Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (5 page)

On the other hand, Captain Haines‘ private vision of a town thriving on trade diverted from Mocha was being marvellously realised by 1854, when he was suddenly recalled to Bombay, to face charges of embezzlement. No one in Bombay was thinking of abandoning the Aden enterprise by the time another anonymous observer reported that under British rule Aden was so relatively safe and prosperous that Arabs and Africans and Indians were ’flocking in with cheerful countenance, exclaiming
“Angrazi zainf Angrazi zain
”
-
Oh, the Good English!‘ He added that ’cheap goods of the newest patterns‘ were being sold ’at a handsome discount for ready money‘ and that everyone was doing business ’in a fair and liberal style and to their entire satisfaction’. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the resulting increase in traffic through the nearby Bab al-Mandab
^e
and up and down the Red Sea made Aden’s fortunes. With its ‘cafes and cabarets’ in which the colourful cosmopolitan mix could be heard ‘proclaiming that Arrack [brandy] cures the gout, the colic and is of all things the very best physic’,
³⁸
Aden was a lively, unbuttoned place to be - unless you were a tribesman still smarting from the loss of land to the infidel.

In the forlorn hope of putting a stop to the tribes‘ ’frequent paltry squabbles‘ which they dismissed as the product of ’ignorance and bigotry’,
³⁹
the British opened a school for the sons and nephews of sultans in 1858. Although it was free, only sixteen out of the sixty-eight pupils of the first intake were Arab and the rest were Indians. The stated Arab objection to the place turned out to be a reasonable one: the absence of the Koran from the curriculum. Less than two years later it had closed. More than a decade was to pass before the Bombay government reluctantly concluded that Britain’s best hope of securing the coaling station from tribal attack was to build on what Captain Haines had started by formalising alliances bolstered by stipends and ‘gifts’ with each of the so-called rulers of the nine tribes surrounding the port, thereby establishing a protectorate, in spite of Prime Minister William Gladstone’s objection that he could see ‘every imaginable objection’ to such an arrangement because ‘it binds us to support those over whose conduct to others we have no control. It threatens to impair, and most chronically our good understanding with Turkey, which is necessary to the peace of the East.’
⁴⁰
Like the Turks in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Britain would find herself paying a high price for Aden in terms of time, effort and money. By the time the First World War broke out, her sphere of influence had extended still further inland with the signing of another twenty-three treaties. In 1937 Aden’s tribal hinterland would be divided into the Eastern Aden Protectorate (EAP), which comprised Hadhramaut with its Qaiti and Kathiri sultanates and the Mahra provinces with the island of Soqotra, and the Western Aden Protectorate (WAP), in which the Abdali, Fadhli, Yaffa and Aulaqi tribes predominated. By 1954 there would be a total of ninety treaties in existence, for a population of less than a million inhabiting an area that was almost the size of Britain.
⁴¹

Gladstone had good reason to fear that enlargement of Aden’s defensive buffer zone would only serve to revive Ottoman interest in the area because, two hundred years after departing from Mocha, the Turks were back in Sanaa - initially as invited guests.

By the 1840s the lands of the Zaydi Imams had become so deeply plunged into what Yemeni historians remember as the ‘Time of Corruption‘ on account of their declining coffee fortunes and the chaos caused by competing imams, that a group of Sanaa notables -merchants and clergy - had despairingly penned an invitation to the Porte to come back and impose some order. Although presumably well aware the request did not guarantee a warm welcome from the highland tribes, the expanding British presence in the south was dictating a correspondingly ’forward policy‘ on the Ottomans’ part. They also persuaded themselves that their occupation of Yemen was a charitable endeavour. As a Turkish journalist wrote at the time, ‘The Arab is our teacher whose nerves have been harmed through the disorder and turmoil of ages past… Now we are going to assist them in rescuing them from the state in which they find themselves.’
⁴²

