However, there were no signs that common cause had been made or any alliance established between any of the three movements, a fact which might have reassured Yemen’s western allies but was no comfort at all to President Salih. On 21 May 2009, the eve of the nineteenth anniversary of unification, Yemen’s president issued a terrible warning couched in an apocalyptic vision of the country’s near future. If people set the ball of national fragmentation rolling, catastrophe would surely ensue: ‘You will be towns, sub-districts and statelets and there will be door to door fighting. No street will be safe and there will be no airplanes flying in the air or boats at sea coming to or leaving from Yemen.’12
Thanks to neighbouring Somalia, the words ‘failed’ and ‘state’ were already being linked in Yemen, but there was little agreement about how that failure would come about or how catastrophic it would be for most Yemenis, given the hardiness of tribal structures and the fact that especially the majority northern Yemenis had long been accustomed to relying on themselves rather than any state for their needs. For some time, both domestic and foreign observers of Yemen’s political landscape had been agreeing that in order to stand a chance of preserving the country’s integrity, Salih would have, in the words of one Sanaani political analyst, to ‘accept a level of decentralisation he’s not even contemplating at the moment’. Some thought eight different regional entities joined in a Yemeni federation would work, others that twenty-one would be more realistic.
But it might already be too late for such finely calibrated compromises. While north and south are two obvious entities, there remains a question over whether Hadhramaut would want to go it alone too. Southern secessionists optimistically insisted to me that Hadhramaut would not because it would have to employ an army of mercenaries to defend itself - ‘Hadhramis make business, not war’, I was told - but there remains the question of Saudi Arabia’s interest in a corridor to the ocean. For Salih the stakes are far higher than they were in 1994. Most of the country’s remaining oil reserves and a brand new $4 billion gas liquefaction plant, which he is too optimistically assuming he will be able to rely on for revenue when the oil runs out, are located in the south. There are some who argue that a four-way fragmentation of the state on the simple basis of economic viability is the most likely scenario: Sanaa, the northern highlands and northern Tihama with the port of Hodeidah would continue to be run by the Saudi-subsidised northern highlander tribes; Hadhramaut would be bankrolled by Saudi Hadhramis; the wealthy southern Yemeni diaspora in the Gulf States - people like my friend, Dr al-Affifi - would subsidise Aden and its hinterland; Yemen’s only industrial giant, the Taiz-based Hayel Saeed conglomerate, powerful both as an employer and as a source of charity, would effectively underwrite the central southern highlands.
In the late summer of 2009 the sixth Saada war broke out. Sanaa’s launch of the unambiguously named Operation Scorched Earth‘ began with the collapse of the year-old ceasefire Salih had announced and a rocketing of Abdul Malik al-Huthi’s headquarters in Saada. At last the complicated and obscure conflict began registering on the Richter scale of international news, thanks to international aid agencies’ warnings that the Saada situation was a humanitarian disaster in the making, as well as to counterterrorism agencies’ opinings that Yemen’s increasingly hospitable chaos was guaranteed to attract jihadists from all over the Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan and East Africa. By November the conflict had spilled over into Saudi Arabia with Saudi jets obliging Sanaa by bombing al-Huthi-held villages. Fears of the obscure domestic insurgency escalating into into a dangerous regional proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran looked increasingly justified. The regime in Sanaa irritated its counterpart in Tehran by renaming the capital’s Iran Street after Neda Agha Soltan, the young girl student killed at a rally to protest against the outcome of Iran’s June elections, while Iran retailiated by naming one its thoroughfares The Martyrs of Saada Street. Against the looming background fear of Iran’s imminent acquisition of a nuclear weapon, the United States and all the GCC were at pains to reiterate their support for Yemen’s integrity under Salih’s rule, and overlooked his highly dubious presentation of both al-Huthi and southern insurgencies as additional fronts in the old ’War on Terror’.
Alarmed that Tariq al-Fadhli was emerging as the de facto leader of the Southern Mobility Movement, Sanaa was accusing him of inciting his Fadhlis to open fire on the motorcade of the chief of the PSO in the south. Tariq, heading the ministry of the interior’s most wanted list, had been given two choices, either to surrender or to leave the country.
