webmaster
© Copyright DEHAI-Eritrea OnLine, 1993-2011
All rights reserved
From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Thu Jul 21 2011 - 06:44:16 EDT
Yemen on the Brink of Hell
By
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/robert_f_worth
/index.html?inline=nyt-per> ROBERT F. WORTH
Published: July 21, 2011
On May 29, a young woman named Bushra al- Maqtari joined a group of several
thousand protesters marching down a trash-strewn boulevard in the Yemeni
city of Taiz. The Arab world’s democratic uprising was five months old, and
patience among the protesters in Taiz — Yemen’s second largest city — was
wearing thin. Maqtari had been one of the first and most fearless leaders of
the movement. She is a remarkable figure: a 31-year-old university
administrator and fiction writer, she is also a childless divorcee who
refused, until recently, to wear the
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/m/muslim_veili
ng/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> abaya, the all-covering gown that is
practically mandatory for women in Yemen. Tiny and frail, she has a round,
lovely face, with level brows and tranquil brown eyes.
On that afternoon, Maqtari was standing in a crowd gathered around the
city’s General Security building — an imposing six-story edifice flanked by
guards — when she heard cracking sounds. She looked up and saw that the
officers on the building’s roof were not just throwing rocks, as they had in
the past. They were firing straight down into the crowd below. Within
minutes, at least four people were dead and about 60 were wounded. Maqtari
began running back toward “Freedom Square,” the intersection where thousands
of protesters had been camped out for months demanding the resignation of
Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s strongman president. Then the real assault
began. Armored vehicles, tanks and bulldozers began converging on the
protesters’ tent city from all sides. They fired tear gas and water cannons
into the square and began shooting protesters at point-blank range. They
doused the tents, which extended for hundreds of yards in every direction,
with gasoline and lighted them on fire. None of the protesters had weapons.
“People were dying all around us, and there was nothing we could do,”
Maqtari told me. Some were burned alive. At around 11 p.m., Maqtari fled to
her sister’s house, about 200 yards uphill from the square. There, she and
other protesters watched as flames engulfed the entire square, raging for
several hours. Officers stormed through the local hospital and several field
clinics where protesters were being treated, firing tear gas down the
corridors, shooting up the ceilings and arresting doctors and nurses. Some
thrust their gun butts into patients’ wounds. Others were laughing
hysterically, as if they were on drugs, Maqtari and others told me, and
shouting into the darkness, “Ali is your god!” The next morning, amid the
charred remains of the tents, someone had scrawled a sardonic reversal of
the protesters’ chants on a wall. “The regime wants the fall of the people,”
it said.
The massacre in Taiz received little attention in the West, blending in with
the larger chaos and violence enveloping the Arab world. In Syria, tanks
were rolling through the streets of several cities, as months of protest
evolved into a bloody national insurrection. In Libya, the civil war was
festering into a grim status quo, with
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/north_a
tlantic_treaty_organization/index.html?inline=nyt-org> NATO airstrikes
unable to dislodge Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi from his Tripoli stronghold. Even
Egypt and Tunisia seemed endangered, with fresh violence breaking out and
their economies in tatters.
Yet the events in Taiz took on a tragic dimension that went beyond the
numbers of dead and wounded. Taiz is Yemen’s least tribal city, home to the
highest number of educated people, professionals and traders. The city was
“the heart of the revolution,” in one popular refrain, and its protesters
were less politicized and more rigorously nonviolent than elsewhere in
Yemen. The attack on May 29, with its deliberate cruelty and excess,
confirmed what many Yemenis feared: that Saleh sees the democratic uprising
as a greater threat to his power than Al Qaeda. The burning of the Taiz
square, after all, coincided with the collapse of all government authority
in large areas of south Yemen, where heavily armed jihadist groups have
captured two towns and several villages. In the northwestern province of
Saada, too, a militia movement now reigns supreme; they recently elected
Yemen’s biggest arms dealer as their new governor. All this has implications
that go well beyond Yemen’s remote mountains and deserts — the chaos in the
north, for instance, threatens to set off a proxy conflict between the
region’s two great nemeses, Saudi Arabia and Iran — and the Yemeni military
has done little to oppose any of it.
Even after Saleh was flown to a hospital in Saudi Arabia in early June,
wounded in a bomb blast at his palace mosque, his government — or what is
left of it — seemed determined to crush the unarmed protesters while leaving
the rest of the country open to some of the world’s most dangerous men.
