Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (20 page)

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Ramzi bin al-Shibh is the highest-value Yemeni prisoner at Guantanamo, charged with planning the 9/11 attacks.

Like most Yemeni offices, it was mysteriously, worryingly bare of papers and computers and empty of staff, but I had no choice except to hope and trust. Whatever this enterprise was, its boss, Mohammed Salih Muhsin, represented my best chance of visiting Yemen’s central Marib desert, home to oil fields and famously restive tribes, and haven of fugitive jihadists. To my great relief, he arrived at precisely the time he had promised he would, with a fashionable mobile phone in one hand, some prayer beads in the other and no qat cud swelling his cheek.

The absence of that cud was an important clue, but there were others to alert me to the fact that I was meeting no ordinary Yemeni. Bearded, beatifically smiling but avoiding both my eye and the physical contact of a handshake, Muhsin was the Muslim equivalent of a born-again Christian. He was a person who believed he was practising his faith in a manner resembling as closely as possible that of the Prophet and his companions; technically speaking therefore he was a Salafist. But there were at least two varieties of Salafist. If I was lucky he was not the al-Qaeda jihadist sort like Osama bin Laden but the more common and moderate variety. I surprised myself hoping he confined himself to restricting his womenfolk’s freedom while waging harmless spiritual jihad against himself and refraining from politics rather than believing it his bounden Muslim duty to wage lethal violent jihad against the West and all her Muslim allies. On the simple grounds that he seemed to bear me no obvious grudge, I decided I was safe.

After graciously reiterating his willingness to be of assistance, he divulged a few facts. As the owner of a company involved in transporting supplies to Marib’s oil fields, he was indeed in a position to procure me the requisite
tasrih
permit from the interior ministry without which I could not travel in a region renowned for its instability and frequent kidnappings. Better still, he could pass me off as a guest of one of the oil companies and, best of all, he would arrange for his nephew Ibrahim to show me around. When I enquired about payment for all these kind and valuable services, he smiled and raised a languid hand. I understood that we would not debase our new friendship with squalid money talk until I returned to Sanaa, satisfied.

Two days later, my taciturn northern highlander tribesman driver Walid and I drove east out of Sanaa in the direction of Marib with twenty photocopies of the requisite
tasrih
safely stowed in his Land Cruiser’s glove compartment, one for every checkpoint we were likely to encounter. While we idled in the capital’s chaotic rush-hour traffic, tut-tutting about the primary-school-age children dodging dangerously between the lines of cars to hawk their boxes of tissues, bottles of water and newspapers, Walid observed that although he bore no personal grudge against our friend Mohammed Salih Muhsin, he himself had no time for Salafism of any kind. A Salafist neighbour of his had paid for his puritanical zeal with his life when another neighbour had hurled a great lump of cement at him, he told me with quiet satisfaction, before adding that he had expressly forbidden his teenage son to loiter around the mosque after Friday prayers when such notions were easily picked up.

Taking advantage of Walid’s rare talkativeness, I moved our conversation on to another ‘ism’- tribalism. Although handsomely dressed from head to toe as a tribesman, Walid surprised me by declaring that he had about as little patience with tribalism as he did with Salafism. When I questioned him about his own highland Khawlani tribe, through whose land a part of our route to Marib lay, he insisted that it meant nothing to him, that there was no point in visiting his village because there was nothing to see, that he had no contact with his sheikh, a businessman who spent most of his time in Sanaa. A few months spent working as a driver for the team of Americans investigating al-Qaeda’s attack on the USS
Cole
had - thanks be to God! - left him rich enough to build his large family of seven daughters and only son a home in Sanaa, where the power of the tribe was greatly reduced, he explained. Thank God he could think and act for himself, without the help of any sheikh. ‘What are sheikhs good for?’ he demanded of me, one hand on the steering wheel and the other resting lightly on the hilt of
his jambiyah
, before embarking on a long tale aimed at proving to me that only greedy sheikhs profited from lethal tribal feuds.

