Read Online Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes by Victoria Clark - Free Book Online
Authors: Victoria Clark
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lunch one day with his uncle Nasir, his cousin Tariq and Tariq’s brother-in-law, the powerful Brigadier-General Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar, to voice the common southern complaint: ‘By all means buy our land if you [northerners]can afford it, but don’t just take it!’ he had told the Brigadier-General.
A few days after our checkpoint incident I learned that Dr al-Affifi’s willingness to throw himself and, by extension, his mighty and well-armed Yafai tribe, the biggest of all the southern tribes, into the southern independence struggle had elevated him to the rank of a poisonous snake in the president’s eyes. Summoned to Sanaa for a meeting with Salih, Dr al-Affifi had backed up his general point about the north’s ill-treatment of the south by recounting the tale of the theft of his own real estate in Aden. Soon after unification, he told Salih, he had invested in twenty-two different plots of land in Aden and even opened a private hospital in the city’s most salubrious Tawahi district. In the wake of the 1994 war, that hospital, complete with $200,000-worth of medical equipment, had been commandeered as a military barracks for a period of twenty years. To add insult to injury, nineteen of his twenty-two plots had been confiscated without explanation or right of appeal, let alone compensation.
Instead of instructing an underling to look into the matter, the president had summoned Brigadier-General Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar to make a frank appeal to Dr al-Affifi’s baser nature thinly disguised as an invitation to serve his country: there must have been some mistake, so Dr al-Affifi must have his land back, and would he care for a plum posting as director of the army’s medical services too? Or could he fancy being the governor of Abyan? ‘No, thank you. I don’t want or need a job,’ Dr al-Affifi had replied, ‘and my land and hospital are not my first concern. The most important thing is that you stop demonising all southern separatists as a bunch of Marxists and agents of foreign powers and allies of al-Qaeda, and take the trouble to talk to them.’ The sending in of tanks and rounding-up of 300 rebels, including Hassan ba-Oom and young Ahmad bin Ferid, was ample proof that Salih had rejected his advice.
A source of particular humiliation and frustration for Adenis was the regime’s failure to remedy the economic mess left behind by the baneful application of Marxist economic theory. They wanted Aden turned back into the money-spinning marine transport hub it had been in British times thanks to its excellent natural harbour and strategic location between East and West, near the foot of the Suez Canal. Some suspected that Salih’s strategy was to punish the south for daring to rebel in 1994 by deliberately ensuring that its capital remained ‘a village’, but the cock-up theory seemed more credible. A shaming tale of corrupt and incompetent politicians (a Hadhrami government minister nicknamed ‘Mr Ten Per Cent’ was said to have purchased at least two London properties with a single backhander), added to al-Qaeda’s attacks on the USS Cole in 2000 and the French oil-tanker, the Limburg , in 2002 sending the price of marine insurance sky-high, all seem to have contributed to the delay and failure. The upshot of almost twenty years of bad luck, bungling and rampant greed has been that in late 2008 Dubai Ports International, which already runs Dubai’s South terminal as well as the ports of Jeddah and Djibouti on either side of the Red Sea, assumed the running of Aden too. b Expert outside observers pointed to the obvious danger of a monopoly which would mean Aden remaining the ‘Cinderella of the East’ for decades to come.
President Salih has shown no remorse or understanding. His reply to a New York Times reporter’s question about north-south tensions in July 2008 was rough and sarcastic: ‘We built the infrastructure, including electrical projects, roads, universities, and we restored public
A few days after our checkpoint incident I learned that Dr al-Affifi’s willingness to throw himself and, by extension, his mighty and well-armed Yafai tribe, the biggest of all the southern tribes, into the southern independence struggle had elevated him to the rank of a poisonous snake in the president’s eyes. Summoned to Sanaa for a meeting with Salih, Dr al-Affifi had backed up his general point about the north’s ill-treatment of the south by recounting the tale of the theft of his own real estate in Aden. Soon after unification, he told Salih, he had invested in twenty-two different plots of land in Aden and even opened a private hospital in the city’s most salubrious Tawahi district. In the wake of the 1994 war, that hospital, complete with $200,000-worth of medical equipment, had been commandeered as a military barracks for a period of twenty years. To add insult to injury, nineteen of his twenty-two plots had been confiscated without explanation or right of appeal, let alone compensation.
Instead of instructing an underling to look into the matter, the president had summoned Brigadier-General Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar to make a frank appeal to Dr al-Affifi’s baser nature thinly disguised as an invitation to serve his country: there must have been some mistake, so Dr al-Affifi must have his land back, and would he care for a plum posting as director of the army’s medical services too? Or could he fancy being the governor of Abyan? ‘No, thank you. I don’t want or need a job,’ Dr al-Affifi had replied, ‘and my land and hospital are not my first concern. The most important thing is that you stop demonising all southern separatists as a bunch of Marxists and agents of foreign powers and allies of al-Qaeda, and take the trouble to talk to them.’ The sending in of tanks and rounding-up of 300 rebels, including Hassan ba-Oom and young Ahmad bin Ferid, was ample proof that Salih had rejected his advice.
A source of particular humiliation and frustration for Adenis was the regime’s failure to remedy the economic mess left behind by the baneful application of Marxist economic theory. They wanted Aden turned back into the money-spinning marine transport hub it had been in British times thanks to its excellent natural harbour and strategic location between East and West, near the foot of the Suez Canal. Some suspected that Salih’s strategy was to punish the south for daring to rebel in 1994 by deliberately ensuring that its capital remained ‘a village’, but the cock-up theory seemed more credible. A shaming tale of corrupt and incompetent politicians (a Hadhrami government minister nicknamed ‘Mr Ten Per Cent’ was said to have purchased at least two London properties with a single backhander), added to al-Qaeda’s attacks on the USS Cole in 2000 and the French oil-tanker, the Limburg , in 2002 sending the price of marine insurance sky-high, all seem to have contributed to the delay and failure. The upshot of almost twenty years of bad luck, bungling and rampant greed has been that in late 2008 Dubai Ports International, which already runs Dubai’s South terminal as well as the ports of Jeddah and Djibouti on either side of the Red Sea, assumed the running of Aden too. b Expert outside observers pointed to the obvious danger of a monopoly which would mean Aden remaining the ‘Cinderella of the East’ for decades to come.
President Salih has shown no remorse or understanding. His reply to a New York Times reporter’s question about north-south tensions in July 2008 was rough and sarcastic: ‘We built the infrastructure, including electrical projects, roads, universities, and we restored public
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