The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (18 page)

WE CHOOSE AN OUTSIDE TABLE,
overlooking busy Hadda Street. Karim, I discover, has been everywhere. He has been embedded with the U.S. military in Afghanistan, traveled with the Taliban, covered the Iraq war, explored Iran, and written features on the nightlife of Beirut. Of all of the countries he has visited, Yemen is the most beautiful, he says. Karim’s impressive résumé includes freelance work for the
New York Times, Time, Newsweek
, the
International Herald Tribune, Geo
, and various German magazines. He is planning to go back to Afghanistan next month to be embedded and then to go on a night raid against the Afghan National Army with the Taliban.

“That’s just crazy,” says Faris.

“That’s just responsible journalism,” says Karim.

I could use him on my staff. He tells me stories about smoking opium in the mountains with the Taliban. One morning, he woke up to find his socks missing, only to find out that the Taliban soldiers had washed them for him. I’m impressed by his fearlessness and a bit dispirited that I’ll probably never have
my
socks washed by the Taliban.

Talk turns to the hostages down south. While the kidnappings don’t make Faris worry about my personal safety in Yemen, he does fret that violence could break out around the upcoming elections and that westerners could be targeted. Yemen is home to myriad groups of extremists, among them al-Qaeda, which has been growing in strength in recent years.

“Jennifer,” says Faris. “Do me a favor. Don’t leave your house at the same time every morning.” Predictable routines make one an easy target for terrorists. This is the same warning offered by the U.S. State Department website. Of course, if I believed everything I read on the State Department website, I would never leave home.

But I don’t need encouragement to vary my route; boredom keeps me from ever walking the same streets two days in a row. This means that I often end up lost and add an extra half hour to my travel time just trying to get back to a major road. But at least I’m not predictable.

“Faris,” I say as we stand to go, “are you worried al-Qaeda will come for me when they find out a New Yorker is editing the paper?”

He hesitates. “I don’t
think
so.”

BUT AL-QAEDA HAS APPARENTLY
set its sights on targets more strategic than me. It’s a Friday, our only day off, when it next makes the news. Several oil installations have just been attacked by al-Qaeda operatives, and Faris wants the story on the website immediately. In the South, two terrorists drove car bombs at high speed toward oil storage tanks at al-Dhaba plant, Yemen’s main export terminal on the Gulf of Aden. Guards managed to detonate the bombs before they reached their targets, but one security officer was killed in the explosions. Less than an hour later, two other cars loaded with explosives headed toward the oil-gathering and gas-oil separation plant in Ma’rib Governorate. Guards shot at the men, and only the attackers were killed when the car bombs exploded. Neither attack damaged facilities, but they are dramatic evidence that al-Qaeda has been resurrected.

Al-Qaeda in Yemen grew out of militant Islamic campaigns overseas. Yemenis flooded to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight the Soviets, and many stayed through the 1990s to train. Others returned to Yemen to fight in the 1994 civil war against the “godless Socialists” in the South. Osama bin Laden, whose father was born in Yemen, recruited Yemenis to train in al-Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, large numbers of Yemenis traveled there to fight U.S. forces.

Until the late 1990s, Yemeni terrorists stuck to a deal they had made with the government: they would be allowed sanctuary and freedom of movement in Yemen in return for not staging attacks within Yemen’s borders. But by the end of the decade, militant groups, frustrated with government negotiations with the United States for military basing rights in Yemen, opened training camps in the South and launched a campaign of attacks on government offices. And in October 2000, a group of al-Qaeda veterans launched a suicide attack on the USS
Cole
in Aden harbor, killing seventeen American seamen. The MV
Limburg
, a French ship, was hit two years later. These attacks prompted the government, with U.S. support, to crack down on terrorists. Nearly a hundred were arrested by 2003.

But al-Qaeda continued to grow, inside and outside Yemen. The September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States vaulted al-Qaeda into public consciousness. Before then, the terrorist organization was relatively obscure. But the massive publicity it received in the wake of the attacks suddenly made it a global brand. Afterward, any self-respecting terrorist group with Islamic credentials and aspirations to bring the West to its knees began claiming to be part of al-Qaeda.

In the Central Prison of the Political Security Organization (one of Yemen’s domestic intelligence services), in Sana’a, several key al-Qaeda leaders continued to plot. On February 3, 2006, twenty-three prisoners, some of whom had participated in the
Cole
and
Limburg
attacks, escaped the maximum-security prison through a tunnel to the al-Awqaf Mosque. Since the prison break, al-Qaeda in Yemen has organized a series of terrorist attacks on Western and Yemeni government targets—the latest of which is today’s assault on the oil installations. Al-Asaadi reports the story, and we get it online that evening.

It’s only my second week at the paper, and already we’ve had kidnappings, stampedes, and suicide bombings. This is a news junkie’s paradise.

