In Yemen, Hard Times as Rebels Take Charge. But What Else Is New?

SANA, Yemen — Twelve-year-old Nefisa Nasser lined up four jerrycans by a faucet on the side of a busy street, patiently waiting her turn to fill them with water. She completed the daily routine, capping each container and sliding it into a wheelbarrow that she pushed back home through the clamor of morning traffic.

“Sometimes she comes back crying,” said her father, Muhammed Nasser, as Nefisa sat nearby on a folded bedspread. “Of course it pains me,” he said, “but our circumstances are difficult.”

Difficult is just how life is in Yemen, yesterday, today and every day. It does not matter that the president and his cabinet have resigned, that the government has not functioned for weeks, or that the gunmen in control of the streets say they plan to set up a new regime to their own liking.

Families have always had to struggle to get through their days in a country where the government has long been incapable of delivering essential services. There is hardly any running water now — and there was hardly any before the political crisis.

 

“In this country, people are accustomed to managing their lives without the state,” said Abdullah Alrahabi, who dug a well years ago on his property to supplement the critically short supply from the official system. He also supplies water to neighboring schools and mosques, and provides the free outlet Ms. Nasser uses every morning. “We don’t even rely on the state for the most basic services,” Mr. Alrahabi said.

Take Mr. Nasser, for example. He spent one recent morning, as he does many mornings, negotiating to reduce the fines on traffic tickets issued for a minibus he owns and rents out. Then he borrowed $250 to put the vehicle back on the street. At home, his wife prepared lunch for their five children and a few visiting relatives, just as she almost always does, without running water or electricity.

She strapped a flashlight to her forehead and used the water her daughter brought to cook a dish made of dough and broth.

To be sure, Yemenis are now confronting a whole new level of political uncertainty. The Shiite Houthi militia from the north has taken over the capital and has announced plans to name a new national council and eventually a new president. Southern separatists are fighting to break the country back up into two independent states. The former longtime president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was driven from power by popular protests in 2012, appears to be using old loyalties to renew his sway.

But people here say everyday life is unchanged.

Mr. Alrahabi, a manager in the president’s foreign relations office, said he continued to go to work, as he has done for 20 years, knowing that he is performing a perfunctory role in a system with crippled institutions.

“Let’s just say we live in a quasi-state,” Mr. Alrahabi said plainly.

That sentiment echoed from door to door in the capital, exposing the deep social disarray at the heart of the current political crisis. Yemenis have withstood the momentary leadership vacuum not by relying on state institutions but by turning to geographic, religious and tribal safety nets that have never been fully united under a strong, shared national identity.

The fissures in Yemen today are largely the legacy of Mr. Saleh, who ruled for decades and deliberately kept the formal state frail while emphasizing his personal hold on power, experts and officials here said.

“His role is that of the devil,” said Hasan Zaid, a minister of state and a member of the cabinet of Mr. Saleh’s successor, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who resigned two weeks ago. “You keep discovering how weak state institutions are. The army and police are sizable, but they are closer to militias belonging to the former president and his family than to a national force.”

Fearing the growing strength of his government’s military and intelligence agencies, Mr. Saleh had created parallel security bodies and placed them in the hands of his son and nephew. After he was ousted in the wave of Arab Spring revolutions, Yemen’s various security forces polarized, serving the interests of competing power centers rather than the state and doing little for the security of ordinary Yemenis. And the provision of basic services, in a country facing increasing violence and persistent poverty, only worsened.

“We should hide how we live,” said Moneef Almaqtari, 20, as he walked home in the popular Belaily neighborhood of Sana, not far from where Ms. Nasser draws her water. Mr. Almaqtari ducked his head under the clotheslines strung outside his door, where a pair of washed disposable baby diapers were hung.

“It is not a home, it’s a hut,” Mr. Almaqtari said as he walked to the kitchen, where his sister was making flat bread on a gas stove. He earns $200 a month as a supermarket cashier, he said, but his father and two of his brothers are construction day laborers and they rarely get work these days. All their earnings are pooled to buy food. “This is the only life I ever knew,” he said, “but with every president, the crisis gets worse and we suffer more.”

How much influence Mr. Saleh still wields is unclear, but the legacy of his years in power and the fractured state he led is palpable in the attitudes of Yemenis on the street.

“We never feel like the government is there, anyway,” said Taghreed Abdul Wahab, 21, a student at Sana University who stood with a group of classmates preparing for a geography test.

Their exams were postponed after the latest spate of violence, but they complained more about persistent problems on campus like favoritism and corruption, which they said are never addressed. “Students with lower grades can be admitted to medicine over others because they’re from the right family or they know the right people,” Ms. Abdul Wahab said.

Belal Hussein, 25, a graduate with a business degree who supervised an exam earlier in the day, overheard the conversation. Mr. Hussein introduced himself as a government employee who has not been paid his salary in seven months.

“They keep saying they have no revenues,” he said.

Mr. Hussein’s job is to keep track of employee attendance at the Commission for Public Lands, a body that manages state property. He admitted that he accepted bribes to mark colleagues present who had missed work because they had second jobs.

“How else am I supposed to live?” Mr. Hussein asked.

Yemenis refer offhandedly to the revolution set off in 2011, when the Arab Spring began, and its aftershocks as “the crisis.” The instability it brought allowed the Houthis to sweep into the capital, driving out the old leadership and promising reform. But many Yemenis have reason to be skeptical.

Back in Al Belaily, Mr. Nasser waited for lunch to be served.

“So far, the Houthis haven’t done much for us,” he said as his children gathered for the meal. He looked at the basic food spread on the floor. “On Fridays,” he said, a little embarrassed, “we also eat chicken.”