contradicted decades of blind eye turning to Israel’s flouting of countless UN resolutions. Salih was between a rock and hard place, wondering if he might just get away with turning his back on Saddam in order to keep in with the world’s only superpower, calculating that at the very least it would entail getting that superpower to back the appointment of a UN commissioner to monitor the treatment of West Bank Palestinians.

  On 19 September the Saudis signalled their wrath at Yemen’s refusal to condemn Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait by hitting Yemen where it really hurt, in her pocket. Thanks to the end of the oil-fuelled boom, earnings from remittances sent back to Yemen from the various Gulf States had already plunged. Now the Saudis revoked the preferential terms on which Yemenis had been working in the Kingdom by telling some 800,000 of them that they had a month to liquidate their businesses, sell all their assets and clear off home. The Saudi revenge cost Yemen around $1.5 billion in remittances and unemployment leapt to 25 per cent.5 Around half a million of the returnees, the poorest, found themselves sweltering in squalid refugee camps in Tihama. The lucky ones were given non-existent jobs with token salaries in a civil service that had been badly bloated since unification. By 1991 half the entire national budget was being consumed by the civil service wage bill.6 Fifteen years on, I met one of these supernumerary civil servant refugees still squatting with his family in the crumbling ruins of Imam Yahya’s old palace in Sanaa, without either electricity or running water.

  If the Saudi vengeance was devastating, the American one - petty and vengeful - was just as damaging. It so happened that three months into the crisis it was Yemen’s turn to take up one of the non-permanent seats on the UN’s fifteen-man Security Council. Along with that of Cuba, Malaysia and Columbia, Yemen’s support for UN resolution 678 sanctioning a US and British-led invasion of Iraq, was suddenly crucially important to the United States.

  Accordingly, in late November 1990 Secretary of State James A. Baker III set off on a four-day arm-twisting tour of Sanaa, Bogota and finally Los Angeles airport, where he met his Malaysian counterpart. In his memoirs Baker vividly recalls the trouble he had convincing President Salih that America was not bluffing about its plan to invade Iraq. Although he clearly spelt out that continued payment of the US development aid package to Yemen, worth a useful $70 million a year, was dependent on Yemen’s support for resolution 678, Salih was ‘very unconcerned’, merely observing that the entire crisis was ‘like a summer storm’ which would ‘blow over’. An exasperated Baker warned him, ‘The storm, if it comes, will be violent,’ but Salih remained imperturbable. After politely serving Baker and his team a Thanksgiving dinner featuring mutton rather than turkey - Salih ‘couldn’t have been more hospitable’, apparently - he unequivocally announced at a press conference that Yemen would not be supporting Resolution 678. Baker was thoroughly embarrassed, noting testily that although the Saudis had hinted he would be wasting his time in Yemen, Salih had given him ‘no indication in private that he would reject my request quite so firmly in public’.7

  Six days later, Yemen duly posted its ‘no’ vote, alongside that of Cuba. Within minutes an American diplomat was telling Yemen’s ambassador to the UN, ‘That was the most expensive “no” vote you ever cast’, and just three days later all American aid to Yemen was stopped.8 A gift to Salih from a grateful Saddam Hussein of a gold-plated AK-47 was probably little consolation.

  FAMILIARITY BREEDS CONTEMPT

  Tempting as it is to cast united Yemen in the role of a newly married couple helplessly buffeted by outside forces too strong to withstand, it would be wrong to place all the blame for the souring of the union on the First Gulf War.

  There are many reasons why divorce was on the cards as early as autumn 1992. Most of them are attributable to the fact that, for all his generous power-sharing offers, Salih and his highland Zaydis had retained tight control of the most important levers of power: finance and defence. In spite of repeated attempts by eastern-bloc advisers to reform it, the PDRY’s treasury had remained as tightly run as it had been under British rule. Here was a perfect opportunity to overhaul the former YAR’s corrupt and ad-hoc system by replacing it with southern best practice, but nothing of the sort happened because the crucial finance ministry was headed by a northerner. Similarly, led by a respected Hadhrami, the planning ministry might have taken a useful lead in decentralising the former YAR according to the PDRY’s example, but it was hobbled by the overwhelming power of the finance ministry.

