Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes

by Victoria Clark

  Safe in my bag was another tasrih to travel outside the city, obtained from a policeman who forbore from refusing my request on the grounds that I should have applied at least twenty-four hours in advance and instead smiled and said, ‘If it is God’s will I want you to visit Radfan because it’s my home.’ As he handed me the permit, he had added with an odd mixture of pride and regret, ‘Of course, you know that we in Radfan started the revolution against you British imperialists back in the sixties?’ In theory, a tasrih was all I needed, but if I was right in thinking that Salih regarded the southern secessionist movement as the most dangerous snake’s head he had to dance on simply because he cherished the 1990 union of the two Yemens as the proudest and most concrete achievement of his thirty years in power, I thought I had better secure some extra insurance. A verbal laissez-passer from Yemen’s minister for local administration, whom I encountered in the lobby of the Aden Hotel would do, I had decided. Rather to my surprise, the kindly official had not been able to think of any good reason why I should not visit Radfan. Saada, at the opposite end of the country, near the Saudi border, where an on-off war had been in progress since the summer of 2004, was completely out of bounds and, thanks to jihadist activity, Marib could not be visited without an armed police escort, and the situation in Hadhramaut changed from week to week for the same reason, but Radfan should be all right, he thought. Anyway, I was welcome to call him on his mobile if I had any problems.

  So unworried was he by my plan, I almost doubted my calculation that southern secessionism was giving President Salih many more sleepless nights than third-generation jihadists or even another flare-up of the troubles in the north. Although completely unrelated to its southern counterpart, the so-called al-Huthi rebellion in Saada resembled the southern insurgency in two important respects. Both groups of rebels had identified the regime as their enemy and both disturbances had deep roots in the past. If the southern uprising harked back to British times, the al-Huthi one had reawakened animosities last aired in the Royalist versus Republican civil war of the 1960s. In both cases, Salih had tried to work his old magic with promises and gifts and flattery and dividing and ruling and compromise but it had failed, in very much the same way as it was also failing to bring the third-generation jihadists of AQAP to heel. Because the two unrelated insurgencies were snakes’ heads he could not dance on he had resorted to the only other strategy he knew: force. If thousands of lives had already been lost in the north-west since the first outbreak of fighting in the north-west in 2004, the First Saada War as it was known, thirteen southern lives had been lost, four of them in Radfan, by the end of 2007 and the trouble showed every sign of escalating.

  I soon discovered that all three of my cheerful companions as well as the managing editor of Aden’s Al-Ayyam newspaper whom I had met that morning shared a passionate conviction that unless the outside world was swiftly apprised of the heavy-handed manner in which Salih was tackling southern discontent there would soon be another civil war. It was a while before I understood that they were working on the badly mistaken assumption that if I was sufficiently interested in Yemeni affairs to ignore the travel advice of my own government, then I must be engaged on an important clandestine mission for that government, and therefore ideally placed to convey their alarm to the West. Together, they had calculated that if I could only witness the tensions in Radfan with my own eyes, surely powerful men in London would listen to my account of the situation, sympathise with their plight, support their liberation struggle, and influence powerful men in Washington to do the same. I realised I was witnessing a perfect example of what the foremost historian of the British capture of Aden, Gordon Waterfield, identified as ‘the eternal surge of Arab optimism’, but anxious as I was to explore Aden’s hinterland I did nothing to dispel their delusion.

  It was still early afternoon when our car slid to a smooth halt at the first checkpoint on the edge of town and I produced my tasrih for perusal, and we waited, and waited, watching qat wads the size of golf balls swell in the cheeks of the soldiers, until suddenly the mood changed. Suddenly, they were yanking open the back door of the car, yelling at us to hand over our identity documents and mobile phones, pushing and shoving at my companions. Ahmad bin Ferid, the bookseller and I suffered in silence but Dr al-Affifi gave as good as he got, bellowing back, clasping his hands to the hilt of his jambiyah which was tightly lodged along with his mobile phone and Emirates passport in the rolled waistband of his futa, roaring at them: ‘I’m the sheikh of the Yafai tribe! Get your hands OFF me! RESPECT ME!’

