Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (21 page)

‘He’s right,’ interjected Ibrahim. ‘Oxy, for example, is protected by Sadeq al-Ahmar, one of Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar’s sons…’

‘Those big sheikhs take a big percentage for themselves as a kind of commission for acting as the local agent,’ Mohammed continued, ‘which means they behave as if they have the right to rent out the land to the oil companies when, of course, it doesn’t belong to them at all. The only benefit any of us locals see from our oil is the light we get from the oil flares!’

Kidnappings of both foreigners and Yemenis and attacks on pipelines and oil company personnel by heavily armed tribesmen intent on extracting from the government what they see as at least their just deserts - a clinic, a school, a well, jobs, a road or legal redress - have long been drawing unwelcome attention to the fact that the writ of the state does not often extend here. Both before and after 9/11, Yemen’s al-Qaeda jihadists were less of a headache and a threat to the state than tribal disturbances in those desert wastes of Marib-Shabwa, in what is effectively - given that oil accounts for more than 70 per cent of the country’s revenues - an important engine room of Yemen’s economy.

From a military outpost, high on a hill overlooking the mile-and-a-half-wide Wadi Harib that once marked the frontier between the YAR and the PDRY, a soldier was keeping a close watch over the Jannah-Hunt works which are all that remain of the pioneering Hunt Oil Inc. venture in Yemen. His tiny distant/a
t
e-clad figure, waving a gun in our direction, was enough to dissuade me from taking more photographs. Instead, we glided on across the ocean of sand towards what Ibrahim called the Ukrainian camp, a gated settlement of mobile homes occupied by a Ukrainian firm named Vikoil that had been subcon-tracted by a British oil firm named Burren to carry out a preliminary seismic survey. While Walid purchased a little pink plastic bag of qat from a pair of salesmen in a black Fiat Panda who told him they made their living by journeying out to the oil fields every day with fresh supplies of the staple stimulant, I went inside the compound to speak to a Burren employee who had appeared at the door of one of the Portacabins. Over a cup of instant coffee, while a group of sullen-looking Yemeni workers sat chatting in a circle outside, I learned that Burren had mistakenly hired the cheapest rather than the most experi-enced team of seismic surveyors. Corner-cutting newcomers in a competitive field led by the Chinese and the French, the Ukrainians had not troubled to take local conditions into consideration. They had not held meetings with the tribes, let alone offered them tangible benefits, and so soon landed not just themselves but the soldiers deployed by the state to protect them, as well as local tribesmen, in very serious trouble. Tensions over insufficient job opportunities with the Ukrainians added to the tribesmen’s resentment at the interloping military’s monopoly on protecting the foreigners had escalated alarmingly in November 2007.

Early one morning, a few Ukrainians and a military escort sallied out of the camp to survey an oil line, only to find their path blocked by armed men of the Balharith tribe. Even as the sheikh and colonel parleyed, a tribesman sharpshooter stationed some distance away shot out the colonel’s eye. That at least was the story the Ukrainians told about an incident that had rapidly developed into a pitched battle costing the lives of ten soldiers and six tribesmen. But Ibrahim, a member of the Balharith tribe himself, knew a different version. According to him, the blinded colonel had been asking for trouble having opened hostilities a few days earlier by kicking over the wheelchair of a disabled tribesman who had arrived at the camp with his son to ask if the Ukrainians could find work for his bulldozer. Both my British informant and Ibrahim agreed, however, that six weeks later the government had calmed the situation sufficiently to allow the Ukrainians to return to the camp, mainly by addressing the tribesmen’s demands for work and distributing large sums of money. Ibrahim had heard that three million riyals of compensation had been received by the family of every dead tribesman - ‘of course, the tribe only accepted that tiny sum because they’d already had their revenge by killing ten soldiers,’ he added.

