Well Gone Dry
A good, comprehensive article:
Well Gone Dry
A Letter from San‘a
Gregory D. Johnsen
Local legend holds that San‘a was the first
city built after the Flood, founded by
Shem on the choicest land available. The
Prophet Muhammad called it “the paradise of
earthly paradises”, and Yemen’s current poet
laureate, Abd al-Aziz al-Maqalih, writes that it
is the “capital of the soul.” But this city of towering
gingerbread houses so celebrated in verse
and song is no longer the exotic medieval capital
it was only a generation ago. With the exception
of the old city, San‘a has become, like most
Middle Eastern cities, full of crowded markets
and narrow streets that reek of sweat, diesel and
tobacco. The dust rising from these congested
streets seems to carry with it the fear and frustration
of a place about to go over the edge, and
pull the rest of Yemen along with it.
Yemen could be the first case of what happens
when an Arab state runs out of oil and
water even as it confronts rising unemployment
and the widespread social dissatisfaction
so well described in a series of UN Arab Human
Development reports. That dissatisfaction
flows from the pressures caused by an annual
population growth of 3.9 percent, a largely unacknowledged
HIV/AIDS crisis, rampant poverty
mixed with corruption, and a central government
too weak to deal effectively with any
of these or other problems. As all of this bad
news gathers, coming changes in the leadership
of the country’s three main power blocs suggest
a looming lack of political capital to manage
the challenges ahead.
Given Yemen’s reputation as a refuge for Islamic
extremists, one might think that American
diplomats there would be warning Foggy
Bottom of these maladies. Perhaps they are, but
if so, their warnings weren’t heeded in the appointment
of Edmund Hull to be the first post-
9/11 ambassador to Yemen. The choice of Hull,
a counterterrorism expert, suggests that U.S.
policy on the southern edge of the Arabian peninsula
is focused singlemindedly on the War on
Terror, to the exclusion of almost all else. So as
long as the Yemeni government cooperates—or
maintains the illusion of cooperation—on that
front, all else is forgiven, and very likely forgotten.
And that’s a problem.
The Last Refuge
The modern history of Yemen has been tumultuous,to put it generously. The port
of Aden and most of the country’s southern
lands were British territories from 1839 into the
1960s. The rest of the country, including San‘a,
stayed relatively free of direct colonial influence,
but not of royal and tribal chaos, nor of
intrigue and interference from Yemen’s neighbors.
Yemenis take pride in the fact that the
borders of the modern state were drawn free of
colonial influence (though not of Saudi aggression)
during the 1930s. But this pride, along
with references in ancient texts to a geographical
area called Yemen, disguises the fact that the
modern state has never achieved political cohesion
or stability.
After the British were forced out of Aden in
1967, Southern Yemen fell to a strange mixture
of revolutionaries and Marxists who eventually
established the People’s Democratic Republic of
Yemen (PDRY) in 1970. This Marxist state was
the Soviet Union’s closest ideological client in
the Arab world, though it also attracted Chinese
weapons and aid. The PDRY also served as
a base from which Soviet agents and some local
adventurers encouraged a rebellion in neighboring
Oman, which attracted the resistance
of, among others, the late Shah of Iran. Within
a few years, politics in the PDRY came down to
running gun battles among rival factions on the
streets of Aden, complete with the cessation of
anything resembling a government service. The
bloody events of January 1986 are still clouded
in mystery, but one fact is clear: a lot of people
were killed. Mass graves, such as one discovered
this past December, are still being unearthed.
By 1990, after the PDRY’s loss of its Soviet
supporter, the country began to fall into the
arms of its northern neighbor. The north was
no model of political stability either, having suffered
equally through royalist and republican
rule, with a 1962–70 civil war complete with
Egyptian and Saudi interference marking the
passage from one to the other. But by the early
1990s the north was much stronger and more
stable than Aden, and unification was achieved
in May 1990.
Four years later, the south attempted to secede
under the leadership of its former president
and the vice president of united Yemen, Ali Salim
al-Baydh. The ensuing civil war ensured
that the south would remain a part of Yemen,
but at a high cost. Al-Baydh went into exile in
Oman, while his once-strong Socialist Party
was left in shambles. Aden, which in Arabic is
spelled the same as Eden, was left as anything
but a paradise. A city which as late as the 1950s
had rivaled New York and Liverpool as the busiest
port in the world was, by 1994, a shell of
its former self. Pockmarked cement buildings
and a destroyed brewery stood as memorials to
ideological madness and civil war.
Since 1994, the north has effectively colonized
the south. It has installed officials in
southern districts and cities who have systematically
looted public accounts and stolen land before
returning to their homes in the north. Others
have stayed in the south, working to turn
their ill-gotten gains into further profit through
haphazard and cronyized attempts at development.
The city’s once pristine beaches bordering
the Gulf of Aden are now littered with threesided
cement hovels that were meant to serve as
tourist bungalows, but which have since become
home to packs of mangy desert dogs that keep
picnicking families to a minimum.
The 1994 civil war was also instrumental in
institutionalizing Islamist elements—known as
“Afghan Arabs” for their role as fighters against
the Soviet Union in the 1980s—into the country’s
political system. Following the withdrawal
of the Red Army from Afghanistan in 1989,
many of these young participants in the U.S. and
Saudi-sponsored anti-Soviet jihad made their
way back to the lands of their birth. Many were
full of religious zeal and the thrill of victory, eager
to replicate their successes at home. Their respective
governments, however, took a dim view
of becoming targets of these wandering veterans.
Subsequent armed clashes, massive crackdowns
and arbitrary arrests led many of these men to
seize upon a well-known though spurious hadith
of the Prophet Muhammad: “When disorder
threatens, seek refuge in Yemen.”
The Yemeni government took advantage of
the influx of Afghan Arab fighters and managed
to organize them into an effective paramilitary
force to put down the south’s attempted secession,
which San‘a portrayed as a jihad against infidel
communists. Foremost among the Yemeni
leaders of these fighters were Sheikh Abd al-Majid
al-Zindani, now listed as a “specially designated
global terrorist” by the United States and the
United Nations, and Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar, the
shadowy commander of the 1st Armored Division
and relative of President Ali Abdullah Salih
(often mistakenly said to be his half-brother).
Al-Zindani developed extensive contacts
among the Afghan Arabs during his time in
self-imposed exile in Saudi Arabia where he
headed up a “scientific institute” at King Abd
al-Aziz University in Jeddah from 1979 to
1991, and from numerous trips to Afghanistan
during the 1980s. He was also a member
of the five-man Yemeni presidential advisory
council from 1993 to 1997, and he remains
a major figure within Islah, the main opposition
party. As the most powerful military
commander in Yemen, Ali Muhsin monitored
carefully the post-1989 influx of roughly
4,000 battle-hardened veterans. He maintained
close ties to several Afghan Arabs, and
he is married to the sister of Tariq al-Fadhli,
the most prominent Yemeni “Afghan” vet. Al-
Zindani and Ali Muhsin’s experience with the
Afghan Arabs paid dividends in 1994, when
thousands of these fighters were let loose on
the socialists on the strength of a fatwa from
the former and training from the latter.
But much like U.S. support for the Afghan
Arabs in the 1980s, Yemen’s use of Afghan Arabs
to destroy its own “communist” threat has
produced unanticipated blowback. Renegades
from the Afghan Arab contingent attacked
the destroyer U.S.S. Cole in October 2000 as
it refueled in Aden and the French oil tanker
Limburg in October 2002. Earlier in 2002, the
Yemeni government had invited U.S. Special
Forces into the country as advisers and trainers.
Following the attack on the Limburg, it
cooperated with the November 2002 Predator
strike on Ali Qaid Sinan al-Harithi, the suspected
head of al-Qaeda in Yemen, and five of
his companions. The Yemeni government paid
a high price domestically, however, for allowing
the United States to strike inside Yemen’s borders.
Following a Pentagon leak that revealed
the secret agreement between the two countries,
President Salih, who felt personally betrayed by
the leak, cooled Yemeni cooperation with the
United States. When Yemeni police captured
al-Harithi’s replacement, Muhammad Hamdi
al-Ahdal, in November 2003, Salih refused to
allow U.S. officials to interrogate him directly.
This refusal came against the backdrop of a
series of bombs in San‘a during 2002 that threatened
Salih’s government. Since then Salih and
his associates seem to have reached a tacit nonaggression
pact with the Islamists: Yemen will go
after certain individuals when the United States
provides names, but it will not move to disband
Islamist groups as long as they refrain from striking
at the government. This is probably not a stable
arrangement, even if Salih manages for the
time being to straddle the pressures coming from
Washington and his internal opposition.
Ticking Time Bombs
Yemen’s terrorism problem is certainly serious,but its other pressing challenges
are, too. If Yemen’s economic and social time
bombs explode, the country will pass from a
merely fragile state to a full-blown failed one,
with all that implies about Yemen’s potential to
become a major haven for terrorists. The foremost
near-term problem the government faces
is the country’s rapidly declining oil reserves.
The World Bank estimates that Yemen’s
oil production, never large to begin with, will
grind to a halt within the next few years. Oil
production declined by 5.9 percent in 2004,
and roughly 4.7 percent in 2005. Projections
for 2006 put the daily output at 368,000 barrels
per day (bpd), a reduction of 25,000 bpd
from 2005. At current levels of production,
Yemen will run out of oil within five years.
If production is slowly cut back, which seems
to be happening, the country could continue
to export oil for another 12 years. There is, of
course, some possibility of new discoveries, but
both oil companies and the government believe
the chances of this are slight.
Since oil accounts for roughly 75 percent
of Yemen’s annual budget of nearly $5.6 billion,
it is clear that the loss of this income will
be catastrophic. Unless new money flows into
the treasury, the government will be forced to
reduce state employment and cut subsidies on
food and other essentials, in a country where
42 percent of the population live below the
poverty line. The government is the country’s
largest employer, providing close to 40 percent
of all jobs, so cutbacks in new hiring as well as
the liquidation of current positions will drastically
increase unemployment. That, in turn,
will affect foreign investment and, ultimately,
the stability of the country. The government
already has to deal with 50,000 new entrants
to the work force every year, a number that is
bound to grow for the foreseeable future, since
more than half of Yemen’s 22 million people
are under the age of 15. I once had lunch with
a professor from San‘a University in the old
Jewish quarter of al-Qa‘a, whose one- and twostory
houses still reflect the pre-revolutionary
limitation on the height of Jewish homes. At
one point, he interrupted our meal to approach
a young man hawking tapes from a cardboard
box. When he returned to the table he was
shaking his head. “The smartest kid in my class
and now he is selling tapes from a box”, he said.
“It’s tragic.” Indeed it is.
The water situation is no less desperate. In
2000, Yemen’s per capita water supply was about
2 percent of the world average. Six years on, the
problem is even worse, with no ready solutions
at hand. Greater San‘a, with nearly two million
inhabitants, may be the first capital city in the
world to run out of water. The groundwater
level is decreasing by six meters per year in the
capital, more in some other parts of the country.
In Taiz, another major urban center, water pipes
are opened only once every forty days. Residents
are forced to buy water from surrounding villages
or rely on the generosity of neighborhood
sheikhs. The loss of groundwater has also severely
affected Yemen’s agriculture: a country
that only a generation ago could feed itself now
imports more than 80 percent of its grain.
Most Yemenis will experience extreme water
stress over the next two decades, not least
because of sharp population growth. The birth
rate is already leveling off in many poorer countries,
including most Arab countries—but not
in Yemen. The key factor in controlling population
growth is high or growing female literacy.
Female literacy in Yemen is only about 25 percent—
one of the lowest in the world. The average
Yemeni woman will have seven children,
one of the highest rates in the world. This will
not change soon. Yemen’s urban schools are
thus wildly overcrowded, in some cases with
more than a hundred students per classroom,
and there are few schools in rural areas.
Most
teachers have long since given up any hope of
imparting knowledge; the best have left teaching
for better paying and more fulfilling positions
in the private sector. Even the guards
outside schools, such as the Sayf bin Dhi Yazan
School in downtown San‘a, seem to have
resigned themselves to the situation. I saw them
stop boys from sneaking past the gate during
recess, while ignoring those climbing through a
hole in the wall twenty yards away. “I’m paid to
watch the gate”, one told me. The government’s
reticence even to discuss birth control, for fear
of alienating religious leaders, compounds the
problem.
This same fear also plays into the government’s
refusal to admit that Yemen has an
HIV/AIDS problem. There are about 5,000
reported cases in the country, but the World
Health Organization estimates that at least
15 times that number exist. Ironically, only
Sheikh al-Zindani seems to take the crisis seriously. Unfortunately, he insists he can heal HIV/AIDS patients through Quranic intercession.
The patent he has applied for is still
pending.
Like the country’s resources, its infrastructure
has also been unable to keep up with
increased demand. Running minor errands
like going to the bank can take all day. This
is partly due to the incessant traffic jams that
plague San‘a. After the revolution of 1962 the
city burst outside its ancient walls and grew
from 50,000 to nearly two million residents
in the span of a generation. Traveling more
than a few blocks on al-Zubayri Street or Abd
al-Mughni Street, two of the city’s main thoroughfares,
can take hours as battered Peugeot
taxis do battle with oversized trucks, bruised
Toyota pick-ups, honking Land Rovers and
the occasional late-model Mercedes. By 10:30
every morning the traffic on most San‘a roads
has backed itself into a shrill, screaming tangle
of cars, bodyguards, donkeys and men. For a
while in 2005, parliament banned motorcycles
inside the city, but after several demonstrations
and a new tax, they returned to the mix.
Only 40 percent of the population has electricity,
and even in San‘a, where coverage is
widespread, daily power outages are the norm.
Local merchants often grumble about “criminals”
and “terrorists” stealing electricity as they
go through the daily ritual of lighting candles
and kerosene lamps. The frustration with the
power failures is increased by the perception
that they affect every district of the capital except
for the Westernized suburb of Haddah,
where most high-level officials live. Kentucky
Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut and Baskin-Robbins
are all located here, and this is where the
city’s famed stone tower houses give way to the
mock-marble and pseudo-modern designs of
the elite’s more contemporary tastes. Milliondollar
gated compounds with expensive cars in
the driveways, all owned by government officials,
stand on streets littered with small, black
plastic bags that some have taken to calling “the
official bird of Yemen.”
General frustration has begun to seep into
the public discourse. In 2004, when the Arab
League designated San‘a the “cultural capital
of the Arab world”, the Islah party paper,
al-Sahwa—not generally known for its sense
of humor—ran an article entitled “No Water,
No Electricity, No Services: Welcome to
San‘a, Cultural Capital of the Arab World
2004.” The pressures Yemen faces are well
understood by both the government and the
opposition, but they see them more as sticks
to beat each other with than as obstacles to
overcome. Most Yemenis agree that there is
too much kalam fadi, “empty talk”, and not
enough action.
Power, Corruption and Qat
These pressures will descend on a countryrich in two questionable commodities:
corruption and qat. An anecdote from Paul
Dresch’s A History of Modern Yemen suffices
to illustrate the former: “A man caught simply
plundering the petrol company at home (on a
massive scale) was not jailed or even forced to
pay back his gains, but appointed ambassador
to a European capital.” Successful plundering
is not a career impediment in Yemeni society;
to the contrary, it is widely regarded as a sign
of personal skill.
The corruption problem was brought into
the open last year when Faisal Amin Abu Ras, a
member of parliament for the ruling party and
son of a revolutionary war hero, resigned in protest,
saying: “This government is drowning in
corruption.” Though only in his first term as an
MP, Abu Ras was a representative in the FDR
mold, except holding thrice-weekly qat chews
for his constituents, rather than fireside chats.
Qat chews are an important forum for debate
and discussion in Yemen.
I attended a qat chew at Abu Ras’ house
in the summer of 2004 and was impressed
with what I saw. The room was filled with
fifty tribesmen from Abu Ras’ Dhu Muhammad
tribe, centered around Mount Barat in
the north Yemeni highlands, each one sporting
the ceremonial dagger known as a jambiyah.
Before long the floor was carpeted with
discarded qat branches, their mildly narcotic
leaves now stored in the cheeks of the tribesmen,
and the smoke from numerous cigarettes
floating in what Mikhail Bulgakov described
in a different context as “slow, dense, horizontal
layers, without a quiver.” The room was
sealed tight, for anything, even the slightest
breeze—and certainly the shanini, a piercing
blast of cold air that may sneak in through
a poorly fastened window or a crack in the
wall—can disturb a qat chewer’s serenity.
Throughout the chew Abu Ras received
small pieces of paper from men in the room detailing
their problems, while other men slipped
into the seat next to him to whisper their situation
into his ear. Everything from back electrical
bills to tribal disputes was discussed; no
problem was too small. Murmured conversations
were interrupted only by Abu Ras’ cell
phone as he arranged this, fixed that, and lobbied
for something else. What’s the distinction
between servicing a tribal constituency and
corruption? Qat somehow makes the difference
clear.
Abu Ras’ resignation is unlikely to affect
Yemen’s level of corruption, and neither is much
else. Nearly everyone in a position of power is
implicated, which means that no one is particularly
guilty. Corruption in Yemen has fully
merged into patronage, and when the people at
the top participate in it, those in the middle and
on the bottom rungs of society must follow suit
to survive.
The rampant corruption seems to have finally
caught up with Yemen, however. During
Salih’s most recent trip to the United
States, in November 2005, he was told that
both the U.S. government and World Bank
were cutting aid to the country due to high
levels of corruption. Yemen seems to have taken
this message to heart, at least outwardly.
This summer when I arrived in Yemen I was
greeted by a large sign featuring President Salih
and the message: “Corruption will not be
tolerated.” But besides the series of billboards
that have sprouted up throughout San’a, it is
unclear what affect Salih’s anti-corruption
campaign has had.
Yemen will soon face a generational
change in leadership, and a new group
of largely untested leaders will have a chance
to modernize Yemeni politics and deal decisively
with corruption. They will also confront
the possibility of spectacular failure in
the face of mounting economic and social
problems.
Yemen’s many political parties (28 different
parties fielded candidates in the last three
parliamentary elections) and a feisty, 301-seat
parliament often give outside observers the impression
that formal political institutions are
important here. In reality, only the country’s
three main power blocs—the government, the
military and especially the tribes—really matter.
Each of these blocs is headed by a single
individual. In the case of the government and
its General People’s Congress (GPC) party, it is
President Salih. Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar controls
the military through a series of personal and
family relationships. The most powerful tribal
bloc is led by Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar (not
related to Ali Muhsin), the paramount sheikh
of the Hashid tribal confederation, the speaker
of the parliament and the head of Islah. These
three men rule Yemen.
These blocs do not always speak with one
voice, but they generally command greater loyalty
and more power than do political parties.
They are also intertwined. For example, four
of Sheikh Abdullah’s sons—Hussein, Hamayr,
Mudhij and Hamid—are members of parliament,
two with the GPC and two with Islah.
His oldest son, Sadiq, who was a member of
parliament from 1993 to 2003, ran once on
the GPC ticket and once on Islah’s. In such
a world, political parties are mostly for show.
Behind the scenes, relationships of family and
tribes matter more, and political transition in
Yemen flows through patrilineal succession
within the blocs.
Salih is 64-years-old and, following his victory
in the September elections, will remain
in office until 2013, rounding out 35 years in
power. Conventional wisdom holds that Salih
will use his final seven-year term to lay the
groundwork for his son, Ahmad, to succeed
him. Ahmad, however, has little popular support.
The opposition press routinely mocks
his capabilities (he flunked out of military
academies in Jordan and Britain) as well as
his vicious temper and manifest immaturity.
Like Sheik Abdullah’s sons, Ahmad has been
a member of parliament, and in 1999 his father
named him commander of both the Republican
Guards and the Special Forces. This
upset Ali Muhsin, who is rumored to have his
own eye on the presidency.
That same year, Ali Muhsin lost two powerful
supporters within the military in a he-
licopter crash, Deputy Chief of Staff Ahmad
Faraj and the Commander of the Eastern Region
Muhammad Ismail. The crash was officially
ruled an accident, although rumors persist
that it was a well-timed one. In any event,
Salih has since begun purging the military of
officers and units loyal to Ali Muhsin, a delicate
process of retiring or promoting officers
and dismantling units that will take years to
complete. If he is successful at this, Ahmad’s
road to the presidency will be clear. Ahmad has
simultaneously taken steps to bolster both his
public image and his support within the military,
such as financing a mass wedding for 79
members of the Special Forces. Public relations
events like this, always well reported by the
media, will only increase in the coming years.
One may safely predict full employment for
quality caterers.
The aging Sheikh Abdullah is also preparing
the way for his eldest son, Sadiq, to succeed
him as head of the Hashid tribal confederation.
The Hashid is the smaller of Yemen’s two major
tribal confederations, but it is better organized
than the larger Bakil confederation. Sheikh
Abdullah has led Hashid for more than forty
years, and during that time he has crafted a
number of alliances that he is now calling on to
support Sadiq’s rise to power.
There is also a possibility that Sadiq’s younger
brother, Hamid, could challenge for the
family’s top spot after his father’s death. Hamid
has become a permanent fixture in the Yemeni
press over the past year, at one point calling for
a “popular revolution” aimed at removing entrenched
ministers and politicians. But he and
his father split over the 2006 elections. Sheikh
Abdullah supported President Salih, while his
son very publicly endorsed the challenger, Faisal
bin Shamlan.
The best indicator that power blocs trump
political parties in Yemen is the fact that neither
of these heirs apparent, Ahmad or Sadiq,
defended his parliamentary seat during the
2003 elections, choosing instead to concentrate
on their succession bids. Neither, however,
currently has the experience or support
to rule without the help of his father. Just as
journalists grumble about Ahmad’s unsuitability
to rule, so one hears tribesmen complain
that Sadiq is not a “true tribesman”, and
that he lacks the main qualification—namely,
heartfelt generosity—that has made his father
such a powerful leader.
Stories of the sheikh’s generosity are legendary.
I witnessed this firsthand at a conference
on Yemeni folk poetry. Following a particularly
forceful recitation of a nationalist poem by a
six-year-old child, Sheikh Abdullah—in the
tradition of Muslim rulers who often rewarded
favorite poets with a mouthful of coins—asked
the boy to name his prize. “A computer”, was
the reply, which pleased Sheikh Abdullah to
such an extent that he took the boy back to his
house and gave him both a computer and the
equivalent of $3,000. His son, Sadiq, on the
other hand, has only his reputation as a shady
businessman, a status that has not endeared
him to most Yemenis.
Breaking Up Is Easy to Do
Both Ahmad and Sadiq will have to growinto their roles just as the twin crises of oil
and water depletion reach the tipping-point.
Young and untested, they will be operating
without the cushion of popular support that
has allowed their fathers to make mistakes and
remain in power. For that reason their ability
to hold the country together in tough times is
questionable.
