WASHINGTON - From Mexico to Iraq, we can see the practical consequences of
"wars" against abstractions, whether drugs or terror. In Yemen, there are signs
that both President Ali Abdallah Saleh's government and the Barack Obama
administration are drawing back from repeating the mistakes of Afghanistan, and
perhaps even of Somalia.
Indeed, it is worth comparing Somalia with Yemen. In traditional Western terms,
Somalia should have been almost the most successful state in Sub-Saharan
Africa. Its population was homogenous in religion, language and culture, with a
strong sense of identity. But what outsiders did not realize was how much clan
diversity there was beneath that seeming unity. What looked like strong central
government under Siad Barre, the last
effective national president, looked like a monopolization of resources by one
group to all the other clans. Since then, no putative national government has
been able to come up with an offer that the various parties cannot easily
refuse.
Just across the mouth of the Red Sea, in Yemen, there are even more
crosscutting fault lines. There is a Zaidi/Sunni divide, there are the
divisions between the north and the former Marxist People's Democratic Republic
in the south, which are not so much ideological as based on Saleh's government
cutting the former leadership down there from the access to power and wealth
that they thought the reunification of 1990 entitled them.
In the north, in Saada province, the Houthi tribe used to provide the emirs for
the thousand-year dynasty in what is now the capital, Sana'a, and now feel
excluded. Because they are Zaidi, and therefore technically Shi'ite,
opportunistic Yemeni officials linked them with Iran, thereby encouraging Saudi
and American support for the central government. Yet they are no closer to
Iranian Shi'ites than Anglicans in Britain are to American Pentecostalists,
even if both are technically Protestants. But since they are Shi'ite, they are
anathema to the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia and their al-Qaeda offshoot.
In the mountains, the various clans happily ignore the central government, and
some of them seem to be tolerating, at least, al-Qaeda, quite likely for a
mixture of financial and theological reasons.
The Yemeni government has always been weak and decentralized, dependent on
mediating the demands of the clans and localities whose physical isolation is
reinforced by the national habit of weapon-bearing. Yemen is the National Rifle
Association's paradise on Earth, and most men would consider themselves naked
without their jambiyas, the knife stuck in the belt.
Much of the recent internal conflict is about distribution of scarce resources.
Yemen is a desperately poor country, whose poverty has not been helped by
frequent civil wars and which was enhanced even more when Yemen's envoy voted
in the United Nations Security Council against resolutions authorizing the
1990-1991 Desert Storm after Iraq invaded Kuwait.
United States diplomats told the Yemeni envoy at the time that this was the
most expensive vote he'd ever cast, and for once, an American prediction came
true. Saudi Arabia expelled hundreds of thousands of Yemeni workers whose
remittances had kept the economy afloat, and foreign aid shrank even more.
Needless to say, Saddam Hussein's gratitude was strictly limited.
Things have improved now. Saudi Arabia and Yemen finally broadly agreed their
long-disputed frontier in 2000, even though it did not restore the former
privileged position of Yemeni workers in the kingdom.
However, the oil revenue which provided much of the central government's
funding has been declining, and foreign aid has not been expanding, even if the
post-1991 boycott is no longer in effect. However, the nepotism and corruption
of the Saleh government, now in power for three decades, has taken a visibly
disproportionate share of what there is left, and has provoked widespread
agitation from those left out.
The main industry and commerce is the growth, distribution and mastication of qat,
which takes a huge amount of land and water and anything up to a third of
personal income. (Qat is a tropical evergreen plant whose leaves are
used as a stimulant.)
On its positive side, the cultivation of a cash crop so lucrative that fields
have armed guards has also, according to some economists, been a means of
transferring wealth to the countryside and absorbing the deported workers from
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.
At first, when the government faced widespread dissent, it seemed to have seen
an opportunity. By characterizing all the dissident groups as Iranian or
al-Qaeda-influenced, they effectively rang the right bells in Riyadh and
Washington, and hoped for military and financial aid.
Since the abortive Christmas Day bombing of the North West Airlines flight by a
Nigerian linked to al-Qaeda and Yemen, both sides seem to have drawn back. The
Yemenis who had been canvassing for heavy weaponry that would allow them to
defeat all their various rebels seem to have realized that if they wanted to
put truth in the rumors about al-Qaeda being behind them, all they had to do
was get too close to the US and West - as in fact they had already shown signs
of doing with bombing raids.
Any visible intervention by the US could unify Yemen like nothing else -
against the invader. The same thought seems to be occurring in Washington,
despite the apocalyptic language from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about
the Yemeni situation being a regional and global threat. Support for police
units has already been announced, and the international meeting that British
Prime Minister Gordon Brown has convened (with American and Saudi support) for
the end of the month seems based on the premise that economic, social and
political development are crucial to hold the country together and dampen the
various conflicts.
It is not so much that Yemen is a failed state, but as Indian pacifist Mahatma
Gandhi one said when asked what he thought about Western civilization, a
functioning state would be a good idea. There are unlikely to be any quick and
easy answers, but it could be that the right questions are being asked this
time. If there is to be a war in Yemen against abstractions, it should be
against tangible and real abstractions: poverty and one of its causes,
corruption.
Ian Williams is the author of Deserter: Bush's War on Military
Families, Veterans and His Past, Nation Books, New York.
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