NINE
the front lines of democracy

I’m still adjusting to my new role. One night at a party to celebrate Ethiopian
New Year’s, someone refers to me as Luke’s girlfriend. Luke is quick to correct him. “She’s not my girlfriend,” he says. “She’s my
boss.”

I like the sound of that. I’ve never been anyone’s
boss
. That is, I like the sound of it until we get back later that night to the work I abandoned earlier on my desk.

Even without the recent catastrophes, we’d have no shortage of news. Hardly have I had time to learn the intricacies of Yemeni politics when I am plunged into orchestrating coverage of the September 20th presidential election. The elections are an excellent opportunity to drive home to my reporters the importance of fair and impartial journalism. Almost as important is that I am anxious to prove to our readers that the
Yemen Observer
is not a tool of the regime. Because of Faris’s work with the president, many Yemenis assume the paper is simply a government mouthpiece.

Thus, in the days leading up to the election, I am careful to include coverage of all of the candidates. We split the front page equally between Saleh and bin Shamlan, the major contenders, but also include at least one story on each of the other candidates.

But while we are not short on news, we
are
short on people to write it. I don’t have enough staff to cover the elections while still producing the regular Culture, Business, and Health and Science pages. Only Ibrahim and Farouq seem capable of writing political stories, but they can’t fill the front page alone. How can I create a revolution without an army? If only I had arrived to find a full newsroom, what a world of difference that would have made! But Faris seems intent on running the paper with as few people as possible. This baffles me, because reporters’ salaries cannot possibly be one of Faris’s main expenses. My journalists earn between $100 and $200 per month and have no health insurance or any other benefits. How can a man who drives a Porsche and lives in a mansion with alabaster windows refuse to adequately staff his own paper for financial reasons?

I brainstorm with Luke and Zuhra for solutions to our dearth of staff. We decide to run an ad in the paper and to put up fliers in the university at the school of journalism. Al-Asaadi concurs with this decision but cautions me against hope. “The problem with hiring staff is that none of the graduates of the journalism school can write in English,” he says. “And we can’t hire translators for everyone. But if we hire people who can write in English, they have no journalism experience.” I have no choice, really; I am going to have to train English majors. It irks me that Yemenis seem to believe that if they can write in English, they are qualified to be a reporter. It doesn’t occur to them that other skills might be necessary for the job.

We also have copy-flow issues. I want to get reporters to file some stories on the first day of our three-day cycle, so not everything is coming in just before deadline. Ideally, the features pages would be filed to me Saturday; the Business, Panorama, and back pages would be filed Sunday; and only the front, Local, and Election pages—which need to contain the latest news—would be left to edit on Monday, a closing day. But this seems impossible. I’m lucky if I get any copy by midday on the second day of the cycle. This means I spend days worried sick that we won’t have enough to fill the issue.

It bewilders me that al-Asaadi is unconcerned about the lack of a schedule. He seems perfectly happy to have everything come in at the last minute and to stay up all night closing each issue. In fact, he rarely bothers to come in before eight
P.M
., thus
ensuring
the lateness of our close. Our closing days continue to run from eight
A.M.
until three or four
A.M
. the next day. I am exhausted, and the irregularity of my hours means that when I am home, I often cannot fall asleep. My body has no idea what time zone it is in. The irregular hours don’t seem to bother any of my male staff—but then again, they’re all on drugs. They chew
qat
every day. Like al-Asaadi, they are never in any rush to get home and seem to be quite content to spend all night in the office chewing with their friends.

“It doesn’t speak highly of their wives that they never want to go home,” I say to Luke.

“Well, if your wife was uneducated and illiterate, with no interest in politics and no conversational topics beyond the children and the next meal, would
you
be in a rush to get home?” he says.

ONE FRIDAY,
I have a chance to work on my delicate relationship with al-Asaadi and learn a bit more about Yemeni politics when he invites me to a journalists’
qat
chew. The focus is to be democracy and the imminent elections. This group of journalists chews together every week, in rotating locations. This week it is in the tented
mafraj
on the roof of the
Yemen Observer
building, which disappoints me as I am not anxious to spend any more time at work. Al-Asaadi picks me up at Sabri’s, and we arrive at the office to find Faris’s car outside.

“Great,” I say. “He’s going to try to make us work!”

I run up to the roof and take my seat next to al-Asaadi. Ten journalists are seated in the tent, all men. They work for a variety of media outlets, including al-Jazeera, several Yemeni Arabic-language papers, a Saudi paper, and the
Yemen Observer
. On the way there, I had asked al-Asaadi if the men would mind having a woman join the group. “They loooove having a woman join the group!” he said. Ibrahim, whom I’ve come to think of as Mr. Front Page because he reliably helps fill page one, sits on the other side of me. None of the other journalists speaks English, but al-Asaadi and Ibrahim translate things I don’t understand.

