Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (12 page)

Worse still, as early as 1963 the Egyptian air force was using chemical warfare against the Royalist tribes. Richard Beeston of the
Daily Telegraph
scored a world scoop with the news that Nasser was the ‘first person to employ chemical warfare since Mussolini used mustard gas on Ethiopian tribesmen during the thirties’.
¹⁵
Beeston travelled for three days from the Saudi border to a village in north Yemen named al-Kawma where he witnessed the ‘pitiful coughing of the gassed villagers’, saw the ‘vivid yellow face’ of one woman and a twelve-year-old boy’s ‘deep blister wounds’ and learned that seven people had died. In January 1967 a greyish-green poison cloud drifting downwind over the village of al-Kitaf killed 200 villagers within fifty minutes of its descent. Four months later, over 300 more died in attacks on five different villages.
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Only then did the Red Cross and subsequently the United Nations condemn Egypt for employing chemical warfare against civilians.

Dr Abdul Karim al-Iryani, a former foreign minister and prime minister of Yemen, was out of the country, studying in the United States in the 1960s, but is likewise in no doubt today that Nasser’s intervention in Yemen’s revolution was a costly disaster. ‘For one thing, we never knew anything like secret police before the Egyptians came. The imams had just a few spies, but with the Egyptians terrible things went on - sodomising, torture, people having air pumped up their anuses.’ And al-Iryani had a more general objection: ‘Even if Nasser got fed up with him, al-Sallal was completely Egypt’s man. Without showing any respect for our national identity or pride, the Egyptians came in here and practised “direct rule”, just like Bremer
^d
in Iraq. That was the biggest problem of all, because it lost us the very best of our revolutionary leaders.’

In 1965 two of the leading lights of the Yemen liberation movement whose activities dated back to the 1940s - the Sanaani lawyer and poet Mohamed al-Zubayri and Ahmad Numan - were neutralised (one by assassination, the other by retreat into exile) for daring to call for Egypt’s withdrawal. In the same year Nasser summoned al-Sallal to Cairo for a dressing down, permitting a General Hassan al-Amri to rule in his place. When General al-Amri, in turn, travelled to Cairo with around fifty more of the cream of Yemen’s revolutionaries to beg that al-Sallal be prevented from returning and that the Egyptians loosen their stranglehold on the country, Nasser had the general and his entire retinue either placed under close house arrest or hurled into jail, while al-Sallal returned to Yemen.

One of those eminent dissidents, Yahya al-Mutawakkil, has recalled his freezing, squalid prison cell and the nights he spent scraping away with a belt buckle at the mortar in the wall between his cell and that of a friend:

I managed to dislodge one of the bricks. I removed it every night after the final guard check so I could tell Ali about the films I had seen and Ali could recite poetry to me in return. In the daytime I would seal the brick back in place with cooking oil. So many flies swarmed on the grease that they were like a coat of black paint over the brick, so the guards never noticed that the mortar had been removed.
¹⁷

The cream of Yemen’s revolutionaries were not freed to return to Yemen until 1967, by which time Egypt had been defeated in the Six Day War against Israel and Nasser was offering to resign, admitting that his adventure in Yemen had been a mistake and would soon be terminated.

The root of the Egyptians’ problem was not that all those tribes were thoroughly, nobly wedded to the enemy Royalist cause and the dream of restoring their Imam Badr. It was not even that Republican and Royalist tribes had eventually formed a powerful coalition against the foreign invader. It was the fact that many of them were inconstant in their affiliation, indifferent to any ideology, pragmatic and flexible, eager to prolong the hostilities indefinitely, happy to receive guns and supplies from anywhere and to continue fighting for whichever side would pay them the most. A Soviet
Pravda
correpondent, reporting on an abortive peace conference near the Saudi border in 1965, has described an almost shocking absence of hostility between the various Royalist and Republican tribes gathered for the negotiations: ‘They hugged each other like old friends, kissed each others’ hands, and, once the initial greetings were over, spent a good while strolling around the enclosure hand in hand, as is the local custom.’
¹⁸

