A personable young man with a gentle smile - emphatically not a stony-faced northern highlander like Walid - dressed in a dazzling white thowb, embroidered belt and jambiyah, Ibrahim lowered his gaze like his uncle and proffered only his wrist on greeting me, but the English he had learned at a college in southern India was good and his demeanour towards me otherwise relaxed and perfectly friendly. Although in full-time employment with America’s fourth-largest oil company, Oxy, which had taken a large bloc straddling the old border between the two Yemens, he confirmed he was free to assist me because he had just completed a run of night shifts so, while Walid drove off in search of the town’s qat market, we drank glasses of sweet black tea and tried to converse.
‘I’m wondering how people around here feel at the prospect of the oil running out - by 2017 or so, isn’t it?’ I shouted above the deafening roar of the oven. The question was a stupid one. It was hard to imagine how much poorer, rougher and simpler the locals’ lives could be than they already were. The smells and the dust alone in that place would immediately have informed a blind, deaf and dumb person that the dream of oil wealth on a Saudi scale had never been and now would never be realised.
‘No one’s worried about that,’ Ibrahim answered. ’They’re thinking about the present. People say they wish no one had ever started pumping the stuff - far better that it stay underground than that it be exploited and the proceeds end up in the wrong pockets.‘ We spoke about where the oil money had gone, about Hadda, the Beverley Hills of Sanaa, about the gigantic new mosque President Salih had spent the past decade funding and building at a reported cost of $115 million but a suspected cost of $1.5 billion, and about the further billions being spent on Russian MiG fighters. Returning to the matter in hand, he suggested we visit a Bedouin friend of his who had worked as a foreman for the first American oil company to venture into Yemen in 1981, Hunt Oil Inc. from Texas. But, he explained, on our way out of town we would have to stop by the shop where he had left his AK47. ’They made a rule about six months ago; we’re not allowed to carry our guns into the capital town of any province any more. So now we have a choice; either we can risk leaving them at a checkpoint or we can pay a shopkeeper to look after them.’
I wondered why he had not economised on both time and money by leaving it at home. As far as I knew, the more educated and urbanised Yemeni male was usually content to travel without a weapon but, equally, sure to own at least one. A member of the northern highland Abu Luhum tribe, an employee of the ministry of education, had recently informed me that any man who carried a gun advertised the fact that he was primitive, before admitting that he himself had five guns, one of them with telescopic night sights, which he had arranged neatly, in order of size, along his bedroom wall. Ibrahim told me that he had been given his first gun at the age of fifteen. There were plenty of tales of the lower floors of rural sheikhs’ residences serving as mini-arsenals, stocked with not only rifles and ammunition but with rocket-propelled grenades, and even heavier weapons. There was no way of ascertaining the truth, but it was often said that there were three times as many guns as people in Yemen.
An insatiable appetite for firearms among tribesmen, first and foremost as a mark of both virility and wealth on a par with the jambiyah, dates back at least as far as the arrival of the British in Aden. Reinforced by both the British and the Ottoman habit of buying the tribes’ loyalty with gifts of weapons, the appetite continued to rage in the post-colonial era. Although ranged on opposite sides of the Cold War divide, both the YAR and the PDRY had been ravenously hungry for Soviet armaments with which to threaten each other. An attempt to clamp down on the thriving arms trade, to close Yemen’s handful of large arms bazaars and conduct a buy-back programme funded by America since 9/11, has not succeeded in stifling the old appetite. The domestic trade has become more furtive in Sanaa, for example, but it has continued and acquired an international dimension. As early as 2003, a United Nations report cited Yemen as the chief supplier of weapons to the more unstable areas of East Africa - Somalia, for example.1 Many of the weapons and explosives used in regional al-Qaeda attacks have been traced back to Yemen; the missiles used to fire at the Israeli plane leaving Mombasa in late 2002 were acquired from Yemen via Somalia, and firearms used in the early 2005 attack on the American consulate in Jeddah were discovered to have Yemen defence-ministry markings.
