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From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Sat Oct 02 2010 - 18:52:15 EDT
<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/10/01/our_man_in_sanaa> Our Man
in Sanaa
Why the big problem with Yemen is Yemen's president.
BY ELLEN KNICKMEYER | OCTOBER 3, 2010
SANAA, Yemen -- The scene in Yemen's capital Sept. 20 was almost
embarrassing, according to those who looked on: John Brennan, the
influential White House counterterrorism advisor, was trying to leave Sanaa
after a fly-in, fly-out visit with Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh about
his country's burgeoning al Qaeda branch.
But Saleh was too busy pleading for U.S. cash to let the 25-year CIA veteran
drive away, according to people familiar with Brennan's visit. Clutching
Brennan by the arm, Yemen's burly president of 30-plus years stood at the
open door of Brennan's limo, pressing his appeals that the United States pay
up now, not later, on the $300 million that Barack Obama's administration is
planning to give Yemen over the near term to help it combat al Qaeda.
(Someone finally eased shut the limo door on the Yemeni leader, allowing
Brennan to get away, witnesses said.)
And everyone knows what will happen if Saleh doesn't get more free money,
because it's a threat Saleh and his officials use at every opportunity to
demand international aid: without an urgent and unending infusion of foreign
cash, will lose its fight against the aggressive Saudi and Yemeni offshoots
of al Qaeda that Saleh long allowed -- though he doesn't admit that part of
the story -- to make their home here in Yemen.
"No friend of Yemen can stand by when the economy of that state comes close
to collapse ... or when the authority of the government is challenged by
extremism, by violence, by crime, or by corruption," British Foreign
Secretary William Hague
<http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N24199073.htm> said on Sept. 24 in
New York, striking the spunky, this-is-Yemen's-finest-hour theme at a
"Friends of Yemen" conference of officials of roughly 30 countries gathered
together to brainstorm propping up the Arab world's poorest and most chaotic
country despite Yemen's best efforts to collapse.
Yemeni Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Mujawar echoed the World War II theme
when it came to hinting what kind of money international donors might want
to drop on the dresser on the way out -- that is, if they want Yemen to
fight al Qaeda.
"Certainly, we need a Marshall Plan for supporting Yemen. I believe the
amount needed is around 40 billion dollars," Mujawar told the London-based
Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper. (Yemen's annual GDP is a mere $27 billion.)
Reviewing Yemen's recent history suggests a different idea: The big problem
with Yemen isn't al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Nor is it the Zaidi
Shiite rebellion in Yemen's north or the separatist movement in Yemen's
south. It isn't the 40 percent unemployment. It isn't the near one-in-10
childhood mortality rate or the malnutrition that causes more than half the
country's children to be stunted. Although all those factors exist,
tragically, in this hospitable, ancient, and beautiful country, and all are
grave, none of them is Yemen's main problem.
No, the big problem with Yemen is Yemen's president -- Saleh.
The perpetually shortsighted corruption and mismanagement of Saleh and his
circle have been such that almost everyone -- Westerners, Yemen's Persian
Gulf neighbors, many Yemenis -- routinely use that word "collapse,"
speculating more on the "when" than the "if."
Yemen moved squarely to the front of U.S. security worries last December
when a Nigerian allegedly trained by al Qaeda in Yemen tried to detonate a
bomb on a Detroit-bound airliner. Ambitious and energetic, led in part by
Saudi veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,
as the Yemeni branch is known, has launched almost daily attacks this summer
and early fall on Yemeni security and intelligence forces. Some U.S.
intelligence officials and others see Yemen's branch as the gravest threat
to the United States, and U.S. Central Command said this summer it wants to
pump $120 billion in military aid into Yemen over the coming years to help
it fight al Qaeda.
U.S. State Department officials publicly have been more measured so far,
saying they will direct more than $100 million of the new nonmilitary aid to
building public services and civil society. Brennan, one of the most adamant
in the Obama administration about the threat of al Qaeda in Yemen, made his
trip here last week with a
<http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE68J30P20100920> letter from Obama to
Saleh calling the United States "committed" to
<http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2010/09/obama-pledges-
to-help-yemen-fight-terrorists/1> helping Yemen.
No one doubts that the threat to Saleh's government from the few hundred al
Qaeda fighters here is real. But no one doubts, given Saleh's history, that
the Yemeni leader is trying to exploit that threat to gain foreign aid and
squelch political opponents and dissidents.
