President Salih has shown no remorse or understanding. His reply to a New York Times reporter’s question about north-south tensions in July 2008 was rough and sarcastic: ‘We built the infrastructure, including electrical projects, roads, universities, and we restored public properties which were confiscated during the rule of the Marxist party [Marxists’ YSP]. And we see such an uproar now because we created comprehensive development in the south. This is because of our efforts in the south.’1 A few months later a government analysis of economic activity in the Aden area revealed the dismal reality behind his angry bluster: more than three-quarters of all investment projects in the area between 1992 and 2007 had either failed to materialise or been seriously delayed. Fifty per cent of potential investors cited lack of land as a main obstacle; 49 per cent blamed a lack of co-ordination between government departments; 47 per cent mentioned abandoning their plans after suffering intimidation; legal problems ranging from constant changes to the law to delays in granting judgments were serious obstacles; 12 per cent had not been able to afford the bribes demanded.2
THE SAADA WARS
President Salih’s handling of what was known as the al-Huthi rebellion in the Saada governorate, up near the Saudi border, has only reinforced the impression that his considerable powers of mediation and persuasiveness were on the wane, that his dancing days were over.
Among Yemenis, the true causes of the unrest which began in 2004 remain as obscure as they did to the outside world which generally, but mistakenly, explains it as either a self-contained sectarian struggle between a minority of Yemeni Shiites and a majority of Yemeni Sunnis, or as a proxy war between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia over supremacy on the peninsula, in which the al-Huthis are raised to the rank of an organisation like Hezbollah, or finally, as a local jihadist movement guaranteed to ally itself with al-Qaeda. If all three of these accounts are certainly wide of the mark, the truth remains hard to discern. The manner in which I was able to build up a picture of conflict amply illustrates this opacity.
The first official I spoke to about the rebellion in 2007 was an adviser to the president who provided me with the regime’s official version. A simple class conflict, he explained, the issue was a clear throwback to 1962 and the end of the imamate and its accompanying ascendancy of a few hundred sayyid families who claimed descent from the Prophet. It could also be characterised as a contest between modern Republican Zaydis, President Salih among them, who wore their Zaydism so lightly it was more or less Sunnism, and resentful diehard Saada Zaydis intent on destroying the republic and restoring the imamate. In his view, the al-Huthi clan - a respected Zaydi theologian and his multiple sons - were just arrogant Zaydi sayyids, elitist snobs, irritatingly proud of their guardianship of Zaydi Shiism in Saada, the ancient stronghold of the eighth-century first Zaydi imam, who had managed to gather a couple of thousand similarly superior sayyids to launch a bid to declare Salih’s rule illegitimate and unrighteous in the old Zaydi way. Born two years after revolution that had swept away both the imam and the sayyid ascendancy, my informant claimed that he had never even heard of sayyids until the outbreak of the rebellion. ’Now I know much more. People from the old sayyid families tend to be very good-looking and very intelligent, but they also tend to be bitter about what they lost in the revolution. But actually, they haven’t been so discriminated against. Some of them have found good jobs. Right now the ministers for sport and trade are both sayyids.’