Ibrahim patiently explained that, unfortunately, we were obliged to take his weapon with us if we were travelling out into the desert. No foreigner - certainly not an American or British person - was permitted to leave town without an armed escort. I was surprised but pleased to discover that somehow, in this case, he qualified as my armed escort. As soon as Walid returned, with an unusually large bouquet of quality qat twigs wrapped in pink cellophane, we set off past the town’s gun market, a parade of about twenty tatty wooden booths where firearms that had cost only $150 five years earlier were now retailing for around $750 owing to a recent crackdown on arms smuggling across the long and hardly demarcated Empty Quarter border with Saudi Arabia. After retrieving Ibrahim’s gun, we headed out of town on a good new asphalt road. Soon, our way lay over sand so we stopped to deflate the Land Cruiser tyres before making for the distant speck of a Bedouin camp.
Ibrahim’s Bedouin friend received us graciously in a large central tent spread with carpets and scattered with bolsters. A dozen or so children - the youngest of eighteen, by two wives - scampered about with thermoses of tea for us, while our host remembered his American friends from Hunt Oil Inc. - David, Dick and Bill and Ron, the Englishman - and how satisfied he had been with their treatment of him and his payment, and how all that had changed as early as 1985. In the year before Vice-President George H. Bush had obliged his Texan friend and sponsor, Ray L. Hunt, by travelling all the way to Sanaa and on, east into the Marib desert to open Yemen’s first oil field, ‘more powerful people - people from Sanaa’ had begun ‘arranging jobs for their family and friends’, which had angered the region’s tribes. He went on to explain that things got worse, that foreign companies soon found they could only get permission to work in Yemen if they had the protection of one of the big sheikhs in Sanaa, who might have nothing to do with any of the local tribes.
‘He’s right,’ interjected Ibrahim. ‘Oxy, for example, is protected by Sadeq al-Ahmar, one of Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar’s sons…’
‘Those big sheikhs take a big percentage for themselves as a kind of commission for acting as the local agent,’ Mohammed continued, ‘which means they behave as if they have the right to rent out the land to the oil companies when, of course, it doesn’t belong to them at all. The only benefit any of us locals see from our oil is the light we get from the oil flares!’
Kidnappings of both foreigners and Yemenis and attacks on pipelines and oil company personnel by heavily armed tribesmen intent on extracting from the government what they see as at least their just deserts - a clinic, a school, a well, jobs, a road or legal redress - have long been drawing unwelcome attention to the fact that the writ of the state does not often extend here. Both before and after 9/11, Yemen’s al-Qaeda jihadists were less of a headache and a threat to the state than tribal disturbances in those desert wastes of Marib-Shabwa, in what is effectively - given that oil accounts for more than 70 per cent of the country’s revenues - an important engine room of Yemen’s economy.
TRIBES VERSUS STATE
From a military outpost, high on a hill overlooking the mile-and-a-half-wide Wadi Harib that once marked the frontier between the YAR and the PDRY, a soldier was keeping a close watch over the Jannah-Hunt works which are all that remain of the pioneering Hunt Oil Inc. venture in Yemen. His tiny distant/ate-clad figure, waving a gun in our direction, was enough to dissuade me from taking more photographs. Instead, we glided on across the ocean of sand towards what Ibrahim called the Ukrainian camp, a gated settlement of mobile homes occupied by a Ukrainian firm named Vikoil that had been subcon-tracted by a British oil firm named Burren to carry out a
preliminary seismic survey. While Walid purchased a little pink plastic bag of qat from a pair of salesmen in a black Fiat Panda who told him they made their living by journeying out to the oil fields every day with fresh supplies of the staple stimulant, I went inside the compound to speak to a Burren employee who had appeared at the door of one of the Portacabins. Over a cup of instant coffee, while a group of sullen-looking Yemeni workers sat chatting in a circle outside, I learned that Burren had mistakenly hired the cheapest rather than the most experi-enced team of seismic surveyors. Corner-cutting newcomers in a competitive field led by the Chinese and the French, the Ukrainians had not troubled to take local conditions into consideration. They had not held meetings with the tribes, let alone offered them tangible benefits, and so soon landed not just themselves but the soldiers deployed by the state to protect them, as well as local tribesmen, in very serious trouble. Tensions over insufficient job opportunities with the Ukrainians added to the tribesmen’s resentment at the interloping military’s monopoly on protecting the foreigners had escalated alarmingly in November 2007.
