Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (7 page)

But it was a pair of
non-sayyid
young men who managed to receive an education in Cairo where they were influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood
^b
who began taking practical steps to press for reform and foil Yahya’s plan for a dynastic succession. The Sanaani poet and Zaydi member of the
qadhi
class Muhammad al-Zubayri tried convincing the Imam of the need for reform by intellectual argument, but the attempt landed him in prison for nine months. A switch in strategy, an attempt to win Crown Prince Ahmad for the reform cause, met with similarly discouraging results, so the movement’s leaders - al-Zubayri and the Sunni southern highlander Ahmad Numan - were forced to flee to Aden, where they could rely on funding and support from the 25,000 or so Sunni migrant workers from Yemen’s southern highlands, as well as take advantage of the colony’s relatively free press.

In 1943 a Free Yemeni Party was born with Numan as president and al-Zubayri as director, but it failed to flourish. On the one hand Imam Yahya wreaked a terrible revenge by hurling hundreds of Sunni southern highlanders who were in any way connected with Numan in jail. On the other, the British would not support the movement because, just at that moment, Aden was relying heavily on food imported from Yemen to feed vast numbers of troops transiting through the colony to and from the different theatres of the Second World War. Only with the establishment of the newspaper
Voice of Yemen
in 1945 did the Free Yemeni movement begin to gain real traction, so much so that when Crown Prince Ahmad visited Aden the following year he vowed to kill Numan and al-Zubayri. They both fled the city for the duration of his stay and gained some excellent publicity by the episode, but events soon took an even better turn when Imam Yahya’s ninth son, the thirty-year-old Ibrahim - a whisky drinker who had spent years in one of his father’s jails - pretended to be in urgent need of foreign medical expertise in order to defect to Aden and join the movement. The bagging of so important a Zaydi to counterbalance the majority Sunni membership was a significant success.

Meanwhile the rudiments of a clandestine opposition movement had been taking shape in Sanaa too. It comprised some respected Sunni southern highlanders from the Ibb region who had prospered under Zaydi rule as judges and administrators. Sections of the
ulema
, army officers whom Yahya had risked sending to Iraq for training and some leading tribal sheikhs were likewise inclined to sympathise with the Free Yemeni movement. But it was a grandson of the imam who had preceded Yahya’s father in the late nineteenth century, a former close adviser of Yahya’s as well as a friend of Numan’s, a
sayyid
named Abdullah al-Wazir, who finally emerged as a suitable alternative to Yahya. After spending eight years in Cairo al-Wazir judged himself fit and willing to rule ‘on the lines now followed by the most advanced nations in the civilised world’,
¹³
to be a constitutional imam, in other words. He and a handful of others - members of his own family for the most part, but also an Algerian merchant member of the Muslim Brotherhood named al-Fudayl al-Wartalani, and a young Iraqi army captain named Jamal Jamil - hatched a plot to assassinate the Imam.

On the morning of 17 February 1948 the frail Yahya was being driven a short distance south of Sanaa to inspect a new well. With him were his prime minister, a couple of soldiers and four of his grandsons. Characteristically, the Imam had pared down his escort to save on expense. The plotters had employed a tribesman who had lost an eye and most of his nose to smallpox and been jailed by Yahya twenty years earlier to lead the attack. At a narrow point in the road Yahya’s tiny convoy was strafed with gunfire. It was said that no fewer than fifty bullets found their marks in Yahya’s frame.

Some 150 kilometres to the south, in Taiz, Crown Prince Ahmad acted fast on hearing the news from a brother who was Minister of Communications and therefore equipped with his own radio transmitter. Seizing as much gold as he and his retinue could carry and leaving a sister in charge of holding Taiz in his name, Ahmad fled to the Zaydi heartland north-west of Sanaa, towards the mountain fortress of Hajja, to bribe the northern tribes into rallying to the defence of his succession. To a polite condolence letter from al-Wazir, offering him ‘position, respect and peace’ in exchange for his stepping aside, Ahmad replied with a defiant missive, branding al-Wazir a ‘wretched and despicable traitor’ and warning of his warlike advance against him ‘with God’s helpers’.
¹⁴

Delighted by the gold on offer but also disorientated by the sudden end of Yahya’s long rule, some 250,000 northern tribesmen rallied to Ahmad. Yahya’s assassin was soon caught and his one-eyed scalp tacked to Sanaa’s main gate,
al-Bab al-Yemen.
Within a month, five more members of the al-Wazir clan had been rounded up and executed and the would-be imam’s severed head hurled on a rubbish tip. Sanaanis bore the brunt of the tribesmens’ wrath. Their blood up and discipline lax, they gleefully and vengefully set about punishing the liberal urban-ites of Sanaa for their disloyalty to Ahmad by sacking the capital for a week. Like a plague of locusts, they stripped it of anything they could remove - jewellery, furniture, food stores, livestock, even doors and windows.