I heard other more or less plausible accountings for the virulence and intractability of the conflict. Apart from the belief that it was a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, there were reports that a number of Sunni Iraqi army officers, hurled out of their jobs and fleeing post-Saddam Iraq, had regrouped inside the Yemeni military after 2003 and were venting their spleen against Shiism by stoking the regime’s ire against al-Huthis. There was a widespread belief that the al-Huthis were protesting against their region having been marginalized and starved of funds in a protracted punishment for its having acted as a bastion of support for Imam Badr’s Royalist cause back in the 1960s. Once I was told that the conflict could be blamed on the demarcation of the nearby border with Saudi Arabia since 2000; people who used to make lucrative livings by smuggling goods and weapons to and fro across the frontier were simply kicking against new state controls. A Saada tribesman I encountered in a café near the American embassy in Sanaa one morning assured me that it was nothing much, that it all boiled down to a petty local dispute between two neighbouring sheikhs. The editor of a Yemeni newspaper could shed little useful light but claimed to be able to discern four different strands in the rebellion. In his view it comprised a few die-hard Zaydis, a few anti-western ideologists with political links to Iran, a good many more mercenary adventurers and many, many more tribesmen simply struggling to defend their families against the army’s brutally heavy weaponry.3
Rather more useful clues as to the rebellion’s real causes and character emerged from examining the Zaydi background of the conflict which is traceable back to the era of greater openness and freedom of expression and association that optimistically accompanied the unification of the two Yemens in 1990. Large religious summer schools preaching a Zaydi Islam that had not been promoted or openly aired since before the 1962 revolution were set up in Saada and surrounding predominantly Zaydi areas. These establishments drew their energy and popularity not just from a world-wide resurgence of religious faith as a means of self-definition that resulted from the end of the Cold War but also from a more urgent and growing determination to stand up to the alien Salafism and Wahhabism being imported into the area by migrant workers returning from stints in Saudi Arabia and by Saudi-trained and funded religious leaders like Sheikh Moqbel al-Wadei of the Dar al-Hadith centre, at Dammaj. Until his death in 2001 Sheikh al-Wadei raised local Zaydi hackles by preaching vehemently against any kind of Shiism, even one as close to Sunnism as Zaydism. Folllowers of this counter-active flowering of Zaydism became known as Shabab al-Muomineem [Believing Youth]. By the end of the decade they could boast twenty-four summer schools, with perhaps as many as 18,000 students in the Saada governorate alone, and forty-three more in other governorates.4
But the movement was splitting into moderates and extremists. The latter earned the nickname ‘the al-Huthis’ on account of their charismatic sayyid preacher leader, Hussein Badraddin al-Huthi, one of Yemen’s first MPs and son of a prominent Zaydi theologian. The al-Huthis‘ bold chanting of ’Death to America and Israel!‘ during a televised Friday prayer session in Sanaa’s main mosque in 2003, amounting to an alarmingly frank expression of criticism of Salih’s decision to side with the United States in its ’War on Terror’, was what triggered the countdown to conflict. While the president could be confident that they would not join forces with al-Qaeda given their visceral hatred of Salafism and Wahhabism, he had every reason to fear that a rising tide of fury against him for his having allied Yemen with a superpower that had recently outraged Muslims everywhere by invading Iraq might easily lead to his assassination by bomb or bullet, like his two immediate predecessors. When al-Huthi rebels scrawled anti-regime and anti-US graffiti on government buildings in Saada and began distributing literature attacking Salih for being an American stooge, he had hundreds of them arrested, but still the movement grew. Al-Huthi exhorted his followers to stop paying any taxes to Sanaa, to cut the main highway between Saada and the capital, to occupy government buildings in Saada and to take up positions in the mountains in preparation for a guerrilla war. Salih posted a bounty of $55,000 on Hussein Badraddin al-Huthi’s head and ordered his troops in, under the regime’s most notable Zaydi turned Salafist who happened to have the military command of the region, Brigadier-General Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar.
Against well-armed and highly motivated tribesmen who knew their land well, the troops‘ going was tough. Only after ten weeks of warring and three days of intensive skirmishing about the Maraan Mountains did the regular forces manage to kill the rebel leader. But fi
rst his octogenarian father and then one of his younger brothers, Abdul Malik al-Huthi, stepped into his shoes and, with the help of two more brothers, continued the struggle. The martyred Hussein has been honoured ever since in the movement’s slogan which he generated two years before he died by commanding his followers to shout it: ’With God’s will you shall find those who will make the shout with you in other places. Make this shout with me: “Death to America and Israel.” ’5 In 2005 the Second Saada War broke out and the year after that, the third, and so on. For all the new roads and their tanks and fighter jets the government forces soon discovered that they were at about as much of a disadvantage as the Egyptians had been back in the 1960s. The region’s jagged mountains and roomy caves - the same region the last Imam Badr and his Royalists roamed in the 1960s - have always favoured the rebels.
