Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (26 page)

The economic gulf separating Saudi Arabia and Yemen, which enabled the former to run a lavish and reasonably efficient re-education for its jihadist delinquents while the latter had had to abandon the effort, might have been the most salient difference between the countries and an important reason why jihadism was on the rise rather than waning in Yemen, but it was not the only one. Saudi Arabia was a functioning state, governed in its entirety to the satisfaction of a substantial portion of its population. Yemen, by contrast, was a chronically malfunctioning entity, patchily governed with the acquiescence and to the satisfaction of a rapidly shrinking percentage of its population, home to two domestic insurgencies as well as al-Qaeda by the end of 2009.

^a
Frankincense, also known as olimbanum, was used in worship by both pagans and monotheists for millennia. It is the resin of the hardy
Boswellia sacra
tree which thrives in south Arabia.

^b
Devastating floods in October 2008 killed a number of beekeepers and destroyed some 37,000 beehives in the Wadi Doan (
Yemen Times
, 17–19 November 2008).

^c
All US troops in Saudi Arabia were withdrawn after thirteen years, in 2003.

^d
Abu Bakar Bashir, Abdullah Sungkar and Jafar Umar Thalib.

^e
Typically, Hadhrami family names begin with ‘ba’.

After a fine lunch in the air-conditioned sanctuary of the Aden Hotel, we were all behaving as if we were off on a jaunt to the seaside. But we were headed to Radfan, a sharp thorn in the side of the British in Aden back in the 1960s, a hotbed of the souths renewed bid for secession from Sanaa half a century later in the spring of 2008.

Squeezed tightly together on the back seat of the luxury Land Cruiser so that I could be decently segregated in the front passenger seat, my three male companions joked and laughed and ordered the driver to turn up the air-conditioning. One last fiddle with the controls, and we were off. Through the sleepy baked centre of Aden we sped in our refrigerator on wheels, its tinted windows protecting us from the blinding white sunlight and the dazzle off the Arabian Sea which was visible to our right in the gaps between apartment blocks and new government buildings hung with outsize portraits of President Salih. Round the English-made roundabouts we went on past Crater, the extinct volcano heart of Aden with its neat grid of British-built streets where FLOSY and the NLF had slugged it out and Mad Mitch’s Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders had bagpiped a temporary conquest, past the British-built blocks of Maalla where British servicemen had once lived.

At last I was feeling free to discard the black scarf I had been wearing in token Benazir Bhutto style for weeks in Sanaa. Traces of Aden’s British and Marxist times gone by, when women had felt free to study, work and go out alone and unveiled, had been fading fast since the north tightened the union of the two Yemens following the war of 1994, but they were still not completely erased, and the sea views helped. Even northerners found it easier to breathe, to relax, here in Aden. Sanaa’s
jeunesse dorée
with time on their hands and money to burn were in the habit of racing down in their Land Cruisers from their highland eagle’s nest of a capital to let their hair (and themselves) down by drinking and clubbing and going to the beach. The acme of comfort in British times, the old Crescent Hotel, had weathered the immediate post-Marxist period as a brothel but was now scheduled for a makeover.

The owner of our Land Cruiser and so the de facto leader of our expedition was a military psychiatrist but also a wealthy émigré businessman whose Emirates passport seemed to be no obstacle to his continuing to act as a sheikh of his gigantic Yafai tribe by dispensing largesse and political advice and influence. Impressively attired in a striped business shirt with cufflinks,
a futa
worn like a bath-towel around his wide girth, flip-flops, gold-rimmed spectacles and a tribal head-cloth, Dr Mundai al-Affifi was instantly likeable. The initiator of the expedition was Ahmad bin Ferid, a serious young journalist and a scion of the former ruling family of the once restive Upper Aulaqi Sheikdom which bordered on Dr al-Affifi’s Lower Yafai. Our third travelling companion, described to me by Dr al-Affifi as a ‘prominent citizen of Aden’, turned out to be the proprietor of Aden’s oldest bookshop.

