Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes

by Victoria Clark

  Something wonderful has happened in Yemen, a remote Muslim state on the southern flank of the Arabian Peninsula. About 80 per cent of the 2.7 million registered voters have elected 301 members of Parliament from among 3,545 candidates. Of 50 women who ran, two won. More than 40 parties took part in the election.12

  The president’s party, the General People’s Congress (GPC), garnered 41 per cent of the vote but a new party, Islah (Reform), had gained a 21 per cent share by capturing much of the southern highland area that al-Bidh’s YSP had hoped to win.13 A loose grouping of religious conservatives (Muslim Brotherhood rather than jihadists), people who were not so radical they could have nothing to do with democracy, some highland tribal leaders and conservative-minded businessmen, Islah was led by the mighty Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar. The extent to which it was a creature of the regime was revealed five years later when Sheikh al-Ahmar admitted that even if Islah had won a landslide victory he still would not have sought to relieve Ali Abdullah Salih of the presidency.14

  Al-Bidh, whose YSP had captured a mere 19 per cent of the vote, was bitterly disappointed and running out of options. Within four months of the elections he had retreated back to Aden. Not long afterwards he presented an eighteen-point ultimatum to Salih featuring, among other things, a last demand for financial decentralisation. If no action was taken, he warned, he and his fellow YSP ministers would resign from the government. Nothing changed. By October he was swearing he would never go to Sanaa again and the remainder of the year saw a steady slide towards civil war.

  The ministry of culture ordered the Taiz actor who played the Dahbash to change his accent, and there were more angry accusations on both sides, and another spate of assassination attempts, and a scrambling to buy the loyalty of important tribes. The president could rely on the Hashid while the YSP briefly managed to secure some highland Bakil Confederation tribes’ allegiance. An American satellite was registering alarming troop movements on both sides of the old border.

  WHO WEARS THE TROUSERS?

  By the time Jordan brokered an eleventh-hour agreement to avert the conflict in February 1994, it was too late. Passions were too inflamed. Remembering how the Aden in 1986 had ended in a victory for the Moscow hard-liners, northerners baulked at the idea of being ruled by al-Bidh and his East German-trained and scarily efficient security service. Many southerners on the other hand, knew that al-Bidh had proved himself more of a Gorbachev than a Stalin while running the PDRY after 1986 and that the totalitarian police state was gone for good. They were convinced that President Salih and his Zaydi highland tribes planned to annex their land.

  Conditions for conflict were excellent. The swapping of a few brigades from south to north and vice versa, instead of a real merger of the two armed forces, made it easy for local brigades to attack an isolated foreign brigade. Most such confrontations took place in the former YAR, the southern brigades therefore getting the worst of it. The old PDRY avenged itself by sending its army jets to bomb the northerners‘ two power stations, which left Sanaa and other towns with no electricity for weeks. Northern forces shelled the YSP’s party headquarters in Sanaa for almost two hours and then seized the southerners’ air base, while the south lobbed Scud missiles back at Sanaa. Radio Sanaa and Radio Aden traded insults; President Salih was ‘Little Saddam’ and Vice-President al-Bidh was ‘Ali Salem al-Marxisti or Ali Salem al-Fascisti’. On 21 May al-Bidh formally announced the divorce, declaring the birth of another southern Yemeni state, the Democratic Republic of Yemen, although he and his supporters were in control of no more than Aden and Mukalla at the time.

  Al-Bidh might once have seriously fancied his chances of mounting a palace coup in Sanaa and then leading a Yemen-wide rebellion against the greed and corruption of the northern tribal elite that would result in the toppling of Salih.15 He might have assumed that, with generous Saudi backing channelled through wealthy Hadhrami émigrés living in Saudi Arabia, he and his followers could prevail. The Saudis certainly expected the south to triumph. A senior Saudi official reportedly assured an American diplomat that the southern tribes would be bound to rise up in defence of Aden, ‘You don’t know the tribes like we do,’ he told him.16 An estimated billion dollars’ worth of Saudi arms arrived in Aden. But none of it was to be, largely because President Salih made excellent use of the fact that al-Bidh was a Hadhrami.