In 1849 a first Ottoman attempt to enter Sanaa with a force of 1,500 was thwarted by tribesmen who, incensed by the invader’s demand that Friday prayers be dedicated to the Sultan rather than to their own imam, slaughtered a hundred of them. Just as they had in the mid-sixteenth century, the peaceful Sunni Tihamans made the Turks welcome, and even the southern highlanders tolerated them but, once again, not the Zaydi northern highlanders. A mightier army, whose transportation to Yemen was greatly hastened by the new Suez Canal,
^f
fared much better in 1872 and was greeted by the merchants of Sanaa with roars of ‘Victory to the Sultan!’, as well as with open-mouthed amazement at the ‘order and tidiness and magnificence, splendour and display of the imperial forces’.
⁴³
For a time, even the northern highlands were subdued and the ruling imam thrust into what one historian terms ‘subsidised obscurity’.
⁴⁴
But before long, the highlander tribes started clamouring for stipends and mounting a fierce insurgency that would cost the Ottomans dearly in time, materiel and manpower for almost the next forty years. Still vivid folk memories of the last occasion they had ventured into the northern highlands plagued them. Recruits for their army in Yemen sometimes had to be chained and physically carried on board troop ships, so great was their dread of almost certain death in those desolate mountains. An old Ottoman folk-song captures the dismay and misery surrounding the very name of Yemen in the empire’s heartland:

Yemen, your desert is made of sand
What did you want from my son?
I don’t know your way or your sign
I am just missing my son
O Yemen, damned Yemen …
⁴⁵

The Ottomans’ efforts to rule Yemen as they did any other part of their empire met with dismal failure. Even an admission that the population’s backwardness forced them to administer the place directly, as a colony, as a
muslemleke
rather than a
vilayet
, brought no improvement
.
For example, after abandoning attempts to recruit Yemeni tribesmen into their own multi-national army, they tried to instil some discipline by following the British lead in India and establishing a native army. But, although the tribesmen were smartly kitted out with a specifically Yemeni uniform of white
futa
, black shirt and brass badge bearing the Ottoman state emblem, the force was unruly and unreliable and had to be disbanded after only three years.

Determined as ever to milk Yemen of whatever riches it had and recoup losses incurred by ceaseless punitive military expeditions into the highlands, the Turkish pashas did not follow the British lead in the protectorates by forbearing from taxing the tribes. Instead, misguid-edly priding themselves on their sensitivity to local custom in giving the tribesmen a chance to put up a face-saving show of resistance, they sent out military expeditions to demand payment. Although they could be said to be making improvements - a road from Sanaa to the port of Hodeidah, a telegraph, some schools and sturdy stone administration buildings in Sanaa, Taiz and Hodeidah - taxation swiftly re-emerged as a main source of dissatisfaction with this second period of Turkish rule. Sheikhs to whom they farmed out local administration soon found themselves having to pay for their posts and resorting to extortion in order to recoup their outlay. With the Turks in charge, Yemen’s Time of Corruption can be said to have extended itself into the second half of the nineteenth century and on, into the first decade of the twentieth.

By 1890 Turkish rule was so hated that rival claimants to the title of imam had ceased their feuding and coalesced around one Imam al-Mansur, who promptly established himself in the north-western Zaydi stronghold of Saada and terrified the Turks by organising a guerrilla army of tribesmen to carry out hit and run raids. Al-Mansur’s tribesmen dismantled telegraph poles, blew up municipal buildings and attacked Turkish homes and by 1892 there were 70,000 of them laying siege to Sanaa. The Turks tried to bribe the Imam into submission with an offer of a high position in their administration and a generous stipend in return for his lifting the siege, but al-Mansur was launched on a traditional Zaydi uprising against an unrighteous ruler, gathering fervent support by railing against the Turks’ homosexuality, their European style of dress, their trousers and their fezzes, their love of alcohol and their absence from the mosque. If not to the merchants of Sanaa then to many Yemenis, their Ottoman oppressors seemed to have strayed so far from the true path of Islam that they could properly be reviled as
kuffar
[unbelievers] and still worse, as
nasara
[Christians].

