After bin Laden, the best-known Hadhrami name in Saudi Arabia is bin Mahfouz. The patriarch of the clan, Salim Ahmad bin Mahfouz, also hailed from the Wadi Doan and reportedly pawned his precious jambiyah to raise the cost of his passage to Jeddah by dhow in the 1930s. Starting out as a humble money-changer, he was making his mark and a gigantic personal fortune by the 1950s, having convinced King Abdul Aziz that the new country urgently needed its own bank, the National Commercial Bank.
The eldest of his three sons, Khaled, proceeded to inherit the biggest bank in the Middle East, but he was not as lucky as his father. While he was never convicted of any wrongdoing, his purchase in the 1980s, of a 20 per cent stake in an institution notorious for arms trafficking and money laundering for criminals and terrorists, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) inevitably sullied the family name. A charitable foundation named Muwaffaq (Blessed Relief), which he established in 1992, landed him in more hot water. Long before the declaration of President Bush’s ‘War on Terror’, US intelligence officials were suspecting Muffawaq of funnelling donations to al-Qaeda. Once again, nothing was proved. Khaled loudly asserted his opposition to jihadism, and any journalist or author who alleged a shared ideology and close links between the Hadhrami Saudi banker bin Mahfouz and the Hadhrami Saudi global terrorist bin Laden was immediately sued and always lost. An often repeated report that the two families were related by marriage, that one of bin Mahfouz’s sisters was one of bin Laden’s wives, has been similarly denied and retracted. Nevertheless, Khaled’s son Abdulrahman wasted little time in visiting the US consul in Jeddah after 9/11 to assure him that the bin Mahfouzes were with, rather than against, the US in the new ‘War on Terror’.1
The al-Amoudis, the bin Ladens, Buqshans and bin Mahfouzes have all tried to pull their weight for Yemen since unification in 1990, especially in the formerly Marxist south of which Hadhramaut was a part. If Buqshan is most visible in the Wadi Doan itself, his name emblazoned on smart signposts detailing his charitable giving, bin Mahfouz’s oil company Nimr expended half a billion dollars on a bloc in the Shabwa area before withdrawing from the sector in 2003. Both Buqshan and bin Mahfouz have been involved in the long-delayed and murky project to redevelop the port of Aden. Al-Amoudi has also contracted to build two large hotels in Sanaa, and the bin Ladens have built the new road leading from the Hadhramaut port of Mukalla west, almost as far as Aden.
That the Wadi Doan should have generated such an especially entrepreneurial streak in a Hadhramaut known for its entrepreneurs is surprising given that it produces nothing itself except some thirty-five tons a year of the best and most expensive honey in the world, sold on the comb in large, round tins.b Mentioned in the Koran, honey of any kind is prized all over the Muslim world, but the Doan variety is famed for its medicinal and aphrodisiac powers and particularly loved in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States where a kilo of the product of the apis mellifera yemenitica can fetch $150. Back in the mid-1930s the first British political officer in the Hadhramaut, Harold Ingrams, tried to promote the honey’s export to Britain by sending a sample tin to the Colonial Office for testing but it failed to excite any interest. ‘It is probable that such dextro-rotatory honey would be regarded with suspicion, whilst its unattractive flavour and odour would be further obstacles to its sale’,2 was the expert negative response. Undaunted, the following year, one of the Hadhramaut sultans marked the coronation of King George VI with a gift of a hundred tins of the exotic elixir, some of which found its way to Buckingham Palace, Downing Street and two London hospitals.
