Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (28 page)

The desperate voices of southerners clamouring to be released from union with Sanaa reached a crescendo in the spring of 2009 with the news that Tariq al-Fadhli had switched allegiances. In a clear break with his paymaster in Sanaa, he was openly championing independence for the south. Referring to a new state called not South Yemen but ‘South Arabia’, he was turning his back on his Yemeni identity and the ghost of the old PDRY to recall the stillborn ’Federation of South Arabia’ which the retreating British had tried to bring about, complete with its flag, its army and its national anthem. Addressing a mass of protestors waving old PDRY flags, at a mass rally in Zinjibar and in an interview with Aden’s
al-Ayyam
he boldly declared that united Yemen, President Salih’s proudest legacy, ‘was born deformed, grew up disabled and now is thankfully buried’.
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I was not surprised to hear of his volte-face. If none of the Fadhlis I had met - not old Sultan Nasir, nor Ahmad, nor Tariq, nor Walid the mercenary - had actively denounced the union of the two Yemens, they had left me in little doubt of their dismay at its practical implementation. I vividly recalled Tariq’s ominous recital at our last meeting: ‘We came to the voice of the power, and we returned without any snakes even … And those who knew they already had their snakes clasped them closer.’ Suddenly, with Tariq championing the cause, the Southern Mobility Movement seemed to be acquiring what it had sorely lacked for the three years of its existence: a leader of charisma and energy, to say nothing of a reputation for bravery. On the other hand, that same jihadist background as well as his alliance with Salih in the 1994 war and his willingness to take Salih’s gold for the past fifteen years might count against him, not to mention complaints that he had sold a lot of tribal land to northerners. Ideally, the movement needed a leader without a jihadist, or a Marxist, or a Yemeni unionist, or an exile past, but with Yemen’s last Marxist leader, the Hadhrami Ali Salim al-Bidh who had recently removed from an exile in Oman to another in Austria also offering himself for the position, the choice of candidates seemed uncommonly limited. At around the same time, my companion in trouble at the Aden checkpoint, Dr al-Affifi, excitedly called me from Saudi Arabia late one night to inform me that members of his own mighty Yafai tribe had been badgering him to step into the breach. Some were claiming that no single leader of the movement had emerged, not for lack of discipline or decently trustworthy candidates, but because of a reasonable fear that such a leader would be assassinated - mostly likely in a ‘car accident’ - the instant he made himself known.

Nevertheless, Tariq al-Fadhli was in the forefront of the liveliest secessionist activities over the summer. Within days of his turncoating there was violence in Radfan over the siting of a new military checkpoint, but the Fadhli capital of Zinjibar was bristling with soldiers and more checkpoints and Tariq under siege in his fortress home on the roundabout. A week later, with a death toll of eight, including security personnel, and eight southern newspapers, including
Al-Ayyam
, forced to stop printing, international human rights organisations were in full cry, but not so foreign governments. When the United States issued a boldly unequivocal statement of support for Yemeni unity and Saudi Arabia and the Emirates followed suit, it was clear that no matter how justified and aggravated the southerners‘ grievances, Yemen’s integrity as a bulwark against the spread of jihadism came first in the minds of the outside world. The fear was that AQAP would hitch its star to the secessionists’ wagon, adding its own weight to the centrifugal forces tearing Yemen apart, before stepping in to take charge.

Sure enough, the leader of AQAP, Nasir al-Wahayshi, issued an Internet declaration of support for the southern independence movement: ‘Injustice, oppression and tyranny should not be practised in the name of unity,’ it said, ‘We in the al-Qaeda network support what you are doing; your rejection of oppression practised against you and others, your fight against the government and your defending yourself.’
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But it cautioned southern separatists against making plans to set up either another Marxist state or a democracy with political parties because ’such parties give our
umma
nothing but disunity, subordination and submission to the enemies’. An Islamic state governed by sharia law was the answer to all the south’s problems,
¹¹
al-Wahayshi claimed.