After decades of backdoor collusion with jihadis and armed rebels of all
kinds, Saleh and his generals may believe they can more easily defeat these
warriors, or make deals with them. If so, they are taking an enormous risk,
one that could have deadly consequences for the United States, which has
become the chief target of the Al Qaeda franchise in Yemen. It could also
prove disastrous for the greater Middle East, now faced with the prospect of
a Somalia-style collapse on its southern flank. For 23 million Yemenis, the
risk is even greater. If the country continues to disintegrate, they will
lose a chance to finally rise above the violence and chaos that have ruled
their lives for so long. “They are still attacking us every day, targeting
the activists’ houses, arresting people,” Maqtari told me. “It’s as if they
are pushing us and pushing us to take up violence, so that we will be like
them. They want to turn the revolution into a tribal war. And this will tear
the country apart.”
In a sense, the counterrevolution in Yemen began with a single word:
baraghala. It is an old Yemeni word, used by northern tribesmen to denigrate
the citified, unarmed people of Taiz and its environs. Its meaning is
something like “weakling,” but with the negative force of “nigger.” Starting
in early February, Saleh and his subordinates began sending out flocks of
young thugs to the protest sites, where they would shout, “Baraghala!” at
the demonstrators as they beat them with batons. The word did not come as a
surprise. Saleh is himself a northern tribesman with an elementary-school
education, a manipulative ruler who has shredded his country’s few civil
institutions during his 33 years in power. He is widely said to resent Taiz,
which was once Yemen’s capital, for its role as a beacon of education and
enlightenment. By attacking it, he and his commanders seemed to be
deliberately provoking Taizis to abandon their moral high ground and fight
back.
The damaged home of Sadeq al-Ahmar, one of the most prominent tribal leaders
now opposed to the Saleh government.
“Some of us were thinking of calling it the Revolution of the Baraghala,”
Maqtari told me when I met her for lunch on my first day in Taiz. We sat at
a long table loaded with roast chicken and a spicy lamb stew called fahsa,
in a bustling restaurant owned by a sympathetic businessman who had helped
feed the protesters. She wore a black-and-white-flecked head scarf wrapped
tightly around her face, and she had with her a group of fellow protest
organizers whose polite, manicured appearance and career profiles all hinted
at the city’s distinct identity: a doctor, a lawyer, a graduate student, an
engineer. Taizis are intensely proud of their civil roots, Maqtari told me.
The city is an ancient center of trade, cradled by high green mountain
slopes where coffee grows. It is just northeast of the ancient Red Sea port
of Mokha, for which the coffee drink is named, and the relative
cosmopolitanism of its merchant classes helped dissolve the power of the
tribes long ago. The area is known to Yemenis as balad al aish — the country
of living — in contrast with the north, which is called balad al jaish, or
the country of the army. It has always been vulnerable to raids by tribesmen
from the arid northern mountains. Taiz was once an attractive city, but it
is now battered and decayed, even by the standards of Yemen, the Arab
world’s poorest country. For three decades, Maqtari told me, Saleh has
systematically starved the city of capital, while focusing his patronage
network on Sana. “It is like a kind of racism,” Maqtari said. “He wants Taiz
to suffer because of who we are.”
After lunch, one of Maqtari’s friends drove us to the square. The streets
reeked of overflowing garbage; residents told me the government had barred
municipal workers from collecting it. The lines of cars waiting to buy
gasoline went on as far as the eye could see, blocking the city’s main
roads. We passed several checkpoints where the guards were dressed in
plainclothes; many are said to fear assassination since the attack on the
square. Only one checkpoint had a full complement of uniformed soldiers,
near a huge poster of the president. “They are here to guard the poster,”
Maqtari told me as the guards waved us through. “It’s the only one left in
Taiz.”
We stopped near Freedom Square and walked the rest of the way. The streets
were littered with blackened tent fragments, chunks of concrete and shell
casings. Even the trees had been burned, their trunks charred and their
uppermost leaves shriveled and brown. As we reached the center of the
square, a few dozen teenagers and children ran up to us, greeting Maqtari as
if she were the Pied Piper. Then something remarkable happened: The Yemeni
national anthem began playing from a tinny loudspeaker nearby. Instantly,
everyone in the square stood at attention, raised their right hands in a
peace symbol and sang along. I had never seen this anywhere in Yemen.
Afterward, Maqtari explained that this had been a regular ritual during the
sit-in, along with moments of collective silence. “We wanted to show that
patriotism does not belong to the regime,” she said.
Moments later, thick clouds darkened the sky, and a heavy rain began pelting
the streets into mud. We ran for shelter under the eaves of a burned
building, and one of Maqtari’s colleagues drove up in a battered brown
sedan. They wanted to take me up to the mountains for a view of the city.
Eight of us piled into the car, four men and four women, packed in tightly
together — a shocking breach of decorum for most Yemenis, but here in
liberal Taiz, it was, apparently, perfectly natural. As we drove through a
blinding downpour, Maqtari talked about her love of the novels of José
Saramago, Jorge Amado and Milan Kundera. She has published one story
collection of her own and is working on her first novel. “I’m a bookworm,”
she said, and described to me how she flies to Cairo whenever she can afford
it and comes home with suitcases full of books in Arabic translation. One of
her recent favorites — to my amazement — was the letters of Henry Miller and
Anaïs Nin, the twin idols of 20th-century literary erotica. It is difficult
to convey just how unusual this is in a country where many women are married
off by age 13 and most cannot read.
