In a remote village in the south of Yemen, a car proudly displays two images on its windscreen. One shows the country’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has enlisted alongside the United States in the ‘war on terror’; the other is of Osama bin Laden. These contradictory loyalties are not simply the sign of duplicity that many foreign observers angrily take them for, they are also a reflection of the government’s ability to maintain stability by not alienating an Islamist opposition that many in the country regard as legitimate. This policy has demonstrably succeeded: Yemen has not suffered a serious attack since 2001.
Individual Yemenis are less concerned about terrorist violence than about economic and social issues, the progressive exhaustion of the country’s meagre oil reserves, the corrosive effects of the current government’s prolonged exercise of power, and the damaging local effects of the international community’s obsession with security.
After 9/11, the Yemeni government - anxious not to repeat the mistakes that, during the first Gulf war of 1990-91, led to its ostracism by the western nations and some Arab states - took the decision to cooperate in the war on terror. The October 2000 attack on the American warship, USS Cole, in the port of Aden, and the obstacles put in the way of the subsequent FBI investigation, placed the Yemeni government in a delicate position. Since then it has struggled to balance the expectations of its population and its political elite, both susceptible to the anti-imperialist rhetoric of al-Qaida, against the demands of the United States and its allies, who seek to criminalise any opposition - even non-violent - based on religion.
The government resolved its dilemma by doing as little as possible. The FBI opened an office in the capital, Sanaa, and U.S. soldiers trained the Yemeni army. Official protests following the extrajudicial assassination of an alleged al-Qaida leader by a U.S. Army drone, in November 2002, were distinctly muted. As a result, rather than a potential target for U.S. bombs, Yemen became a valued ally. The external signs of this new status include an increase in aid from western countries and the World Bank; United States Agency for International Development (USAID) projects in various regions of the country, including potential terrorist havens like al-Jawf, Marib and Shabwa; and the invitation to president Saleh issued by George Bush at the G8 in June 2004.
A careful policy
The government’s aim is to sustain its carefully-balanced policy of integrating the different components of Yemeni society - tribes, religious leaders and opposition parties - into state and even executive structures. Accordingly it refused to shut down the private al-Iman university, accused of training jihadist fighters, or to bow to U.S. demands that it should freeze the assets of the university’s founder Abd al-Majid al-Zindani, a leading figure of the opposition Islamist Islah (Reform) party. All the government would agree to was the need to exert tighter control over foreign students attending Islamic institutions (at the end of 2001 it claimed to have expelled more than 600).
Despite occasional harassment and prosecutions, the press and the various opposition parties enjoy a freedom of expression unique in the Middle East. President Saleh has carefully adopted nationalist and anti-Zionist postures to maintain an illusion of independence. The 2003 Iraq war afforded him an excuse to express fierce criticisms of U.S. Middle East policy and to set himself up as a leading voice of resistance to externally-imposed reforms. In 2002 Yemen’s parliament, which is controlled by the governing General People’s Congress Party (GPC), passed a resolution calling upon Arab countries to stop all cooperation with the United States until it abandoned its policy of support for Israel.
At the same time, the government developed a communication strategy to help it reconcile conflicting demands. It secured wide publicity for judge Hamud al-Hitar’s success in convincing various groups that armed struggle was against Islam and persuading them to renounce terrorism. The official line is that these negotiations proved more effective than repression in preventing attacks. But a series of deals and compromises were also agreed, some - for example with fighters returning from Agfhanistan in the early 1990s - at the highest level of government. And it is actually more likely that it was these that persuaded the jihadists to reintegrate into the Yemeni economic, even military, system and to renounce violence against the state and the West.
Unfortunately, the United States was unimpressed by this policy of compromise and, amid rising tensions, accused the Yemeni government of duplicity. Early in 2004, Saudi Arabia threatened to build a barrier along its frontier with Yemen in order to prevent infiltration. Plausible revelations that senior officers in the Yemeni security services were implicated in the attack on the USS Cole were followed by the identification of Yemenis within the ranks of the resistance in Iraq. Rumours surrounding the incredible escape of 23 terrorist suspects in February 2006, made the government’s position even more difficult. President Bush wrote to Saleh, questioning his commitment to the struggle against terrorism.
What these events reveal is, above all, the fragility of a state that is under unique pressure to compromise with very different social groups. Ever since the creation of the Republic of Yemen in 1962, bogus jobs in the civil service have been the primary tool for the redistribution of wealth, particularly in the tribal areas in the north and centre of the country where infrastructure and public services are non-existent. At every level of the decision process, individuals and groups are likely to interfere, thus reducing the effectiveness of public policies.
Compromise has its limits
The nationalisation of private religious schools was announced in 2002, and again in 2005. Gun-control legislation was promised. Neither had any significant effect. The complexity of the state, the sheer multiplicity of its interests and its skill in integrating the various elements of the political landscape have, on the whole, allowed Yemen to avoid political violence and to preserve a degree of pluralism.