  To my surprise, they backed away from him, disappearing with a haul of only three mobiles, some identity cards and my passport. Badly shaken by his manhandling, sweating into his elegant shirt, Dr al-Affifi pointed out that this was typical barbarian, thuggish northern Yemeni behaviour, that this was precisely why southerners‘ patience was running out, this was why there would soon be war. ’Now you’ve seen for yourself what’s happening here! Let’s see what will happen next!’ He was anxiously ensuring that our stories would tally under interrogation when the soldiers returned, commanded my companions to squeeze up again and shoved a qat-chewing young cadet and his gun onto the back seat beside them. A Toyota pick-up loaded with a mounted gun and a posse of soldiers swerved to a halt in front of us. A few minutes later, still minus our documents and most of our mobile phones, we were ordered to follow it back to Aden. On the way Dr al-Affifi raged at the skinny youth. After confirming that the boy was a tribesman, he lectured him angrily about it being ’ayV - a shameful mark of dishonour according to the tribal code - to treat a sheikh and a foreigner in this fashion.

  I was more disturbed by the loss of my passport than by the cadet’s lack of tribal manners. I was also concerned for my companions’ safety, recalling young Ahmad bin Ferid telling me that his articles on the subject of southern discontent had already landed him in serious trouble. Six months earlier plain-clothes security men had bundled him into a police car and repeatedly punched him in the stomach before dumping him in the stony wilderness far outside Aden, to make his way back as best he could. To press home his point, he had proceeded to show me pictures on his mobile phone of a bare bloodstained back with a jambiyah buried in it, up to the hilt. Claiming that a dispute over land ownership had pitted this luckless southerner against seven carloads of well-armed northerners, he told me that it had taken two doctors to hold the victim down and three attempts by a third to remove that weapon. The picture, along with one of a crowd of the victim’s fellow tribesmen rallied in protest outside the hospital, had been reproduced in all its colourfully gory detail on the front page of that day’s edition of his newspaper. While I had nothing to fear from the fall-out of our aborted expedition, its repercussions for my friends might be worse than serious, I realised, as we arrived back at almost exactly the point we had started out from, the police compound directly opposite the Aden Hotel.

  A PSO officer in fiita and flip-flops sauntered towards us, grinning. He had our passports and mobiles in his hands but no explanation. We were not about to be interrogated and my companions would not be tortured. In fact, we were free to leave, though not to Radfan, of course, and he was confiscating Dr al-Affifi’s car. Deflated and overheated, Dr al-Affifi and I made for the cool of the lobby of the Aden Hotel. Flopping into one of its plush sofas, he tossed his headgear onto the seat beside him in a gesture of resignation that instantly demoted him from a mighty sheikh to a weary businessman. Within a few minutes, however, a surprising sequel to our mini drama was restoring him to his sheikhly dignity and offering me a rare view of Yemen’s tribal inner workings. One after another he began fielding a flood of calls from Yafai tribesmen up country, from Sanaa, from members of the substantial Yafai diaspora in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, even from the United States. There was some excited discussion about mounting a protest at our treatment by rallying Yafai tribesmen to close the road through their territory to any army or police vehicle.

  Small wonder those policemen had
tried to confiscate Dr al-Affifi’s mobile phone, I thought; he had an army at his instant command. Here was ample justification for President Salih’s unorthodox style of ruling, for his custom of dancing rather than stamping on the heads of his snakes. What real choice did he have when a single word from a very wealthy émigré like Dr al-Affifi was all it would take for thousands of well-armed tribesmen to rise up and sever a main artery linking south to north, to effectively destroy Yemen’s unity by creating a fact on the ground? Dr al-Affifi wisely refrained from saying that single word; he feared the loss of his Emirates citizenship if he was branded a serious trouble-maker in Yemen. ‘No, no,’ he was telling all his callers, ‘no need for action, thank you - I just hope they return my car.’ A few days later a couple of state-owned newspapers printed articles about the incident, alleging that I was a British spy, intent on stirring up trouble in the south and reasserting British influence over the area, but I was safely back in London by the time I heard about them. Less than a month later, however, President Salih cracked down hard on southern separatism for the second time. If a few months earlier, in late 2007, an angry rash of demonstrations had been broken up by riot police with tear gas, live ammunition and thirteen deaths, there were now tanks on the streets and mass arrests of almost three hundred secessionists. The corpulent Adeni bookseller was among those rounded up in the middle of the night, but he was released after questioning. Young Ahmed bin Ferid was not so lucky. Along with the elderly leader of the movement, a Hadhrami from Mukalla named Hassan ba-Oom, whom I had also briefly encountered in the lobby of the Aden Hotel shortly before departing on our aborted expedition to Radfan, he was thrown into a Sanaa jail.a

  IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES

  Weather-beaten but fresh in a rose-pink shirt, no jambiyah, and a futa adorned with a striking pattern of blue flowers, Hassan ba Oom had not looked much like a conviction politician, but at the time of our brief encounter at the Aden Hotel this former head of the Hadhramaut branch of the old PDRY’s ruling Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP) had already earned himself arrest, a beating up and two months in jail for organising a peaceful separatist rally in Mukalla the previous autumn.

  Ba-Oom’s background was no more typical of members of what was becoming known as the Southern Mobility Movement than Dr al-Affifi’s. Southern disaffection had first coalesced into the makings of an organisation with branches all over the south among army officers of former PDRY who had a special axe to grind. After their defeat by the north in 1994, thousands of southern military were among some 80,000 other southerners humiliatingly forced to take early retirement on inadequate pensions. Still mistrusted as Marxists by the YAR’s military, they had found themselves unable to pull the right strings, tap into the right patronage networks or even grease the right palms, to earn themselves a decent living. Young southerners wanting to join the national army soon encountered the same obstacles, as did southerners seeking jobs in the oil industry. The protest movement, which first appeared under the cumbersome name of ‘Retired Military Consultation Association’ had been bitterly nicknamed the ‘Stay-at-home-Party’. But back in late 2006 its reasonable demand for equal rights and a level playing field had been too modest and abstract to fire many imaginations. It had not begun to gather adherents and a momentum of demonstrations and rallies with arrests, injuries and deaths until 2007, until it had hardened its message into an outright demand for secession. Southerners of all kinds - not just the military, or old Marxists like ba-Oom who lost power by unity with the YAR, or intellectuals who fondly recalled the British era, or aspiring oil-workers - were agreed that while they had nothing left to lose, they had a little oil wealth and a lot of dignity and peace of mind to gain by trying to break free of Sanaa again.

  Even ambitious and high-flying southerners who had secured themselves good government jobs in Sanaa after unification sympathised with the desperate frustration of those left behind and remained acutely aware of the gulf still separating northerners from southerners.

  ‘One feels like an outsider here in Sanaa,’ an Adeni government minister told me, ‘but is it they who can’t accept us or we who can’t accept them?’ Some believe that unification per se is not the problem, that the real trouble is Salih’s northern tribal regime and the way in which it has been imposed on the south. In other words, it is the regime that needs changing, not the country that needs dividing. If that were generally agreed to be the right remedy, a good many northerners would rally to the cause too, but those calling for southern independence sincerely doubt that even a new president would solve the problem. They are people who believe that a century and a half of separate existence have rendered the two parts of Yemen simply too different in too many essential ways to be welded into one unit.

  At the root of the problem lies the rule of law, or rather, lack of it. One southerner, a former government minister, explained to me that in the north’s era of the imams and Ottomans, it was accepted that if someone wanted a malefactor arrested he had to pay for the service, but, equally, it was understood that if the malefactor wanted to escape imprisonment he would have to pay even more. Neither the British nor the Marxists countenanced such a modus operandi in the south, he told me. Another southerner who had prospered in Sanaa since unification, a member of parliament who feared the country would have to divide again, told me ‘It’s a difference of mentality - we didn’t notice it immediately. We southerners were brought up to respect the system you work within, to believe that finances were sacred, that you only took what belonged to you and that if you were entitled to something you’d get it. Here in the north an entitlement has to be fought for, and you end up spending a lot of money’ Sultan Nasir al-Fadhli was old and wise enough to make a fair comparison between the British era and the present day: ‘There are much better roads now, but in British times there was the rule of law; no one could be imprisoned for more than forty-eight hours without charge.’