Whatever the precise truth of the tale, it amply illustrated one of Yemen’s most serious shortcomings as a state capable of making a useful contribution to any ‘War on Terror’, to say nothing of providing an attractively secure environment for foreign investment. For the past half century, since the demise of the imamate and the proclamation of the republic in 1962, none of Yemen’s leaders had faced up to the fact that tribal custom law -
urf
, in Arabic - which governed the lives of a sizeable and well-armed sector of Yemen’s population, competed and sometimes clashed with Yemen’s badly malfunctioning legal system. The mismatch and ambiguities frequently led to violence and bloodshed.

After thirty years in power, there could be no doubting Salih’s gift for balancing forces, for dividing and ruling, for co-opting, charming, reconciling, bribing and so on, but wherever I went in Yemen I was treated to tales of violent confrontations between the state and the tribes. Just as in Ottoman times, some sheikhs are still known to wildly exceed their authority by ruling their territories as petty autocrats. A few miles from the bustling southern highland city of Ibb, the cruel tyranny of a sheikh who was also a member of the upper house of Yemen’s parliament and one of Yemen’s best poets, was making lurid headlines in early 2008. Accounts of Mohammed Ahmed al-Mansour’s arbitrary confiscations of houses and livestock and extortionate taxes paled into insignificance beside tales of medieval tortures that members of his community had suffered in his private prison, at the hands of his personal militia. One victim complained he had been chained up, doused in cold water, denied any bedding or food and drink, terrorised by a snake and forced to eat a raw rabbit. Another had had his fingernails pulled out.
²

But the tribes were certainly not always to blame. Tariq al-Fadhli had told me that his fortress home on the roundabout had been suddenly attacked by government forces in May 2004, all the glass in his windows shattered by their shooting and two of his private guards and a woman of his household injured before he discovered he was being punished for mediating in the generally accepted sheikhly manner in the case of a locally disputed water-pump. Only by putting in a direct call to President Salih had he managed to halt the assault. In due course and in accordance with tribal custom, he had been compensated for his injuries with five rifles.

As a Yemeni tribesman, albeit one who had spent much of his life in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, Tariq would have been familiar with the carefully calibrated system of compensation that often took the form of a certain number of guns or a slaughtered bull, but not all Yemenis and certainly not a prominent Adeni like the elderly proprietor of Aden’s
Al-Ayyam
newspaper, Hisham Basharaheel, would either know or respect such customs.

In March 2008 I was invited to a qat chew at Basharaheel’s Sanaa residence. An impressive multi-storey edifice shielded from the bustle of the noisy street behind high walls and a stout metal gate, it was surprisingly unfurnished inside, very poorly lit and teeming with armed men wearing bandoliers of bullets. I soon discovered why it looked and felt like a fortress under siege. My host had been on the point of selling up and moving back home to Aden when his ownership of the land on which the house was built was disputed by a family who aggressively daubed their counter-claim on his exterior wall. Undaunted, convinced all his paperwork was in order, Basharaheel had gone on looking for a buyer for his property and left his son and an armed guard in charge of defending it. But the rival claimants had not backed off and, one evening, in an exchange of gunfire outside the gate, one of them - a teenage boy - had been killed. Basharaheel’s guard was already languishing in jail, charged with firing the fatal shot, but the dead boy’s tribe was claiming that Basharaheel’s son, sniping from an upstairs window, had been responsible and must be punished instead of the guard, with immediate incarceration and even execution. Old Basharaheeel had hurriedly fortified his home with more armed guards. He told me that neither he nor any of his family - certainly not his son - had left the place for weeks.

Leaving this embattled qat chew I had gone straight to a meeting with one of the president’s advisers, an American-educated businessman named Faris al-Sanabani who happened to be in a position to brief me further on the saga. A tribesman himself, Faris explained that the tribal code of honour required Basharaheel to make an immediate and proper show of remorse for the boy’s death by offering at least twenty rifles to his family in compensation. Although he cared little for tribal customs, Basharaheel had duly set about collecting the twenty rifles, but to no avail. The offering had not proved acceptable, which meant there could be no compromise, which meant that no less a person than the president himself had been forced to intervene. Al-Sanabani informed me that Salih had spent all that afternoon parleying with the elders of the dead boy’s tribe, charming them with his detailed knowledge of and respect for their tribal genealogy, gently trying to persuade them to withdraw their demand - however correct from the tribal point of view - that Basharaheel’s son be imprisoned.