The tribes had rarely, if ever, had it so good. The case of a Bakil sheikh whose fortunes were immensely enhanced by the end of the war graphically illustrates the point. Very shortly after the revolution Sheikh Naji al-Ghadir declared himself and his following of 120 tribesmen for the Royalists, and was rewarded with Saudi arms and money via the Sharif of Beihan in the West Aden Protectorate. A year later he was being bribed by the Egyptians with 2,000 rifles, plenty of ammunition and 800,000 Maria Theresa dollars to bring all his Khawlan tribesmen out on the side of the Republic instead. He gave some of the booty to the Royalists, but he was in Saudi Arabia six months later asking King Feisal for more guns and money for 12,000 men. In 1967 he was boasting to a French journalist: ‘At the moment I receive subsidies from King Feisal, from Sharif Hussein of Beihan, and from our sovereign (May God grant him a long life!) the Imam al-Badr.’
¹⁹

Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar of the Hashid played an almost equally flexible hand. Initially inclined towards the republic on account of Imam Ahmad’s cruel killing of his father and brother, he even served as Minister of the Interior and Tribal Affairs in the republican government, but he turned against the Egyptians and al-Sallal in 1965 and went into exile, while his tribesmen chose whichever side offered them the best pecuniary inducement. Representing the durable, pragmatic might of the northern highlands, al-Ahmar was the biggest winner of all, emerging as Yemen’s chief power-broker, the speaker of the Yemen Arab Republic’s Consultative Council by 1971. Almost without a break, he retained his pre-eminent position as power broker and
éminence grise
in Yemeni affairs until his death at the age of seventy-four in late 2007.

Like every unwelcome invader before them, the Egyptians had been seen off at last by Yemen’s highland tribes. Field Marshal al-Amer, who masterminded the Yemen campaign and later committed suicide or was poisoned after his country’s defeat in the Six Day War, bitterly regretted the way the Yemen adventure had distracted his army from preparing to face its real enemy. In terms eerily similar to those used by the last Ottoman Turkish governor of Yemen, he wrote about those five wasted years in Yemen: ‘We did not bother to study the local, Arab and international implications or the political and military questions involved. After years of experience we realised that it was a war between tribes and that we entered it without knowing the nature of their land, their traditions and their ideas.’
²⁰

With the Egyptians gone after 1967, and al-Sallal finally fled into exile in Iraq after attending the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian revolution celebrations in Moscow in November that year, the Royalists were emboldened to mount a last offensive, a siege on Sanaa which lasted seventy days, from November 1967 to February 1968. Officers from the southern highlands whom the Egyptians had trained and encouraged as a useful counterweight to the Royalist northern high-landers played an important role in defending the revolution and finally throwing off the siege, but were soon deemed too dangerously leftward-leaning in their views to reap the rewards of their efforts. In effect, their more egalitarian outlook represented a threat to the Zaydi northern highlanders‘ traditional supremacy. General al-Amri, then in charge of the armed forces and effectively Yemen’s ruler, but presumably still smarting from his humiliating treatment by Nasser, was as determined as sheikhs like al-Ahmar to purge the new Yemen of any taint of socialism. So the fighting and killing continued among the Republicans themselves. By the start of 1969 the desired purge had been achieved and a group of what the historian Fred Halliday calls ’tribalist republicans’ - General al-Amri, President Abdul Rahman al-Iryani and Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar of course - were in a strong enough position to extend a conciliatory hand to the Royalists. In the end, it was far easier to do business with home-made highlander Zaydi Royalists than with foreign-made Socialists with Sunni backgrounds, especially since Saudi Arabia had made clear that it would only agree to stop funding the Royalists if the Yemen Arab Republic declared itself ‘Islamic’.

When it came down to it, the Yemen Arab Republic was likely to get more aid with fewer strings attached out of Saudi Arabia than out of impoverished, demoralised and leftward-leaning Egypt. But, just as importantly, the Zaydis had reasserted their ancient right to rule north Yemen. Royalists and Republicans mingled easily at last in a new unelected National Assembly. The country, it was easily agreed, needed no political parties because it had its tribes and, in the words of President al-Iryani, parties only brought unwelcome foreign interference because ‘people import political ideas from outside the country’.
²¹
But al-Iryani knew just what kind of a new Yemen he was presiding over. His politician nephew, Abdul Karim al-Iryani, told me that his uncle was perfectly well aware of the extent to which he, like any imam before him, depended on the support of the northern highland tribes, because he once told their principal sheikhs, ‘If ever you want me out, you won’t have to do anything to me. Just tell me to go and I’ll go. There’ll be no need to kill me.’

