Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (31 page)

An essence of that ‘what we have now’ had been memorably captured in a larger than life-size oil painting adorning the atrium hallway of the GPC’s central office in Sanaa. It was a portrait of President Salih, but unlike any I had seen before.

Framed portraits of Yemen’s short but reasonably good-looking leader grace almost every home and public building in the country but are especially visible on the sides and roofs of public buildings in Aden, which favour an image of him head down, writing, hard at work. Others depict him in a variety of costumes: in tribal head-dress,
thowb
and
jambiyah
, in a western-style dark suit, pale blue shirt and plain tie, in military uniform, or even - by 2009 - bespectacled, tweed-jacketed and smiling in an approachably avuncular fashion. Although, as on a giant billboard on the road from Sanaa into Hodeidah, he is as gamely grinning as if he were advertising toothpaste, his expression is usually sombre, his brow knitted in visionary thought and his jaw firmly tilted resolutely forward. In this particular oil painting, however, he is dressed in a lounge suit and unsmiling but seated astride a richly caparisoned chestnut steed against a pitch black background enlivened by arcs of colourfully exploding fireworks. His shop mannequin stiffness and an outsize pair of dark glasses suggest both wilful blindness and a sinister power. I guessed the artist was obliquely criticising a leader who had deliberately blinded himself to his people’s sufferings but, if I was right, the critique was too subtle to have hit its mark; the masterful satire was hanging there in pride of place where every GPC functionary who worked in the building would pass by it every day. It was hard to blame the artist for erring on the side of caution, however. Jokes at the expense of President Salih have been known to have serious consequences.

Salih’s entourage had targeted Yemen’s funniest satirist, Fahd al-Qarni, a young actor from Taiz, as a particularly dangerous snake. An active member of Islah, al-Qarni was hurled in jail for the third time in as many years for allegedly insulting the president and fanning the fires of southern separatism with his jokes. A cassette recording of his song ‘Fed Up’ first landed him behind bars during the presidential elections of 2006. In the summer of 2008, shortly before he went on trial again, a convoy of a hundred cars filled with al-Qarni’s fans journeyed from Hadhramaut to Taiz for a protest sit-in outside the courthouse, only to endure beatings by the police. The next day, treated by the prosecution to a recording of a skit featuring a clueless but reckless taxi driver with a voice identical to that of the president, the courtroom dissolved in helpless laughter, but al-Qarni was sentenced to eighteen months in jail and a large fine. Unrepentant but amnestied by the president in September, he was briefly rearrested in February 2009 for the same crime, before being released again.

Although Yemen has rejoiced in a press that is freer than that of any of her neighbours since 1990, there are subjects better left untouched by journalists who value their skins. They have learned by trial and error not to delve into four key topics: the president’s family and especially the question of whether his eldest son Ahmad will succeed him; the country’s sovereignty with reference to secessionism in the south and the rebellion in the north-west; religion; and the military. In 2005 the correspondent for the London-based
Al-Quds al-Arab
’
s
uncovering of a corrupt trade in fighter-plane spare parts that had accounted for a number of MiG-29 crashes cost him two days’ detention by air force high command and a night of interrogation, until President Salih himself ordered his release. The case of Khaled al-Khaiwani, a newspaper editor trying to report on subjects like Yemen’s jails and the Saada war, was eventually taken up by Amnesty International. In 2004 al-Khaiwani spent a year in jail for insulting the president. Amnestied in 2005, he was rearrested in 2007 -snatched off a Sanaa street by masked PSO gunmen in a Toyota Land Cruiser - thrown into their security service jail and beaten up, before being amnestied again. In 2008 he was rearrested and sentenced to six years behind bars, but once again pardoned by Salih. His rearrest in January 2009 raised a storm of international protest and yet again he was pardoned, after receiving Amnesty International’s Award for Journalism Under Threat. The closure of Aden’s independent
al-Ayyam
newspaper in May 2009 and a physical attack on the paper’s offices served as a tacit acknowledgement by Sanaa of the power of the written press to promote separatism in Yemen’s second city.

Frequent arrests, amnesties and rearrests of political dissidents, whether they are journalists like al-Khaiwani, or comedians like al-Qarni, or southern secessionists like young Ahmad bin Ferid, or jihadists like the men who attacked the USS
Cole
, furnish useful proof that not only is Salih not an all-powerful dictator but he is also far from being a bloodthirsty tyrant in the mould of Saddam Hussein or Imam Ahmad, for example. Nor does the secret of his survival in power lie in a monopoly over the country’s means of coercion. How could it when there are reportedly an average of three guns in circulation for every Yemeni man, woman and child and when many of the larger tribes boast their own arsenals of even heavy weaponry? And it was certainly not attributable to his having steadily improved his people’s living standards, let alone to his having firmly established the rule of law.