On that occasion the president sided with the non-tribesman Basharaheel for the simple reason that he did not want the old man and his son being hailed as persecuted martyrs of the growing secessionist movement in the south of the country, which the family’s newspaper was supporting. On another famous occasion he came down on the side of tribal law. Just before the outbreak of the war against the south in 1994, one of Salih’s closest allies, a powerful northern highland sheikh, admitted that he had taken it upon himself to arrange the assassination of a deputy prime minister, Hassan Makki, to punish him for being too ready to compromise with the southern Marxists. After the war, the sheikh was permitted to make full and final amends for the assassination attempt that had killed Makki’s driver and two bodyguards by simply slaughtering a bull outside Makki’s house.
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Far from discouraging tribalism and promoting the rule of secular law, President Salih has generally encouraged the old ways, not just in the former YAR but in the former PDRY since 1990. Tariq al-Fadhli’s smooth transition from jihadist to establishment sheikh was a good illustration. In the president’s view tribes are a
sine qua non
for Yemen. His reply to a question put to him by
Al-Majallah
newspaper back in October 1986 about how far Yemen had moved away from the tribal system towards a modern state was as follows: ’The state is part of the tribes and the Yemeni people are an ensemble of tribes. Our urban and rural areas all consist of tribes. All the official and popular state institutions are made up of the
qaba’il
[tribes/tribespeople].’
⁴

To overlook the fact that large sections of Yemen’s population -people of the Tihama and Hadhramaut and even the southern highland towns of Taiz and Ibb, let alone Adenis and Sanaanis - would not describe themselves as tribespeople suggests a wilful ignorance of his own people. It seems possible that the question confused him; perhaps, to his way of thinking, tribal and state systems could not be compared in the first place, the tribes being a natural phenomenon and the state systems man-made ones. Which was better? A tree or a house? A mountain or an aeroplane? The world view behind Salih’s refusal to regard tribalism as a man-made political system like any other resurfaced in a statement made by the paramount sheikh of the Hashid Federation, Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar, in May 2000. ’The
qabilah
[tribe] is the foundation of our Arab society and to deny the
qabilah
is to deny our authenticity and our ancestors. It is the foundation and it is natural. And God says, “We have created for you nations and tribes so that they would know each other.” So why do we approve of one part of the verse and try to omit the second part, and why do we say this nation and that nation but not this tribe and that tribe? God clearly says, “we created you nations and tribes”.’
⁵

There was still no acknowledgement of the manner in which tribalism could inhibit the development of state institutions and compromise national security. Evidence piled on evidence - the killing of soldiers by tribesmen defending their ancestral land, the jeopardising of the work of foreign companies involved in oil extraction, the freelancing vigilantism of the tribes and examples of them sheltering wanted jihadists according to the rules of tribal code of hospitality or for simple mercenary gain -had yet to drive home that lesson. Sarah Phillips, an acute Australian observer of Yemen’s political scene, has defined the relationship between the Yemeni state and the tribes as ‘often contradictory, with each at times increasing and at times diminishing the other’s power, but both reinforcing traits in the other that provide considerable obstacles to state-building’.
⁶
Unregulated, ad hoc, highly personalised and utterly opaque would be other ways of describing the manner in which the competing authorities of the state and tribes are constantly being challenged, tested and renegotiated. The steps of the president’s dance on the heads of his snakes are never routine and the dance never ends. The state as embodied by Salih and the tribes as represented by their sheikhs are willing partners in this endless dance. It suits them both well because it is what they both know best.

I wondered if the tribal law governing the sheltering of an outlaw with no questions asked for at least three days meant that even an educated young tribesman like Ibrahim, a person employed by a western company, would feel bound by tribal custom to shelter a person branded ‘a terrorist’ by Yemen’s western allies - bin Laden, for example?

