Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (24 page)

Hadhramaut reveals how large Saudi Arabia looms in the affairs of Yemen. Not only have tens of thousands of the traditionally adventurous and entrepreneurial Hadhramis chosen to migrate to the Kingdom to seek their fortunes while maintaining a strong connection to their homeland but, until very recently, one could be forgiven for thinking this vast and mostly desert eastern half of Yemen was a part of Saudi Arabia. Until the turn of this millennium no one had succeeded in demarcating an Empty Quarter border between them.

A Treaty of Jeddah set that to rights at last, in June 2000. By its terms Yemen formally accepted Saudi Arabia’s right to rule over various southern provinces that had briefly belonged to the Yemen of the imams (Asir, Najran, Jizan), and Saudi Arabia implicitly abandoned any ambition to expand, by way of a corridor, straight down through the Hadhramaut to the Arabian Sea. The Kingdom’s oil exports, basic food imports and other trade would have to continue to use the Iranian-controlled Straits of Hormuz, or the currently Somali pirate-ridden Bab al-Mandab strait at the bottom of the Red Sea. That Saudi dream of gaining a corridor via Hadhramaut to the open ocean was widely suspected of being the real issue at stake in the 1994 civil war, the main reason why, forgetting its old fear and loathing of the PDRY’s Marxists, Saudi Arabia had swiftly funnelled a billion dollars’ worth of support to al-Bidh’s secession movement.

If the Jeddah Treaty scuppered that scheme, the Saudis could console themselves with the hope that the proper demarcation of their 1,800 kilometre-long southern border would end the Kingdom’s creeping contamination by Yemeni arms, qat and drug smugglers, economic migrants, child traffickers and Africans gravitating towards the richest country on the peninsula in search of work. But simple demarcation was not enough, they discovered and, by September 2003, Yemen was loudly protesting a Saudi initiative to erect a physical barrier consisting of an $8.5 billion concrete-filled pipeline raised three metres above the ground and embellished with an electronic surveillance system. Yemen angrily reminded her neighbour that the Jeddah Treaty had clearly stipulated a neutral thirteen-kilometre zone on either side of the border to allow for tribal to-ing and fro-ing and livestock grazing. With only seventy-five kilometres of wall in place, construction was halted. Both sides did then agree to set up watch-towers and regular patrols, but the problem was still unresolved.

By late 2008, Saudi Arabia’s efficient hounding and rounding up of its jihadists since 9/11 had sent many fleeing straight across the border into Yemen where they seemed to be injecting a new vigour into Yemen’s al-Qaeda cell, and Yemeni drug-smugglers had never had it so good. Furthermore, Yemeni sheikhs whose tribal lands straddled the border were exacerbating the situation. In March 2009, for example, an army of tribesmen near the western end of the border closed one of the busiest crossings to all Saudi vehicles; they were demanding the right to work in Saudi Arabia according to the preferential terms of an agreement signed between their sheikh’s grandfather and the first Saudi king.
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Small wonder that the bulk of Saudi Arabia’s armed forces have long been concentrated in the south of the country, within striking distance of the Yemeni border, or that by mid-2009 the Saudis were identifying Yemen as their most pressing internal security threat
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and allocating approximately $2.5 billion to the erection of a border system involving radar, surveillance cameras and hi-tech communications as well as physical barriers.
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I was a long way from that border, in the Hadhramaut port of Mukalla, at the time of the
Eid al-Adha
holidays in December 2007, when I felt closest to Saudi Arabia and the other oil-rich Gulf States. Mukalla has fared much better than Marib from its oil wealth. Its shops and banks and currency exchanges, busy late into the night, were teeming with prosperous-looking young men dressed in jeans, T-shirts, trainers and baseball caps, rather than
in futas
and head cloths. Many were oil workers from the nearby Masila field, currently by far the most productive in Yemen. Others were migrant workers from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, back home for the holidays. Mukalla is now a lively seaside resort with an elegant corniche and some large luxury hotels, popular with wealthy Sanaanis. In addition to its oil wealth, a new law providing for the restitution of land to its former owners fuelled an extraordinary property boom in the town after unification. The unsettled time that followed - the first Gulf War in which Yemen’s perceived siding with Saddam Hussein against the West and Saudi Arabia led to the Kingdom expelling some 800,000 Yemenis - had given Saudi Hadhramis another strong incentive to own a patch of their own homeland. Thousands had got busy buying plots of land they had never even seen and erecting buildings they hoped never to have to inhabit, clinching the deals by fax and telephone. Between 1990 and 1994 the town had tripled in size.
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The pace of growth slowed dramatically after 1994. Because the leader of the secessionist south, Ali Salim al-Bidh, was a Hadhrami, the punishment meted out to the region in the form of a heavy northern military presence was more onerous than that experienced elsewhere in the south. Used to a measure of self-government and proud of its separate traditions, Hadhramaut was suddenly on a far tighter leash. The Hadhrami charged with housing and land distribution around Mukalla, for example, was pressurized by the region’s new northern highlander governor to parcel out plots to northerners from the army and security services, and was fired after only two months when he failed to comply. Resentment towards the northern conquerors mounted when it became known that local land was being brazenly requisitioned for use in settling northern highlander feuds.
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Another important reason why, to Sanaa’s way of thinking, Hadhramaut had to be closely watched and shielded from undue Saudi influence was because it was home to the richest oil field in the country, which was also placed firmly under northern control. As military commander of Hadhramaut, one of President Salih’s uncles was well placed to assume the responsibility - or rather, commandeer the contract - for providing security for the foreign oil companies, a move which deeply antagonised Hadhramis who had been performing the task perfectly adequately before the war.
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Much of northern Yemenis’ distrust of Hadhramis and their close links with their diaspora in Saudi Arabia is attributable to the conviction that the Kingdom remains as powerfully involved in Yemen’s affairs, as implacably hostile to their Republican regime in Sanaa, as it was during the 1960s. There is also an irrational but powerful feeling of injustice. Why should Allah have poured out his blessings on a group of primitive Bedouin with no rich and ancient history and no special mention in the Koran to boast of? Why should everything have come up roses for Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states and everything have turned to ashes for Yemen? How was it that in spite of their human-rights record and disdain for democracy, Saudi Arabia was still respected and considered in the affairs of the western world while poor Yemen was ignored and despised? For Yemenis it was a clear case of bad luck and the world’s double standards, a fine illustration of the proverb, ‘if a rich man ate a snake, they would say it was because of his wisdom; if a poor man ate it, they would say it was because of his stupidity’.