Early one morning, a few Ukrainians and a military escort sallied out of the camp to survey an oil line, only to find their path blocked by armed men of the Balharith tribe. Even as the sheikh and colonel parleyed, a tribesman sharpshooter stationed some distance away shot out the colonel’s eye. That at least was the story the Ukrainians told about an incident that had rapidly developed into a pitched battle costing the lives of ten soldiers and six tribesmen. But Ibrahim, a member of the Balharith tribe himself, knew a different version. According to him, the blinded colonel had been asking for trouble having opened hostilities a few days earlier by kicking over the wheelchair of a disabled tribesman who had arrived at the camp with his son to ask if the Ukrainians could find work for his bulldozer. Both my British informant and Ibrahim agreed, however, that six weeks later the government had calmed the situation sufficiently to allow the Ukrainians to return to the camp, mainly by addressing the tribesmen’s demands for work and distributing large sums of money. Ibrahim had heard that three million riyals of compensation had been received by the family of every dead tribesman - ‘of course, the tribe only accepted that tiny sum because they’d already had their revenge by killing ten soldiers,’ he added.
Whatever the precise truth of the tale, it amply illustrated one of Yemen’s most serious shortcomings as a state capable of making a useful contribution to any ‘War on Terror’, to say nothing of providing an attractively secure environment for foreign investment. For the past half century, since the demise of the imamate and the proclamation of the republic in 1962, none of Yemen’s leaders had faced up to the fact that tribal custom law - urf, in Arabic - which governed the lives of a sizeable and well-armed sector of Yemen’s population, competed and sometimes clashed with Yemen’s badly malfunctioning legal system. The mismatch and ambiguities frequently led to violence and bloodshed.
After thirty years in power, there could be no doubting Salih’s gift for balancing forces, for dividing and ruling, for co-opting, charming, reconciling, bribing and so on, but wherever I went in Yemen I was treated to tales of violent confrontations between the state and the tribes. Just as in Ottoman times, some sheikhs are still known to wildly exceed their authority by ruling their territories as petty autocrats. A few miles from the bustling southern highland city of Ibb, the cruel tyranny of a sheikh who was also a member of the upper house of Yemen’s parliament and one of Yemen’s best poets, was making lurid headlines in early 2008. Accounts of Mohammed Ahmed al-Mansour’s arbitrary confiscations of houses and livestock and extortionate taxes paled into insignificance beside tales of medieval tortures that members of his community had suffered in his private prison, at the hands of his personal militia. One victim complained he had been chained up, doused in cold water, denied any bedding or food and drink, terrorised by a snake and forced to eat a raw rabbit. Another had had his fingernails pulled out.2
But the tribes were certainly not always to blame. Tariq al-Fadhli had told me that his fortress home on the roundabout had been suddenly attacked by government forces in May 2004, all the glass in his windows shattered by their shooting and two of his private guards and a woman of his household injured before he discovered he was being punished for mediating in the generally accepted sheikhly manner in the case of a locally disputed water-pump. Only by putting in a direct call to President Salih had he managed to halt the assault. In due course and in accordance with tribal custom, he had been compensated for his injuries with five rifles.
As a Yemeni tribesman, albeit one who had spent much of his life in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, Tariq would have been familiar with the carefully calibrated system of compensation that often took the form of a certain number of guns or a slaughtered bull, but not all Yemenis and certainly not a prominent Adeni like the elderly proprietor of Aden’s Al-Ayyam newspaper, Hisham Basharaheel, would either know or respect such customs.