  The picture Salih painted of Saudis, Hadhramis (both in Saudi Arabia, as well as Hadhramaut) and al-Bidh all malevolently plotting together to destroy the noble ideal of a united Yemen was a powerful one, and guaranteed to unite all northern Yemenis and even many southerners behind him. Painting the separatists as godless Marxists also played its part. Leading northern clergy described the war as lawful, as a ‘jihad in the name of God’, and Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar piously endorsed their position by declaring that while the northern dead were bound for heaven, the southern separatists‘ were destined for hell. Having privately opposed unification back in 1990, Sheikh Abdullah had decided ’unity is part of Islam‘, which made those who opposed it ’infidels’.

  Perhaps just as importantly, the US State Department set the priority of its alliance with Saudi Arabia to one side for a change and declared itself in favour of a united Yemen, simply because a reinforcement of the status quo seemed the best way to avoid destabilising the region and disrupting the flow of a useful three million barrels of oil a day through the Bab-al-Mandab, the lower opening of the Red Sea. The superpower’s support for Salih meant that no one - not Saudi Arabia nor any of the other GCC states - dared to recognise the breakaway Yemeni state that al-Bidh declared.

  Six weeks later, after pounding Aden with artillery and howitzer fire, after subjecting its inhabitants to a siege that reminded many of those Sanaa had undergone in its history, northern tanks and APCs, under the command of an able PDRY generald who had fled north with Ali Nasir in 1986 and had an old score to settle, rolled into the city to be met by cries of ‘Welcome!’ A triumphant Sanaa Radio declared, ‘Al-Bidh and his deviant gang wagered on their military machine. They have found themselves a scum drowning in the mud of treason at which all Yemenis spit!’17 Al-Bidh and his closest supporters fled by boat from Aden to Oman. Those cries of ‘Welcome’ faded as soon as the invading forces were seen to include hundreds of Afghan War veterans and local religious extremists - forces which, like the tribes, Salih had been not only tolerating but encouraging as a useful counterweight to the Marxists. Bearded fanatics applied themselves to instituting sharia law by flogging people for drinking alcohol or talking to unrelated women, by ransacking Aden’s recently reopened Anglican church and demolishing the city’s famous Sira beer factory. The ancient port was then plundered by northerners claiming their war booty in the old time-honoured fashion: ‘large garbage trucks given to Aden municipality by foreign donors were driven away northwards’, even window-frames, bathroom fittings, door knobs and bed-sheets were taken’.18

  The war cost united Yemen some 7,000 lives, as much as eight billion dollars19 and any last hope of a happy marriage.

  TEN YEARS ON

  In late May 2000 President Salih mobilised every resource of the state to mark the tenth anniversary of unification with the most lavish jamboree the country had ever seen. Sanaa’s streets were cleaned and brightly lit, rubbish collected, doors painted, schoolchildren dragooned into synchronised displays of song and dance and a new model of tank unveiled for the obligatory military parade. All at an astronomical cost of approximately 200 million dollars.

  The cost in negative publicity for Salih’s regime was probably at least as astronomical because those entrusted with the job of ensuring the event’s success felt obliged to crack the whip: the use of all pagers and mobiles was forbidden a week in advance; the number of extra checkpoints and road blocks meant that it was hard for people to travel to enjoy the holiday with their relatives in other parts of the country; school-leavers were informed that failure to participate in the parades would mean automatic failure in their exams; the sky ov
er Sanaa was regularly torn by screaming fighter jets; the already meagre salaries of civil servants were halved in the month before in order to help pay for it all. Southerners, still smarting in the aftermath of the 1994 civil war, were left in little doubt that the union was a northern rather than joint success. The 1990 poster showing President Salih happily hoisting the new flag of Yemen with his Vice-President Ali Salim al-Bidh standing behind him had been reprinted for the grand occasion, but with al-Bidh air-brushed out.20

  It had long been clear that the dream of national unity would not be the cure-all Yemenis craved, but Yemeni nationalism - the latest in a ruinous succession of previous ‘isms’ Yemenis had experimented with either under foreign tutelage or of their own volition - was failing too, thanks to the state’s wild veering between bouts of action and repression such as the unity anniversary celebrations and long periods of inertia. President Salih’s hope that the anniversary celebration’s ‘circuses’ nationalism could begin to compensate people for their poverty and bleak futures was about to be dashed. The dramatic public exploits of a tiny minority who had no interest in the petty business of nation state-building having long before espoused another ‘ism’ - global jihadism - were about to thrust Salih’s unity jamboree into the shade. Within five months of the celebrations, in October 2000, Yemeni members of al-Qaeda staged the movement’s most audaciously dramatic attack to date by exploding a large hole in the side of the American warship, the USS Cole, while she was refuelling at Aden.