The air on the mountaintop was cool and damp. There was a magnificent view
of the terraced hillsides below, with traditional Yemeni mud-brick houses
set on escarpments overlooking the city. It is probably the prettiest place
in Taiz, but one protester described it to me as “a jewel of ashes.” Maqtari
and I sat inside the lobby of an empty hotel and ordered tea. The Taiz
protests, she told me, started in January, when a group of young left-wing
dissidents were inspired, like their peers in Egypt and elsewhere, by the
Tunisian revolution. Most of them had grown disillusioned with Yemen’s
opposition political parties, which have made tacit deals with Saleh in
order to maintain their paltry share of power. They began organizing
demonstrations, using the slogan popularized in Tunisia and Egypt: “The
people want the fall of the regime.” Yemen’s largest opposition party, an
Islamist group known as Islah, demanded that they modify the slogan and ask
for “reform” of the regime. The protesters refused. Maqtari wrote a series
of strident columns for the one local paper willing to publish her. On Feb.
11, the day Mubarak fell, the protests in Taiz swelled to tens of thousands
and turned into a permanent sit-in at the intersection that became known as
Freedom Square. “We never expected that many people to join us,” Maqtari
told me. Taiz seemed to be seeding all of Yemen with its spirit. Taizis have
been at the core of local protest movements in several other cities,
including the capital. After gunmen opened fire on the protesters in Sana in
March, killing dozens, their names and hometowns were read out at the
central stage at the protest square. Most of them, it turned out, were from
Taiz.
It was then that the United States began reconsidering its support for
Saleh. He had been an essential if unreliable partner ever since November
2001, when he flew to Washington to pledge his support in the war on terror.
Yemen’s role as a wellspring of the global jihad — many of Al Qaeda’s foot
soldiers were Yemenis — allowed him to provide intelligence and access to
leading jihadi figures like Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric who is
now hiding in the mountains of Shabwa province in central Yemen. Terrorism
helped raise the profile of a country that had long been neglected as an
arid, impoverished backwater. As one Yemeni official put it to me: “Yemen
used to be called the tail of the Saudi cow. Now it is its own cow.”
Yet as American aid and military assistance grew over the years, the
diplomats doling it out became increasingly uneasy. Saleh seemed to view Al
Qaeda as a bargaining chip, one that could be used to guarantee his own
relevance as Yemen’s meager oil and water reserves ran dry. He paroled
convicted terrorists, or allowed them to escape from prison, even as he
cracked down on peaceful protesters. At the same time, his divide-and-rule
policies left him more and more isolated inside Yemen. Eventually, even the
Americans and their Saudi partners would turn against him, convinced he was
more trouble than he was worth. But the uprising of 2011 took them by
surprise, perhaps in part because they (and almost everyone else)
underestimated the power of the nonviolent movement that started in Taiz.
Even Yemenis were caught unprepared. Soon after the protests started,
sympathy for the baraghala and their cause spread into the most unlikely
places. Among the first to embrace it was a paunchy 36-year-old tribesman
named Abdullah bin Haddar. Haddar is from Marib, a famously lawless province
east of Yemen’s capital. I first met him in the tent where he had been
living for four months in the protest square in Sana. I was struck instantly
by his appearance: he wore no belt or jambiya, the traditional dagger Yemeni
tribesmen always carry on their belts. “I stopped wearing it since I came to
the square,” he told me. His head was bare, too — he had disdained the
patterned cloths most tribal men wear — and though he spoke in a thick
Bedouin accent, he wore rimless glasses that made him look more like an
ill-shaved salesman than a feudal warrior.
When the Sana protests first started in February, Haddar told me, he had
been at home in Marib, surrounded by his family and a vast armory of
weapons. “I used to sleep with guns all around me,” he said. “It always
scared my wife.” He needed them. His life, he explained, was dominated and
constrained by tribal feuds. The feuds are almost constant in Marib, and
because they are collective, any member of the tribe is fair game. Tribal
boundaries are closely watched, so that walking or driving into enemy
territory can instantly endanger your life. Sana is often just as dangerous,
Haddar told me, because your enemies can catch up to you at any time in the
anonymity of the crowd, and it is harder to see them coming. “This is why I
never learned English,” he said. “The class is always at a certain time and
place, so people know where to find you.” Students at Sana University have
been gunned down in exactly this way, Haddar and others told me. ……………….
Please read further at the link below- from page 4 to 10.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/yemen-on-the-brink-of-hell.html?p
agewanted=3
----[This List to be used for Eritrea Related News Only]----