Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (16 page)

Tempting as it is to cast united Yemen in the role of a newly married couple helplessly buffeted by outside forces too strong to withstand, it would be wrong to place all the blame for the souring of the union on the First Gulf War.

There are many reasons why divorce was on the cards as early as autumn 1992. Most of them are attributable to the fact that, for all his generous power-sharing offers, Salih and his highland Zaydis had retained tight control of the most important levers of power: finance and defence. In spite of repeated attempts by eastern-bloc advisers to reform it, the PDRY’s treasury had remained as tightly run as it had been under British rule. Here was a perfect opportunity to overhaul the former YAR’s corrupt and ad-hoc system by replacing it with southern best practice, but nothing of the sort happened because the crucial finance ministry was headed by a northerner. Similarly, led by a respected Hadhrami, the planning ministry might have taken a useful lead in decentralising the former YAR according to the PDRY’s example, but it was hobbled by the overwhelming power of the finance ministry.

The main, far too simplistic, mechanism of the merger, the wholesale swapping of senior civil servants, failed. On both sides of the old border, local underlings - a deputy governor of a province, for example -retained real control while the imposed newcomer functioned as an idle figurehead, sidelined and mistrusted. The machinery of government soon seized up under the weighty pressure of mutual suspicion. Brian Whitaker, a journalist and author, has detailed how one side would be unwilling to compromise in a dispute without first testing the other side’s willingness to give way on a second issue. The other side would then demand assurances of compromise on a third issue, and so on. This meant that disputes, instead of being tackled one at a time, became compounded and ever more intractable, until eventually the decision-making process became paralysed.
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The most obvious focus for this kind of trouble was the defence ministry. The southern minister of defence was shocked to discover how much military funding was being funnelled into subsidising the northern highland tribes, but his efforts to put a stop to the abuse inevitably brought him into direct confrontation with members of the president’s own clan who occupied many of the most senior posts in the former YAR’s army.

To add to the former south’s woes - financial and administrative - a very promising brand new oil find in Hadhramaut in December 1990 was fuelling regret that al-Bidh had succumbed to Salih’s bullying rush towards union. The opening of the Masila field meant that 40 per cent of Yemen’s known oil reserves were now located in the territory of the former PDRY Noisy complaints that greedy northerners were helping themselves to southerners‘ oil only exacerbated deepening divisions. The sad truth of the matter was that, united or not, Yemenis would never be as rich as their Saudi neighbours. Even with the new Masila field, its proven reserves amounted to a mere four billion barrels, compared with the Saudis’ 261.5 billion barrels.
¹⁰

Knowledge of this did nothing to help foster a spirit of generosity already strained by the drying up of remittances. Before unity, remittances of migrant workers earned in both the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia had accounted for at least 20 per cent of the income of both Yemens. After unity, the main - almost the only - source of income was oil, a business entirely in the hands of Salih and his people. In effect, unification had coincided with an important and unpopular shift in the balance of power from remittance-rich citizen and poor state, to poor citizen and oil-rich state. Between May 1990 and the spring of 1991 food prices quadrupled and unemployment climbed again, to 35 per cent. Flush with oil wealth himself, Salih was in a better position than ever to distribute largesse in the manner of the imams, to tie his people’s prosperity and influence to their political biddability and loyalty to his person. Southerners deeply resented their exclusion from the networks of patronage that had been established in the YAR long before unity and were now giving northerners an unfair advantage over them.

Closer familiarity between the Yemens was breeding more and more contempt. On a trip to Aden in early 1992 furious, disenchanted crowds pelted President Salih’s cavalcade with old plastic sandals, shouting, ‘Go home Zaydis!’
¹¹
A popular television comedy series,
The Tales of Dahbash
, which had been created by a group of actors from Taiz shortly before unification, had furnished southerners with a pejorative nickname for all northerners -
dahbashi.
Dahbash was a cheeky-chappy northerner, a lazy, bungling conman, a hopeless but lovable rogue, whose northern accent struck the southern ear as being as nasal and condescending in tone as President Salih’s. In the former PDRY the word
‘dahbash’
became shorthand for typically northerner behaviour, for anything that was dodgy or shoddy, from the chaotic way northerners navigated Aden’s British-built roundabouts to the unjust and opaque manner in which Salih was running the country.