  But if the attack on the USS Cole was al-Qaeda in Yemen’s debut on the international stage, Yemen’s modern jihadist roots had been struck at least twenty years earlier, in the soil of Afghanistan, in the youthful exploits of men like the country’s best-known jihadist, Tariq al-Fadhli -whom, thanks to his cousin, Ahmad al-Fadhli, I first encountered at his house for lunch in December 2004.

  a GCC - Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Oman.

  b It is said that on his deathbed in 1955, the founder of Saudi Arabia, King Abdul Aziz, croaked, ‘Never allow Yemen to be united’.

  c Population of north c.11 million, of south c.2.5 million.

  d Major General Abd al-Rab Mansur al-Hadi, now vice-president of Yemen.

  PART TWO

  Chapter 5 First Generation Jihad

  Chapter 6 A Tribal Disorder?

  Chapter 7 Keeping Up With the Saudis

  Chapter 8 Al-Qaeda, plus Two Insurgencies

  Chapter 9 Can the Centre Hold?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  FIRST GENERATION JIHAD

  AT HOME WITH THE AL-FADHLIS

  Welcome back, my dear! You are home!

  All Ahmad al-Fadhli knew when I called him from my hotel in Aden was that I was a friend of a friend, born there over forty years ago when it was still a British Crown Colony. But he had sounded as warm as if we had known each other for years so I happily accepted his kind invitation to travel a short way up the coast to spend a day with him at his banana farm.

  He would send his driver and car to collect me, he said, but I must be sure to remember to bring my passport for presentation at check-points. All these security measures are an awful bore, aren’t they? Ruddy bin Laden and ruddy War on Terror! Ahmad chuckled, while I swiftly calculated that if that was his attitude he was obviously not on speaking terms with his cousin, Tariq al-Fadhli, an old friend of Osama bin Laden s. I felt a twinge of disappointment; much as I was looking forward to meeting Ahmad and seeing his farm, I had also been hoping for a chance to sound him out on the subjects of both jihadism in Yemen and Tariq’s relations with bin Laden. Never mind, I reasoned, the al-Fadhli clan had doubtless cut their Tariq off just as most of the bin Ladens had disowned their Osama. I made a mental note not to embarrass Ahmad by so much as mentioning Tariq the next day.

  While it was still cool, at around eight the following morning, I climbed aboard a Toyota Land Cruiser. Ahmad’s driver, wearing the southern Yemeni tribesman’s uniform of prettily striped fiitaa and faded checked turban, politely produced one of his employer’s cards to remove any anxiety I might have been feeling about being kidnapped and then we were on our way, easily clearing the checkpoint on the edge of town with a simple mention of the al-Fadhli name.

  I found it hard to imagine a Yemeni banana farm. As far as my eye could see, there was no vegetation, just dust and stone on the one hand and a sandy beach and glittering Arabian Sea on the other. A light winter breeze was blowing a smoke of white sand from right to left, up the deserted shore, across the empty strip of asphalt we were speeding along, towards the baked and barren expanse reaching inland to a ridge of bare russet mountains. Shortly before we reached Zinjibar, the old Fadhli tribal capital, the view changed to more promisingly green plantations however, and soon we were hurtling off the road, along ever narrowing dusty tracks, past clusters of poor huts and ragged children, and a camel or two, and a brand new white mosque and on, plunging between rows of low banana trees straight to the middle of Ahmad’s farm, to stop at last by a scruffy caravan. A few yards away, at a rusty folding table set under a single generously spreading eucalyptus tree, sat Ahmad. Bearded and beaming, he was dressed Saudi style in a long, pristine white thowb and red-and-white checked headcloth, with a mobile phone, a walking stick and a glass of Mecca’s ZamZam water to hand.

  ‘Marvellous stuff! Cures absolutely everything!’ he exclaimed.