  The most solid fuel firing the anger engine of southern separatism was the less abstract, horribly tangled business of land ownership. Southerners with outraged tales of woe about the theft of their land and property by a horde of greedy northern carpetbaggers since the civil war were two a penny. The managing editor of Al-Ayyam informed me that in the course of the past four years the northerner military commander in charge of the south had helped himself to an area of land ‘nearly the size of Bahrain’. An Adeni judge I met told me how he had only managed to retrieve some land he had been robbed of by ‘running from pillar to post’ and bribing someone with 15,000 riyals - approximately £600. I recalled the circle of Balharithi tribesmen I had seen near Ibrahim’s home one early morning, plotting revenge on behalf of a fellow tribesman whose land near Aden had been stolen. I also remembered my friend Ahmad al-Fadhli telling me that he had seized the opportunity presented at lunch one day with his uncle Nasir, his cousin Tariq and Tariq’s brother-in-law, the powerful Brigadier-General Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar, to voice the common southern complaint: ‘By all means buy our land if you [northerners]can afford it, but don’t just take it!’ he had told the Brigadier-General.

  A few days after our checkpoint incident I learned that Dr al-Affifi’s willingness to throw himself and, by extension, his mighty and well-armed Yafai tribe, the biggest of all the southern tribes, into the southern independence struggle had elevated him to the rank of a poisonous snake in the president’s eyes. Summoned to Sanaa for a meeting with Salih, Dr al-Affifi had backed up his general point about the north’s ill-treatment of the south by recounting the tale of the theft of his own real estate in Aden. Soon after unification, he told Salih, he had invested in twenty-two different plots of land in Aden and even opened a private hospital in the city’s most salubrious Tawahi district. In the wake of the 1994 war, that hospital, complete with $200,000-worth of medical equipment, had been commandeered as a military barracks for a period of twenty years. To add insult to injury, nineteen of his twenty-two plots had been confiscated without explanation or right of appeal, let alone com
pensation.

  Instead of instructing an underling to look into the matter, the president had summoned Brigadier-General Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar to make a frank appeal to Dr al-Affifi’s baser nature thinly disguised as an invitation to serve his country: there must have been some mistake, so Dr al-Affifi must have his land back, and would he care for a plum posting as director of the army’s medical services too? Or could he fancy being the governor of Abyan? ‘No, thank you. I don’t want or need a job,’ Dr al-Affifi had replied, ‘and my land and hospital are not my first concern. The most important thing is that you stop demonising all southern separatists as a bunch of Marxists and agents of foreign powers and allies of al-Qaeda, and take the trouble to talk to them.’ The sending in of tanks and rounding-up of 300 rebels, including Hassan ba-Oom and young Ahmad bin Ferid, was ample proof that Salih had rejected his advice.

  A source of particular humiliation and frustration for Adenis was the regime’s failure to remedy the economic mess left behind by the baneful application of Marxist economic theory. They wanted Aden turned back into the money-spinning marine transport hub it had been in British times thanks to its excellent natural harbour and strategic location between East and West, near the foot of the Suez Canal. Some suspected that Salih’s strategy was to punish the south for daring to rebel in 1994 by deliberately ensuring that its capital remained ‘a village’, but the cock-up theory seemed more credible. A shaming tale of corrupt and incompetent politicians (a Hadhrami government minister nicknamed ‘Mr Ten Per Cent’ was said to have purchased at least two London properties with a single backhander), added to al-Qaeda’s attacks on the USS Cole in 2000 and the French oil-tanker, the Limburg, in 2002 sending the price of marine insurance sky-high, all seem to have contributed to the delay and failure. The upshot of almost twenty years of bad luck, bungling and rampant greed has been that in late 2008 Dubai Ports International, which already runs Dubai’s South terminal as well as the ports of Jeddah and Djibouti on either side of the Red Sea, assumed the running of Aden too.b Expert outside observers pointed to the obvious danger of a monopoly which would mean Aden remaining the ‘Cinderella of the East’ for decades to come.