What had become absolutely clear by mid-2009, in spite of a ban on both domestic and foreign reporting of the conflict, was that in the course of five years, through six surges of fighting known as the six Saada wars, in which the regime’s regular troops armed with fighter jets and tanks battled suspiciously well-trained and highly motivated tribesmen in some of Yemen’s harshest and most mountainous terrain, an estimated 150,000 inhabitants of the region had been displaced and thousands of troops and non-combatants killed. Also absolutely clear was that the conflict was spreading well beyoned the Saada gover-norate, east to the governorates of Amran and al-Jawf towards Marib. In the words of one Yemeni political analyst, ‘With every new round of confrontation, clashes increase in their intensity, scope and repercussions, and new grievances are provoked, thereby multiplying the points of conflict.’6 If Yemen was Nasser’s Vietnam, then Saada seemed to be shaping up into Salih’s.
By early 2006 he was already reckoned to have some 20,000 troops engaged in quelling an uprising that had only attracted a tenth of that number in the beginning.7 In the summer of 2007, Salih and Brigadier-General Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar had concluded that the conventionally equipped army was too clumsy a beast for the job. In order to fight thousands of tribesmen skilled in mountain guerrilla warfare they needed to hire thousands more similarly skilled tribesmen. A plan to create a ‘popular army’ of 27,000 mercenaries, the majority of them Hashid tribesmen, was mooted. The eldest son of Yemen’s Hashid sheikh, Sadeq al-Ahmar, for example, obligingly despatched 1,000 tribesmen to Sanaa for some military training but was relieved when they proved surplus to requirements. Hashid tribesmen fighting the mainly Bakil tribesmen of the Saada area was a dangerous prospect; traditionally, Yemen’s two largest and most powerful tribal federations avoid conflict with each other. But the Hashid Federation of tribes are divided in their attitude to the rebellion to judge by the variety of political stances adopted by the many influential sons of its late paramount sheikh, Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar. Other tribes with less to fear by getting mixed up in the argument, tribes whose lands were nowhere near Saada, were gleefully answering the lucrative call to arms and helping to ensure the escalation of the conflict.
Late in 2007 Ahmad al-Fadhli had introduced me to yet another of his cousins, not Tariq the jihadist but Tariq’s younger brother, Walid the mercenary leader. Younger than Tariq and blessed with the almond-shaped eyes, slicked-back hair and smile of a matinee idol, Walid welcomed me to his fine mansion near Zinjibar with its crenellated gate posts, gravel drive, ornamental fountain and manicured lawn, before divulging that he had recently returned from leading 300 Fadhli tribesmen up north to fight the al-Huthis, and would surely be heading back there soon. ‘Anyone with enough money to pay me can have as many of my fighters as he wants, to fight whoever he wants,’ he boasted, when I ventured to question the wisdom and morality of Fadhlis battling tribesmen with whom they had no quarrel, on the side of a regime that Walid, as a southerner, probably disliked as much as any al-Huthi. He offered to take me with him on his next campaign, promised he could arrange the crucial tasrih for me, but the next time we met, in early 2008, the annual campaigning season had not yet begun.
The Fifth Saada war did not break out for another two months, in May 2008, after a mysterious bomb exploded in a Saada mosque. Fighting soon spread to other northern highland regions, to Amran and Hajja and to Bani Hushaish only twenty miles north-west of Sanaa, close enough for Sanaanis to hear the fighting. It was beginning to look as if the rebels might be capable of toppling the regime, but President Salih suddenly surprised everyone by choosing the thirtieth anniversary of his accession to power to unilaterally declare hostilities at an end. Perhaps his denunciation of the rebels as ‘ignorant forces of darkness who have adopted deviant terrorist and racist ideas’8 sounded hollow, even to him. Perhaps persistent rumours had reached him that his army was deliberately perpetuating the conflict for financial gain by selling arms to the rebels. Perhaps the news that his son Ahmad’s Republican Guard and his kinsman Brigadier-General Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar’s regular military had been using the conflict as a cover for their own bloody rivalry, fighting each other rather than the al-Huthis, had reached him. Alternatively, there were many who suspected Salih himself of orchestrating that lethal struggle for the succession.