Hadhramaut honey has had a bizarre walk-on part to play in the ‘War on Terror’ since 9/11. Shortly after the attacks, American intelligence officials divulged that they had been keeping a close watch on the Middle East’s luxury honey trade for the past two years, suspicious that because the product’s ‘smell and consistency’ made it ‘too messy’ for customs officers to want to handle, it was proving a useful medium in which to smuggle cash, drugs and weapons.3 Along with thirty-seven other Middle Eastern enterprises suspected of involvement with bin Laden’s cause, two Yemeni honey shops, one in Sanaa and another in Taiz - the latter humbly listed its address as ‘by the shrine, next to the gas station, Jamal Street, Taiz’ - had their assets frozen. In the end, no firm link to al-Qaeda was established, but honey merchants all over Yemen enjoyed mocking the allegations. A better-established link between Osama bin Laden and honey seems to be that according to his fourth wife - a Yemeni from the southern highlands region whom he married in 2000 - he eats a lot of it.4 It is also known that his Hadhrami paternal grandfather, Awad bin Laden, scraped a precarious living from beekeeping in the Wadi Doan in the early decades of the twentieth century.5
At the southernmost end of the Wadi Doan, far from al-Amoudi’s Buckingham Palace and well to the south of the Buqshan Palace, at the spot where the wadi’s high walls narrow into a claustrophobically shaded cul de sac, is al-Ribat, the bin Laden family’s home village. By the mid-1930s, when the painstaking Harold Ingrams reported that it contained 800 fighting men with 100 rifles between them,6 the poor beekeeper Awad’s illiterate eldest son, Muhammad bin Laden, had already left it, first for a docker’s job in Mukalla and then to Ethiopia and finally to what was about to become the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Possessor of an abundance of Hadhrami virtues, adventurous and self-reliant as any al-Kaff, Muhammad bin Laden was an astute businessman and as gifted a builder and engineer as the men who had built the first road out of the Wadi Hadhramaut in the 1930s, Tarim’s hundreds of mosques and the soaring mud skyscrapers of Shibam. He was also hard-working and reliable, so he was soon employed as a bricklayer for the jointly owned Saudi-American oil company, Aramco, where he earned the respect of his American employers and began to take on projects himself before setting up on his own, to profit by the building boom. He then caught the eye of the Saudi minister of finance, who recommended him to the obese King Abdul Aziz, who entrusted him with the delicate task of constructing a ramp up the side of his palace to enable him to drive straight into his second-floor bedroom. Once close to and appreciated by the royal family, especially by its relatively liberal al-Faisal branch, he was made. By 1950 he was renovating and expanding the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina. Saudi Arabia urgently needed roads, so he built most of them. Even his death, in a plane crash over the southern province of Asir in 1968 did not inhibit his company’s rise; in the 1980s the Bin Laden Group was entrusted with the most prestigious, and still ongoing, public work of all - the renovation of Mecca’s Grand Mosque.
But bin Laden Snr built himself a comparatively modest mansion in al-Ribat, so the bin Ladens are more practically remembered there in a road and school of the same name and a project to bring running water to the village. I arrived there one mid-afternoon at qat time, to wander through the tight cluster of houses, feeling like an intruder watched by unseen eyes, marvelling at the tangible prosperity of such a remote place, guessing it was entirely dependent on remittances earned in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. Two of its inhabitants - a man with the fiery stare of a habitual qat chewer and a rifle slung over his shoulder, and his young son - passed me without a glance or a nod, let alone a greeting. Like the rest of the Hadhramaut interior, al-Ribat holds itself aloof from the outside world.
While Hadhrami men are quiet and guardedly polite in their dealings with strangers, the women of the wadis signal their reserve by adopting not just the full black rig of their Saudi sisters but also black gloves and socks and very tall, pointed straw hats that are said to keep their heads cool when herding their goats in the palm groves or working in the fields. Just over a hundred years ago a doughty first British visitor to the Wadi Doan, Mabel Bent, found them far more colourfully dressed, in blue embroidered dresses which were short in front and long at the back and showed off ‘their yellow-painted legs above the knee’, but noted a similar wariness; when she tried to establish contact ‘they fled precipitously like a flock of sheep before a collie dog’.7 In more recent
times, they have been known to throw stones at tourists who stop to photograph them. A year before 9/11, when a small army of FBI agents was hard at work unravelling the story behind the attack on the USS Cole, already suspecting bin Laden’s involvement and learning that two of the bombers had had Hadhrami accents, some of them visited the Wadi Doan but learned nothing. In the aftermath of 9/11, when Hadhramaut seemed an obvious place to search for its world famous son, a small army of foreign reporters beat a path to al-Ribat. If they were lucky they discovered that, just like anywhere else in Yemen or the wider Muslim world, there was plenty of admiration for the West’s most wanted terrorist. Usually, the then rough track along the wadi to bin Laden’s home village was barred by security officials and the locals tight-lipped.