Safe in my bag was another
tasrih
to travel outside the city, obtained from a policeman who forbore from refusing my request on the grounds that I should have applied at least twenty-four hours in advance and instead smiled and said, ‘If it is God’s will I want you to visit Radfan because it’s my home.’ As he handed me the permit, he had added with an odd mixture of pride and regret, ‘Of course, you know that we in Radfan started the revolution against you British imperialists back in the sixties?’ In theory, a
tasrih
was all I needed, but if I was right in thinking that Salih regarded the southern secessionist movement as the most dangerous snake’s head he had to dance on simply because he cherished the 1990 union of the two Yemens as the proudest and most concrete achievement of his thirty years in power, I thought I had better secure some extra insurance. A verbal laissez-passer from Yemen’s minister for local administration, whom I encountered in the lobby of the Aden Hotel would do, I had decided. Rather to my surprise, the kindly official had not been able to think of any good reason why I should not visit Radfan. Saada, at the opposite end of the country, near the Saudi border, where an on-off war had been in progress since the summer of 2004, was completely out of bounds and, thanks to jihadist activity, Marib could not be visited without an armed police escort, and the situation in Hadhramaut changed from week to week for the same reason, but Radfan should be all right, he thought. Anyway, I was welcome to call him on his mobile if I had any problems.

So unworried was he by my plan, I almost doubted my calculation that southern secessionism was giving President Salih many more sleepless nights than third-generation jihadists or even another flare-up of the troubles in the north. Although completely unrelated to its southern counterpart, the so-called al-Huthi rebellion in Saada resembled the southern insurgency in two important respects. Both groups of rebels had identified the regime as their enemy and both disturbances had deep roots in the past. If the southern uprising harked back to British times, the al-Huthi one had reawakened animosities last aired in the Royalist versus Republican civil war of the 1960s. In both cases, Salih had tried to work his old magic with promises and gifts and flattery and dividing and ruling and compromise but it had failed, in very much the same way as it was also failing to bring the third-generation jihadists of AQAP to heel. Because the two unrelated insurgencies were snakes’ heads he could not dance on he had resorted to the only other strategy he knew: force. If thousands of lives had already been lost in the north-west since the first outbreak of fighting in the north-west in 2004, the First Saada War as it was known, thirteen southern lives had been lost, four of them in Radfan, by the end of 2007 and the trouble showed every sign of escalating.

I soon discovered that all three of my cheerful companions as well as the managing editor of Aden’s
Al-Ayyam
newspaper whom I had met that morning shared a passionate conviction that unless the outside world was swiftly apprised of the heavy-handed manner in which Salih was tackling southern discontent there would soon be another civil war. It was a while before I understood that they were working on the badly mistaken assumption that if I was sufficiently interested in Yemeni affairs to ignore the travel advice of my own government, then I must be engaged on an important clandestine mission for that government, and therefore ideally placed to convey their alarm to the West. Together, they had calculated that if I could only witness the tensions in Radfan with my own eyes, surely powerful men in London would listen to my account of the situation, sympathise with their plight, support their liberation struggle, and influence powerful men in Washington to do the same. I realised I was witnessing a perfect example of what the foremost historian of the British capture of Aden, Gordon Waterfield, identified as ‘the eternal surge of Arab optimism’, but anxious as I was to explore Aden’s hinterland I did nothing to dispel their delusion.

It was still early afternoon when our car slid to a smooth halt at the first checkpoint on the edge of town and I produced my
tasrih
for perusal, and we waited, and waited, watching qat wads the size of golf balls swell in the cheeks of the soldiers, until suddenly the mood changed. Suddenly, they were yanking open the back door of the car, yelling at us to hand over our identity documents and mobile phones, pushing and shoving at my companions. Ahmad bin Ferid, the bookseller and I suffered in silence but Dr al-Affifi gave as good as he got, bellowing back, clasping his hands to the hilt
of his jambiyah
which was tightly lodged along with his mobile phone and Emirates passport in the rolled waistband of his
futa
, roaring at them: ‘I’m the sheikh of the Yafai tribe! Get your hands OFF me! RESPECT ME!’

