Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (30 page)

Qat is one political hot potato and diesel is another, but they are linked. Yemen currently spends $3.5 billion a year - a quarter of its budget - subsidising 2.9 billion litres of diesel, 70 per cent of which has to be imported. Thanks to these subsidies, a litre of Yemeni diesel costs roughly half what it should. Obviously, the arrangement benefits most Yemeni enterprises, but it also works dangerously to the advantage of two far less deserving groups: qat farmers and white-collar smugglers. A thirsty plant, accounting for 20 per cent of the country’s water consumption every year,
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qat would be impossible to farm without recourse to mechanical drills and pumps fuelled by subsidised diesel because only with their help is it possible to penetrate deep enough to access the sinking water table. It is fair to say that without subsidised diesel, qat-farming would not be nearly so lucrative a business, and Yemen’s water supply would not be so threatened, and more arable land might be used for growing food. At least as damagingly, a steeply rising quantity of subsidised diesel is reportedly being smuggled across the Red Sea to the Horn of Africa by high-ranking civil servants who pocket up to 30 per cent of the original subsidy in the transaction.
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Urgent demands from foreign donors like the IMF and the World Bank that these fuel subsidies must be removed before the next injection of aid can be received have only resulted in toppled prime ministers, riots and even deaths, in 1995, 1998 and again, in 2005. In September 2008, a carefully targeted and limited lifting of the fuel subsidies caused panic-buying, stockpiling and such chronic shortages that even the Sanaa public bus service was out of action.

A combination of bad luck and bad management has left Yemen dependent on foreign aid and oil for more than three quarters of its revenue, a risky position, given that neither the price of a barrel of oil nor the generosity of foreign donors can be controlled or predicted. The fact that the country’s oil production is projected to diminish from its peak of 460,000 barrels a day in 2002 to only 268,000 by 2010 and that oil revenues had plunged by a catastrophic 75 per cent in the first quarter of 2009, compared to the same period in 2008, was not Salih’s fault, although the business environment he had fostered certainly discouraged prospecting. Nor was the world economic recession and resulting slashing of aid budgets in the last quarter of the decade Salih’s doing, but some blame him for the fact that in the spring of 2009 as much as half the money spent by the state was swallowed up by unaf-fordable fuel subsidies benefiting not just Yemeni qat farmers and corrupt officials but also a substantial number of East Africans, and by the wages of a gigantic surplus of civil servants.
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Salih’s dancing on the heads of not only tribal sheikhs but civil servants and qat farmers by buying them, and his turning a blind eye to the black market in subsidised diesel could only continue while he had funds. By the end of 2009 signs that the money was starting to run low were not only visible in the form of aggravated instability but in Yemen’s steady climb up the index of failing states - from twenty-fourth to twenty-first, to eighteenth position.
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By the autumn, people were beginning to imagine how the touchpaper of collapse could be lit - when he couldn’t pay the wages of the military, some said, by 2012 at the latest.

When al-Sanabani veered wildly off his public relations message to attack Yemen’s parliamentarians and declare in favour of a dictatorship, I was more surprised by his crediting parliament with any influence than by his cynicism. In the pecking order of Yemen’s power centres, the House of Representatives ranked far lower than the technocratled government ministries, which in turn were nowhere near as powerful as the president and his kinsmen highlander tribesmen who staffed the top echelons of the military and security establishments.

Western governments had heartily applauded Salihs decision to crown the new unity of the Yemens in 1990 with the enfranchisement of every Yemeni adult, male and female, multiple political parties, a free press and the makings of a civil society. But Yemenis, at all levels of society, very soon lost faith and even interest in what even Salih soon wisely began referring to as the country’s emerging democracy. Coming barely a year after the Yemen’s first general election, the 1994 civil war had badly complicated its birth. In second and third general elections held in 1997 and 2003, the party of the president, the General Peoples Conference (GPC) increased its already generous lead. Thanks in large part to the first-past-the-post-system, the 123 seats it had won in 1993 became 187 in 1997, when the souths YSP boycotted the election, and then soared again to 229 in 2003.
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Such results were only to be expected, it was said, while the regime controlled all the broadcast media (overwhelmingly more powerful than the press in a country with such a low rate of literacy) and while an army of civil servants directly relied on the state for payment of their wages, and while it was impossible to tell where the structures of the state or the regime ended and those of the GPC party began. For by far the larger part of its twenty-year life therefore, Yemen’s parliament had been widely and routinely dismissed as window-dressing, only ever created in the first place because Salih had shrewdly calculated that a show of democracy - decorative democracy, as Yemenis called it - was a small price to pay for large injections of foreign aid money. The mere act of holding the 1997 elections, for example, had gained the country a package of aid equal to the size of the national debt.