Al-Qaeda’s astonishing attacks on those towering symbols of American power and wealth struck a special imaginative chord in the land of the mud-brick skyscraper, where the light is usually as dazzlingly clear as it was on that September morning in New York. Bin Laden’s attack on the American superpower and the billionaire migrants of the Wadi Doan are compelling modern proofs that high, bright dreams of worldly power and wealth still can and do come true for Hadhramis. A large magazine photo-montage I spotted on the wall of a teahouse in a village near al-Amoudi’s palace seemed to me to proclaim this fervent faith. Comprising a background of high snow-topped mountains, a middle ground of Manhattan skyscrapers looking uncannily like the famous 500-year-old mud skyscrapers of nearby Shibam, and a foreground resembling the sandy floor of a wadi, graced by a shiny red Toyota Land Cruiser and dotted with palm trees, it spoke volumes. On closer inspection, I noted that someone had embellished the bizarrely glamorous scene with a biro scribble of two tiny aeroplanes, making straight for the Manhattan mid-ground.
BAD NEIGHBOURS
Hadhramaut reveals how large Saudi Arabia looms in the affairs of Yemen. Not only have tens of thousands of the traditionally adventurous and entrepreneurial Hadhramis chosen to migrate to the Kingdom to seek their fortunes while maintaining a strong connection to their homeland but, until very recently, one could be forgiven for thinking this vast and mostly desert eastern half of Yemen was a part of Saudi Arabia. Until the turn of this millennium no one had succeeded in demarcating an Empty Quarter border between them.
A Treaty of Jeddah set that to rights at last, in June 2000. By its terms Yemen formally accepted Saudi Arabia’s right to rule over various southern provinces that had briefly belonged to the Yemen of the imams (Asir, Najran, Jizan), and Saudi Arabia implicitly abandoned any ambition to expand, by way of a corridor, straight down through the Hadhramaut to the Arabian Sea. The Kingdom’s oil exports, basic food imports and other trade would have to continue to use the Iranian-controlled Straits of Hormuz, or the currently Somali pirate-ridden Bab al-Mandab strait at the bottom of the Red Sea. That Saudi dream of gaining a corridor via Hadhramaut to the open ocean was widely suspected of being the real issue at stake in the 1994 civil war, the main reason why, forgetting its old fear and loathing of the PDRY’s Marxists, Saudi Arabia had swiftly funnelled a billion dollars’ worth of support to al-Bidh’s secession movement.
If the Jeddah Treaty scuppered that scheme, the Saudis could console themselves with the hope that the proper demarcation of their 1,800 kilometre-long southern border would end the Kingdom’s creeping contamination by Yemeni arms, qat and drug smugglers, economic migrants, child traffickers and Africans gravitating towards the richest country on the peninsula in search of work. But simple demarcation was not enough, they discovered and, by September 2003, Yemen was loudly protesting a Saudi initiative to erect a physical barrier consisting of an $8.5 billion concrete-filled pipeline raised three metres above the ground and embellished with an electronic surveillance system. Yemen angrily reminded her neighbour that the Jeddah Treaty had clearly stipulated a neutral thirteen-kilometre zone on either side of the border to allow for tribal to-ing and fro-ing and livestock grazing. With only seventy-five kilometres of wall in place, construction was halted. Both sides did then agree to set up watch-towers and regular patrols, but the problem was still unresolved.