But compromise, however effective, has its limits. In 1990 two Yemens - the nationalist North, and the ‘scientific socialist’ South - united to form a single country. Power-sharing proved difficult and led, in the spring of 1994, to a brief war between the armies of the two former sovereign states.
Since 9/11 the government has reacted to mounting pressure from the United States by trying to offer its ‘allies’ a series of proofs of its commitment to the war on terror. The resulting concentration on security issues led to a hardening of the regime: press censorship, arbitrary imprisonment, show trials, and the grotesque war in the north of the country against the Believing Youth (Shabab al-Mu’minin) movement led by Hussein Badr al-Din al-Huthi, a former MP for the conservative Zaydi-Shia party al-Haqq.
In an attempt to preserve the republican balance maintained since the revolution of 1962 and the overthrow of Imam Muhammed al-Badr, the government has concentrated its repressive energies against ‘history’s losers,’ the Zaydi minority, rather than against the Islamist heirs of the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1994, the government fought the former South Yemen’s socialist elite. Since 2004, it has combated a group whose association with the former Zaydi Imamate deprives it of any real legitimacy.
By depicting Believing Youth as a Shia terrorist group, linked to Hizbullah and funded by Iran, government propaganda has secured international support for military intervention against the ‘supporters of al-Houthi’. But, in fact, Believing Youth has little in common with al-Qaida, apart from anti-Zionist and anti-American rhetoric, and presents no threat to either Saleh or the United States.
In June 2004, the government used a skirmish between members of Believing Youth and the army as an excuse to launch a major offensive in the Saada area, near the Saudi border, against a group that it had previously supported as a counterweight to local Salafist influence. The army encountered unexpected resistance in a region that had long been excluded from state development policies. After several attempts at tribal or religious reconciliation, the violence intensified and villages were bombed and shelled.
Fierce fighting
Several thousand civilians, government soldiers and rebels died in the fierce fighting, which was suspended in September 2004, following the death of al-Houthi, only to resume the following March. Meanwhile the government conducted a campaign of repression against Zaydi intellectuals, banned many books and temporarily closed some newspapers.
Given the rivalries and conflicts of Yemeni politics, the fact that the war took place is hardly surprising. But its violence was primarily the result of the excessive concentration upon security questions encouraged by the international war on terror. Overseas pressure led the regime to over-react to any threat against western interests, such as kidnappings (few of which were politically motivated), attacks or anti-imperialist speeches. The consequent cycle of repression undermined individual Yemenis’ sense of security, threatening the stability of the political system and emphasising its authoritarian character.
The al-Houthi affair also demonstrates the damaging effects upon the Saleh government of its long tenure of power. Unfortunately - despite attacks on press freedom, a developing personality cult and the progressive legitimisation of a hereditary regime under which Ahmed Ali Saleh, the head of special forces, would succeed his father - there is no credible opposition. The success of attempts to unite the various parties, from the Muslim Brothers to the socialists, can mostly be attributed to the goodwill of the government, whose strategy of integration and compromise has fatally undermined the opposition’s ability to play its proper part.
Over the years, the GPC has managed to build up an extensive support network, based on patronage rather than ideological conviction. In July 2005, Saleh announced that he would not seek a further term of office. But the continuing uncertainty surrounding his final decision has prevented the emergence of any serious alternative. The opposition, however united, has no legitimate, credible candidate to put up against Saleh, who will probably be re-elected until 2013.
Yemen is undermined by economic, social and health problems, by unemployment and inflation, and by its inability to control its own foreign policy. Most of its people are resigned to this and recognise the powerlessness of their government. But the riots of July 2005, provoked by a dramatic rise in petrol prices, which left 50 dead, were a reminder that weariness could turn into revolt.
The attitude of the western powers, including Europe, is ambiguous. They are aware of the absence of any credible alternative and know that the main beneficiaries of their calls for greater pluralism could be the Islamist Islah opposition with its links to the Muslim Brotherhood. They simultaneously endorse and criticise the government’s hard line, and fund programmes that would allow opposition parties a chance of achieving power. At the end of 2005, the World Bank - keen to eliminate widespread corruption associated with arms contracts and the flood of aid after 9/11 - reduced its aid by a third.
Despite the discovery of natural gas reserves in the east of the country, the increasing exhaustion of Yemen’s meagre oil reserves is placing it in a position of dependence. International investors have supported projects designed to encourage the emergence of a liberal civil society, to allow the organisation of democratic elections, and to train the local MPs to match the ambitious policy of decentralisation introduced in 2000. Some of these worthy initiatives have been effective at a local level; but they have done little to persuade western policymakers that security is not the only issue.
Analysts continue to predict war, chaos and even collapse. Yet the people and government of Yemen have managed to maintain a certain equilibrium. Indeed, the main source of instability is the international community’s determination to impose its own obsession with security. In the long term, any attempt to preserve the West’s safety at the expense of the Yemenis will prove to be a mistake. It remains to be seen whether the Yemeni government and the western powers understand this paradox. [Translated by Donald Hounam]
Laurent Bonnefoy is attached to the French Centre for Archaeology and Social Sciences (Cefas) in Sana.
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