‘What do you think of Osama bin Laden, Ibrahim?’ I asked him as we bounced on south across the sand into the former PDRY, in the direction of his family home where we were to spend the night.

‘Do you want the truth?’ he said, eagerly leaning forward from the back seat.

‘Yes, of course,’ I replied.

‘Osama bin Laden’s a hero, I think,’ said Ibrahim, cautiously adding that he was sure the need for global jihad would evaporate if only America could bring itself to be more even-handed in the treatment of the Israel-Palestine question.

‘Do you thnk there’s any chance that he’s hiding in Yemen?’ I asked, and received an answer that confirmed my belief that, if history was anything to go by, Yemeni tribesmen’s overriding interests were money and land, not any ideology about a restored Caliphate.

‘No,’ said Ibrahim, ‘with that big a bounty on his head? Someone would definitely betray him! He wouldn’t risk coming here!’

‘If bin Laden called for Yemenis to go and fight jihad in Iraq, would you go?’ I asked him.

‘If he asked me to go and kill American or Israeli soldiers, of course, I would love to go, but I wouldn’t go and kill civilians.’

Ibrahim’s lucrative employment with Oxy and the cluster of excited and happy faces that greeted him when we arrived at his home a few minutes later amply accounted for his failure to beat a path to the jihad in Iraq. As head of the family since his father had died, he was clearly the happy object of at least a dozen women’s deep devotion. His mother, his sisters, his teenage nieces who were happily learning to read at the age of fifteen, his startlingly beautiful but illiterate wife and his one-year-old baby daughter all doted on him. Three small nephews copied every gesture he made.

Early the next morning Walid piloted the Land Cruiser slowly around the low sand dunes on the outskirts of the Ibrahim’s village, allowing us plenty of time for a good look at a school built with foreign aid but standing empty for lack of any teachers, and then at a circle of men in their pale shirts, patterned
futas
and faded head-cloths sitting cross-legged in a small patch of shade next to a Toyota pick-up. I thought they must be having their breakfast.

‘Breakfast? No. They’re men from my Balharith tribe,’ said Ibrahim. ‘They’re holding a strategy meeting. It’s nothing so special, just that one of those guys owns some land on the coast, on the road between Aden and Abyan. He has paperwork proving his ownership and authorisation from the president, but the officials down there have decided to seize it. About a week ago soldiers removed the posts marking the plot and arrested the man he had employed to guard it. So those guys are planning to cut the road near here, to stop the flow of traffic to and from the oil fields.’

‘Will it work, do you think?’

Ibrahim shrugged. ‘Maybe, probably - because the state hates anything to disrupt the oil business. That’s why the tribes around here are powerful. We’ve got some kind of chance of getting justice!’ Proud of his tribe, he was surprised and pleased when I recalled that the suspected leader of al-Qaeda in Yemen in the period immediately before and after 9/11 had been a fellow Balharith, yet another Afghan War veteran named Qaid Sinan al-Harithi.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when, on account of its lawlessness, Yemen was regarded as the likeliest refuge for jihadists fleeing the western onslaught on Afghanistan, President Salih had warded off a rumoured American invasion by speedily deporting whole planeloads of foreign Afghan War veterans. Anxious not to repeat the costly mistake of siding with Saddam Hussein in 1990, he had also hurried off to Washington to reassure President George W Bush that he was on his side in the new global ‘War on Terror’, but Bush had given him to understand that he would have to prove it, that actions would have to speak louder than words. When Salih offered to help lower the international temperature by mediating a reconciliation between Baghdad and Washington, chattily quoting an old Arab proverb to Bush about taking care not to put a cat in a cage because it might turn into a lion, Bush retorted that the Iraqi cat had rabies which could only be cured by cutting off its head.
⁷
He then upped the pressure by demanding he demonstrate his new commitment to tackling jihadism by arresting a pair of al-Qaeda men suspected of playing leading roles in the attack on the USS
Cole
the previous year. The more important of the two had been Ibrahim’s fellow tribesman, Qaid Sinan al-Harithi.