By late 2008, Saudi Arabia’s efficient hounding and rounding up of its jihadists since 9/11 had sent many fleeing straight across the border into Yemen where they seemed to be injecting a new vigour into Yemen’s al-Qaeda cell, and Yemeni drug-smugglers had never had it so good. Furthermore, Yemeni sheikhs whose tribal lands straddled the border were exacerbating the situation. In March 2009, for example, an army of tribesmen near the western end of the border closed one of the busiest crossings to all Saudi vehicles; they were demanding the right to work in Saudi Arabia according to the preferential terms of an agreement signed between their sheikh’s grandfather and the first Saudi king.8 Small wonder that the bulk of Saudi Arabia’s armed forces have long been concentrated in the south of the country, within striking distance of the Yemeni border, or that by mid-2009 the Saudis were identifying Yemen as their most pressing internal security threat9 and allocating approximately $2.5 billion to the erection of a border system involving radar, surveillance cameras and hi-tech communications as well as physical barriers.10
I was a long way from that border, in the Hadhramaut port of Mukalla, at the time of the Eid al-Adha holidays in December 2007, when I felt closest to Saudi Arabia and the other oil-rich Gulf States. Mukalla has fared much better than Marib from its oil wealth. Its shops and banks and currency exchanges, busy late into the night, were teeming with prosperous-looking young men dressed in jeans, T-shirts, trainers and baseball caps, rather than in futas and head cloths. Many were oil workers from the nearby Masila field, currently by far the most productive in Yemen. Others were migrant workers from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, back home for the holidays. Mukalla is now a lively seaside resort with an elegant corniche and some large luxury hotels, popular with wealthy Sanaanis. In addition to its oil wealth, a new law providing for the restitution of land to its former owners fuelled an extraordinary property boom in the town after unification. The unsettled time that followed - the first Gulf War in which Yemen’s perceived siding with Saddam Hussein against the West and Saudi Arabia led to the Kingdom expelling some 800,000 Yemenis - had given Saudi Hadhramis another strong incentive to own a patch of their own homeland. Thousands had got busy buying plots of land they had never even seen and erecting buildings they hoped never to have to inhabit, clinching the deals by fax and telephone. Between 1990 and 1994 the town had tripled in size.11
The pace of growth slowed dramatically after 1994. Because the leader of the secessionist south, Ali Salim al-Bidh, was a Hadhrami, the punishment meted out to the region in the form of a heavy northern military presence was more onerous than that experienced elsewhere in the south. Used to a measure of self-government and proud of its separate traditions, Hadhramaut was suddenly on a far tighter leash. The Hadhrami charged with housing and land distribution around Mukalla, for example, was pressurized by the region’s new northern highlander governor to parcel out plots to northerners from the army and security services, and was fired after only two months when he failed to comply. Resentment towards the northern conquerors mounted when it became known that local land was being brazenly requisitioned for use in settling northern highlander feuds.12 Another important reason why, to Sanaa’s way of thinking, Hadhramaut had to be closely watched and shielded from undue Saudi influence was because it was home to the richest oil field in the country, which was also placed firmly under northern control. As military commander of Hadhramaut, one of President Salih’s uncles was well placed to assume the responsibility - or rather, commandeer the contract - for providing security for the foreign oil companies, a move which deeply antagonised Hadhramis who had been performing the task perfectly adequately before the war.13
Much of northern Yemenis’ distrust of Hadhramis and their close links with their diaspora in Saudi Arabia is attributable to the conviction that the Kingdom remains as powerfully involved in Yemen’s affairs, as implacably hostile
to their Republican regime in Sanaa, as it was during the 1960s. There is also an irrational but powerful feeling of injustice. Why should Allah have poured out his blessings on a group of primitive Bedouin with no rich and ancient history and no special mention in the Koran to boast of? Why should everything have come up roses for Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states and everything have turned to ashes for Yemen? How was it that in spite of their human-rights record and disdain for democracy, Saudi Arabia was still respected and considered in the affairs of the western world while poor Yemen was ignored and despised? For Yemenis it was a clear case of bad luck and the world’s double standards, a fine illustration of the proverb, ‘if a rich man ate a snake, they would say it was because of his wisdom; if a poor man ate it, they would say it was because of his stupidity’.
Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes Page 23