Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (15 page)

The toll on the PDRY’s morale and international credibility was just as crippling. ‘When are you people going to stop killing each other?’ was all a weary Fidel Castro had to say to the ‘leftist’ al-Bidh, the Hadhrami who assumed the leadership of the YSP once the smoke of battle had cleared, once the bulldozers had done their gruesome work, and new posters of the ‘martyrs’ been plastered on the bullet-pocked walls of the city.

The unification of the two Yemens had never looked less likely. With the hard-liners back in power in Aden, the project could be shelved and forgotten as far as the YAR was concerned. In that blood-soaked spring of 1986 no one could have dreamed that the two Yemeni republics would become one less than four years later.

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After an approach by a British SAS officer, Mossad agreed to mount two operations - ‘Porcupine’ and ‘Gravy ’ - to supply fourteen planeloads of weaponry to Yemen’s Royalists between 1964 and 1966
(Ha’aretz
, 20 October 2008).

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Neil (Billy) Maclean MP; Julian Amery Minister for Aviation; Duncan Sandys, Secrretary of State for the Colonies and Commonwealth Realtions; David Stirling, founder of the SAS; Colonel David Smiley.

^c
Some estimates put the figure as high as 70,000.

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L. Paul Bremer headed the Coalition Provisional Authority in post-Saddam Iraq from 2003 until 2004.

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The PRSY was renamed the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) in 1970.

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Ali Nasir later chose exile in Damascus where he remains to this day, still taking an interest in south Yemeni affairs.

On 22 May 1990, after more than 150 years of separation and the sharp frost that descended on relations between the two Yemens in the wake of the PDRYs blood-letting in 1986, the noble dream of unity at last came true. The speedy coupling took everyone by surprise. Only a few months earlier the US ambassador to Aden had confidently opined that unification was at least fifty years away’.
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Given the swift contraction of both political and economic Soviet influence in the region after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, the YAR looked by far the sturdier of the two Yemens. Like other collapsing eastern bloc states, the PDRY was suffering underemployment and chronic shortages of everyday items such as fresh fruit, ciga-rettes, cars and spare parts. Southerners knew that, although ruled in the interests of the Zaydi highland tribesmen, northerners were wealthier and freer and their society a lot more dynamic than their own. If both Yemens were able to rejoice in the news that, at last, economically viable quantities of oil had been discovered in their territories, it was the YAR - with an energetic Texan oil company named Hunt Oil Inc. on its team - that had got off to a quicker productive start in the Marib desert east of Sanaa, in 1986. South of the border, further to the east, in Shabwa, the USSR’s Tekhnoexport was begrudging investment and dragging its heels.

But President Salih’s position was not as advantageous as it seemed. By the late 1980s he was sorely in need of a grand populist project to boost his support among almost everyone but the military and the bloated civil service. There had been a price to pay for the longed-for oil find; high hopes that Yemen might soon be as rich as neighbouring Saudi Arabia had excited the local tribes and led to flare-ups of feuding around the oil fields. Clumsy army interventions to protect the Hunt Oil installations and workers took dangerously little account of tribal custom, eroding Salih’s support among the tribes and his control over the region. In other words, Salih’s control over the all-important means of coercion was weaker than his counterpart’s over the PDRY Unlike the PDRY’s Marxists, the YAR’s military tribal republicans had never tried to disarm the tribes or to disabuse them of their belief in their sovereignty over their tribal territories. In effect, the northern tribes had been allowed to avoid explicitly signing up to the project of building a modern sovereign state. The anthropologist Sheila Carapico has argued that by the end of the 1980s the Yemens were ‘each in their own way so flimsy, flawed and illegitimate that merger [unity] was each leadership’s best option’.
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A former PDRY and Adeni historian recalled that the rulers of the two republics ‘escaped to unity’ to save their skins.

Following the 1986 events, the best vehicle for a rapprochement between the two Yemens turned out to be oil. Both regimes were equally anxious to extract as much of it as possible in as short a time as possible from the large and desert Marib-Shabwa region straddling their border. A joint committee whose work on the production of a geological map of the area had long been a rare oasis of transparency and trust between the two states served, in the words of a PDRY deputy oil minister, as ‘the guinea-pig for unification’. At a summit meeting in Sanaa in May 1988, after a bout of particularly serious cross-border skirmishing, Salih and al-Bidh seized on the new map and made it the basis for an agreement that 850 square miles of the Marib-Shabwa border area be demilitarised and declared a no-man’s-land. In addition, a consortium made up of Hunt Oil Inc., Tekhnoexport, France’s Total and Elf Aquitaine, and a Kuwaiti firm signed an exploration and production-sharing agreement with both governments.

By the early spring of 1989 enough excitement about oil had fuelled enough confidence in a peaceful future for unification to be back on the agenda on both sides of the border. President Salih must have assessed the risk of diluting his power and that of his northern tribal Zaydi highlanders by adding two million-odd more southern Sunnis to the YAR’s already densely Sunni-populated southern highlands and Tihama. He certainly failed to convince either Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar, or the country’s leading religious authority, that unification with an impoverished atheist state was a good idea, but these domestic doubts paled into insignificance when weighed against the demands of living in a neighbourhood increasingly dominated by Iraq.