However, there were no signs that common cause had been made or any alliance established between any of the three movements, a fact which might have reassured Yemen’s western allies but was no comfort at all to President Salih. On 21 May 2009, the eve of the nineteenth anniversary of unification, Yemen’s president issued a terrible warning couched in an apocalyptic vision of the country’s near future. If people set the ball of national fragmentation rolling, catastrophe would surely ensue: ‘You will be towns, sub-districts and statelets and there will be door to door fighting. No street will be safe and there will be no airplanes flying in the air or boats at sea coming to or leaving from Yemen.’
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Thanks to neighbouring Somalia, the words ‘failed’ and ‘state’ were already being linked in Yemen, but there was little agreement about how that failure would come about or how catastrophic it would be for most Yemenis, given the hardiness of tribal structures and the fact that especially the majority northern Yemenis had long been accustomed to relying on themselves rather than any state for their needs. For some time, both domestic and foreign observers of Yemen’s political landscape had been agreeing that in order to stand a chance of preserving the country’s integrity, Salih would have, in the words of one Sanaani political analyst, to ‘accept a level of decentralisation he’s not even contemplating at the moment’. Some thought eight different regional entities joined in a Yemeni federation would work, others that twenty-one would be more realistic.

But it might already be too late for such finely calibrated compromises. While north and south are two obvious entities, there remains a question over whether Hadhramaut would want to go it alone too. Southern secessionists optimistically insisted to me that Hadhramaut would not because it would have to employ an army of mercenaries to defend itself - ‘Hadhramis make business, not war’, I was told - but there remains the question of Saudi Arabia’s interest in a corridor to the ocean. For Salih the stakes are far higher than they were in 1994. Most of the country’s remaining oil reserves and a brand new $4 billion gas liquefaction plant, which he is too optimistically assuming he will be able to rely on for revenue when the oil runs out, are located in the south. There are some who argue that a four-way fragmentation of the state on the simple basis of economic viability is the most likely scenario: Sanaa, the northern highlands and northern Tihama with the port of Hodeidah would continue to be run by the Saudi-subsidised northern highlander tribes; Hadhramaut would be bankrolled by Saudi Hadhramis; the wealthy southern Yemeni diaspora in the Gulf States - people like my friend, Dr al-Affifi - would subsidise Aden and its hinterland; Yemen’s only industrial giant, the Taiz-based Hayel Saeed conglomerate, powerful both as an employer and as a source of charity, would effectively underwrite the central southern highlands.

In the late summer of 2009 the sixth Saada war broke out. Sanaa’s launch of the unambiguously named Operation Scorched Earth‘ began with the collapse of the year-old ceasefire Salih had announced and a rocketing of Abdul Malik al-Huthi’s headquarters in Saada. At last the complicated and obscure conflict began registering on the Richter scale of international news, thanks to international aid agencies’ warnings that the Saada situation was a humanitarian disaster in the making, as well as to counterterrorism agencies’ opinings that Yemen’s increasingly hospitable chaos was guaranteed to attract jihadists from all over the Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan and East Africa. By November the conflict had spilled over into Saudi Arabia with Saudi jets obliging Sanaa by bombing al-Huthi-held villages. Fears of the obscure domestic insurgency escalating into into a dangerous regional proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran looked increasingly justified. The regime in Sanaa irritated its counterpart in Tehran by renaming the capital’s Iran Street after Neda Agha Soltan, the young girl student killed at a rally to protest against the outcome of Iran’s June elections, while Iran retailiated by naming one its thoroughfares The Martyrs of Saada Street. Against the looming background fear of Iran’s imminent acquisition of a nuclear weapon, the United States and all the GCC were at pains to reiterate their support for Yemen’s integrity under Salih’s rule, and overlooked his highly dubious presentation of both al-Huthi and southern insurgencies as additional fronts in the old ’War on Terror’.

Alarmed that Tariq al-Fadhli was emerging as the de facto leader of the Southern Mobility Movement, Sanaa was accusing him of inciting his Fadhlis to open fire on the motorcade of the chief of the PSO in the south. Tariq, heading the ministry of the interior’s most wanted list, had been given two choices, either to surrender or to leave the country.

