On A Dagger's Edge
Yemen has become America's surprise ally in fighting terrorism. But can the Muslim nation survive its own struggle with endemic poverty and extremism?
The anger on the streets is palpable. In Yemen's cities, small villages, and farming communities, the talk is all about inflation. When Yemen tried to lower gas subsidies last year (in response to World Bank demands), violent riots broke out around the country; several dozen people were killed.
On street corners in Sana, unemployed laborers--some even with university degrees--gather every morning desperately looking for a job. They are lucky if they can find work one day a week. Hamood, a 50-year-old construction worker, has to support his wife and 10 children on an average of $10 a week. "Every year," he says, "it becomes worse." Hamood cannot afford school fees, so his wife and kids all work as sharecroppers in his home village. "Without fixing these things, we cannot guarantee that we will survive in the future," says Mohamed al-Tayeb, a member of the Shura Council, Yemen's equivalent of a senate.
"Divide and conquer." Increasingly, however, Yemenis fear that the strongman who has ruled for 28 years will be unable or unwilling to make the tough reforms needed. "The Americans are happy because they found someone who will fight terrorism," says Mutawakil. "But my fear is that we're establishing the foundation for terrorism in the country, just as they did in Iraq." He is particularly concerned about what he calls Saleh's "divide and conquer" style. Faced with trying to control Yemen's powerful and unruly tribes, Saleh has worked to maintain a delicate balance between competing forces, rewarding friends and pitting rivals against one another.
Saleh's defenders bristle at this analysis. For one thing, they point out that most of Yemen was virtually cut off from the world for centuries, ruled by hermetic religious regimes. "It was really medieval," says Abdulkarim al-Arhabi, the minister of planning, "and not much different from the days of the prophet perhaps." Indeed, up until the 1962 revolution, the gates of Sana's medieval old city were locked at 6 p.m. every night, barring any entry or exit until the next morning. Yemen has been relatively stable for only a decade. After many years as a Cold War battleground, it was unified in 1990 but then suffered through a civil war in 1994.
Yemen has always been one of the most traditional Islamic countries, in part because of its isolation. But in recent years, more radical forms of Islam have begun to seep in. One factor was the return of the hardened mujahideen from Afghanistan, some of them with ties to al Qaeda. Another was the arrival of a veritable army of Yemeni laborers expelled from Saudi Arabia in the wake of the Gulf War (after Yemen backed Saddam Hussein). Many of these returning expatriates brought the Saudis' ultraconservative brand of Islam back with them.
It is also hard to control an unruly country with complicated tribal relationships and an estimated 60 million guns in private hands (or three for every man, woman, and child). That doesn't even include the weapons trade, which U.S. officials believe includes planeloads and shiploads of weapons moving through the nation. (It is difficult to overstate the gun culture in Yemen. Take Nasser, a taxi driver in Sana, who proudly lists the weapons he keeps in his house: AK-47s, pistols, grenades, even tear gas--to control his wife and kids if they protest, he jokes. He recalls the time that he loaned an empty family house to a friend of his. When the owner, his uncle, returned, he asked, "Did you take the land mine out of the living room?")
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