Like Nasser before him, Saddam Hussein was dreaming the grand pan-Arab dream of uniting the entire peninsula under his rule. To that end he had set about promoting his country as the peninsula’s main rival to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)
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by creating a rival economic union, the Arab Cooperation Council (ACC). Jordan and Egypt as well as the YAR, all friends and supporters of Iraq in its recent war against Iran, joined the new ACC in February 1989, but it seemed to Saddam that the more Yemenis he could muster under his flag for the coming confrontation with Saudi Arabia, the better. A swift eradication of the border between the two Yemens would suit him very well. From Salih’s point of view, Iraq looked like a far more attractive ally than Saudi Arabia. In the wake of Aden’s 1986 blood-bath, the Saudis had enraged him by suddenly staking a territorial claim to Hadhramaut and to some of the PDRY oil region in Shabwa and even to a sliver of the YAR, as well as distributing Saudi passports to Hadhramis. It seems likely that Saddam Hussein managed to persuade Salih that the PDRY’s Marxists were not nearly as serious a threat as he feared, and boosted his confidence by mentioning their common backgrounds (humble, tribal) and equally long hold on power (twenty years).

Whatever the exact truth, there is no doubt that by November 1989 President Salih was entirely won over to the cause of unity. He therefore seized an opportunity to advance the matter on a trip to Aden to attend the PDRY’s anniversary celebrations of the British departure. According to his own account on his government website,
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Salih was politely received at the border crossing by three PDRY leaders who joined him in his car. Not having been exposed to Saddam Hussein’s pressure, they were not as convinced of the wisdom of unification as Salih. ‘When we entered Aden, I was greeting and waving to the public whilst all three men accompanying me in the car remained silent,’ Salih recalled. ‘They were in shock to see the overwhelming support for unity.’ Those PDRY leaders proceeded to erect every barrier they could think of to the merger Salih was asking for, even warning him that the Saudis would be so alarmed by the demographic threat of a united greater Yemen,
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they would probably have him assassinated. A bullish Salih in turn warned them that they themselves might be slaughtered if they selfishly denied their people the chance to realise the noble dream of unity. Salih claims he insisted on union ‘at all costs, including our lives, and even if we only get to experience it for a few days’.

Not until he and General Secretary Ali Salim al-Bidh reconvened later for a more private evening qat chew was any headway made towards Salih’s suddenly declared goal of signing an agreement on unity that very night. Bending over backwards to make unity seem attractive, Salih acknowledged al-Bidh’s fears that the PDRY, with a fraction of the YAR’s population,
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would be swallowed up by promising him that there would be jobs for all southern civil servants, a quarter of the PDRY’s working population. In addition, the post of vice-president of the new state would not only be reserved for a southerner, for al-Bidh himself therefore, but would be equal in status and privilege to president. Furthermore, the prime minister of united Yemen would be a southerner and southerners would head the trade and oil ministries.

Reassured by these arrangements as well as by the promise of free democratic elections which he calculated his YSP could win with some support from the YAR’s southern highlanders and Tihamans, al-Bidh was won over. But many of his colleagues still hesitated, complaining that there was no need to rush into a union, suggesting that a federation might be a sensible first step. One member of the PDRYs polit-buro even threatened to slaughter all his fellows if they agreed to Salih’s plan. Another resorted to delaying tactics, claiming that there could be no signing ceremony that night because there was no hall available. President Salih stood his ground and issued a clinching ultimatum: ‘Either we sign tonight, or I leave to Taiz and publicly disclose to the people the reality of the situation as it stands.’

Rushed and bullied was how many of the south’s leaders felt by the end of 1989, as much by their own reportedly ‘pig-headed’ al-Bidh as by President Salih. And the new year brought no relief. President Salih met al-Bidh in Taiz and together they agreed that the process of merging the two systems, scheduled to take only a year, needed to be speeded up - in fact, crammed into only six months. Neither dared allow the opponents of union, who included the powerful Saudis, time to organise a coherent challenge. Furthermore, it was hoped that the presentation of a united Yemen at an ACC summit in Baghdad at the end of May 1990 would both enhance the image of the new organisation and intensely irritate the Saudis who would find themselves suddenly encircled by a ring of more or less hostile ACC states.

Unification was rushed, but it was also bungled. No merger was achieved in the most crucial area of all, defence, because neither side was prepared to relinquish control of its armed forces. The best they could agree on was a half-hearted exchange of units. Nor was there any true merger of the two civil services, only a vague and unfulfilled direction to institute whatever in either regime had proved ‘best practice’. A week before unification the lists of official appointees had only just been completed, while the constitutional committee had not finished its work. All this spoiled the excellent impression made by President Salih’s offer to share out the government ministries and establish a brand new two-chambered parliament. And behind delays and logjams lurked a dangerous complacency. Both sides were convinced that the nuts and bolts of a fair-minded amalgamation did not matter too much since their own side’s way of doing things would be bound to prevail in the long run. Real intentions to compromise and share and build anew were in desperately short supply, which meant that sooner rather than later all those high hopes for a harmonious future cushioned by oil wealth were bound to come to grief.