For four years, from 1970 until 1974, Abdul Rahman al-Iryani struggled to steer Yemen on a fair and steady course that put all its factions to work rebuilding a country on its knees after almost a decade of war and three years of drought.

A member of the
qadhi
class who had spent fifteen years in the imams’ jails and narrowly escaped beheading by Imam Ahmad for his part in the 1955 coup plot, al-Iryani embodied the spirit of reconciliation. He took steps to heal the old Zaydi/Sunni regional split. Sunnis from the southern highlands and Tihama were welcomed into his five-man Republican Council and well represented in his government of foreign-educated technocrats and intellectuals, some of whom were even moderately inclined towards socialism. But so were the appointees of the leading northern Zaydi tribes, whose stipends and access to lucrative posts in the rapidly expanding civil service cost Yemen very dearly, as did the army which was demanding heavy expenditures in weapons purchases. Yet, for all al-Iryani’s strenuous efforts at establishing a new politics, for all his good relations with the tribes (he was close to Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar, having tutored him in one of the imam’s prisons), for all his promotion of a new breed of urban technocrat and his laudable achievement of providing the Yemen Arab Republic with its first constitution and a vital Central Planning Organisation to power his reforms, there was no reconciling the clamouring demands of the disparate factions. The most serious obstacle was the tribes: accustomed as they were to stipends and exploiting the more productive Sunni areas of the country for their income, they did not take kindly to the threat posed by a new, modern order to their age-old hegemony.

Prime ministers came and went. One lasted less than four months in 1971, complaining that when the YAR was £75 million in debt and annual expenditure running at more than double its revenues, the tribal leaders were grabbing far too large a slice of the budget pie.
²²
General al-Amri, the mighty defender of the country from the socialist contagion in 1968, lasted hardly a week in 1971, having lost his temper and shot a photographer who insulted him. Muhsin Alaini notched up four separate terms of office under al-Iryani, two of which lasted only a month. A boldly determined reformer, Alaini once tried to cancel all stipends to the tribes and was so embarrassed to be begging for international food aid while Yemenis spent what money they had on qat that he banned all government workers and military from on. In his autobiography,
50 Years in Shifting Sands
, Alaini details the miserable impotence of the Yemeni premiership: ‘When the Prime Minister or one of his ministers “dares” take a decision that even slightly challenges the authority of those in power (be it tribal, religious, military or economic [note the order of interests]) his own position is threatened. Mediators may even have to intervene for him to be forgiven and pardoned.’
²³
The time-honoured customs of respecting physical might and seeking direct access to the highest authority - preferably by winning an invitation to the president’s afternoon qat chew - sabotaged the creation of an efficient government machine. The various powerful interest groups effectively rendered all governments as superfluous to the running of the country as they had been in the imams’ day.

By mid-1973 the Saudis had come to al-Iryani’s rescue with an agreement to cover the deficit in the YAR’s annual budget, and made a first payment of $25 million, but there was a price to be paid for their help. The extent of Saudi leverage, not just financial but also political, would sink al-Iryani. Alarmed and infuriated by the establishment of a Marxist state in the formerly British-ruled south after 1967, Saudi Arabia helped to reopen old civil war wounds by encouraging an army of ex-Royalists from the north and ex-sultans from the former protectorates to invade the south. In 1972, with al-Iryani and the technocrats in his government looking on helplessly, a two-week war between the two Yemeni republics erupted, at the end of which the leaders of both parts of Yemen suddenly concluded a peace based on a reiteration of their commitment to the ideal of unity. Wise President al-Iryani had good-humouredly defused his Marxist counterpart’s dogmatic stipulation that unity was impossible until the north had got rid of its bureaucracy and bourgeoisie, with ‘I agree. But first you have to give me a bureaucracy and also give me a bourgeoisie. Once I have them, I can then discuss getting rid of them again.’
²⁴

Displeased with this truce, alarmed by the prospect (however dim) of a union of all Yemenis in a single state to rival their own, the Saudis increased their financial and political pressure on al-Iryani by boosting the influence and confidence of the tribes and the army with generous gifts. Al-Iryani first left for Syria in the summer of 1973 but chose a permanent exile there the following summer, after the sputtering war with the Marxist south, just as soon as he learned of a plot to oust him. He had told the tribes they would not need to kill him in order to be rid of him, and he was as good as his word. The only civilian president Yemen has ever had died peacefully in Damascus in 1998, at the age of eighty-nine.