Al-Asaadi has brought
qat
for me and shows me how to pick only the tenderest and prettiest leaves to chew. The big glossy leaves are too tough and hurt the gums.

Before the session, I run into Faris, who pulls me aside. “Jennifer, don’t chew too much
qat,”
he says, looking grim. “It isn’t good for you. There are pesticides, and it’s bad for your teeth.”

“Don’t worry,” I reassure him. “I don’t do too much of anything.”

After some initial persiflage, the men fall into serious, focused discussions about the elections and
fatwahs
and democracy.

On paper, Yemen is a constitutional democracy, with executive, legislative, and judicial branches of its government. The president is head of state and the prime minister head of government. A 301-seat elected parliament and a 111-seat president-appointed Shura Council make up the legislative branch. Yemen has notional separation of powers. It has regular elections to the presidency, parliament, and local government. It has genuine pluralism. Any constitutional change requires a popular referendum. Which is more democracy than exists in any other country in the Arabian Peninsula.

But all is not quite as it seems.

While Yemen’s government has many superficial resemblances to the checks and balances prevalent in developed Western democracies, in practice, parliament is little more than a tool of the executive. Saleh’s party, the General People’s Congress or al-Mu’tamar Party, wields nearly all of the power. Saleh uses parliament to stall legislation he doesn’t want. The judiciary is corrupt and manipulated for political purposes by the regime. Big decisions are made by the president and not by ministers. A small ruling elite prevents decisions that are in the best interests of the country from being made, so as to protect their own vested interests. For example, costly fuel subsidies encourage oil smuggling, from which corrupt presidential allies benefit. Oil subsidies also help big
qat
producers, who include friends of the president, as diesel pumps are used for water to irrigate the crop.

There’s no question Saleh will win reelection, though he is campaigning with the ruthlessness of an underdog. I’m amazed at the bitterness and viciousness of his attacks on his opponent. Does he truly believe negative campaigning is necessary when he has the election all but sewn up?

True, things are a bit tougher for him now than they were in the 1999 election. The second-most-important party, Islah, the Islamic reform party, has joined forces with the Yemen Socialist Party and other opposition parties to form the Joint Meeting Party. The JMP’s presidential candidate is Faisal bin Shamlan, a former oil minister campaigning on an anticorruption ticket. While no one thinks bin Shamlan has a chance, it would be a hopeful sign for Yemeni democracy if he could draw, say, 30 percent of the vote.

The journalists gnawing on their
qat
leaves are pessimistic about the chances of a completely fair election. Saleh has a near-monopoly on media time and resources. All broadcast media is government controlled and airs nonstop coverage of Saleh’s rallies around the country. Even Sheikh Abdullah bin Hussein al-Ahmar, the head of the Hashids and the chairman of the Islah Party, endorses Saleh at the last minute. “Better the devil you know,” he tells reporters.

Some Salafi clerics go so far as to contend that democracy is un-Islamic. The ultra-traditionalist Salafis believe that Islam has strayed from its roots since the Prophet Mohammed’s day and desire a return to a “purer” version of the religion. “To compete with the ruler is an illegitimate act; this is un-Islamic,” says scholar Abu al-Hassan al-Maribi at an election rally. Naturally, the government broadcasts his speech.

In this last month before the election, there is hardly a surface in Sana’a that isn’t plastered with Saleh’s stern, mustached face. Posters paper the walls of the Old City, fill shop and car windows, and hang from bridges. I’ve begun to feel like I know the guy personally. My reporters tell me that the shopkeepers who put Saleh’s face in their windows aren’t necessarily supporters; they are merely trying to stay out of trouble with the ruling party.

The political talk at the chew eventually subsides and is followed by the inevitable Solomon’s Hour of Zenlike quiet. I find myself feeling rather depressed as I stare into the carpet with nothing to say. I’m not sure Yemen is ready for true democracy. How can a largely illiterate people with no access to independent broadcast media make informed choices about their future? I wonder.

AS PART OF MY EFFORTS
to encourage impartial reporting, I am trying to keep the advertising department from telling my reporters what to cover. When I say advertising department, I mean Qasim, whom I originally found so charming. He constantly steals one or two of my reporters and sends them off to cover one of his advertisers or stands in the newsroom trying to dictate a positive story about Saleh. He fails to grasp that the editorial and advertising departments of a newspaper must be discrete entities. I explain that what he is doing is unethical, that a thick wall must be maintained between editorial and advertising. “We lose all of our credibility if our readers think we are reporting something because advertisers are paying us to write about it,” I tell him. “Besides, I am trying to teach my reporters how to do real reporting, and you are confusing them.”