In March 2008 I was invited to a qat chew at Basharaheel’s Sanaa residence. An impressive multi-storey edifice shielded from the bustle of the noisy street behind high walls and a stout metal gate, it was surprisingly unfurnished inside, very poorly lit and teeming with armed men wearing bandoliers of bullets. I soon discovered why it looked and felt like a fortress under siege. My host had been on the point of selling up and moving back home to Aden when his ownership of the land on which the house was built was disputed by a family who aggressively daubed their counter-claim on his exterior wall. Undaunted, convinced all his paperwork was in order, Basharaheel had gone on looking for a buyer for his property and left his son and an armed guard in charge of defending it. But the rival claimants had not backed off and, one evening, in an exchange of gunfire outside the gate, one of them - a teenage boy - had been killed. Basharaheel’s guard was already languishing in jail, charged with firing the fatal shot, but the dead boy’s tribe was claiming that Basharaheel’s son, sniping from an upstairs window, had been responsible and must be punished instead of the guard, with immediate incarceration and even execution. Old Basharaheeel had hurriedly fortified his home with more armed guards. He told me that neither he nor any of his family - certainly not his son - had left the place for weeks.
Leaving this embattled qat chew I had gone straight to a meeting with one of the president’s advisers, an American-educated businessman named Faris al-Sanabani who happened to be in a position to brief me further on the saga. A tribesman himself, Faris explained that the tribal code of honour required Basharaheel to make an immediate and proper show of remorse for the boy’s death by offering at least twenty rifles to his family in compensation. Although he cared little for tribal customs, Basharaheel had duly set about collecting the twenty rifles, but to no avail. The offering had not proved acceptable, which meant there could be no compromise, which meant that no less a person than the president himself had been forced to intervene. Al-Sanabani informed me that Salih had spent all that afternoon parleying with the elders of the dead boy’s tribe, charming them with his detailed knowledge of and respect for their tribal genealogy, gently trying to persuade them to withdraw their demand - however correct from the tribal point of view - that Basharaheel’s son be imprisoned.
On that occasion the president sided with the non-tribesman Basharaheel for the simple reason that he did not want the old man and his son being hailed as persecuted martyrs of the growing secessionist movement in the south of the country, which the family’s newspaper was supporting. On another famous occasion he came down on the side of tribal law. Just before the outbreak of the war against the south in 1994, one of Salih’s closest allies, a powerful northern highland sheikh, admitted that he had taken it upon himself to arrange the assassination of a deputy prime minister, Hassan Makki, to punish him for being too ready to compromise with the southern Marxists. After the war, the sheikh was permitted to make full and final amends for the assassination attempt that had killed Makki’s driver and two bodyguards by simply slaughtering a bull ou
tside Makki’s house.3
Far from discouraging tribalism and promoting the rule of secular law, President Salih has generally encouraged the old ways, not just in the former YAR but in the former PDRY since 1990. Tariq al-Fadhli’s smooth transition from jihadist to establishment sheikh was a good illustration. In the president’s view tribes are a sine qua non for Yemen. His reply to a question put to him by Al-Majallah newspaper back in October 1986 about how far Yemen had moved away from the tribal system towards a modern state was as follows: ’The state is part of the tribes and the Yemeni people are an ensemble of tribes. Our urban and rural areas all consist of tribes. All the official and popular state institutions are made up of the qaba’il [tribes/tribespeople].’4
To overlook the fact that large sections of Yemen’s population -people of the Tihama and Hadhramaut and even the southern highland towns of Taiz and Ibb, let alone Adenis and Sanaanis - would not describe themselves as tribespeople suggests a wilful ignorance of his own people. It seems possible that the question confused him; perhaps, to his way of thinking, tribal and state systems could not be compared in the first place, the tribes being a natural phenomenon and the state systems man-made ones. Which was better? A tree or a house? A mountain or an aeroplane? The world view behind Salih’s refusal to regard tribalism as a man-made political system like any other resurfaced in a statement made by the paramount sheikh of the Hashid Federation, Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar, in May 2000. ’The qabilah [tribe] is the foundation of our Arab society and to deny the qabilah is to deny our authenticity and our ancestors. It is the foundation and it is natural. And God says, “We have created for you nations and tribes so that they would know each other.” So why do we approve of one part of the verse and try to omit the second part, and why do we say this nation and that nation but not this tribe and that tribe? God clearly says, “we created you nations and tribes”.’5
Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes Page 20