By that spring of 1992 north-south tensions had escalated as far as a string of assassination attempts, first against prominent southerners -Vice-President al-Bidh fled Sanaa to the safety of first Aden and then his native Hadhramaut - and then against northerners. None of the incidents was ever fully investigated or prosecuted. Al-Bidh made the holding of free and fair multi-party elections in four months’ time, in April 1993, a condition of his return to Sanaa and government. An election, the first on the peninsula, was duly held. Ignoring signs that Yemen’s commitment to transparency was not all it might be, the United States magnanimously forgave Salih’s unhelpfulness in the lead-up to the Gulf War, and heartily congratulated him for holding the first democratic elections ever seen on the Arabian peninsula. A starry-eyed editorial in the
New York Times
titled ‘A Real Arab Revolution’ began:

Something wonderful has happened in Yemen, a remote Muslim state on the southern flank of the Arabian Peninsula. About 80 per cent of the 2.7 million registered voters have elected 301 members of Parliament from among 3,545 candidates. Of 50 women who ran, two won. More than 40 parties took part in the election.
¹²

The president’s party, the General People’s Congress (GPC), garnered 41 per cent of the vote but a new party, Islah (Reform), had gained a 21 per cent share by capturing much of the southern highland area that al-Bidh’s YSP had hoped to win.
¹³
A loose grouping of religious conservatives (Muslim Brotherhood rather than jihadists), people who were not so radical they could have nothing to do with democracy, some highland tribal leaders and conservative-minded businessmen, Islah was led by the mighty Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar. The extent to which it was a creature of the regime was revealed five years later when Sheikh al-Ahmar admitted that even if Islah had won a landslide victory he still would not have sought to relieve Ali Abdullah Salih of the presidency.
¹⁴

Al-Bidh, whose YSP had captured a mere 19 per cent of the vote, was bitterly disappointed and running out of options. Within four months of the elections he had retreated back to Aden. Not long afterwards he presented an eighteen-point ultimatum to Salih featuring, among other things, a last demand for financial decentralisation. If no action was taken, he warned, he and his fellow YSP ministers would resign from the government. Nothing changed. By October he was swearing he would never go to Sanaa again and the remainder of the year saw a steady slide towards civil war.

The ministry of culture ordered the Taiz actor who played the Dahbash to change his accent, and there were more angry accusations on both sides, and another spate of assassination attempts, and a scrambling to buy the loyalty of important tribes. The president could rely on the Hashid while the YSP briefly managed to secure some highland Bakil Confederation tribes’ allegiance. An American satellite was registering alarming troop movements on both sides of the old border.

By the time Jordan brokered an eleventh-hour agreement to avert the conflict in February 1994, it was too late. Passions were too inflamed. Remembering how the Aden in 1986 had ended in a victory for the Moscow hard-liners, northerners baulked at the idea of being ruled by al-Bidh and his East German-trained and scarily efficient security service. Many southerners on the other hand, knew that al-Bidh had proved himself more of a Gorbachev than a Stalin while running the PDRY after 1986 and that the totalitarian police state was gone for good. They were convinced that President Salih and his Zaydi highland tribes planned to annex their land.

Conditions for conflict were excellent. The swapping of a few brigades from south to north and vice versa, instead of a real merger of the two armed forces, made it easy for local brigades to attack an isolated foreign brigade. Most such confrontations took place in the former YAR, the southern brigades therefore getting the worst of it. The old PDRY avenged itself by sending its army jets to bomb the northerners‘ two power stations, which left Sanaa and other towns with no electricity for weeks. Northern forces shelled the YSP’s party headquarters in Sanaa for almost two hours and then seized the southerners’ air base, while the south lobbed Scud missiles back at Sanaa. Radio Sanaa and Radio Aden traded insults; President Salih was ‘Little Saddam’ and Vice-President al-Bidh was ‘Ali Salem al-Marxisti or Ali Salem al-Fascisti’. On 21 May al-Bidh formally announced the divorce, declaring the birth of another southern Yemeni state, the Democratic Republic of Yemen, although he and his supporters were in control of no more than Aden and Mukalla at the time.

Al-Bidh might once have seriously fancied his chances of mounting a palace coup in Sanaa and then leading a Yemen-wide rebellion against the greed and corruption of the northern tribal elite that would result in the toppling of Salih.
¹⁵
He might have assumed that, with generous Saudi backing channelled through wealthy Hadhrami émigrés living in Saudi Arabia, he and his followers could prevail. The Saudis certainly expected the south to triumph. A senior Saudi official reportedly assured an American diplomat that the southern tribes would be bound to rise up in defence of Aden, ‘You don’t know the tribes like we do,’ he told him.
¹⁶
An estimated billion dollars’ worth of Saudi arms arrived in Aden. But none of it was to be, largely because President Salih made excellent use of the fact that al-Bidh was a Hadhrami.

The picture Salih painted of Saudis, Hadhramis (both in Saudi Arabia, as well as Hadhramaut) and al-Bidh all malevolently plotting together to destroy the noble ideal of a united Yemen was a powerful one, and guaranteed to unite all northern Yemenis and even many southerners behind him. Painting the separatists as godless Marxists also played its part. Leading northern clergy described the war as lawful, as a ‘jihad in the name of God’, and Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar piously endorsed their position by declaring that while the northern dead were bound for heaven, the southern separatists‘ were destined for hell. Having privately opposed unification back in 1990, Sheikh Abdullah had decided ’unity is part of Islam‘, which made those who opposed it ’infidels’.