Within a month of his return from Washington, in December 2001, with pledges of millions of dollars, bugging equipment, helicopters, guns and bullet-proof vests as well as a hundred special-forces trainers, Salih duly went to work. Al-Harithi and four other alleged jihadists were tracked down to the Marib desert, to a village called al-Hosun where, outlawed by his own Balharith tribe, he and his companions were being sheltered by members of the powerful Abidah tribe. The president then despatched his son Ahmad at the head of a few hundred freshly American-trained special forces, with helicopters, artillery and tanks, to Marib to winkle them out. For two days the military followed the letter of the tribal law, parleying with local leaders, patiently working to convince them to flout the tribal custom that required them to shelter a fugitive, no questions asked. But either the pressure exerted by the din of helicopters overhead, or the shock of a jet suddenly breaking the sound barrier, seems to have destroyed all confidence and trust, and caused negotiations to break down and fighting to break out. After a three-hour battle that left eighteen dead and twenty-five wounded, the Abidah tribesmen gloried in a victory over the state: only five of them were dead, only seven had been wounded and their troublesome Balharith guest and his friends had made a safe getaway
⁸

The state did subsequently manage to arrest ten Marib sheikhs who were soon released, but, using an old tactic regularly resorted to by the imams, their sons kept hostage in their place. Three months later four of these boys explained to the
Daily Telegraph
that they were locked up because their fathers were still refusing to sign a pledge to ‘fight terrorism and hand over al-Qa’eda suspects on an American list’.
⁹
Taken aback by Salih’s unaccustomed determination to exercise some control over the region, and perhaps mollified by a raise in their stipends, twenty sheikhs did eventually agree to co-operate and soon the Marib-Shabwa oil region was bristling with checkpoints and crawling with military and informants in the pay of the Americans as well as Yemen’s PSO.

Washington’s initial delight at seeing President Salih go into action against al-Qaeda was tempered by disappointment at the failure of the operation and a fresh determination that if Yemen lacked sufficient skill, then the US itself would get the job done. The rumoured invasion of Iraq and signs that the Bush administration might once again be eyeing Yemen as the ‘next Afghanistan’, as next in line for invasion, meant that Yemeni sentiment against the US was running high, but Salih found himself having to agree to the US directly intervening in Yemen. On the understanding that no word of the embarrassing surrender of sovereignty ever leaked out, he gave the CIA permission to carry out an Israeli-style targeted assassination of the man who had escaped capture a year earlier, Ibrahim’s outlawed kinsman, Qaid Sinan al-Harithi.

Intercepted mobile-phone conversations had convinced both the CIA and Edmund Hull, America’s ambassador in Sanaa, that the Marib desert was still the right place to focus the hunt for Yemen’s leading jihadists. An energetic Arabic-speaker with a counter-terrorism background, Hull had quickly got the measure of Yemen and its tribes and figured out the most efficient way of doing business in the country. He regularly travelled the road between Sanaa and Marib, with a full armed escort, sometimes wearing a Texan stetson, to spend hours chewing qat and crossing the palms of local sheikhs in exchange for useful intelligence. But none of those arduous excursions bore much useful fruit until late 2002, very shortly after Qaid Sinan al-Harithi was reported to have pulled off another propaganda coup for al-Qaeda by badly damaging a French oil tanker named the
Limburg
a few miles off the Hadhramaut coast.

On the afternoon of Sunday, 3 November, one of Hull’s local spies watched the thickly bearded al-Harithi and five others climb into a black Toyota Land Cruiser and then phoned through the car details to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia. Final telephone permission for immediate action was then swiftly received from Salih, who was enjoying a holiday cruise in the waters off Aden. With a Predator drone launched from Djibouti ‘loitering’ noiselessly some 15,000 feet above Marib, equipped with a video camera fitted with a 900mm zoom lens that could read car licence plates, the job of locking onto and tracking the car was managed by means of al-Harithi’s mobile phone signal and a global positioning system. Soon CIA operatives 7,000 miles away in Virginia had a real-time, close-up image of the Land Cruiser on their computer screens, and were watching it wind its way down a twisting mountain road towards a main road before it veered off into the desert along a sand track. Within a second of one of those operatives pressing a button, a five-foot-long AG-114 Hellfire missile fixed to the undercarriage of the Predator fired off, locked onto the Land Cruiser and blew it to pieces. The vehicle and all six of its occupants were instantly incinerated. Only Qaid Sinan al-Harithi was subsequently identifiable, by a mark on his leg.