Hundreds of thousands of Yemeni migrant workers in Saudi Arabia before 1990 swallowed their tribesmen’s pride - it was
ayb
, shameful, for a tribesman to toil with his hands - and slaved for the Saudis as household servants or building-site labourers. Now, with the visa regime much tighter and plenty of cheaper non-Arab migrant labour to be had from Bangladesh and the Philippines, from people who can be relied on to steer clear of jihadism and go home when the work runs out, Yemeni guest workers are not as welcome in any of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries as they were in the 1970s and ’80s. In fact, the six GCC states - Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Oman - feel about as keen to include Yemen in their economic zone as many Europeans feel about welcoming Turkey into the European Union. They foresee their labour markets being inundated by Yemenis who earn an average of $900 a year to their $35,000,
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by people who - according to the crude popular stereotype -live for qat and guns and jihad. Only Saudi Arabia, increasingly alarmed by the spectre of Yemen collapsing into chaos, is said to be torn between wanting to keep Yemen cordoned off behind the latest thing in electronic border barriers and well away from the GCC, and recognising that the best way to defuse the Yemeni ticking time-bomb would be to open its borders and labour market to allow young Yemenis a means of earning a living.
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Yemenis deeply resent the fact that their wealthy neighbours are not helping to alleviate their poverty in a decent and constructive fashion by employing enough of them or by investing in Yemeni industry, while still feeling entitled to throw their weight around. ‘The Saudis treat Yemen as their back yard,’ one Sanaani political analyst complained to me, claiming that it suited Saudi Arabia to maintain Yemen at a debilitating level of poverty and instability rather than to assist its sustainable development. He reminded me how, ever since the time of Imam Yahya with whom relations had been cool thanks to the disputed ownership of Asir, Najran and Jizan, the Saudis had undermined Yemen’s sovereignty and eroded the integrity of its tribal order by paying thousands of Yemeni sheikhs generous annual stipends. ‘We have 9,000 sheikhs in Yemen, and about 6,000 of them have been receiving money, Saudi riyals in cash, from the Special Office which is headed by one of the crown princes, with no banks, no records involved,’ he told me. ‘The late Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar of the Hashid Federation, for example, was receiving 3.5 million dollars a month,’ he continued. ‘Although Yemenis hate Saudis, the Saudis know how to spread their influence by their wealth - they have corrupted everything in Yemen.’