To my surprise, they backed away from him, disappearing with a haul of only three mobiles, some identity cards and my passport. Badly shaken by his manhandling, sweating into his elegant shirt, Dr al-Affifi pointed out that this was typical barbarian, thuggish northern Yemeni behaviour, that this was precisely why southerners‘ patience was running out, this was why there would soon be war. ’Now you’ve seen for yourself what’s happening here! Let’s see what will happen next!’ He was anxiously ensuring that our stories would tally under interrogation when the soldiers returned, commanded my companions to squeeze up again and shoved a qat-chewing young cadet and his gun onto the back seat beside them. A Toyota pick-up loaded with a mounted gun and a posse of soldiers swerved to a halt in front of us. A few minutes later, still minus our documents and most of our mobile phones, we were ordered to follow it back to Aden. On the way Dr al-Affifi raged at the skinny youth. After confirming that the boy was a tribesman, he lectured him angrily about it being
’ayV -
a shameful mark of dishonour according to the tribal code - to treat a sheikh and a foreigner in this fashion.

I was more disturbed by the loss of my passport than by the cadet’s lack of tribal manners. I was also concerned for my companions’ safety, recalling young Ahmad bin Ferid telling me that his articles on the subject of southern discontent had already landed him in serious trouble. Six months earlier plain-clothes security men had bundled him into a police car and repeatedly punched him in the stomach before dumping him in the stony wilderness far outside Aden, to make his way back as best he could. To press home his point, he had proceeded to show me pictures on his mobile phone of a bare bloodstained back with
a jambiyah
buried in it, up to the hilt. Claiming that a dispute over land ownership had pitted this luckless southerner against seven carloads of well-armed northerners, he told me that it had taken two doctors to hold the victim down and three attempts by a third to remove that weapon. The picture, along with one of a crowd of the victim’s fellow tribesmen rallied in protest outside the hospital, had been reproduced in all its colourfully gory detail on the front page of that day’s edition of his newspaper
.
While I had nothing to fear from the fall-out of our aborted expedition, its repercussions for my friends might be worse than serious, I realised, as we arrived back at almost exactly the point we had started out from, the police compound directly opposite the Aden Hotel.

A PSO officer in
fiita
and flip-flops sauntered towards us, grinning. He had our passports and mobiles in his hands but no explanation. We were not about to be interrogated and my companions would not be tortured. In fact, we were free to leave, though not to Radfan, of course, and he was confiscating Dr al-Affifi’s car. Deflated and overheated, Dr al-Affifi and I made for the cool of the lobby of the Aden Hotel. Flopping into one of its plush sofas, he tossed his headgear onto the seat beside him in a gesture of resignation that instantly demoted him from a mighty sheikh to a weary businessman. Within a few minutes, however, a surprising sequel to our mini drama was restoring him to his sheikhly dignity and offering me a rare view of Yemen’s tribal inner workings. One after another he began fielding a flood of calls from Yafai tribesmen up country, from Sanaa, from members of the substantial Yafai diaspora in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, even from the United States. There was some excited discussion about mounting a protest at our treatment by rallying Yafai tribesmen to close the road through their territory to any army or police vehicle.

Small wonder those policemen had tried to confiscate Dr al-Affifi’s mobile phone, I thought; he had an army at his instant command. Here was ample justification for President Salih’s unorthodox style of ruling, for his custom of dancing rather than stamping on the heads of his snakes. What real choice did he have when a single word from a very wealthy émigré like Dr al-Affifi was all it would take for thousands of well-armed tribesmen to rise up and sever a main artery linking south to north, to effectively destroy Yemen’s unity by creating a fact on the ground? Dr al-Affifi wisely refrained from saying that single word; he feared the loss of his Emirates citizenship if he was branded a serious trouble-maker in Yemen. ‘No, no,’ he was telling all his callers, ‘no need for action, thank you - I just hope they return my car.’ A few days later a couple of state-owned newspapers printed articles about the incident, alleging that I was a British spy, intent on stirring up trouble in the south and reasserting British influence over the area, but I was safely back in London by the time I heard about them. Less than a month later, however, President Salih cracked down hard on southern separatism for the second time. If a few months earlier, in late 2007, an angry rash of demonstrations had been broken up by riot police with tear gas, live ammunition and thirteen deaths, there were now tanks on the streets and mass arrests of almost three hundred secessionists. The corpulent Adeni bookseller was among those rounded up in the middle of the night, but he was released after questioning. Young Ahmed bin Ferid was not so lucky. Along with the elderly leader of the movement, a Hadhrami from Mukalla named Hassan ba-Oom, whom I had also briefly encountered in the lobby of the Aden Hotel shortly before departing on our aborted expedition to Radfan, he was thrown into a Sanaa jail.
^a