Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (27 page)

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 compensation.

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.

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

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 first 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.