Constantinople despatched a commander named Ahmad Feyzi Pasha at the head of a 4,000-strong army to break the siege and quash al-Mansur’s uprising, which he managed to do by holding out to the famine-stricken rebel tribesmen the promise of a daily meal, a reward for any of their severed heads, and a general pardon. Locating the main source of trouble in the Hashid federation of highland tribes, Feyzi Pasha also took a leaf out of the British book by showering the Hashid sheikhs with gifts. But the Imam remained at large and on the offensive, pursuing Ahmad Feyzi Pasha’s army to Sanaa and on south, as far as Taiz. Ottoman supply lines broke down and the Syrian troops mutinied over having received only one year’s pay after several years‘ service in Yemen. Losses of manpower were running at over a third when, thanks to yet another fresh influx of miserably underpaid and disheartened troops, Feyzi Pasha, who was in his seventies and himself begging to be allowed to retire from a place already renowned as the ’graveyard of the Turks’, gradually managed to turn the tide.

His back to the wall at last, Imam al-Mansur wrote to the British authorities in Bombay, begging for help. Wisely, Britain passed up this chance of extending its tribal protectorates around Aden north to the highlands. But still the jihad sputtered on, even spreading as far as the usually docile Tihama. By 1900 a team of foreign specialists surveying the route for a Turkish railway linking Sanaa to the Tihaman port of Hodeidah required a 350-strong armed guard to go about its business. In the same year an American visitor to the country detailed what he judged to be the baneful effects of Ottoman rule: ‘The peasantry are robbed by the soldiers on their way to market, by the customs collector at the gate of each city and by the tax gatherer in addition,’ he noted. ‘No wonder we read of rebellions in Yemen, and no wonder that intense hatred lives in every Arab against the very name of Turk.’
⁴⁶

Al-Mansur’s son, Imam Yahya, succeeded him, largely because a powerful Hashid sheikh threatened to slaughter all those involved in the selection process unless they chose Yahya. The memory of having briefly lost control of their highlands in the early 1870s made the Hashid tribes especially keen to fight the Turks. Under Yahya those tribes renewed the jihad in 1905, mounting probably the worst siege Sanaa has ever experienced. More than two thirds of Sanaanis starved to death while the remainder held out for the three months of the ordeal on a hideous diet of straw bread, dog, cat, rat and human flesh. The city’s 8,000-strong community of Jews was especially hard hit. On a visit to Sanaa a few months after the siege had been lifted, the British diplomat Aubrey Herbert reported that the city’s ghetto ‘was like the dream of some haunted painter. Many of the men were still skin and bone, and the crowd of dark faces with cavernous cheeks, half-hidden by twisted, black elf-locks that hung on either side, begging eyes and clutching hands, were horrible.’
⁴⁷
Described by one foreign visitor in 1900 as the ‘most impressive city [in the Ottoman Empire] after Baghdad’, filled with Greek shops selling European goods, whose Turkish quarter boasted billiard rooms, boot-blacks and a brass band,
⁴⁸
Sanaa had been reduced to dusty savagery. It was estimated that no fewer than 8,000 of the 10,000 besieged Turkish troops had died too, the vast majority of sickness.
⁴⁹
Another reckoning states that of the 55,000 Turkish troops that disembarked at Hodeidah, 6,000 were killed in the siege but 9,000 died of typhoid.
⁵⁰

Once again, Feyzi Pasha had mustered a mighty force to throw off the siege but, pursuing Imam Yahya to yet another Zaydi mountain fastness - this time to Shahara, half a day’s journey by car to the north-west of Sanaa - he was forced to concede defeat after two months. There were 50,000 Turkish troops in Yemen at the time, but still the northern highlands resisted Ottoman colonisation and by 1911 they were ready for a fresh offensive. Arthur Wavell, an intrepid British army officer, happened to be in Sanaa that year. The only other European in town, an Italian merchant and spy named Signor Caprotti, had weathered the sieges of 1892 and 1905 and so warned Wavell that he should lay in supplies because another was in the offing.