ON TWO FRONTS AT ONCE
The desperate voices of southerners clamouring to be released from union with Sanaa reached a crescendo in the spring of 2009 with the news that Tariq al-Fadhli had switched allegiances. In a clear break with his paymaster in Sanaa, he was openly championing independence for the south. Referring to a new state called not South Yemen but ‘South Arabia’, he was turning his back on his Yemeni identity and the ghost of the old PDRY to recall the stillborn ’Federation of South Arabia’ which the retreating British had tried to bring about, complete with its flag, its army and its national anthem. Addressing a mass of protestors waving old PDRY flags, at a mass rally in Zinjibar and in an interview with Aden’s al-Ayyam he boldly declared that united Yemen, President Salih’s proudest legacy, ‘was born deformed, grew up disabled and now is thankfully buried’.9
I was not surprised to hear of his volte-face. If none of the Fadhlis I had met - not old Sultan Nasir, nor Ahmad, nor Tariq, nor Walid the mercenary - had actively denounced the union of the two Yemens, they had left me in little doubt of their dismay at its practical implementation. I vividly recalled Tariq’s ominous recital at our last meeting: ‘We came to the voice of the power, and we returned without any snakes even … And those who knew they already had their snakes clasped them closer.’ Suddenly, with Tariq championing the cause, the Southern Mobility Movement seemed to be acquiring what it had sorely lacked for the three years of its existence: a leader of charisma and energy, to say nothing of a reputation for bravery. On the other hand, that same jihadist background as well as his alliance with Salih in the 1994 war and his willingness to take Salih’s gold for the past fifteen years might count against him, not to mention complaints that he had sold a lot of tribal land to northerners. Ideally, the movement needed a leader without a jihadist, or a Marxist, or a Yemeni unionist, or an exile past, but with Yemen’s last Marxist leader, the Hadhrami Ali Salim al-Bidh who had recently removed from an exile in Oman to another in Austria also offering himself for the position, the choice of candidates seemed uncommonly limited. At around the same time, my companion in trouble at the Aden checkpoint, Dr al-Affifi, excitedly called me from Saudi Arabia late one night to inform me that members of his own mighty Yafai tribe had been badgering him to step into the breach. Some were claiming that no single leader of the movement had emerged, not for lack of discipline or decently trustworthy candidates, but because of a reasonable fear that such a leader would be assassinated - mostly likely in a ‘car accident’ - the instant he made himself known.
Nevertheless, Tariq al-Fadhli was in the forefront of the liveliest secessionist activities over the summer. Within days of his turncoating there was violence in Radfan over the siting of a new military checkpoint, but the Fadhli capital of Zinjibar was bristling with soldiers and more checkpoints and Tariq under siege in his fortress home on the roundabout.
A week later, with a death toll of eight, including security personnel, and eight southern newspapers, including Al-Ayyam, forced to stop printing, international human rights organisations were in full cry, but not so foreign governments. When the United States issued a boldly unequivocal statement of support for Yemeni unity and Saudi Arabia and the Emirates followed suit, it was clear that no matter how justified and aggravated the southerners‘ grievances, Yemen’s integrity as a bulwark against the spread of jihadism came first in the minds of the outside world. The fear was that AQAP would hitch its star to the secessionists’ wagon, adding its own weight to the centrifugal forces tearing Yemen apart, before stepping in to take charge.
Sure enough, the leader of AQAP, Nasir al-Wahayshi, issued an Internet declaration of support for the southern independence movement: ‘Injustice, oppression and tyranny should not be practised in the name of unity,’ it said, ‘We in the al-Qaeda network support what you are doing; your rejection of oppression practised against you and others, your fight against the government and your defending yourself.’10 But it cautioned southern separatists against making plans to set up either another Marxist state or a democracy with political parties because ’such parties give our umma nothing but disunity, subordination and submission to the enemies’. An Islamic state governed by sharia law was the answer to all the south’s problems,11 al-Wahayshi claimed.
Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes Page 27