While I could understand why the Saudis might be subsidising independence-minded southerners in the vague hope of one day being rewarded with a pipeline through Hadhramaut, I could not see what they gained by pouring millions of riyals into the bottomless pit of Yemen’s northern highland tribes. ‘Maybe the Saudis are paying off the tribes now,’ my informant reasoned, ‘in the hope that one day, when the south is ready to secede from the north again, they’ll be able to pay them to stay home instead of fighting for President Salih and unity, and then - finally - the Saudis will have their oil pipeline through Hadhramaut and they’ll be able to ignore the Jeddah Treaty.’

As far as the West was concerned however, Saudi Arabia’s most baneful influence on Yemen was not this murky meddling but the spread of its Sunni Wahhabi Islam since al-Hamdi opened the door to it back in the mid-1970s, desperate for funding for education and a counterweight to the south’s Marxism. By 1994 a devout Zaydi politician was publicly lamenting its deplorable effects on Yemen: ‘Wahhabism is a child of [Saudi] imperialism and its spearhead in our country. Both are one and the same thing. How do we stand up to an enemy we don’t see? We are seeing imperialism in our country in its Islamic guise. In reality, we are fighting something which is more dangerous than imperialism.’
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He was right. The spread of Wahhabism toYemen would not matter so much if not for the fact that - put very simply - global jihadism of the al-Qaeda kind is Saudi Wahhabism reinforced and made more intolerant by Salafism and finally rationalised into violence by fury at the West’s unjust handling of the Palestine question and disgust at the hypocritical manner in which the Kingdom’s Wahhabi religious establishment has tolerated the impious excesses of the royal family and the trampling of Islam’s Holy Places by infidel army boots since the first Gulf War.
^c

The relationship between global jihadism and Saudi Wahhabism has been uncomfortably clear since 9/11, but with implications that look far more serious for Yemen than for Saudi Arabia. It is yet another sad case of ‘If a rich man ate a snake, they would say it was because of his wisdom; if a poor man ate it, they would say it was because of his stupidity’; Wahhabism might not have done wealthy Saudi Arabia much good but it could prove catastrophic for poor Yemen. Unlike its rich neighbour, Yemen cannot afford to neutralise its spreading jihadist threat with lavishly funded re-education programmes and an inexhaustible supply of houses, new cars and wives. If Yemen is fast breeding jihadists, it is not because radical Islam has a special appeal for Yemenis, or because violence and intolerance are in their blood, but in large part because jihadist groups can afford to pay adherents who have no other means of earning a living.

In the middle of Tarim, a famous old town in the Wadi Hadhramaut, is an open-air eatery purveying stringy chicken and rice at dented tin tables spread with striped plastic sheeting. A plague of starving kittens and qat-sellers hugging bundles of qat the size of sleeping toddlers, wrapped in damp towels for freshness, only add to the place’s charm. Popular with the trickle of western tourists who still risk travelling the road east from Marib across the desert to see the town’s hundreds of mosques and now derelict mansions built by generations of cosmopol-itan and entrepreneurial Hadhrami
sayyias
, I noted on my second visit in late 2007 that it was also attracting groups of young men who were neither tourists nor Yemenis, nor even Arabs to judge by their clothes and the language they spoke.

Dressed in
futas
and plastic sandals but also long jacket-style cotton shirts with mandarin collars and pill-box hats, they turned out to be Indonesians who had journeyed all the way from Jakarta to Hadhramaut to immerse themselves in the language and meaning of the Koran. One of them told me that the local
madrassah
they were attending - the Dar al-Mustafa - had become famous among Muslims the world over since its opening in 1993, after the demise of the godless PDRY. Recalling not only Hadhramis centuries-old habit of sailing away to seek their fortunes and preach Islam in south-east Asia, I also recalled al-Qaeda’s links with jihadist movements in that region, with Indonesia’s Jemaah Islamiyah, for example. Hadhramaut’s remoteness from any power centre and yet openness to the outside world seemed to render it ideally suited to hosting an international terrorist network and there was no denying the fact that the locations of some of al-Qaeda’s goriest triumphs - the explosion of Saudi Arabia’s Khobar Towers in 1996, the East African embassy bombings in 1998, the attack on the USS
Cole
in 2000, the bombing of the Bali nightclub in October 2002 - perfectly mirrored the nineteenth and early twentieth century reach of the Hadhrami diaspora. That was surely more than coincidental, as was the fact that the three leaders of Indonesia’s Jemaah Islamiyah were all Afghan War veterans of Hadhrami descent.
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In short, it seemed to me thoroughly likely that if those Indonesian youths were the sort of Muslims I suspected they were then Hadhramaut, occasionally pinpointed by the media as bin Laden’s ‘ancestral homeland’, might be even more accurately described as al-Qaeda Central, its true and natural hidden heart.

