From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Fri Jan 15 2010 - 00:39:23 EST
Yemen: Deja Vu All Over Again
By Phyllis Bennis, January 13, 2010
Barack Obama is not the first US president to find Yemen a challenge. And
the current $70 million package of military and security assistance is not
the first $70 million US aid program to Yemen.
Two decades ago, in 1990, then-President George H.W. Bush was preparing for
his looming invasion of Iraq – what would become Operation Desert Storm.
Like his son in 2002, Bush was eager to force a unanimous vote in the
United Nations Security Council endorsing his war. But unlike George Junior
who abandoned the UN when the Council stood defiant against his illegal
war, the first President Bush was willing to pay – in expensive bribes
and political concessions – to win what the great Pakistani scholar Eqbal
Ahmad called “a multilateral fig-leaf for a unilateral war.”
For poor and weak countries on the Council, the United States offered new
economic assistance, access to cheap Saudi oil, and crucially, military aid
packages to governments long denied such support because of civil wars
and/or widespread corruption and repression in their countries. So the
governments of Colombia, Ethiopia, and Zaire all took their kickbacks and
voted yes. For China, which had threatened to veto the war-backing
resolution, the Bush administration offered diplomatic rehabilitation and
the resumption of long-term development aid, both of which had been cut in
the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre the year before. China
abstained.
Two countries were left. One was Cuba, which refused on principle to
endorse the US-led invasion, although Cuba had joined in the Council’s
unanimous condemnation of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait as illegal. The
other “no” vote came from Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world.
Yemen was serving as a Security Council member largely in recognition of
its reunification after 10 years of a brutal civil war. With the Arab world
divided down the middle by the threat of a U.S. attack and only one Arab
country on the Council, there was no way Yemen could endorse an invasion of
its region.
Yemen voted no. And no sooner had the Yemeni ambassador, Abdullah
al-Ashtal, put down his hand, then a U.S. diplomat moved to his side,
telling him “that will be the most expensive ‘no’ vote you ever
cast.” The remark was picked up on an open UN microphone and immediately
broadcast throughout UN headquarters and soon throughout the world.
Journalists and analysts excoriated the U.S. diplomat for not knowing the
mike was on and being caught in such an embarrassing situation. But I
always thought he knew exactly what he was doing – because the message
was not really aimed at Yemen. No one in Washington knew or cared at that
time about what Yemen or Yemenis did or thought. The message aimed much
broader, at every country in the UN that might consider defying U.S. power.
The message was clear: if you cross us on an issue important to us, you
will pay a price.
The people of Yemen paid a huge price. Three days later Washington made
good on its threat and cut its entire aid budget to Yemen, an already
measly $70 million. And today, 20 years later, diplomats and staff around
UN headquarters still refer uneasily to the “Yemen Precedent.”
This week the Obama administration announced plans to send $70 million in
aid to Yemen. But it won’t be for medicine, building homes, or job
training. And the accompanying U.S. experts won’t be hydrologists or
doctors or midwife instructors. The $70 million will be for
“counter-terrorism” and “security” purposes – and the U.S.
experts will be military trainers and various kinds of Special Forces.
But a strengthened Yemeni military will not reverse Yemen’s legacy of
anti-Americanism and the support for anti-U.S. violence that sometimes
accompanies it.
What if – just imagine – the United States had not used Yemen to
broadcast the price of defiance to other wavering governments? What if the
United States had not reprimanded the Yemeni government by punishing the
entire Yemeni population and then largely ignoring the impoverished people
for most of two decades? What if, instead of cutting its entire aid budget,
the United States had flooded Yemen and its people with agricultural
assistance, training for midwives and doctors, access to the latest
hydrology technology to recover scarce water, and lots and lots of money
for Yemenis themselves to use to build up their own country’s social and
physical infrastructure as they chose, not as US “experts” imposed?
Today, twenty years later, things might just be a whole lot different..
Phyllis Bennis directs the New Internationalism Project at the Institute
for Policy Studies and is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus. Her
latest book, with David Wildman, is Ending The Us War In Afghanistan: A
Primer (Olive Branch Press, 2009)
Recommended Citation:
Phyllis Bennis, "Yemen: Deja Vu All Over Again" (Washington, DC: Foreign
Policy In Focus, January 13, 2010)
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