Lieutenant Colonel Ibrahim al-Hamdi, a protege of General al-Amri, succeeded him. Al-Hamdi’s military status meant that he enjoyed crucial access to the country’s ‘means of coercion’ and he was of Zaydi highland stock, but educated and well travelled thanks to his family’s
qadhi
class origins. ‘Ibrahim’, as he was popularly called, possessed the kind of charisma Nasser had once had; his oratory was grand and he was dark and stocky, and dressed down in the same short-sleeved military style that Nasser had affected. Frequently spotted driving his own battered VW Beetle around Sanaa, he rejoiced in the common touch. Generally perceived as a sophisticated man of the modern world who could dream up a three-year economic plan and a Supreme Corrective Committee to tackle corruption, and embark on a thoroughgoing legal reform and even try to improve tax revenues which only accounted for 10 per cent of the budget when he took power, he was also gratifyingly emotional about the dream of Yemeni unity. But he was careful not to cross the Saudis, at least at first. Sharing their mistrust and fear of the south’s Marxist regime, he invited the Saudis to fund the spread of their Sunni Wahhabi schools as an ideological counter-influence, and appointed Abdul Majid al-Zindani - today branded a ‘Specially Designated Global Terrorist’ by the United Nations and the US Treasury Department - as the YAR’s spiritual ‘Guide’, or chief religious authority.

Al-Hamdi was also sincerely interested in improving the condition of the countryside, having taken a lead in the emerging Co-operative Development Movement,
al-taawun
, the YAR’s most efficient engine of modernisation. Hundreds of new local development agencies were sensibly building on the mutual self-help traditions that had long been a feature of tribal culture. In the words of the British anthropologist Sheila Carapico, who cites them as crucial evidence in her defence of tribalism against the charge of inactive backwardness, the Local Development Associations (LDAs) became known among foreign aid organisations as ‘inclusive, non-government, non-profit, community-level services providers’.
²⁵
Attracting funds from residents, migrant workers and foreign donors as well as the government, they promoted and supervised the building of roads, schools, clinics and irrigation projects. But perhaps most importantly of all, al-Hamdi was lucky. His period of rule - 1974 to 1977 - coincided with three years of excellent rains and a swift rise in living standards thanks to the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of remittances earned by Yemeni migrant workers in Saudi Arabia.

By the mid-1970s a spell of lucrative work in the Kingdom was almost a rite of passage for a huge number of Yemeni males. Unseen by their family and tribe, proud Yemeni tribesmen, for whom manual work was traditionally demeaning, could slave on building sites or in the oil industry or as a domestic servant for a couple of years and with the proceeds buy a gun, a cassette recorder, perhaps a diesel-powered water pump for irrigation as well as a car, loaded with gifts for all the family, and still be able to build a house. Those were halcyon days. Provincial towns gained electricity at last, the souks filled with imported foods, homes with basic household appliances and newly paved roads with pickup trucks. Hitherto an expensive delicacy whose enjoyment was largely confined to the urban elites, qat became ubiquitous, swiftly supplanting food crops. In 1975 a north Yemeni finance minister comfortably mused,

Few nations are as dependent as we are on abroad for their development, but what enables us to survive, while waiting for our agriculture to revive and perhaps for some happy surprises beneath our earth [Yemeni oil did not come on stream until 1986], are our emigrants. From Chicago to Kuwait, from Marseilles to Jeddah, they are 1,235,000 and each one sends us, on average, about one dollar a day.
²⁶

There was also plenty of aid from a West that had satisfied itself that the YAR was firmly in their Cold War camp, even if its army was entirely kitted out with Soviet-made weaponry thanks to Egyptian influence since 1962. Al-Hamdi, wrote the former American diplomat and historian of Yemen Robert W Stookey fulsomely, was giving ’Yemen by far the stablest
[sic]
and most effective government the country has had since the 1962 revolution. Its single-minded devotion to economic and social development has produced impressive results and growth seems likely to continue.’
²⁷