But the longer I spent happily chatting to them, the harder it was to imagine that those friendly youths had come to sleepy, dusty Tarim to nourish their minds and hearts on hatred for people like me and dreams of martyrdom. Nevertheless, I told myself, appearances in Yemen could be more than usually deceptive, so I went in search of their Dar al-Mustafa madrassah on the rapidly expanding eastern outskirts of town. A large, two-storey complex of buildings, it had a fine green dome, a high white minaret and a conspicuously self-respecting air about it. A doorman swiftly summoned a British Muslim of Pakistani origin, a former graphic design student from Manchester named Zafran, to attend to me.

Impressively serene and courteous, Zafran revealed that he had come to Tarim in search of the biggest question of all: what are we doing here on Earth? With this goal in mind and before embarking on a three-year course in the traditional Islamic sciences of Jurisprudence, Arabic Grammar, Theology, Hadith (the sayings of the Prophet) and Sciences of the Heart, he had spent eighteen months learning Arabic. Tactfully anticipating my big question, he explained that the college was Sufi in its teachings and therefore had nothing to do with Salafism, whether of moderate or the jihadist variety. Under the supervision of its revered dean, a Hadhrami
sayyid
of venerable lineage named
Habib
Omar al-Hafiz, the Dar al-Mustafa was not engaged in training suicide bombers but missionaries, men who would return to their Muslim homelands with Islam’s real message of love and peace in their hearts. ‘We don’t have to show the world what Islam is any more,’ Zafran declared. ’We have to show people what
true
Islam is.’ Clearly, the Dar al-Mustafa’s richly cosmopolitan mix of students and graduates represented no threat whatsoever to either Yemeni or world peace. I subsequently discovered that President Salih had not only turned a blind eye to its reverence for Sufi learning and
sayyid
lineage - the latter an elitist affront to a Republican of his tribal origins - but even conferred his blessing on its peaceful work by honouring it with a visit or two.

On the whole, however, Salih’s record in combating the spread of jihadism in the vital but delicate area of religious education has greatly disappointed Washington. Although a reasonably good start was made in January 2002 when the PSO rounded up and deported some six hundred suspicious foreigners studying in madrassas, the momentum soon stalled. A declaration of intent that schools of all levels teach a moderate form of Islam from a standardised curriculum was not implemented and nor was a new scheme for closer supervision of Yemen’s 72,000 mosques. A 2004 survey conducted by the ministry of religious endowment revealed that the vast majority of imams were still unlicensed to preach and that as few as one in twelve mosques were supervised.
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By 2005 the prime minister was having to admit to a gathering of education officials that an estimated 330,000 Yemeni children in some 4,000 unlicensed ‘underground’ religious schools were still being nourished on violent hatred of the West and Jews, on doctrines that would ‘bring a disaster to Yemen and this generation’.
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Three years later, one in five of those schools was still escaping scrutiny.
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In Washington’s view the picture was bleaker still in the more immediately relevant area of higher education. Two of the Wahhabi world’s most revered and influential Salafists - Sheikh Moqbel al-Wadei and Sheikh Abd al-Majid al-Zindani - were Yemenis. Just as Osama bin Laden would do, Sheikh Moqbel al-Wadei had broken away from the Saudi religious establishment in the late 1970s, puritanically objecting to its symbiotic relationship with the Saudi royals. Back in Yemen he felt freer to propagate his message of hatred for Christians and Jews and warn his disciples not to sully themselves by participating in the democracy that President Salih started building after 1990. By the time he died, in July 2001, al-Wadei had established a network of six madrassahs with thousands of students between them, all over Yemen. The first and largest, Dar al-Hadith, was located near Yemen’s northwestern border with Saudi Arabia, at Dammaj, and was exciting the attention of western intelligence agencies before 9/11. It was known that many of its graduates were imbibing a hatred for the West there before graduating to the liveliest battle-fronts of the Islam versus West confrontation - Afghanistan, Bosnia, Tajikistan, Algeria, Chechnya.
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John Walker Lindh, the ‘American Taliban’ arrested in Afghanistan in 2001, had studied at Dammaj. However, al-Wadei’s personal antipathy towards Osama bin Laden and disapproval of his global jihad as well as his complete lack of interest in politics seem to have secured the president’s protection of his schools.