Wisely, given his ultimate responsibility for this heinous orgy of destruction, Ahmad moved the capital to the southern highlands, to Taiz where he had been governor, barely setting foot back in Sanaa for the ensuing fourteen years of his reign.

In spite of their dramatic topology the southern highlands around Ahmad’s capital, where crusts of stone villages cap every precipice, give the impression of being as densely populated as south-east England, a world away from their bleak northern counterparts. A visitor immediately recognises this verdant central region as united Yemen’s natural centre of gravity, as its real engine room and heartland, but a hunt for traces of Imam Ahmad in Taiz throws up little more than a search for his father in Sanaa.

A military policeman sitting on a low crumbling wall outside the museum that was once his palace, spooning broad beans straight from a can to his mouth, grudgingly admitted me to the first floor lobby of the museum. Its shabby green walls were dotted with blurred photographs of the public beheadings that had taken place in Ahmad’s reign, including one of a sword used for the purpose. No amount of pleading with the unveiled woman sitting idle at an empty desk could induce her to admit me to the rest of the museum, the cumulative effect of whose treasures a previous visitor had so invitingly described as being ‘rather like stepping into the imam’s living room with all the favourite possessions and souvenirs on show’. I was sorry to learn that neither I nor anyone else would ever again see Imam Ahmad’s bizarre collection of ‘hundreds of identical bottles of eau de cologne, Old Spice and Christian Dior, an electronic bed, a child’s KLM handbag, projectors, films, guns, ammunition and swords… passports, personalised Swiss watches and blood-stained clothes’.
¹⁵
The entire exhibition, a unique hoard that decisively linked Imam Ahmad to some of his similarly magpie-minded predecessors, had recently been dismantled in an even worse act of bureaucratic vandalism than the slow neglect of his father’s palace in Sanaa.

The missing display spoke volumes about the manner in which Imam Ahmad spent his reign debasing rather than updating the imamate. His version of the still venerable institution was a luridly burlesque imitation of his father’s, almost a parody. Gratuitously cruel rather than harshly just, extravagantly degenerate rather than frugal, paranoid rather than wary, Ahmad relied on base trickery, assisted by minor products of modern technology and his people’s credulous love of magic, to clothe himself in the charisma his father had earned by real piety and learning. With the aid of a pair of binoculars he could amaze the people of Taiz with his uncanny foreknowledge of a visitor’s arrival. When a lioness given him by Haile Selassie died, Ahmad had her stuffed and set on the wall of his palace to scare bystanders. Before a beheading he would carefully enhance his already prominent eyes with an extra application of kohl and slather so much cream on his dyed black forked beard that it stood out rigidly, ‘as if he had his finger in a light socket’.

One eyewitness recalled Ahmad losing his temper after a beheading because people came jostling too close around him. Thundering at them to back off, he drew his sword: ‘The screech of grating steel echoed across the square and all of us in the crowd recoiled, collapsing onto our backs like dominoes one on top of the other. No one drew so much as a breath until the Imam had safely departed.’
¹⁶
He was said to have drowned his dwarf court jester for a joke and then, overcome with remorse, to have fasted, prayed and played with an electric train for a fortnight. Ahmad’s murder of four of his nine brothers and his frequent and lengthy absences from public view on account of depression, only enhanced his supernatural image and earned him the grim sobriquet,
al-Djinn
- the Devil. A gigantic portrait of him, framed in neon lights, graced the square outside his palace.

As far as his style of ruling went there was little change to report. Just like his father, he micro-managed the kingdom - dealing with 200 telegrams at one sitting, sanctioning a school’s purchase of ten inkwells, deciding the daily schedule of the national airline, authorising the internment of a sheikh’s son - in the belief that to have done things any differently would have detracted from his dignity. Various brothers and a son formed a ‘Royal Cabinet’ of ministers answerable only to him, but he kept a tight personal hold on the treasury which one foreigner recalled as ‘a profusion of money sacks, each containing 1000 [Maria Theresa] thalers, as well as an enormous safe full of foreign currencies, tins of petrol, tinned goods, spare parts for motor cars and filters for drinking water’.
¹⁷
Two councils, one of merchants - described by an American diplomat as ‘elderly individuals with hennaed beards, dirty clothes, several endemic diseases (notably malaria) and a complete distrust of all foreigners’ - the other of religious elders who were ‘more conservative than Ahmad’
¹⁸
ensured that time stood almost as still in 1950s Yemen as it had in the 1920s.