The Yemens had been wed for a little over two months when they were swept up in first regional and then global developments that placed a terrible strain on their marriage.

On 2 August 1990, Saddam Hussein marched his army into Kuwait. An unprovoked invasion that would ignite the wrath of the western world - principally the United States, Britain, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States - it would result in the United Nations sanctioning an invasion of Iraq five months later. As the pressure to secure UN backing for a war dictated by the West’s determination to secure its oil supplies mounted, Yemen’s new relationship with Iraq was put to a terrible test. President Salih neither applauded nor condoned Saddam’s aggression against Kuwait, but Yemenis were disgusted by the way Saudi Arabia, the keeper of Islam’s holy places, was impiously welcoming infidel American forces onto her soil in the build-up to invasion, and by the way Egypt -a fellow member of the ACC - was cravenly toeing the United States‘ line in exchange for some $14 billion of ’debt forgiveness’.
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Salih favoured an ‘Arab solution’ rather than an international United Nations solution to the crisis which, in the circumstances, amounted to taking Iraq’s side. His position played very well at home. Yemenis stoned the Saudi and American embassies in Sanaa, marvelling at the way the latter’s bullet-proof windows hurled the stones straight back at them. Like most Arabs, they were outraged by what they perceived to be American injustice and hypocrisy. Washington’s apparent determination to crack down hard on Iraq for not doing the UN’s bidding by withdrawing from Kuwait glaringly contradicted decades of blind eye turning to Israel’s flouting of countless UN resolutions. Salih was between a rock and hard place, wondering if he might just get away with turning his back on Saddam in order to keep in with the world’s only superpower, calculating that at the very least it would entail getting that superpower to back the appointment of a UN commissioner to monitor the treatment of West Bank Palestinians.

On 19 September the Saudis signalled their wrath at Yemen’s refusal to condemn Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait by hitting Yemen where it really hurt, in her pocket. Thanks to the end of the oil-fuelled boom, earnings from remittances sent back to Yemen from the various Gulf States had already plunged. Now the Saudis revoked the preferential terms on which Yemenis had been working in the Kingdom by telling some 800,000 of them that they had a month to liquidate their businesses, sell all their assets and clear off home. The Saudi revenge cost Yemen around $1.5 billion in remittances and unemployment leapt to 25 per cent.
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Around half a million of the returnees, the poorest, found themselves sweltering in squalid refugee camps in Tihama. The lucky ones were given non-existent jobs with token salaries in a civil service that had been badly bloated since unification. By 1991 half the entire national budget was being consumed by the civil service wage bill.
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Fifteen years on, I met one of these supernumerary civil servant refugees still squatting with his family in the crumbling ruins of Imam Yahya’s old palace in Sanaa, without either electricity or running water.

If the Saudi vengeance was devastating, the American one - petty and vengeful - was just as damaging. It so happened that three months into the crisis it was Yemen’s turn to take up one of the non-permanent seats on the UN’s fifteen-man Security Council. Along with that of Cuba, Malaysia and Columbia, Yemen’s support for UN resolution 678 sanctioning a US and British-led invasion of Iraq, was suddenly crucially important to the United States.

Accordingly, in late November 1990 Secretary of State James A. Baker III set off on a four-day arm-twisting tour of Sanaa, Bogota and finally Los Angeles airport, where he met his Malaysian counterpart. In his memoirs Baker vividly recalls the trouble he had convincing President Salih that America was not bluffing about its plan to invade Iraq. Although he clearly spelt out that continued payment of the US development aid package to Yemen, worth a useful $70 million a year, was dependent on Yemen’s support for resolution 678, Salih was ‘very unconcerned’, merely observing that the entire crisis was ‘like a summer storm’ which would ‘blow over’. An exasperated Baker warned him, ‘The storm, if it comes, will be violent,’ but Salih remained imperturbable. After politely serving Baker and his team a Thanksgiving dinner featuring mutton rather than turkey - Salih ‘couldn’t have been more hospitable’, apparently - he unequivocally announced at a press conference that Yemen would not be supporting Resolution 678. Baker was thoroughly embarrassed, noting testily that although the Saudis had hinted he would be wasting his time in Yemen, Salih had given him ‘no indication in private that he would reject my request quite so firmly in public’.
⁷

Six days later, Yemen duly posted its ‘no’ vote, alongside that of Cuba. Within minutes an American diplomat was telling Yemen’s ambassador to the UN, ‘That was the most expensive “no” vote you ever cast’, and just three days later all American aid to Yemen was stopped.
⁸
A gift to Salih from a grateful Saddam Hussein of a gold-plated AK-47 was probably little consolation.