But it was not as if he systematically demonstrated the parliament’s powerlessness by routinely undermining its brave attempts to do its work. One serious flaw was that MPs - the majority of whom belong to the president’s GPC, of course - had not been willing or able to challenge Salih’s micro-management of the country via his direct control of the finance ministry and the military and security establishments he relied on to ensure his continued hold on power. Yemenis, MPs included, remained conditioned to the belief that, as in the era of the last two imams in the north or British colonial rule in the south, all power was concentrated at the very top. Instead of using parliament as a forum for calling the government and president to account, for formulating and passing laws and toeing an agreed party line, Yemeni MPs tended to treat it as they would any other civil service job, as a resource from which to extract maximum material benefit for themselves. In addition to all this, the adversarial character of western democracies held little appeal for a society that prided itself on having evolved a tribal political culture based on avoiding conflict by recourse to mediation and compromise. From the president down, Yemenis emphasised consultation, compromise and the inclusiveness of ‘pluralism’, rather than the confrontation and strict party allegiance that characterised western democracies. Individual reputations and family ties continued to carry more weight than political programmes. To add to these handicaps, more than a fifth of the MPs elected in Yemen’s third general election, in 2003, had had no formal education, which meant they were either illiterate or barely literate,
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a mighty obstacle to drafting and discussion of legislation and contracts.

I spoke to many who felt they were wasting their time and energies in Yemen’s parliament. Tariq al-Fadhli, who had been happy to take his place in the consultative upper house after 1994, lost interest in its activities as soon as he realised he was powerless to influence the regime’s conduct towards the south and had given up attending its sessions by the time I met him in 2004. A genial Hadhrami lawyer who had allowed himself to be persuaded to become a deputy speaker of the lower house was utterly disenchanted after four years in the post: ‘I’m not running for parliament again because it’s nothing, it means nothing,’ he told me. Hamid al-Ahmar, owner of Yemen’s main mobile phone network but also a powerful tribesman thanks to his late father’s position as paramount sheikh of the Hashid tribes and speaker of parliament, shared his own misgivings about Yemen’s malfunctioning democracy when we met at the large and fashionably glass-fronted premises of his Sabafon headquarters in early 2008. ‘I’m fed up now,’ he told me, ‘there’s no point in parliament if it continues like this - when you’ve got about 238 out of 301 MPs belonging to the GPC, and they’re just there to do whatever he [the president] tells them to do.’

Like his father before him, Hamid al-Ahmar is a leading member of the Islah party, which struggles to unite an incoherent array of Saudi-type Salafists like Sheikh al-Zindani and moderate Muslim Brotherhood Islamists, and businessmen from the southern highlands, and conservative northern highland tribal sheikhs like the al-Ahmars under one umbrella. Deliberately created in 1990 by President Salih’s most powerful supporters - Hamid’s father and Brigadier-General Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar
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- to attract voters away from the south’s Marxist YSP, Islah had taken its time breaking free of its creators and shaping up into anything even resembling a conventional opposition party. After the 1994 war it devoted its energies to banning co-educational classes and sacking female judges in the south, and to opposing the redevelopment of Aden’s port as a free trade zone on the grounds that it would attract too many foreign infidels.
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More popularly, Islah recommended itself by sharing its name with an officially unrelated charity that compensated for many of the state’s shortcomings in the sphere of social welfare. But in the presidential elections of 1999, the party failed even to field its own candidate.

It was 2005 before Islah began to outgrow its original function as a shield of the northern highland tribal ruling elite and the southern highland industrialists in towns like Taiz and Ibb against the old Marxist threat from the south. In November that year the party switched allegiances to join forces with the its old enemy the south’s YSP, and three other minor parties to oppose the president’s GPC in a coalition cumbrously named ‘The Program of the Joint Meeting for Political and National Reform’ (JMP). Ignoring Islah’s original founders (Sheikh al-Ahmar, Sheikh al-Zindani and Brigadier-General Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar), who all remained supporters of President Salih, the JMP proceeded - admittedly, at the very last moment - to field a respected southerner, a former oil minister named Faisal bin Shamlan in the presidential election of 2006. Bin Shamlan went on to achieve a creditable 22 per cent of the vote. Accounting for most of the JMP, Islah is currently Yemen’s fastest-growing political party.
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By the spring of 2009 the JMP was still being described as lacking a grass-roots base of support, as less a political party than ‘a mechanism to lobby the government for greater concessions’,
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but its various component parts could agree that elections scheduled for April that year needed to be postponed for two years because there was no consensus with the GPC with regard to tinkering with the constitution. The GPC favoured keeping the first-past-the-post single-candidate system, while the JMP demanded a party list system which, it believed, would foster fairness and transparency. The JMP wanted a rule compelling voters to vote in their home electoral districts, while the GPC naturally favoured its surplus army of state workers casting their ballots en masse, in their government offices and barracks, for example. If, on the face of it, the postponement looked like a serious set-back for democracy, the decision was hailed as a victory by the JMP and tacitly approved as the lesser of two evils by western organisations such as the US’s National Democratic Institute, an NGO that has been anxiously fostering democratic development in Yemen. It was felt that by refusing to go on serving as window dressing for the regime, by threatening to boycott the elections, the JMP had finally succeeded in wrong-footing Salih. At last, the JMP were all agreed that, in Hamid al-Ahmar’s words, ‘the country’s real problem is the president’.