The first shots were heard in January, and by the end of the month Wavell was observing a ‘sudden great increase in the number of camp fires visible by night around the town’.
⁵¹
The Turks were rumoured to have two years’ worth of rations in store and plenty of ammunition, but the tribes, outnumbering the Turks by a ratio of three to one, were also well armed with Mauser rifles captured or bought from their enemy. Guns of all sorts and every vintage, Wavell observed, were far cheaper in Yemen than in Europe. Scaling ladders were being prepared, but still the tribes hesitated. Popular belief had it that Sanaa enjoyed God’s special protection, that anyone storming the city was doomed. At last, the siege began. For the first two months of its three-month duration only qat was in short supply. Cigarettes, lamp oil and cooking oil ran out eventually, but qat was available by the time it ended and anyone with money never went as hungry as they had in 1905.

Nevertheless, the Turks acknowledged that, once again, they had been bested by the highland tribes. Decades too late, one Ottoman official stated the blindingly obvious: ‘To keep them [Yemenis] down unjustly will take much money and many troops. Conscientiousness and justice is what we expect from our administrators. Yemen has become now the graveyard of Muslims and money’
⁵²
Even a perceived duty to guard the southern approach to the holy places at Mecca and Medina and ever-mounting pressure to compete with the European empires failed to outweigh the crippling cost of maintaining a patchy control of Yemen. As well as the Sanaa siege, the Turks had an unrelated Italian-backed uprising in the Asir region of the country (now a part of Saudi Arabia), to say nothing of unrest in the Tihama to contend with in 1911.

A new pasha was sent out with instructions to come to terms with Imam Yahya, which proved easy enough. Yahya had long argued that he was only rebelling against corrupt Turkish officialdom, not against the Ottoman Sultan, and only on behalf of Zaydis who were, he claimed, the rightful rulers of all Yemen - the highlands, Aden and its tribal hinterland, Tihama and Asir - since the third century of the Islamic calendar. He had, he insisted, ‘no desire save to “order the right” [a key Zaydi concept] and extirpate what is loathsome and reprehensible, to establish the shari’ah, set straight him who strays and advise the ignorant’.
⁵³
In exchange for formal recognition of his control over the Zaydi highlands he could agree to dispense with the titles of Caliph and ‘Commander of the Faithful’ which had hitherto placed all Zaydi imams in direct competition with the Ottoman sultans. In return, he would be free to replace Ottoman with sharia law in his domains, to select his own judges and collect his own taxes. The Turks would remain in control over Tihama and much of the southern highlands including the city of Taiz and retain responsibility for Yemen’s external defence.

Although Yahya faced numerous challenges to his rule, because there were many among his tribal supporters who thought he had conceded too much, the last few years of the Turkish presence in Yemen, until the end of the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, were comparatively peaceful, the Turks less heavy-handedly controlling. ‘Tact is the order of the day, and laissez faire’, observed one British visitor to the region in 1912 of Ottoman rule at the time, ‘… the writing is on the wall’.
⁵⁴
The game was up long before the Turks left Yemen and the stain of failure lingered long after their departure. More than a decade after his exit from Sanaa the last Ottoman pasha to administer the truncated province was still smarting at the memory: ‘in my opinion, this is what happened, from the day we conquered it to the time we left it we neither knew Yemen nor did we understand it nor learn [anything] about it, nor were we, for that matter, able to administer it’.
⁵⁵

For the second time, Yemen’s northern highland Zaydi tribes had expressed their objection to outside rule, even when that rule was by fellow Muslims, even when that rule was imposed in the name of uniting the Muslim
umma.
Together, the ancient memory of being a persecuted and dissident Shiite minority hounded out of what is north Iran in the ninth century, and more recent mistreatment and exploitation at the hands of foreigners, acted as a powerful prophylactic against any outside interference whatsoever.