My attempt to visit Tariq in Zinjibar in October 2009, in the company of his cousin Ahmad’s youngest son, the banana farmer Haidara al-Fadhli, ended in predictable failure. After the chief of Aden’s tourist police deeply regretted that he could not take responsibility for issuing me with the
tasrih
I would need to pass any checkpoint, I found myself paying a second visit to the city’s central security establishment opposite the Aden Hotel. There the polite northerner in charge kindly explained to me that even if I had been a friend of the Fadhlis for five years, even if Walid al-Fadhli the mercenary was preparing a lunch in my honour, even if Tariq al-Fadhli would obviously not dream of harming a hair on my head, he could not guarantee my safety. I quite understood; he would have had to provide me with an armed escort, while knowing perfectly well that such an entourage would be a red rag to the bull, if not of Tariq’s Fadhli tribesmen followers, then of the area’s assorted other jihadist groups who were also restive.

From Haidara, who was supporting Tariq (unlike his brother Walid the mercenary, who remained a supporter of the government) and who had seen Tariq the day before, I was able to ascertain that none of the family had been injured but that the third floor had been burnt out and that one of his four wives had needed smuggling out to Aden to have a baby. I learned that Tariq was frustrated at having his phone tapped and at not being able to move out of his fortress on the roundabout for weeks, but that the place was not under siege. Government forces were two kilometres away, so that visitors and supporters like Haidara were free to come and go. Clearly, if Tariq was topping Yemen’s most wanted list, his capture was not sufficiently urgent to risk enflaming the southern insurgency by turning him into a martyr. ‘If they really want me, they will have to come and kill me here in my house,’ he had told Haidara.

Small wonder President Salih was more preoccupied with his two domestic insurgencies than with what al-Qaeda might be plotting next. Like the Yemeni man-in-the-street, he had good reasons to rank the jihadist threat to his country a distant third to the independence movement in the south and the al-Huthi rebellion in the north. It seemed to me that these two more urgent priorities also went a long way towards accounting for Yemenis’ frequent dismissal of bin Laden and al-Qaeda as merely the inflated bogeyman of a western imagination that seems always to have needed an enemy of supernatural dimensions to test its mettle. When in Yemen I was often politely reminded that the Cold War-era West had created the ’terrorist problem’ for itself back in the 1980s by choosing to fund and arm Afghan mujahideen in the belief that their radical Islam was a lesser evil than Soviet Communism. I had soon discovered that any mention of al-Qaeda to a Yemeni was more likely to elicit the quietly humorous observation that a small, poor town in the southern highlands bore the same name than any opinion or fact about bin Laden’s global jihad. Long before western analysts like Jason Burke set about modifying the average westerner’s view of al-Qaeda as a tightly controlled, efficient and hierarchical organisation, Yemenis were perceiving it rather as an emotion-led climate of political opinion that waxed and waned in response to a number of factors - anger and humiliation felt at the West’s foreign policy in the region, the economic situation, an individual’s treatment by state authorities, the energy generated by the charisma of a leading jihadist, and so on.

It seemed important to remember too that long before the Yemeni man-in-the-street worried about what might be happening in Zinjibar or Radfan or Saada or what AQAP might be plotting against oil pipelines and foreign tourists in Marib or Hadhramaut, he would be worrying about who and how much he would have to bribe to get his mother or wife into hospital or how he would manage to feed and house his extended family on a single salary, or even where the next meal was coming from.

Busy securing his own grip on power by the only two means he understood - ‘dancing on snakes heads’ or resorting to force - Salih had run the country and its minimal resources into the ground. During his thirty years in charge of the military tribal republic he inherited, he had not promoted the development of Yemen into a modern nation state which the majority of its people were content and proud to inhabit. The Prophet’s reported high praise - ‘Faith is Yemeni, wisdom is Yemeni’ -had been twisted into a bitterly funny joke: ’Rumour has it the author of that
hadith
is still under investigation in Heaven for its fabrication.’

If a large number of Yemenis were beginning to wonder if the integrity of their modern state was worth preserving, if the risk of a power vacuum and even a jihadist takeover seemed worth taking, Salih was at least partly to blame.

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Released after tour months, Ahmad bin iend left Yemen to claim political asylum in Austria. Dr al-Affifi’s car was returned after two days.