Read Online Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes by Victoria Clark - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Victoria Clark
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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.’ 10 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.’ 12
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
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.’ 10 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.’ 12
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
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