Two Sanaani women I spoke to, both of them educated to university level, were inclined to blame his entourage rather than Salih himself -the evil counsellors, rather than the king himself - for their country’s many problems. While one male civil servant swiftly diagnosed the president’s problem by saying ‘he still has a 1970s mentality’, his female colleague, a schoolteacher, insisted that as a woman she was grateful to Salih - ‘thanks to him, I can work, I can sit in Parliament, and it may be difficult but there is no law to say that I can’t sit in a car with a man who is not from my family’ Back came her male colleague’s reply, ‘All right, he has given us some freedoms. For example, we are free to talk, but as that old man once complained to him on television “You [Salih] have taken the sticking plaster off our lips and stuffed it in your ears!” What good is being able to talk when the one with the power is not listening?’

Southerners with direct, personal knowledge of Salih tend to be far more critical of him, although all agreed that he was ‘charming’ and emphasised his lack of self-importance, his unrivalled ‘common touch’. A wealthy resident of Hadda, a southerner and government minister, thought hard before attempting to describe him. ’When he speaks to you he gives you his full attention and you are the only person in his world. He is very, very intelligent, and he has a unique memory, and he is not a bloodthirsty person,‘ was how he began. ’But he is one of the best liars on this earth,‘ was how he ended. The verdict of a fellow southerner, a Hadhrami lawyer, was harsher still; he compared Salih to past imams who surrounded themselves with incompetent nonentities: ’He barely has a primary school education which means that he has an inferiority complex, so the last thing he wants is brilliant people around him.‘ An Adeni newspaper editor revealed that a far from charming Salih, an enraged and whisky-sozzled Salih, was in the habit of telephoning the paper late at night to dispute the contents of his front page, especially any coverage of unrest in the south. Abdullah Al-Asnag, the clever leader of the Adeni trade unions in the turbulent years before the British departed, who subsequently served as a minister in YAR governments under al-Iryani, al-Hamdi and al-Ghashmi as well as being adviser to Salih until 1984, confined his comment to a single sentence: ’Ignorance combined with arrogance is the end of the world.’

Most Yemenis - both admirers and critics - had no trouble acknowledging that the real key to Salih’s success has been his uncannily acute understanding and encyclopaedic knowledge of Yemen’s tribal society. It is his intuitive sense that he must only ever be perceived as behaving in the manner of a wise and just sheikh - mediating, balancing, reconciling, co-opting, rewarding, forgiving - that (alongside his access to the oil revenues since 1986) has preserved him from the fate of his two predecessors for so long.

No one disputes that for an uneducated tribesman with only a decent career in the army to recommend him, Salih has done astonishingly well. But there are clear signs that at the age of sixty-eight (he was born in March 1942), and with funds running short, he is flagging. As the sickness created by Yemen’s chronic and interrelated and multiplying problems grows ever less curable by recourse to the sticking plasters of bribery and promises, as the complex demands of running a modern state proliferate and the money begins to run out, his hold on power is perceived to be slipping. As early as November 2005 his nervous entourage were shielding him from the shaming news that, owing to Yemen’s failure to meet various good governance criteria, Washington was withholding some $30 million of aid. Certainly, his fuse was shorter than it had been, his patience with dissent much more limited. In the spring of 2008 he shocked and disgusted ordinary Yemenis by using the occasion of a Festival of Camels and Horsemanship in the Tihaman port city of Hodeidah to tell those threatening the country’s integrity, ‘Our slogan is unity or death and he who does not like this, let him drink from the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea.’
¹⁹
At around the same time a government minister told me, ‘Until about a year ago it looked as if he was still the strong man with all the strings in his hands. Now it’s different. He issues the orders, but they’re not being fulfilled. The people around him are doing what they want’ - abusing their power to act with his authority. I recalled Ahmad al-Fadhli musing along the same lines during one of our chats at his banana farm; ‘the bugs in your own shirt are the ones that can really hurt you’, was how he had put it.

The ‘bugs’ in President Salih’s shirt are arranged in three concentric rings. First comes immediate family, his own children and his nephews who belong to the Bayt al-Affash clan of the Sanhan tribe, which itself is a member of the larger Hashid Federation. The next ring comprises other members of the Sanhan tribe belonging to the al-Qadhi clan, who include two half-brothers and his distant cousin Brigadier-General Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar. Both these Sanhan clans regard their rural heartland as the village of Bayt al-Ahmar, a half-hour drive to the east of Sanaa, where Salih was raised and has built himself a large residence. Beyond these two innermost circles are other Sanhanis and members of his predecessor al-Ghashmi’s Hamdan-Sanaa tribe, which also belongs to the larger Hashid Federation of the Zaydi northern highlands.