In about 1980 a member of Walid’s northern highland tribe who lived about a mile from his village, a young man recently returned, wealthy and self-confident, from working in Saudi Arabia, took a fancy to a shepherdess from a neighbouring tribe who lived five miles away. Soon the pair - he with a group of his young men friends, she with a group of her girlfriends - were regularly meeting up to picnic in the mountains, greatly enjoying themselves out of sight of their elders. Inevitably, a male of the shepherdess’s tribe got wind of these delightful goings on but decided that the whole business was altogether too dishonouring, too shameful -
ayb
(shame, dishonour, disgrace) is a key tribal word - to tackle head on. But tribal custom law,
urf
, dictated that some form of revenge had to be taken. Hostilities were duly opened by way of a minor provocation; a sheep belonging to the shepherdess’s tribe was slaughtered and Walid’s kinsman blamed for killing it. Unfortunately, even this expedient escalated alarmingly into a land dispute, the most serious of all kinds of dispute, in which the sheikhs of both tribes became involved, at great expense to both communities. Every year for a decade, Walid told me, the two tribes would go to war for two or three days. He himself had fought in two of those mini campaigns. ‘We used to climb into the mountains at night, about a hundred of us, wearing camouflage, and just bang away at anything that moved. For all I know the dispute’s still unresolved,’ he said, ‘and the sheikhs still profiting by mediating, although I do know for a fact that the man involved is dead and the shepherdess long married.’

Yemen would be much better off without her tribes, he told me, before changing the subject to gloomily forecast that we would be lucky to clear the first checkpoint on the edge of town without acquiring the tiresome encumbrance of an armed police escort, and he was right. After an hour or so idling at the checkpoint, we learned we would be sharing such an escort with a group of elderly Taiwanese tourists who were headed to Marib too, to view the meagre vestiges of an engineering wonder of the ancient world, the eighth-century BC Marib Dam. As soon as a blue and white Toyota pick-up complete with a posse of police and a mounted heavy machine gun appeared, we were all on our way again. Under a clear blue winter sky, only our strange caravan and the odd stray donkey moved. In that craggily lunar landscape coloured a uniformly Martian russet, nothing grew. It seemed to me that a hardiness honed by a determination to survive in this, the land their forefathers had inhabited, coupled with an imperative drive to avail themselves of the resources to be found in the kinder southern highlands and Tihama coast, were the keys to the Zaydi highlanders’ centuries-old supremacy in this corner of south Arabia.

The descent from the mountains to the Marib desert was sudden enough to set my ears popping. We were both hungry and Walid almost visibly twitching for his daily qat by the time we arrived in the town of Marib, the province’s capital. The place where we had arranged to meet Mohammed Salih Muhsin’s young nephew, Ibrahim, was not so much a restaurant as a canteen - a large, strip-lit room with white bathroom-tiled walls and ceiling fans where serving boys who looked no more than ten hurled burning hot flat-breads and battered tin plates of bean stew onto Formica-top tables that were littered with newspaper and pestered by flies. Men, only men, gestured angrily at them, barking their orders above the already deafening background roar of the furnace oven.

A personable young man with a gentle smile - emphatically not a stony-faced northern highlander like Walid - dressed in a dazzling white
thowb
, embroidered belt and
jambiyah
, Ibrahim lowered his gaze like his uncle and proffered only his wrist on greeting me, but the English he had learned at a college in southern India was good and his demeanour towards me otherwise relaxed and perfectly friendly. Although in full-time employment with America’s fourth-largest oil company, Oxy, which had taken a large bloc straddling the old border between the two Yemens, he confirmed he was free to assist me because he had just completed a run of night shifts so, while Walid drove off in search of the town’s qat market, we drank glasses of sweet black tea and tried to converse.

‘I’m wondering how people around here feel at the prospect of the oil running out - by 2017 or so, isn’t it?’ I shouted above the deafening roar of the oven. The question was a stupid one. It was hard to imagine how much poorer, rougher and simpler the locals’ lives could be than they already were. The smells and the dust alone in that place would immediately have informed a blind, deaf and dumb person that the dream of oil wealth on a Saudi scale had never been and now would never be realised.