By far the better known of Yemen’s two great Saudi-trained Salafists is the flaming red-bearded octogenarian Sheikh Abdul Majid al-Zindani. A pharmacist by training who has devoted his life to proving that science and Islam were compatible by identifying Koranic references to such phenomena as black holes and photosynthesis, al-Zindani also claims that students of his al-Iman University in Sanaa had proved that the coccyx - the origin of all human life, according to the Koran - is indestructible, and that God has helped him to the discovery of a herbal cure for HIV/AIDS - ‘Eajaz-3’.
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A household name in Yemen long before he opened his university, al-Zindani began his august career in Yemen in the mid-1970s when the popular President al-Hamdi welcomed him home from Saudi Arabia, appointed him the country’s chief religious authority and gave him a free hand to promote Saudi Wahhabism as a prophylactic against the PDRY’s Marxism. By the early 1980s al-Zindani - always a fervent enemy of Marxism - was in Saudi Arabia, acting as an important link in the chain of people engaged in steering both Yemeni and Saudi youths towards the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. The early 1990s found him back in Yemen, however, helpfully championing the cause of the north against the infidel Marxist south and mediating between Salih and the Afghan War veterans. Salih appreciated having him on his side, helping to uphold Yemen’s unity, but he was a loose cannon. In the aftermath of 9/11 al-Zindani preached that President Bush had conspired with Jews to attack his own World Trade Center. No wiser a year later, he appeared on Egyptian television waving an AK-47 around while describing Bush as the infidel governor of Muslim lands.
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The ‘War on Terror’ was already in its third year by the time the US Treasury Department and the United Nations felt they had gathered enough evidence to rebrand this Yemeni national treasure a ‘Specially Designated Global Terrorist’. According to their information al-Zindani had fundraised and bought arms for al-Qaeda and acted as one of the movement’s spiritual mentors and even, it emerged later, had a hand in selecting the attackers of the USS
Cole.
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For his part, al-Zindani admitted to having met bin Laden in Jeddah in the early 1980s and to collaborating with him to ensure a steady supply of Saudi Arabian and Yemeni jihadists to Afghanistan in accordance with US foreign policy at the time, but he has refused to either own or disown any subsequent or current contact with the world’s most wanted terrorist. Annoyed by rumours that al-Zindani’s Al-Iman University was packed with jihadists and bristling with weapons, Salih characteristically refrained from directly confronting al-Zindani head-on by sending in the troops. Instead, he informed al-Zindani that, since he had decided to honour the establishment with his presence at its annual graduation ceremony that year, his bodyguards would naturally be conducting a routine but thorough search of the whole campus. Unsurprisingly, nothing was found and Salih went on to score points with his people in early 2006 by boldly vouching for the colourful cleric on television, insisting that he was ‘a rational, balanced and moderate man’, that he knew him well and could ‘guarantee his character’.
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Confident of support from both Salih and elements of the Saudi religious establishment, al-Zindani noisily lambasted Washington for trying ‘to dry up the springs of Islam’ instead of just tackling terrorism
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and for blackening his name as it had blackened Saddam Hussein’s by alleging he was hiding weapons of mass destruction. But he settled back into his role as a loyal supporter of Salih, confining his political activities to taking a rigidly conservative line on matters involving the curtailment of women’s freedoms. In early 2008, for example, he was gathering 2,000 Salafists and powerful conservative tribesmen at his university for a conference aimed at inaugurating a ‘Commission for the Propagation of Vice and Virtue’ - a religious police force like Saudi Arabia’s feared al-Mutawaah. In the spring of 2009, when Yemen’s parliament voted in favour of setting a legal minimum age at which girls can be married (of seventeen), al-Zindani issued a fatwa against any age restriction.

Funded by various Gulf State and Saudi Arabian donors but resembling a hurriedly erected refugee camp or an army barracks, al-Zindani’s university occupies a large hill on the scruffily unfashionable northern edge of Sanaa. Alongside its neat rows of Nissen-style huts, it boasts a mosque that looks like a windowless out-of-town superstore. On the day I drove around it in the friendly company of a minder picked up at the gated entrance, I saw only one student, an African. The only two journalists, both Yemenis, to have been granted permission to research feature articles about the place discovered that the foreign students who made up a tiny fraction of the student body - roughly 150 out of 4,650 in 2007 - tended to be more inclined towards jihadism than the vast majority of their Yemeni counterparts.
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