‘Did you know that he had a bad leg because, when bin Laden was living in Sudan, he was one of his bodyguards, and got hurt once while shielding him from bullets?’ Ibrahim asked me.

Sanaa had hastened to put out its agreed cover story: some of Yemen’s most wanted criminals had been hell-bent on sabotage and murder, headed for the oil fields, for pipelines and foreign workers, with a carload of weapons and a particularly dangerous cylinder of propane gas, when their car had simply exploded. The incident might have ended there, with most Yemenis feeling relieved that God in his wisdom had rid the country of some worthless hooligans, and with the CIA taking a quiet professional pride in a strike so surgically precise it had expunged the bad memory of two previous blunders by Predators in Afghanistan. Everything might have been fine if Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz had not spoken out of turn. In an interview with CNN two days after the event, he revealed precisely what both Sanaa and the CIA had been so anxious to conceal: the US’s sole responsibility for a ‘very successful tactical operation’.
¹⁰
Wolfowitz may have calculated that such a thrilling victory in the ‘War on Terror’, occurring only a day before the mid-term elections, was simply too good a publicity opportunity to pass up, but the admission backfired badly.

The strike had been a relatively clean one - for a start, no wedding party had been accidentally incinerated - but there was an international outcry at Washington’s double standards; on the one hand the Bush administration was reluctantly condemning Israel’s targeted assassinations of Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip, while on the other plotting precisely the same actions in other countries it was not even at war with. There were moral qualms about the dawning of a new era of assassination by remote control and about such ‘extra-judicial executions’ constituting a serious violation of international human rights law. The revelation that one of al-Harithi’s five companions had been an American national of Yemeni origin made many Americans wonder how the US could justify summarily executing its own citizens in that way. But the reaction in the western media and parliaments was nothing compared to the repercussions of the affair in Yemen. Security concerns raised by a rash of anti-US demonstrations all over the country led to the hasty evacuation and temporary closure of the US embassy in Sanaa. The president was known to be both furious and alarmed. A high-ranking member of the ruling political party, Brigadier-General Yahya al-Muttawakil, seemed to be speaking for Salih when he complained to a
Christian Science Monitor
reporter at an afternoon qat chew a few days after the event: ‘This is why it is so difficult to make deals with the United States,’ he began, ‘This is why we are reluctant to work closely with them. They don’t consider the internal circumstances in Yemen.’
¹¹
Over a year was to pass before Salih could risk a formal admission that he had authorised the strike. He had braved not only the displeasure of friends in the region, notably Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, but also the wrath of the large bin Laden-loving section of Yemen society in order to support the War on Terror, and this was all the thanks he got.

Not surprisingly, the dazzling Predator technology has not been employed since in Yemen.
^a
For the two years that remained of his posting Ambassador Hull did what he could to remove the impression he had given to Yemenis who recalled the last years of the British in Aden that he was behaving like a colonial High Commissioner. Between 2001 and 2004 American aid to Yemen far eclipsed Europe’s total aid contribution to the country. Although most of the money was spent on the military equipment which President Salih insisted he needed to secure his grip on the country sufficiently to do battle with al-Qaeda, some was spent on displays of ‘soft power’. Targeted for assassination himself in revenge for the killing of Qaid Sinan al-Harithi, Hull was nevertheless to be seen out and about in Marib during his last summer in Yemen, laying the foundation stone of a $3 million Yemen Civilisation Museum that the US was helping to fund, handing over medical equipment for a new hospital (complete with a plaque indicating that it was the gift of the American people) and donating $40,000 to twenty-six local farmers for improvements in irrigation methods.
¹²