Perhaps just as importantly, the US State Department set the priority of its alliance with Saudi Arabia to one side for a change and declared itself in favour of a united Yemen, simply because a reinforcement of the status quo seemed the best way to avoid destabilising the region and disrupting the flow of a useful three million barrels of oil a day through the Bab-al-Mandab, the lower opening of the Red Sea. The superpower’s support for Salih meant that no one - not Saudi Arabia nor any of the other GCC states - dared to recognise the breakaway Yemeni state that al-Bidh declared.

Six weeks later, after pounding Aden with artillery and howitzer fire, after subjecting its inhabitants to a siege that reminded many of those Sanaa had undergone in its history, northern tanks and APCs, under the command of an able PDRY general
^d
who had fled north with Ali Nasir in 1986 and had an old score to settle, rolled into the city to be met by cries of ‘Welcome!’ A triumphant Sanaa Radio declared, ‘Al-Bidh and his deviant gang wagered on their military machine. They have found themselves a scum drowning in the mud of treason at which all Yemenis spit!’
¹⁷
Al-Bidh and his closest supporters fled by boat from Aden to Oman. Those cries of ‘Welcome’ faded as soon as the invading forces were seen to include hundreds of Afghan War veterans and local religious extremists - forces which, like the tribes, Salih had been not only tolerating but encouraging as a useful counterweight to the Marxists. Bearded fanatics applied themselves to instituting sharia law by flogging people for drinking alcohol or talking to unrelated women, by ransacking Aden’s recently reopened Anglican church and demolishing the city’s famous Sira beer factory. The ancient port was then plundered by northerners claiming their war booty in the old time-honoured fashion: ‘large garbage trucks given to Aden municipality by foreign donors were driven away northwards’, even window-frames, bathroom fittings, door knobs and bed-sheets were taken’.
¹⁸

The war cost united Yemen some 7,000 lives, as much as eight billion dollars
¹⁹
and any last hope of a happy marriage.

In late May 2000 President Salih mobilised every resource of the state to mark the tenth anniversary of unification with the most lavish jamboree the country had ever seen. Sanaa’s streets were cleaned and brightly lit, rubbish collected, doors painted, schoolchildren dragooned into synchronised displays of song and dance and a new model of tank unveiled for the obligatory military parade. All at an astronomical cost of approximately 200 million dollars.

The cost in negative publicity for Salih’s regime was probably at least as astronomical because those entrusted with the job of ensuring the event’s success felt obliged to crack the whip: the use of all pagers and mobiles was forbidden a week in advance; the number of extra checkpoints and road blocks meant that it was hard for people to travel to enjoy the holiday with their relatives in other parts of the country; school-leavers were informed that failure to participate in the parades would mean automatic failure in their exams; the sky over Sanaa was regularly torn by screaming fighter jets; the already meagre salaries of civil servants were halved in the month before in order to help pay for it all. Southerners, still smarting in the aftermath of the 1994 civil war, were left in little doubt that the union was a northern rather than joint success. The 1990 poster showing President Salih happily hoisting the new flag of Yemen with his Vice-President Ali Salim al-Bidh standing behind him had been reprinted for the grand occasion, but with al-Bidh air-brushed out.
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It had long been clear that the dream of national unity would not be the cure-all Yemenis craved, but Yemeni nationalism - the latest in a ruinous succession of previous ‘isms’ Yemenis had experimented with either under foreign tutelage or of their own volition - was failing too, thanks to the state’s wild veering between bouts of action and repression such as the unity anniversary celebrations and long periods of inertia. President Salih’s hope that the anniversary celebration’s ‘circuses’ nationalism could begin to compensate people for their poverty and bleak futures was about to be dashed. The dramatic public exploits of a tiny minority who had no interest in the petty business of nation state-building having long before espoused another ‘ism’ - global jihadism - were about to thrust Salih’s unity jamboree into the shade. Within five months of the celebrations, in October 2000, Yemeni members of al-Qaeda staged the movement’s most audaciously dramatic attack to date by exploding a large hole in the side of the American warship, the USS
Cole
, while she was refuelling at Aden.

But if the attack on the USS
Cole
was al-Qaeda in Yemen’s debut on the international stage, Yemen’s modern jihadist roots had been struck at least twenty years earlier, in the soil of Afghanistan, in the youthful exploits of men like the country’s best-known jihadist, Tariq al-Fadhli -whom, thanks to his cousin, Ahmad al-Fadhli, I first encountered at his house for lunch in December 2004.

^a
GCC - Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Oman.

^b
It is said that on his deathbed in 1955, the founder of Saudi Arabia, King Abdul Aziz, croaked, ‘Never allow Yemen to be united’.

^c
Population of north c.11 million, of south c.2.5 million.

^d
Major General Abd al-Rab Mansur al-Hadi, now vice-president of Yemen.