‘No one’s worried about that,’ Ibrahim answered. ’They’re thinking about the present. People say they wish no one had ever started pumping the stuff - far better that it stay underground than that it be exploited and the proceeds end up in the wrong pockets.‘ We spoke about where the oil money had gone, about Hadda, the Beverley Hills of Sanaa, about the gigantic new mosque President Salih had spent the past decade funding and building at a reported cost of $115 million but a suspected cost of $1.5 billion, and about the further billions being spent on Russian MiG fighters. Returning to the matter in hand, he suggested we visit a Bedouin friend of his who had worked as a foreman for the first American oil company to venture into Yemen in 1981, Hunt Oil Inc. from Texas. But, he explained, on our way out of town we would have to stop by the shop where he had left his AK47. ’They made a rule about six months ago; we’re not allowed to carry our guns into the capital town of any province any more. So now we have a choice; either we can risk leaving them at a checkpoint or we can pay a shopkeeper to look after them.’

I wondered why he had not economised on both time and money by leaving it at home. As far as I knew, the more educated and urbanised Yemeni male was usually content to travel without a weapon but, equally, sure to own at least one. A member of the northern highland Abu Luhum tribe, an employee of the ministry of education, had recently informed me that any man who carried a gun advertised the fact that he was primitive, before admitting that he himself had five guns, one of them with telescopic night sights, which he had arranged neatly, in order of size, along his bedroom wall. Ibrahim told me that he had been given his first gun at the age of fifteen. There were plenty of tales of the lower floors of rural sheikhs’ residences serving as mini-arsenals, stocked with not only rifles and ammunition but with rocket-propelled grenades, and even heavier weapons. There was no way of ascertaining the truth, but it was often said that there were three times as many guns as people in Yemen.

An insatiable appetite for firearms among tribesmen, first and foremost as a mark of both virility and wealth on a par with
the jambiyah
, dates back at least as far as the arrival of the British in Aden. Reinforced by both the British and the Ottoman habit of buying the tribes’ loyalty with gifts of weapons, the appetite continued to rage in the post-colonial era. Although ranged on opposite sides of the Cold War divide, both the YAR and the PDRY had been ravenously hungry for Soviet armaments with which to threaten each other. An attempt to clamp down on the thriving arms trade, to close Yemen’s handful of large arms bazaars and conduct a buy-back programme funded by America since 9/11, has not succeeded in stifling the old appetite. The domestic trade has become more furtive in Sanaa, for example, but it has continued and acquired an international dimension. As early as 2003, a United Nations report cited Yemen as the chief supplier of weapons to the more unstable areas of East Africa - Somalia, for example.
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Many of the weapons and explosives used in regional al-Qaeda attacks have been traced back to Yemen; the missiles used to fire at the Israeli plane leaving Mombasa in late 2002 were acquired from Yemen via Somalia, and firearms used in the early 2005 attack on the American consulate in Jeddah were discovered to have Yemen defence-ministry markings.

Ibrahim patiently explained that, unfortunately, we were obliged to take his weapon with us if we were travelling out into the desert. No foreigner - certainly not an American or British person - was permitted to leave town without an armed escort. I was surprised but pleased to discover that somehow, in this case, he qualified as my armed escort. As soon as Walid returned, with an unusually large bouquet of quality qat twigs wrapped in pink cellophane, we set off past the town’s gun market, a parade of about twenty tatty wooden booths where firearms that had cost only $150 five years earlier were now retailing for around $750 owing to a recent crackdown on arms smuggling across the long and hardly demarcated Empty Quarter border with Saudi Arabia. After retrieving Ibrahim’s gun, we headed out of town on a good new asphalt road. Soon, our way lay over sand so we stopped to deflate the Land Cruiser tyres before making for the distant speck of a Bedouin camp.

Ibrahim’s Bedouin friend received us graciously in a large central tent spread with carpets and scattered with bolsters. A dozen or so children - the youngest of eighteen, by two wives - scampered about with thermoses of tea for us, while our host remembered his American friends from Hunt Oil Inc. - David, Dick and Bill and Ron, the Englishman - and how satisfied he had been with their treatment of him and his payment, and how all that had changed as early as 1985. In the year before Vice-President George H. Bush had obliged his Texan friend and sponsor, Ray L. Hunt, by travelling all the way to Sanaa and on, east into the Marib desert to open Yemen’s first oil field, ‘more powerful people - people from Sanaa’ had begun ‘arranging jobs for their family and friends’, which had angered the region’s tribes. He went on to explain that things got worse, that foreign companies soon found they could only get permission to work in Yemen if they had the protection of one of the big sheikhs in Sanaa, who might have nothing to do with any of the local tribes.