These widening circles of people who not only hold high positions in the presidential household and offices but crucially in the military and security establishments while heading lucrative enterprises and acting as local agents for foreign corporations, are the guarantors of his security. For the time being too many people still have too vested an interest in Salih continuing in the post of president to mount a coup d’etat. As one member of the upper house of Yemen’s parliament put it to me, ‘If something happens to the president, they’ll all suffer too, so they let him be.’ However, the cost of maintaining these concentric circles, especially of his defensive ramparts in the army, security service and personal guard, is considerable; officially declared to account for 25.4 per cent of the annual budget in 2003, it is unofficially estimated by foreign observers to be nearer the 40 per cent mark.
²⁰

Of Salih’s immediate, close family, little is generally known beyond the fact that he has three wives, ten daughters and seven sons. Among his seven sons there is his eldest son Ahmad, an affable and unpretentious person by all accounts but inclined to dissolute behaviour and lacking in charisma, who heads both the elite Special Forces and the Republican Guards and has long been viewed, though not welcomed, as Salih’s heir apparent. Muhammad Duwayd, the husband of his daughter Saba, is in charge of the all-important Secretariat of the Presidential Palace. One nephew, Amar Mohammed Abdullah Salih, is deputy head of the National Security Bureau (NSB) and reputed to be a man western counter-terrorism agencies can do business with. Another nephew, named Tariq Mohammed Abdullah Salih, commands the president’s close protection force and is the third most powerful officer in the army. Yet another, Yahya Mohammed Abdullah Salih, is the Staff Officer of the Central Security forces.

An attempt to get a feel for the inner circles of bugs infesting Salih’s shirt by driving through the village of Bayt al-Ahmar with Walid one late afternoon in 2008 ended in failure, with Walid badly unnerved by a pair of sleek young men in plain clothes appearing from almost nowhere to politely forbid us to drive any further up the road or even to try to photograph the president’s country residence, which includes a handsome domed mosque. The way one of them scribbled our car registration number on the back of his hand was what rattled Walid. Most of the top echelons of Yemen’s defence establishment hail from Bayt-al Ahmar, including the Commander of the Air Force, Mohammed Salih al-Ahmar, and Brigadier-General Ali Salih al-Ahmar, the chief of staff of the general army command and, most importantly of all, the man reckoned to be the second most powerful person in the country, the commander of the north-western military sector which includes Saada and Sanaa, Brigadier-General Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar.

When Yemenis lounge at their qat chews, pondering how a future without President Salih might look, the brigadier-general’s name is always mentioned, and the assumption usually made that he would be far more tolerant of Islamists of most stripes - from mildly Muslim Brotherhood to Saudi Wahhabi style, and perhaps even dyed-in-the-wool jihadists of the al-Qaeda persuasion. He had facilitated the passage of jihadists to the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, remained close to Tariq al-Fadhli, married his sister and recruited him to the cause of unity on the side of the north in the civil war of 1994, and gone on to supervise the funnelling of Yemeni jihadists to Iraq after 2003.

As early as 2002, when the American author Robert Kaplan was in Yemen researching a book on the American military abroad, it had been clear that thanks to Brigadier-General Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar the country was quietly circumventing President George W. Bush’s bellicose war cry of ‘you’re either with us or against us’. Instead, it was spreading its risk by being both for and against, much as the the YAR had sided with the West against Marxism during the Cold War while looking to the USSR for its armaments. Kaplan wrote: ‘it was Ali Muhsen’s ties to the radicals that gave the president the political protection he needed to move closer to the Americans - temporarily that is. And also to distance himself from the Americans swiftly and credibly if that, too, became necessary.’
²¹
It was also Brigadier-General al-Ahmar who brokered the deal that kept Yemen almost free from jihadist incidents between 2003 and 2007; if the jihadists refrained from attacking targets inside Yemen, then Yemen would neither hunt them down or extradite them to the US.

But the breakdown of the tacit agreement with the jihadists after 2007 and subsequent attacks by an Iraq-hardened generation of al-Qaeda likewise damaged his credibility among the other bugs in Salih’s shirt, let alone with the general population. Some believe the brigadier-general and the president - both Sanhani tribesmen of the Hashid northern highlander tribal federation, but from different clans - long ago agreed that the former would replace the latter when the time was ripe, but that Salih has reneged on the deal by setting out, like the imams before him, to groom his son for the succession. Such people viewed all Yemen’s troubles through a highly personalised prism of a two-man rivalry resembling that of Octavian and Mark Antony, or Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. For example, if Salih had used his son’s Republican Guard up in Saada to humiliate Ali Muhsin’s regular army, Ali Muhsin was getting his own back by encouraging his old friend and brother-in-law, Tariq al-Fadhli, to whip up trouble in the south.

By the end of 2009, no one and nothing looked strong enough to reverse Yemen’s decline as a useful ally of the West or its rise as a jihadist stronghold. Thanks to southern separatism and the al-Huthi rebellion threatening the integrity of the country and Salih’s apparent inability to tackle either with anything but force, events looked closer to boiling point than they had done since the civil war of 1994. Those accustomed to watching Yemen, as Kremlinologists once watched Moscow, knew that not only at qat chews in Sanaa and Aden and Mukalla and Taiz and Ibb, but among the diaspora all over the Gulf and beyond, in Britain and the United States, talks were being had, soundings being taken, new and improbable alliances being forged. While western intelligence agencies and think-tanks vaguely and gloomily forecast that a power vacuum and chaos in Yemen would open the door to a jihadist takeover and an important victory for al-Qaeda that might destabilise Saudi Arabia and so threaten the rest of the world, Yemenis able to afford the luxury of thinking about anything but their immediate daily needs felt themselves to be participating in a real and current, not an imagined and future, drama: the disintegration of their country.

^a
The paramount sheikhs family and the Brigadier-General share a name but are not directly related to each other.