Unsurprisingly, given the manner of his accession to power, Ahmad’s relations with the northern tribes were closer than his father’s had been, but he followed Yahya’s lead again, neutralising any rival by never promoting talent. Under Ahmad ‘informality and improvisation’ remained the ‘cornerstones of government’.
¹⁹
Defiantly trumpeting his responsibility for keeping Yemen as isolated and pure as it had been under his father, he early in his reign told a gathering of schoolteachers that he could have ‘opened the gates to [Yemen’s] enemies and told them, “Enter and extract the country’s fortunes and minerals”’ and have given them in return for this Yemen’s ‘religion, dignity, land and bravery’. ‘Do you want this?’ he asked them. ‘No, no, no!’
²⁰
they shouted back.

Nevertheless, with the aged Raghib Bey’s assistance, he did open up the country a little, while ably maintaining it on the geo-strategic course it had embarked on under his father and has not deviated from since. Anyone prepared to grant Yemen material or financial aid while demanding nothing in return was a valued friend and ally. Given the Cold War superpowers’ determination to infect other peoples with their ideological rivalry, there was no shortage of generous offers, the majority of them from Marxist countries. Some 2,000 Chinese arrived to build a 250-kilometre modern road from Sanaa through the mountains all the way down to the port of Hodeidah. An American
Time
reporter observed them labouring in the heat and dust alongside Yemenis, ‘singing the great ballads of the Chinese proletariat, e.g., “We Will Not Allow United States Imperialists to Ride Roughshod over the People” ’.
²¹
On the edge of Sanaa, a small cemetery, with some fifty Chinese graves and a pagoda-style monument, still marks the start of the road.

In the hope of ending Yemen’s humiliating dependence on British Aden’s port facilities, Russia weighed in with some 300 technicians to develop Hodeidah, at a cost of 15 million dollars. In 1957, generous shipments of Soviet weaponry arrived - thirty T34 tanks, fifty self-propelled guns, twenty aircraft, seventy armoured troop carriers, a hundred pieces of field artillery and a hundred anti-aircraft guns.
²²
Sceptical of his people’s ability to work such new-fangled weaponry, the Imam stashed some of their vital parts under his bed for safekeeping. A Yugoslav engineer arrived to oversee the construction of a Yemeni radio station, for Ahmad’s personal use. Not to be upstaged by ‘the Reds’, the United States weighed in too, building another road from Taiz to Mocha
^c
and a water supply system for Taiz. Although he turned down a $5 million American development programme, Imam Ahmad was not averse to having ‘a squad of US Army and Air Force dentists’ secure his dentures with ‘US-made magnets’.
²³
An American doctor who took up residence in Taiz to tend the Imam recalled Ahmad as a ‘300lb heroin addict’ with a thirty-five-woman harem, as a sick old man who worried that if he failed to consummate his marriage to the thirteen-year-old daughter of a sheikh, the latter would consider himself dishonoured, ‘get mad, come down and raid the town and kill everybody’.
²⁴

But the Cold War warriors of East and West were wasting their time and money in Yemen in the 1950s. Much more appealing to all Yemenis than either the West’s capitalism or the East’s communism, and an influence Ahmad would prove powerless to counteract, was Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser’s non-aligned Arab nationalism, thrillingly disseminated by the new-fangled and portable transistor radios that were finding their way from Aden’s duty-free port to Yemen by the mid-1950s. One Yemeni recalled for me that while his educated
qadhi
family tuned in to the BBC for news, they looked to Cairo’s
Voice of the Arabs
for entertainment, ‘for excitement’.