  The main, far too simplistic, mechanism of the merger, the wholesale swapping of senior civil servants, failed. On both sides of the old border, local underlings - a deputy governor of a province, for example -retained real control while the imposed newcomer functioned as an idle figurehead, sidelined and mistrusted. The machinery of government soon seized up under the weighty pressure of mutual suspicion. Brian Whitaker, a journalist and author, has detailed how one side would be unwilling to compromise in a dispute without first testing the other side’s willingness to give way on a second issue. The other side would then demand assurances of compromise on a third issue, and so on. This meant that disputes, instead of being tackled one at a time, became compounded and ever more intractable, until eventually the decision-making process became paralysed.9

  The most obvious focus for this kind of trouble was the defence ministry. The southern minister of defence was shocked to discover how much military funding was being funnelled into subsidising the northern highland tribes, but his efforts to put a stop to the abuse inevitably brought him into direct confrontation with members of the president’s own clan who occupied many of the most senior posts in the former YAR’s army.

  To add to the former south’s woes - financial and administrative - a very promising brand new oil find in Hadhramaut in December 1990 was fuelling regret that al-Bidh had succumbed to Salih’s bullying rush towards union. The opening of the Masila field meant that 40 per cent of Yemen’s known oil reserves were now located in the territory of the former PDRY Noisy complaints that greedy northerners were helping themselves to southerners‘ oil only exacerbated deepening divisions. The sad truth of the matter was that, united or not, Yemenis would never be as rich as their Saudi neighbours. Even with the new Masila field, its proven reserves amounted to a mere four billion barrels, compared with the Saudis’ 261.5 billion barrels.10

  Knowledge of this did nothing to help foster a spirit of generosity already strained by the drying up of remittances. Before unity, remittances of migrant workers earned in both the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia had accounted for at least 20 per cent of the income of both Yemens. After unity, the main - almost the only - source of income was oil, a business entirely in the hands of Salih and his people. In effect, unification had coincided with an important and unpopular shift in the balance of power from remittance-rich citizen and poor state, to poor citizen and oil-rich state. Between May 1990 and the spring of 1991 food prices quadrupled and unemployment climbed again, to 35 per cent. Flush with oil wealth himself, Salih was in a better position than ever to distribute largesse in the manner of the imam
s, to tie his people’s prosperity and influence to their political biddability and loyalty to his person. Southerners deeply resented their exclusion from the networks of patronage that had been established in the YAR long before unity and were now giving northerners an unfair advantage over them.

  Closer familiarity between the Yemens was breeding more and more contempt. On a trip to Aden in early 1992 furious, disenchanted crowds pelted President Salih’s cavalcade with old plastic sandals, shouting, ‘Go home Zaydis!’11 A popular television comedy series, The Tales of Dahbash, which had been created by a group of actors from Taiz shortly before unification, had furnished southerners with a pejorative nickname for all northerners - dahbashi. Dahbash was a cheeky-chappy northerner, a lazy, bungling conman, a hopeless but lovable rogue, whose northern accent struck the southern ear as being as nasal and condescending in tone as President Salih’s. In the former PDRY the word ‘dahbash’ became shorthand for typically northerner behaviour, for anything that was dodgy or shoddy, from the chaotic way northerners navigated Aden’s British-built roundabouts to the unjust and opaque manner in which Salih was running the country.

  By that spring of 1992 north-south tensions had escalated as far as a string of assassination attempts, first against prominent southerners -Vice-President al-Bidh fled Sanaa to the safety of first Aden and then his native Hadhramaut - and then against northerners. None of the incidents was ever fully investigated or prosecuted. Al-Bidh made the holding of free and fair multi-party elections in four months’ time, in April 1993, a condition of his return to Sanaa and government. An election, the first on the peninsula, was duly held. Ignoring signs that Yemen’s commitment to transparency was not all it might be, the United States magnanimously forgave Salih’s unhelpfulness in the lead-up to the Gulf War, and heartily congratulated him for holding the first democratic elections ever seen on the Arabian peninsula. A starry-eyed editorial in the New York Times titled ‘A Real Arab Revolution’ began: