Armies of Liberation

DH One good reason to visit Yemen is its friendly, charming people who do their best to make visitors feel like guests. While trying to get round the confusing capital, Sanaa, Yemenis not only gave me directions but also told taxi drivers my destination.

Yemen is famous for its monumental architecture, its mosques, palaces, and distinctive, elegant mud-brick houses. Narrow buildings, two to eight stories tall, with stone or brick foundations and mud-plastered, mud-brick exteriors pierced by arched windows and decorated with geometric designs in whitewash or pale stone. The Yemeni house is cool in summer, warm in winter, always handsome, whether in the meanest village or the wealthiest city suburb.

Sanaa is a sprawling, shabby city of 2.5 million. At its centre lies the beautifully restored walled town with its bustling souqs. Just inside the arch of Yemen Gate there is a wide cobbled plaza where Yemenis relax, read newspapers, and drink hot sweet tea in small glasses. The narrow streets are lined with shops selling food, materials, shoes, and daggers in simple and elaborately decorated leather holders attached to wide leather belts.

Sanaa boasts some excellent restaurants which serve charcoal-grilled fish and paper-thin rounds of Yemeni bread baked in clay ovens, a chilli sauce, curried prawns, and mansaf, whole lamb filled with spicy rice and roasted slowly in an oven. Yemeni cuisine is strongly influenced by India.

The most fashionable restaurant of the moment is al-Fahker, the place influential people dine.

Yemen is a big country with many attractions. We took a car into the countryside and toured the magnificent palace of the imams, the former rulers, built atop a huge rock. At the medieval town of Thula we were pursued by vendors selling daggers, jewelery, and Indian materials. But even insistent touts could not spoil the beautiful multi-storied houses of Thula, dating from the 15th century. At the hilltop village of Kawkaban we discovered a tourist hotel with a splendid view but no clients.

YT Yemen’s current constitution is contradictory, out-of-date, and incompatible with democracy, said a report released yesterday.

The Yemeni Strategic Report 2004 issued by the Yemeni Center for Strategic Studies said that unless the President’s responsibilities are clearly defined to be accountable to the people of Yemen, true democracy cannot prevail.

The report had noted a long-ignored fact that the constitution does not have any clear indication of the responsibilities of the President to his people and how he could be held accountable for his actions, i.e., the people have no system to hold him accountable. “The responsibility of an official should be relative to his powers.” the report said.

Meanwhile the report also noted that being in control of all initiatives, decisions, and actions, the President was granted absolute powers that are lacking in the government, making it a mere tool that he could utilize without any questioning whatsoever.

The report also noted serious flaws in the election laws and described the presidential election process as artificial at best under the current restrictions and limitations.

In conclusion, the report defines democracy in the country as incomplete without an overhaul and update of the constitution to be more compatible with democracy.

Yes time to revise the constitution and election law to pave the way for the regular and peaceful transition of executive power.

SANA’A – Two Yemenis who fled in April 2003 from the custody of political security in Aden, were responsible for suicide attacks in Iraq, sources have told Raynews.

The two separate attacks, which led to dozens of deaths and injured, were carried out this month by two persons originally from Aden in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.

The sources said that the family of one of the suicide bombers, 29 year-old Khaldoun Al-Hukaimi, were informed of his “martyrdom” by a call from Syria on 19th of July, the day the attack on coalition forces was executed.

According to the sources, the same scenario faced the family of the second Yemeni, 28 year-old Saleh Mana, who received the news of their relative’s suicide the day before the Al-Hukaimi family.

The two, held in Aden under charges of involvement with the 2000 attack on the American vessel USS Cole, escaped along with another eight from custody in Aden.

So two suspected Cole bombers were reported killed in Iraq in a phone call to their families in Yemen. So I guess we can stop looking for them now. Or not.

Yemen Should Come with a Deck of Cards, like Iraq.

Ramzia Al-Eryani, chairperson of the Yemen Women’s Association, believes that there is a political inability to find a viable alternative to Ali Abdullah Saleh, and she expects serious conflicts between the parties that may lead to armed confrontation if the President keeps to his decision not to run for another electoral term.

Al-Eryani added that the decision would have serious repercussions for democracy and development plans, given the President’s recognized talents in handling such challenges. The women leaders appealed to the President to stand by his people. YO

Pretty negative huh? Very Scary. But the reference to democracy and development gives it away. Then I remembered this guy who said that the NGO’s in Yemen are also compromised:

And just as the Yemeni government sought to coopt the independent press, it now sponsors its own non-governmental organizations. Salih has worked to push independent groups out of business.

So I checked on her. She’s a relative of some high ranking GPC leader. And Saleh’s daughter is the honorary president of one of the woman’s organizations. Takes a little time to adjust to the concept of a NGO thats not automaticly oppositonal to the government or at least independent. But the result of Saleh’s 27 years of rule has been described as “a culture of corruption,” which makes those people who remain independent even more admirable.

Related 2003 Parliamentary elections: The GPC, whose election-time logo was the silhouette of a rearing horse, benefited from free publicity paid for with government resources…..The ruling party’s most compelling campaign message was quintessential pork-barrel politics: if you want better community services, a civil service job or government contracts, only the ruling party can deliver. ….(Yemen) could be on the road to becoming a one-party quasi-democracy, like Egypt, wherein opposition parties are allowed to compete but not to win.

This is a very good article and it includes some solid references on the ever elusive diesel smuggling:

According to a well-informed ex-parliamentarian from the ruling General People’s Congress (GPC), high-ranking regime officials smuggled large quantities of subsidized diesel from Yemen’s southern ports to the Horn of Africa, transferring at least 20 to 30 percent of the public money used to pay for the subsidies into their own pockets. Concrete evidence of the extent of smuggling is impossible to obtain, but the rapid increase in Yemen’s diesel imports makes a circumstantial case.

Though Yemen has its own small oilfields, 70 percent of the diesel consumed per annum must be brought in from elsewhere. While the amounts of other commodities imported remained fairly constant between 1998 and 2003, imports of “petroleum and petroleum products” (the vast majority of which is diesel) leapt from 6.44 percent of all imports in 1998 to 14.86 percent in 2003. The fact that all other categories of imports (including equipment that uses diesel such as power-generating machinery and transport vehicles) actually decreased slightly in this period, combined with the fact that Yemen has no strategic civil or military diesel reserve, make smuggling the only explanation for the increase, or at least a great deal of it. In any event, much of the Yemeni public is convinced that the regime is smuggling diesel. As Islah member Nasser Arman asked some months before the subsidy was lifted, “When the government admits that the subsidies on the oil derivatives go to the pockets of smugglers, why doesn’t it audit even one of them?”

Sucking the Yemeni Economy Dry, using public funds to purchase and smuggle weapons, and to smuggle diesel. I think a good chunk of the budget is allocated to the president without any transparency at all. I found a good fiscal report and W/A this later. (Its 51 pages.) But the WB report notes defense spending ( in millions of Riyals) tripled from 1998-2003, from 52,247 to 148,139

Related: Saudi Arabia will supply Yemen with natural gas to cover its current shortfall, informed sources have reported.(YO 7/27)

Next drug smuggling. Thats another big one. Can we call it narco-terrorism?

“The following are some (excerpts) of the recommendations by reformist Arab writers.:

Whoever thinks he can be comfortable near a wolf and can turn him into a domestic puppy will be astounded when one day it falls upon his flock.

In the past, we told you: ‘Stop them!’ Today, we tell you: ‘Expel them.’”

Extremist websites must be censored, and it must be understood that “the source of intellectual danger today is the media, including the Internet.”

“The time has come for us to declare resolutely that the claim heard whenever Muslims stage a terror attack – ‘George Bush made me do it’ – is a stupid one.

But not enough is said about the so-called intellectuals, who are in effect no more than justifiers of terrorism

In Egypt there is now a group of writers and editors and even politicians past the age of 50, who take political Viagra and feel intoxication and lust when they curse the U.S. and applaud the terrorists

Since 9/11, I have been reading and hearing the Egyptian media, and I cannot name five writers who condemn terrorism unequivocally

Cheap television [programming] is the incubator of terrorism, and the workshop for the creation of a terror discourse

When a mosque becomes a place where firebombs are made, it ceases to be a mosque, and should be treated as the scene of a crime…”

It is regrettable that Western media channels, particularly CNN and the BBC, host Islamist activists who support terrorism and treat them as experts and analysts…

There is no such thing as ‘moderate Islamists.’ There are ordinary Muslims who lead ordinary lives, and there are terrorists and people who are likely to become terrorists in the future

We did not heed the Prophet’s explicit instruction that the Muslims must kill only combatants, not women and children. Anger blinded us, and we enjoyed the analyses that claimed Israel was facing its most difficult challenge since the October [1973] war.

Turning to these (suicide) operations was a great moral mistake, and turning away from them is a good virtue

“The terrorists deliberately distort the precepts of Islam and the image of the Muslims, and thus are necessarily the enemies of Islam and the Muslims. Why, then, isn’t a clear and honest religious position towards them taken… like the hostile positions that these sheikhs take against some of the Muslim schools of religious thought and their followers.

The religious discourse has not educated the people of the Islamist movements to adopt leniency, mercy, and tolerance for the other – but rather has educated to hatred of the other and plans to murder and uproot the other

Then, there is a need to discuss intensively the issue of abolishing chapters in the Koran [naskh] and [a need to examine] whether it is true that the verse of the sword [Koran 9:5] abolished all mercy, leniency, and forgiveness in the Koran

“These human weapons are designed and shaped by a constant flow of anti-Western propaganda from Arab satellite television, the so-called Islamic associations, and countless madrassas (Islamic schools) and mosques throughout the world, including London itself…

Moreover, they disseminate hatred against Muslims who do not walk in their own path, treating them as unbelievers – distinguishing between murdering a Muslim and murdering a non-Muslim, and preaching that it is permitted to murder a non-Muslim but forbidden to murder a Muslim

they see the people of the West as unbelievers who are of no use whatsoever to Islam… and also see them as ‘parasites’ that must be gotten rid of, or converted to Islam – that is, to transform Dar al-Harb into Dar al-Islam…

“the war on terror … requires intensive and ongoing intellectual, political, and educational activities, in order to fight the extremist and terrorist Islamic Salafi thought and the Salafi da’wa that calls to establish a fundamentalist Islamic regime …”

And all this time we thought it was Kool-Aid the leftards were drinking, but now it sounds like it could be political viagra. Lets hope the ideological compatiability between the Arab progressives and the Western conservatives translates into a synchronicity greater than that of the alliance between the media, the western left and the radical islamists.

Criticizing Saleh’s regime is like shooting fish in a barrel, but few things irk me more than the targeting of kids. As previously discussed, the kidnapping and imprisonment of kids is used both as a punishment against adult relatives and as a tactic of intimidation against reformers and critics.

In todays mailbag from Yemen, we find THIS PETITION for Ibrahim al-Saiani, 14 year old boy in prison (without charges since May) in need of medical treatmen and near death.

I wrote about Ibrahim in my last article:

The jailing of children is common. Amnesty International recently issued an urgent alert pertaining to Ibrahim al-Saiani, a 14-year-old boy in prison, in urgent need of medical treatment. Amnesty reports that he may be held solely for being part of the Zaidi community, and at risk of torture and ill treatment. The Arabic daily, al-Shoura, also reported on children in prison; the youngest listed is 9-year-old Aref Mosa al-Qusi. His condition is “wounded.”

So one at a time if need be.

The Arabic on the petition is a translation of the English Amnesty Statement. The petition affirms the concern of Amnesty and calls for medical treatment and release if indeed is “a prisoner of conscience, held solely for being part of the Zaidi community.”

More from Amnesty: Though he was reportedly not directly involved, Ibrahim al Saiani was reportedly injured by shrapnel during the clashes in Sa’da, north of Yemen, between government forces and followers of Hussain Badr al-Din al-Huthi, a cleric from the Zaidi community. His right arm is said to have been amputated, a piece of shrapnel is lodged in his skull, and he has an injury to his right leg. He is said to be completely dependant on his family to carry out daily activities.

So please consider signing THIS PETITION, all it asks is for a doctor and, if he’s innnocent, to release him.

Regardless of all the divisions in the world, one thing I think most people can agree on: this kid needs a doctor and its cruel to deny him medical treatment.

YT: The Shoura Opposition newspaper reported in its website today that the robbery cases in the coastal city of Aden that accompanied rallies in demonstration of the price hike may have been carried out by ‘foreign elements’ unknown to the residents of Aden.

The demonstration, which the newspaper claims started peacefully, turned violent shortly after a group of unknown men started destroying property and robbing shops in the commercial capital’s most prominent neighborhoods.

Analysts say that such action has been adopted by totalitarian authorities in many developing countries by ordering secret police elements to begin causing panic and violence in a peaceful demonstration in order to disperse it by force and arrest all those who participated.

The Secret Police, even the name is creepy.