Imam Ahmad played for time. Instead of combating the new ‘ism’ head on, as neighbouring Saudi Arabia was doing, he hastily espoused the fashionable creed, resolving to turn it to his own advantage. In 1958 Yemen became the third Arab state to join Egypt and Syria in Nasser’s pipe-dream of a United Arab Republic (UAR). Less than four years later, when Syria pulled out, thoroughly disenchanted by Nasser’s controlling style, Yemen followed suit. Ahmad felt empowered to broadcast a powerful verse salvo inquiring of Egypt’s ruler why he ‘pollute[d] the atmosphere with abuse’ and ‘shout[ed] over the microphone with every discordant voice’,
²⁵
reminding him that the nationalisation of property was a crime against Islamic law. Nasser’s
Voice of the Arabs
retaliated with a rich diet of anti-imam propaganda. The ludicrously anomalous inclusion of Yemen’s theocracy in the UAR in the first place had probably played a part in its failure to attract a larger membership.

UAR or no UAR however, the inspiring example of Nasser’s Egypt was forcing Yemenis to confront the reasons for the pitiful state of their country. They were beginning to wonder if rather than Ahmad in particular, the institution of the imamate in general was to blame. Discontent spread, especially after Ahmad foolishly fell into the same trap as his father by nominating his son Badr as his heir. His over-taxation of the Tihama was another sore grievance, and his almost pathological cruelty yet another. Ahmad had hundreds of dissidents slung into horrible fortress jails in Hajja, Taiz and Sanaa where many were beheaded. Occasionally, one might be reprieved and cast into exile. One Yemeni woman described to me how her grandmother, ‘a power in Ahmad’s palace’ on account of her beautiful renditions of religious songs, was forced to go down on bended knee to beg for the lives of two of her dissident sons: ‘Please forgive them,’ she pleaded with the Imam’s wives, ‘in recognition of the bread we have eaten together.’ Her sons were permitted to flee to Aden rather than be executed.

Plots to remove Ahmad multiplied. In 1955 his own brother and foreign minister, Abdullah, led a coup aimed at forcing Ahmad to abdicate in his favour. With the backing of a small group of army officers Abdullah seized Taiz and imprisoned the ailing Ahmad, before telegraphing the news of regime change around the country. For two weeks no one reacted, not even Cairo’s
Voice of the Arabs.
Then came the news that Crown Prince Badr was heading, like his father before him in 1948, up to the northern highlands to rally the tribes. Ahmad’s captors trembled at the vengeance they knew to expect. Relaxing their guard, they allowed Ahmad to seize one of their Bren guns and overpower them all and, by the end of the day, he was back in charge.

Three years later the ailing Imam allowed himself to be persuaded to travel to Rome with his harem, a good deal of antiquated weaponry and plenty of gold bullion, in order to have his morphine addiction treated. Left in charge, Crown Prince Badr - a young man of reformist leaning who was thrilled by Nasser’s Arab nationalism - clumsily upset his father’s fragile equilibrium by raising the wages of the army and the stipends of the tribes and announcing a programme of reforms. An uncommonly wide assortment of merchants, intellectuals, army officers and even tribal sheikhs supported him, daring to hope that Ahmad was on his death-bed at last, dreaming of turning Yemen into a republic with Badr as a figurehead president perhaps. Most important among the tribal leaders was Hamid al-Ahmar, the son of the paramount sheikh of the Hashid tribes, Hussein al-Ahmar. Hamid al-Ahmar imagined a role for himself as prime minister in the forthcoming republic. But all those high hopes were dashed when Ahmad returned from Italy refreshed after four months away, furious at his son’s manoeuvrings, suspicious of Egyptian meddling and thirsty for vengeance. ‘There will be some whose heads will be cut off… and there will be others whose heads and legs will be cut off’,
²⁶
he promised. The two al-Ahmars were among those he beheaded, a mistake that in the longer term was to prove as serious as any Yahya had ever made.

Although there were reportedly seven attempts on Ahmad’s life in 1961 alone, the last one cemented his reputation as
al-Djinn.
In the spring of that year he travelled to a hospital in the Tihaman port of Hodeidah, home to the only two X-ray machines in Yemen, for a check-up. There, while he lay helpless on a trolley, a hospital worker and his accomplices shot him three times at point blank range. Although astonishingly Ahmad survived by rolling onto the floor and pretending to be dead, the rest of his life until his peaceful demise in Taiz in September the following year was spent in a morphine-fuelled fug.

To Imam Badr he bequeathed a country less developed than any other on the Arabian Peninsula. By 1962 coffee exports were less than half what they had been before the Second World War and the country could no longer feed itself. The Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen had no native doctors, no factories, a single paved road (thanks to China), and a handful of secular schools for boys but only one for girls, run by the wife of the American chargé d’affaires in Taiz.