My attempt to visit Tariq in Zinjibar in October 2009, in the company of his cousin Ahmad’s youngest son, the banana farmer Haidara al-Fadhli, ended in predictable failure. After the chief of Aden’s tourist police deeply regretted that he could not take responsibility for issuing me with the tasrih I would need to pass any checkpoint, I found myself paying a second visit to the city’s central security establishment opposite the Aden Hotel. There the polite northerner in charge kindly explained to me that even if I had been a friend of the Fadhlis for five years, even if Walid al-Fadhli the mercenary was preparing a lunch in my honour, even if Tariq al-Fadhli would obviously not dream of harming a hair on my head, he could not guarantee my safety. I quite understood; he would have had to provide me with an armed escort, while knowing perfectly well that such an entourage would be a red rag to the bull, if not of Tariq’s Fadhli tribesmen followers, then of the area’s assorted other jihadist groups who were also restive.
From Haidara, who was supporting Tariq (unlike his brother Walid the mercenary, who remained a supporter of the government) and who had seen Tariq the day before, I was able to ascertain that none of the family had been injured but that the third floor had been burnt out and that one of his four wives had needed smuggling out to Aden to have a baby. I learned that Tariq was frustrated at having his phone tapped and at not being able to move out of his fortress on the roundabout for weeks, but that the place was not under siege. Government forces were two kilometres away, so that visitors and supporters like Haidara were free to come and go. Clearly, if Tariq was topping Yemen’s most wanted list, his capture was not sufficiently urgent to risk enflaming the southern insurgency by turning him into a martyr. ‘If they really want me, they will have to come and kill me here in my house,’ he had told Haidara.
Small wonder President Salih was more preoccupied with his two domestic insurgencies than with what al-Qaeda might be plotting next. Like the Yemeni man-in-the-street, he had good reasons to rank the jihadist threat to his country a distant third to the independence movement in the south and the al-Huthi rebellion in the north. It seemed to me that these two more urgent priorities also went a long way towards accounting for Yemenis’ frequent dismissal of bin Laden and al-Qaeda as merely the inflated bogeyman of a western imagination that seems always to have needed an enemy of supernatural dimensions to test its mettle. When in Yemen I was often politely reminded that the Cold War-era West had created the ’terrorist problem’ for itself back in the 1980s by choosing to fund and arm Afghan mujahideen in the belief that their radical Islam was a lesser evil than Soviet Communism. I had soon discovered that any mention of al-Qaeda to a Yemeni was more likely to elicit the quietly humorous observation that a small, poor town in the southern highlands bore the same name than any opinion or fact about bin Laden’s global jihad. Long before western analysts like Jason Burke set about modifying the average westerner’s view of al-Qaeda as a tightly controlled, efficient and hierarchical organisation, Yemenis were perceiving it rather as an emotion-led climate of political opinion that waxed and waned in response to a number of factors - anger and humiliation felt at the West’s foreign policy in the region, the economic situation, an individual’s treatment by state authorities, the energy generated by the charisma of a leading jihadist, and so on.
It seemed important to remember too that long before the Yemeni man-in-the-street worried about what might be happening in Zinjibar or Radfan o
r Saada or what AQAP might be plotting against oil pipelines and foreign tourists in Marib or Hadhramaut, he would be worrying about who and how much he would have to bribe to get his mother or wife into hospital or how he would manage to feed and house his extended family on a single salary, or even where the next meal was coming from.
Busy securing his own grip on power by the only two means he understood - ‘dancing on snakes heads’ or resorting to force - Salih had run the country and its minimal resources into the ground. During his thirty years in charge of the military tribal republic he inherited, he had not promoted the development of Yemen into a modern nation state which the majority of its people were content and proud to inhabit. The Prophet’s reported high praise - ‘Faith is Yemeni, wisdom is Yemeni’ -had been twisted into a bitterly funny joke: ’Rumour has it the author of that hadith is still under investigation in Heaven for its fabrication.’
If a large number of Yemenis were beginning to wonder if the integrity of their modern state was worth preserving, if the risk of a power vacuum and even a jihadist takeover seemed worth taking, Salih was at least partly to blame.
a Released after tour months, Ahmad bin iend left Yemen to claim political asylum in Austria. Dr al-Affifi’s car was returned after two days.
b Yemen’s Aden Ports Company and Dubai Ports International (35 per cent) and Abdullah Buqshan (15 per cent) announced the creation of a 50/50 joint venture company in April 2009.