The West, the Arab states in the Persian Gulf, and others have already put
$5.7 billion on offer to Yemen since 2006, as Yemen's al Qaeda threat grew.
But Saleh's ineffective government has been unable to come up with concrete
spending and monitoring plans that satisfy the donors. The Friends of Yemen
conference was intended to sidestep those concerns and come up with a way to
push development regardless, perhaps by establishing an additional
development fund for the country.
What Yemen needs most isn't more cash, though, but a government that spreads
its cash to the people, rather than steals it. Military and domestic aid
given without the strictest of conditions and oversight will only let
Saleh's government continue to ignore all pressure for reform, perpetuating
the disaffection and suffering that sustain insurgencies and al Qaeda.
When it comes to short-sightedness regarding Yemen's best interests, Saleh
and his ruling family circle have demonstrated a near unerring propensity to
err since he assumed the presidency in 1978, after leading a military coup
in 1962. Since then, Saleh has built a power system based heavily on buying
the goodwill of Yemen's tribal leaders, allegedly paying them to deliver the
votes of their people in election after election.
In the first Gulf War, Saleh cast what became known as the most expensive
"no" in history -- voting against international deployment to roll back
Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. Yemen's Gulf neighbors expelled Yemeni
workers from their countries, lastingly depriving Yemen of remittances, the
mainstay of its tiny economy.
The blunders continued. Saleh allowed al Qaeda members to make their homes
here as long as they didn't target his government (a gentleman's agreement
broken only in recent years). Instead of incorporating southern Yemenis
after the 1994 north-south civil war, Saleh marginalized them, politically
and economically. Anger in the south has fed insurgencies and protests
against Saleh's government, creating southern discontent that al Qaeda is
now trying to exploit.
In 2004 when the Zaidis, a religiously oriented sect in Yemen's north, took
up arms against the government, Saleh's military rocketed and mortared the
cities and towns of the north, according to residents there -- killing
hundreds if not thousands of his people and doubling and doubling and
doubling again the ranks of fighters for and supporters of the northern
rebels.
Corruption -- the theft of Yemeni public funds and foreign aid -- is so
rampant here it would make Afghan President Hamid Karzai blush. In a country
with one of the highest child-mortality rates in the Middle East, where only
about half the people have access to medical services, top government
officials and low-ranking workers alike steal and waste half of the slim
allocation that the government devotes to health care, according to the
World Health Organization.
Saleh's government also has resisted significantly scaling back an outdated
fuel-subsidy program that sucks up more than 10 percent of Yemen's GDP --
perhaps because, according to Abdul-Ghani Iryani, a Yemeni development
analyst, Saleh's cronies are skimming $2 billion a year off the program for
their own pockets.
Estimates are that Yemen, a country at peace with all its neighbors, spends
from one-third to one-half of its budget on security and intelligence
services, keeping a lid on its own people.
On the day Brennan visited, Yemeni forces with U.S. help staged an attack on
an al Qaeda hideout in the southeast. But the siege ended with the showy
Yemeni cordon of tanks, artillery, troops, and warplanes around the town of
Huta somehow letting top al Qaeda leaders escape, as Yemeni forces did last
month at another siege in the southern city of Lawdar.
Saleh's regime appears eager to use the influx of new military aid against
its own people, persistently claiming that al Qaeda and Yemen's southern
separatists are one. (Separatist leaders deny it; Saleh's regime has
supplied no hard evidence; and most Westerners are skeptical.)
Saudi Arabia has been one of the worst enablers for Saleh's regime, bailing
it out recently with a more than $2 billion gift of cash just when growing
money pressures had economists hoping Yemen might be forced into reform.
U.S. officials seem to be more properly cynical about Saleh and his claims,
and working to try to monitor aid for special operations and critical social
services.
But if Saleh continues to refuse and delay reforms, the United States and
its allies should do something inconceivable in the can-do war on terror:
back off and let Saleh feel the pain of his sucked-dry economy and thwarted
people. Rather than trying to prop up another wobbly tyrant, as in
Afghanistan, the United States would help most by allowing Yemen's citizens,
and potentially better Yemeni leaders, to finally have a say.
Ellen Knickmeyer is a former Associated Press bureau chief in Africa and
Washington Post bureau chief in the Middle East who is now doing research in
Yemen.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/files/yemen_2.jpg
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