Al-Hamdi is still remembered by Yemenis as a prince among presidents, as a real friend to the poor. In a Sanaa back street one afternoon in 2008, I came upon a battered old army jeep. Painted a startling gold, its bonnet adorned with a dented tin tea-pot sprouting flowers and its roof crowned with a megaphone, its back and sides were plastered with a collage of posters and yellowing newspaper cuttings covered in plastic to preserve them. Noting my puzzled interest, a passer-by pointed out the mobile number painted on the front of the vehicle and kindly offered to phone the owner of the vehicle whom he happened to know lived in the opposite apartment block. A rotund middle-aged man, his cheek bulging with qat and his eyes fiery, soon descended to street level to tell me that driving his mobile history class around the city for the past thirty-four years, since the year of al-Hamdi’s accession to power, was his favourite hobby. Leading me on a tour of the vehicle, he pointed out a fading photograph of the boggle-eyed Imam Ahmad and another of a beheading in 1955, and various martyr revolutionaries, and a poster of the late Yasser Arafat, and another of the recently deceased paramount sheikh of the Hashid tribes, Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar, until we reached a torn newspaper image of al-Hamdi - ‘Ah!’ he paused theatrically, turning to address the cluster of children who had gathered to enjoy his history lesson, ‘we all loved al-Hamdi best - he was so simple and honest.’

But those who knew al-Hamdi rather better than the doting masses, had their doubts. Out of the public eye, he was hot-tempered, too fond of alcohol and had a boorish habit of stifling the flow of conversation at afternoon qat chews by playing music cassettes. Far more worry-ingly, he was as chronically suspicious as any imam had ever been of anyone he considered a rival, so it was not long before he alienated some important constituencies. Determined to curb the power and greed of the tribes and re-channel the stream of Saudi money that was flowing directly to Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar, for example, into development projects and arms purchases, he was soon surrounded by disgruntled enemies among the leading highland sheikhs, the Hashid and Bakil. While Robert Stookey was happily applauding al-Hamdi’s mission to ‘gradually take power from the traditional leaders [in order to] place it in the hands of the new elites possessing technical skills needed for modernisation and enhancement of the people’s material and cultural well-being’, those northern sheikhs believed al-Hamdi was stripping them of their influence and concentrating all power in his own hands, not just in order to promote technocrats but to elevate lesser sheikhs in their place, a mark of unforgivable disrespect - utterly
ayb
, shamefully dishonouring.

The YAR’s most powerful sheikh, Abdullah al-Ahmar, was out of a job as the Speaker of the Consultative Assembly when al-Hamdi abruptly dissolved that body. Turning his back on the president he retreated from Sanaa to his tribal stronghold of Khamir and, in the spring of 1977, there were serious fears that his Hashid tribes would march on Sanaa to subject the capital to another great siege and sacking. Increasingly isolated, with only his closeness to the Saudis and his popularity with the masses and the army rank and file to boast of, al-Hamdi finally managed to alienate the Saudis too by making peaceful overtures towards south Yemen. This, and the fact that his old comrade-in-arms and Chief of Staff, the ambitious Ahmad al-Ghashmi, was egging him on in his ill-judged confrontations with the most powerful sheikhs, sealed his fate. But a peaceful retreat into exile like his predecessor was not an option. His popularity among the military rank and file meant that his removal from power was guaranteed to involve violence.

On the day before he was due to fly down to Aden to meet his south Yemeni counterpart to advance the cause of unity, al-Hamdi and his brother Abdullah were murdered at his home in Sanaa. Two dead French women - some reports said they were Japanese - were also found at the scene but later revealed to have been planted there in a squalid little touch designed to confirm rumours about al-Hamdi’s louche lifestyle. Al-Ghashmi, possibly in cahoots with Saudis determined to scupper al-Hamdi’s rapprochement with the south, was reckoned to be the most likely perpetrator of the crime.

Scion of a sheikh’s family hailing from Hamdan, near the Saudi border well to the north of Sanaa, al-Ghashmi was an uneducated soldier-tribesman who had none of his predecessor’s charisma or way with words. Operating gloomily under a cloud of suspicion that he had killed the people’s beloved ‘Ibrahim’, he spent much of his eight-and-a-half months in office rooting out any vestiges of al-Hamdi support and socialist dissent by means of brutal purges and executions. He also embarked on a rationalisation and consolidation of the army, which at the time of his accession barely merited the name, being a loose grouping of units generally led by powerful and independent-minded sheikhs whose loyalty to the new state could not be relied upon.