CHAPTER NINE
CAN THE CENTRE HOLD?
PAYING FOR POWER
I look at this country, and I see a plane ready to take off!
In what direction?
I can see you don’t believe me, said Faris al-Sanabani, pausing for another forkful of steak, But we have everything in Yemen!
The presidents smart public relations supremo, who doubled up as a wealthy businessman with his own security company and English-language newspaper, knew at least as well as I did that Yemen had almost nothing, that its oil and water were running out, that jihadism was on the rise, that corruption was endemic, southern secessionism à la mode and, at the time, a fifth Saada war was in the offing. Equally, we were both aware that the rule of law was a distant dream, the population exploding, unemployment running at 40 per cent and the president spending billions Yemen could not spare on Russian fighter planes.
It was March 2008 and only the previous evening a western diplomat had told me that, at a recent gathering of his counterparts from other western embassies, all had agreed that Salih’s removal from power was vital if Yemen was to avoid disintegration. But even with him gone, the diplomat had confided, not one of them had been able to suggest a plan to reverse the country’s decline. ‘Of course we’d start by raiding the president’s foreign bank accounts for a few billion dollars, but that wouldn’t stop the rot,’ he had said.
There was clearly no question of Yemen being about to ‘take off’, although from where al-Sanabani and I were sitting, dining off steak and chips in a fashionable restaurant in Hadda, a southern suburb of Sanaa, it was hard to believe the outlook was all gloomy. We were surrounded by unveiled, wealthy women from the Gulf States and foreign businessmen; the lighting was low, the air-conditioning soothing, the service attentive. Looking around me in that oasis of luxury, I might almost have swallowed al-Sanabani’s ludicrous line if I had never seen the dreary destitution of towns like Mocha or Marib, or the squalor of ancient Zabid, if I had not met women who had been married off at the age of nine, if I had not known that a city as vast as Taiz had no mains water supply for weeks on end, or that so much of rural Yemen remained without electricity or that around half the population could not read. I dreaded to think what the camps filled with people fleeing the on-off war in Saada were like, what out-of-bounds Saada itself looked like.
A mere twenty-minute drive from old Sanaa to wealthy Hadda is a journey from the third world to the first. Hadda’s clean, quiet avenues were lined with glamorous eateries and the fortress palaces of the rich and influential concealed behind high blank walls and iron gates, and protected by armed guards. I had visited a few of them. A former prime minister’s home boasted a basement library and a reception room the size of a hotel conference hall. While lunching at the palatial residence of a member of Yemen’s upper chamber of parliament, I had learned that the second power in the land, Brigadier-General Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar, occupied a neighbouring mansion. Another gigantic marble-floored palace, the home of a former minister of transport, had a swimming pool and tennis court. The al-Ahmar clan’s stronghold in the capital, a cluster of high-rises in Hadda, was located not far from the American and British embassies with their anti-al-Qaeda fortifications. Al-Sanabani himself was proud to have built his own brand new home in Hadda of stone quarried from a whole mountain he had purchased near Marib, rather than from cement, and to have employed a skilled craftsman to create traditional stained glass and alabaster windows for him. In the main, however, the wealthy of Hadda seemed to have looked to the architecture of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States for inspiration, rather than to Yemen’s famously decorative native style.
In old Sanaa it is much easier to believe oneself in the remote and mysterious heart of Arabia, in a place with a claim to being the longest continuously inhabited city on earth, founded by one of Noah’s sons and visited by the Prophet’s father and son-in-law. Residing in one of the hundreds of high-rise fortresses fashioned of stone and brick with decorative frostings of white plaster-work around stained-glass half-moon windows, with uneven floors and steeply winding central staircases wafted by burning incense, one experiences a style of Yemeni life far more compellingly attractive than anything on offer in Hadda. In Hadda there are no sturdy, prettily patterned minarets greeting God’s new day with a crackle of amplified electronic feedback, before their muezzins’ preparatory coughs give way to the shattering surround-sound of the call to prayer. The rich of Hadda are too distant from the old city to enjoy the full effect of those competing wails mounting to heaven like the cries of hundreds of prisoners in an overcrowded dungeon, ricocheting off the nearby mountains and then fading to a sporadic grumble as more workaday noises start up in the narrow alleyways: the roar of engines and the braying of donkeys, the banging on old wooden doors and shrieking from high windows, all the sounds and stinks of the souk.