  In a Queen’s English hardly heard since the 1950s he chatted on charmingly. I discovered why he preferred to live in a caravan rather than at either his Aden or Sanaa or even his Saudi residence. He was never happier than when on his ancestral tribal land, he told me, but he was clearly also very fond of reminiscing about a childhood spent as a member of the ruling family of the Fadhli tribe, under colonial British ‘protection’ until 1967 when he and his family had been chased off their beloved land by Marxist insurgents to a sad exile in Saudi Arabia.

  In 1947, aged only six, he told me, he had been kitted out with a white cotton blazer complete with school badge, a khaki futa, shirt and turban, and sent to the colony’s College for the Sons of Emirs and Chiefs. Despite its Spartan regime, it had failed to curb his Yemeni tribesman’s rebellious streak and Aden’s British masters had packed him off to Britain to a minor Gloucestershire public school, for a life of ‘potatoes and frostbite and feeling hungry’. Ever the resourceful tribesman, Ahmad had set traps for rabbits and squirrels with the aid of a few horse hairs purloined from the school’s stables and barbecued whatever he caught, until he was caught himself one day by worried firemen who had spotted a plume of smoke.

  When his schoolboy derring-do stories ran out Ahmad spoke about his farm, explaining that he hoped banana-growing would keep his youngest son, Haidara, out of trouble and away from the Fadhli tribal calling to bear arms. ‘You see, the trouble with us is that we like fighting much better than anything else,’ he confided. ‘Pay a Fadhli to build a house and it will be a slow business, pay him to fight and he’s there with his gun in an instant!’ We laughed together over how much trouble his ancestors had given Aden’s British rulers in the mid-nineteenth century, about how one only had to consult the tribe’s founding myth which featured an illegitimate Turkish baby washed up on the nearby shore in the sixteenth century to know that the Fadhlis had, in his words, ‘always been bastards’. Then he suggested that if I was so interested in Fadhli tribal history I might like to meet his octogenarian Uncle Nasir, the Fadhlis‘ last sultan who, just like Ahmad, had been exiled in Saudi Arabia but had recently returned to live out his days among his own people. ’After that,’ Ahmad suggested, patting his ample stomach, ‘we might drop in on Nasir’s son, my cousin Tariq, in time for a nice lunch. You’ve heard of him, have you? Well, he’s the big sheikh here now - no one uses the title sultan any more - so he’s got plenty of money from the government and a big new house, just there on that first roundabout into Zinjibar, you would have passed it…’

  Evidently, my delicate scruples about not about embarrassing my host
by mentioning Tariq were wasted, but what on earth was any friend of Osama bin Laden doing at large rather than safely behind bars, and being paid by the government in Sanaa to live with high status and in some luxury? It was baffling given President Ali Abdullah Salih’s pledge to side with the West in President George W Bush’s global ‘War on Terror’. Furthermore, why would Tariq al-Fadhli dream of inviting an infidel Englishwoman into his home for a ‘nice lunch’?

  I wondered if Ahmad could be all he seemed, if his nostalgia for his British schooldays was all an elaborate act designed to lull me into a false sense of security. After all, the al-Fadhlis had every reason to be nursing a special old grudge against the British who had built them up as local rulers of this land, called them sultans and flattered them with rich gifts and gun salutes for over a century before abandoning them to the Marxists. As I climbed back into Ahmad’s car a terrifying thought crossed my mind: might the plan be to kidnap and deliver me to Tariq al-Fadhli for a video-recorded beheading?

  Driving back through the farm and the tatty centre of Zinjibar and on north-east along the coast road, we turned inland, at a place called Shuqra - ‘the first capital of the Fadhlis, where my ancestors used to plunder ships from and what have you,’ Ahmad explained. It was Fadhli tribesmen, he proudly reminded me, who had given the British their perfect excuse to invade Aden back in 1839, by plundering the Indian Duria Dawla and parading her women passengers naked on the deck. Bouncing along a rough desert track, we seemed to be making for the distant shape of a tall edifice. Eventually we drew close enough for me to identify it as a mud brick fort, some four storeys high. Alone in its humble glory in that flat dun expanse, unshaded by any trees, with only a dusty chicken coop for company, it was hardly more appealing than Ahmad’s caravan.