The following month, in May 2009, on the eve of the nineteenth anniversary of Yemen’s unification, over a thousand delegates attended a two-day meeting convened by the JMP and chaired by Hamid al-Ahmar, to confront the country’s multiple crises: revived secessionism in the south, the prospect of a sixth Saada war, a lively new al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, economic meltdown, electricity cuts, the rocketing price of flour, and so on. Appropriately, the mood was more sombre than celebratory: ‘We should observe the event [the anniversary] with development projects rather than military parades,’
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declared the young al-Ahmar, to enthusiastic applause. Needless to say, Salih’s military parade went ahead the next day. An hour-long procession of 30,000 troops with their Russian tanks and aeroplanes, the largest ever seen in Sanaa, marched past the president who was seated on his rostrum, safely shielded by a bullet-proof glass wall, while down in Aden a demonstration of 3,000 secessionists was broken up by police, leaving three dead, thirty wounded and over a hundred under arrest. By August, Hamid was boldly telling Al-Jazeerah television that President Salih should step down and be tried for treason, for the crime of appointing too many of his relatives to high posts.

Signs of Hamid al-Ahmar’s intensifying political activity came as no surprise. He had played a leading role in Islah’s slow maturing process and had clearly had his sights set on power by the time I met him in the spring of 2008. A short but sturdily built man in his early forties, usually dressed as a tribesman (
thowb
or
fiita, jambiyah
and sandals) but with the addition of a Harris tweed jacket to complement a good command of English gained at a Brighton language school, he had ushered me into a penthouse office furnished with a large desk, a display of antique
jambiyahs
and photographs of his late father. One of Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar’s nineteen offspring, the third of his ten sons, Hamid was looking like Islah’s obvious leader-in-waiting but refusing to be formally appointed. He explained that having risked loud criticism of President Salih while his beloved father still lived, he was being careful, missing his father’s influence and protection.

His reluctance to act and confront had seemed to me a graphic illustration of the way Salih’s snake-dancing style of rule had hampered the country’s movement in a democratic direction but kept the president in power. Like so many of the larger tribal sheikhs, the al-Ahmar clan have benefited gigantically by their close association with Salih during the past three decades. Although Hamid might object to the way in which Salih was running the country, he would need to think twice before biting the hand that had been feeding him and his brothers the pick of lucrative agencies for foreign firms, for example. Nevertheless, over a lavish lunch spread for us on his boardroom table, he confided his ambition to be the next Yemeni to try his luck at ruling Yemen. ‘I’m proud and willing to do the job’ he told me, ‘When you want to help your country, you don’t count the danger.’ If push (playing by the rules of modern democracy by getting elected) ever came to shove (mounting a traditional tribal armed rebellion in the manner of his Zaydi forbears) he would only, as he put it, ‘need to phone about a hundred people to rally about 50,000 fighters’ to his cause. Not that he was planning to take the ‘shove’ route to power, but he worried Salih might try and change the constitution’s goal-posts by permitting himself another term as president, after his present one expired in 2013.

Hamid would not be satisfied, as his father had been, with exerting power and influence in the background, comfortable in the knowledge that he was ‘not directly responsible for the hunger and suffering of the people’. His experience as a modern businessman meant that he was used to wielding direct power and taking direct responsibility, to saying what he meant and meaning what he said. My first thought was that, frustrated by the slow and disorganised pace of ordinary Yemeni life and by the endless and expensive task of balancing disparate interests, by the old need to dance on snakes’ heads, he would soon lose patience and turn tyrannical. By the time we had finished tearing at a leg of lamb and scooping at a dish of honey pudding together, however, his quick intelligence and sense of humour had persuaded me otherwise and, by the time I left the premises, I believed that Yemenis could do a lot worse than elect such a likeable blend of both the traditional and the modern Yemen as their president.

Subsequently, I met a number of not just northerners but southerners too who told me they respected and trusted Hamid al-Ahmar, in spite of his family’s position at the very apex of the northern highlander military-tribal ascendancy. One southerner judged him ‘certainly not worse’ than Salih, while another praised him as ‘politically sober’ and by far the best-educated member of his family. But others, northerners more closely acquainted with him, relayed tales of his thuggish business practices, of the ways in which he had abused his position to enrich himself and once badly sullied his democratic credentials by helping himself to some ballot boxes at gunpoint in Hajja, back in 1993.

In the evening of the day of that boardroom lunch, the affable and Yale University-educated Abdul Karim al-Iryani, a leading member of the GPC who had served as both foreign and prime minister, a member of the
qadhi
rather than the tribesman class, wasted no time in pouring cold water on my claim that I might have lunched with Yemen’s next president. ‘I very much hope not!’ he declared, ‘I don’t doubt he’s a good businessman, but if he was president he would just put members of his own tribe in power, and the Hashid are the biggest, as you know. It would be even worse than what we have now!’