Barring a few restaurants, Hadda after nightfall is silent and dark, while old Sanaa is at its most seductive, the coloured half-moon windows of its high-rise palaces aglow with jewel light. After ruminating the afternoon away in their above-ground-level niches, on rolled carpets or battered car seats, with their qat and their bottled water and their cigarettes, the merchants and carpenters and blacksmiths in the souk are back in business. Each dimly gas-lit niche and cupboard shop is like a window opened in an advent calendar and, in the low glow of hissing paraffin lamps, a row of crouching qat sellers resembles a group of priests engaged in some mysterious pagan rite. Men returning from the hammam with towels slung over their shoulders and a group of their elders lounging companionably on the steps of a mosque suggest the closest kind of community life, as does the fact that if one has visited old Sanaa more than once one is guaranteed to be recognised and greeted, as if one has never left. ‘You are welcome’ and ‘I love you’ shout the children in the only English they know. More than anywhere else in Yemen, old Sanaa has the power to persuade one that 9/11, Osama bin Laden and the global ‘war on terror’ are just sad, bad figments of the western imagination.
Our first-world Hadda surroundings and even the excellent steak were not improving al-Sanabani’s spirits. He began railing against Yemen’s mulish parliament; if the jet plane of Yemen was taking its time achieving lift-off, if the material gap between Hadda and the rest of Sanaa, old and new, was showing no sign of narrowing that was because, in al-Sanabani’s opinion, the ignorant tribesmen who accounted for the bulk of Yemen’s MPs were refusing to let the government speculate to accumulate by building a duty-free port at the Bab al-Mandab for example, or a n
ew pipeline and refinery at Mukalla, or a big duty-free port north of Hodeidah, near the Saudi border. Al-Sanabani grabbed a paper napkin and impatiently scribbled a rough map of Yemen with some pipelines and percentages for me. It was really so simple, he said. Actually, he could not see any point in Yemen having a parliament. ‘What we need here right now is a dictatorship, not democracy,’ he told me, ’Carrots and sticks is what it takes. We should just leave people as they are - illiterate and without electricity - they’ve been that way for hundreds of years, after all - and just get in the investment from outside and make a start on these big projects. That’s the way to get jobs and growth -’ He stopped short, belatedly aware of the damage his cynicism was doing to his cause.
American-educated, impatient with his president’s costly and time-consuming dancing on snakes’ heads that often looked to him like a failure of a will to rule, he was tired and out of sorts. A young friend of his, a deputy of minister of international financial relations named Jalal al-Yaqoub, might be better placed to convince me of Yemen’s economic potential, he said. A few days later al-Yaqoub and I duly met, again in Hadda, in another fashionable establishment called The Coffee Trader, at an hour of the afternoon when most Yemenis were lounging at home consuming qat. The American-run café with its authentic Yemeni coffee, Wifi connection and pleasant courtyard garden was as outlandishly first world as the steak restaurant al-Sanabani had taken me to. A threesome of veiled teenage girls sat hunched and giggling over a single laptop. A few young men, dressed in jeans and T-shirts lolled in their chairs, idly scrolling up and down their screens.
In spite of a first, brave assertion that he was ‘tired of whining about how bad things are’, al-Yaqoub turned out to be far less persuaded of Yemen’s chances of pulling off an economic miracle than al-Sanabani had hoped. After a promisingly enthusiastic start - he and Ahmad, the eldest son of the president, were about to embark on an urgent mission to the US and Europe in search of skilled and educated compatriots who could be persuaded to return home to jobs in the higher echelons of the civil service and government - he slowly succumbed to gloom. It transpired that the proposed bait for these young ex-pats - essentially, ‘your country needs you’ - was highly unlikely to do the trick, given the level of remuneration on offer to those they would be relying on to carry out their commands. As a US-educated deputy minister, al-Yaqoub himself was guaranteed a basic monthly salary of only $250. ‘You can see now why no one with any talent wants a job in the civil service,’ he grumbled.
Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes Page 28