In qat chews around San‘a one already hears
lurid scenarios about fragmentation and civil
war, and not without reason. The government’s
writ does not extend to much of the Yemeni
hinterland, where the kidnapping of foreign
terrorists has become a favorite pastime. Were
its its revenue to dry up, government power
could recede back to small urban pockets. For
the past two years the government has been
combating a low-level insurgency around the
northern city of Sa’dah. The revolt by the Shab
al-Muminin, the Believing Youth, was ignited
in the summer of 2004 when the government
tried to arrest its leader, former MP Hussein
Badr al-Din al-Houthi. The initial round of
fighting lasted until September, when al-
Houthi was killed in a firefight with the military.
When the government failed to honor a
pledge of amnesty, a second round of fighting
broke out in March 2005 under the leadership
of al-Houthi’s elderly father. The al-Houthi
Rebellion is shrouded in secrecy, since the government
has prohibited reporters from traveling
there, but independent estimates put the
cost of the fighting at more than $1 billion and
more than a thousand killed.
The fighting was supposed to end in February
when, in the midst of a cabinet reshuffle,
Salih replaced the governor of Sa’dah, General
Yahya al-Amri, who had played a major role in
sparking the revolt. The new governor, General
Yahya al-Shami, presided over the release of 627
al-Houthi followers from prison. Since then,
sporadic episodes of violence have threatened,
but not completely derailed, the fragile peace.
The Red Sea coastal area of Tihama and the
relatively wealthy eastern province of Hadramaut
are also believed to be ripe for fragmentation.
Malarial Tihama, whose scrubland coastal
plain resembles East Africa more than the
rest of Yemen, lacks the military or financial
power to secede. But if government power were
to diminish in the face of an economic crisis,
Tihama could acquire significant autonomy by
default. It already has a thriving black market
trade from Africa. Driving down the coast, one
is more likely to meet alcohol smugglers than
government soldiers. The people in Tihama
resent the perceived government bias against
them, offering as proof of this the fact that the
highest position someone from the region has
attained under the current government is minister
of agriculture.
Hadramaut, historically a separate entity, is
a different story altogether. This eastern governorate,
whose name translates as “death has
come”, has a landscape that gradually changes
from bleak to accursed the further into the interior
one goes. Somewhere deep in the rocky
gorges and nearly inaccessible wadis, where
the thermometer routinely tops 110 degrees, is
the legendary Bir Barhut, the well where the
souls of the unbelievers are said to be thrown
after death to be tormented by hellfire, snakes
and scorpions. But contemporary Hadramaut
has escaped the curse of its past. It has much
wealth—mostly from Hadramis living in Saudi
Arabia and Indonesia—and little stomach
for a protracted secession struggle. Still, many
in San‘a believe that Hadrami merchants have
contingency plans to withdraw from the state
if the government collapses or proves incapable
of ruling. One possibility is that Hadramaut
would be gobbled up by Saudi Arabia, just as
the former Yemeni province of Asir was lost to
the Al-Saud in 1934.
The Saudi Role
How Saudi Arabia reacts to the comingeconomic crisis in Yemen remains one of
the key wildcards in Yemen’s future. Saudi Arabia
has exerted considerable influence over its
southern neighbor during the past forty years,
mostly by subsidizing factional divisions, which
prevent any single group—government, tribe
or military—from achieving outright superiority.
Put a bit differently, Saudi Arabia has traditionally
desired a certain degree of instability in
Yemen, but not outright chaos. It is not clear,
however, what policy Saudi Arabia will pursue
if its neighbor begins to fall apart. The Saudis
may well grab for territory—especially potentially
oil-rich territory near the Saudi-Yemeni
border—as well as influence. If that becomes
Riyadh’s policy, the Yemeni state will not survive
as we know it today.
Who, then, would pick up the pieces? Those
with the best chance of replacing a rapidly receding
or collapsed state could easily be militant
salafis searching for a final refuge—thus making
true Muhammad’s apocryphal saying about
Yemen. The Saudis might live to regret contributing
to such a situation, but the United States
could only consider such a turn of events a disaster.
Yemen therefore bears careful watching. Creative,
forward-leaning efforts to help it deal with
its economic and social challenges are in order.
The United States has somewhere between five
and 15 years to make a difference in Yemen, and
it will probably need them all. Whatever such
help may cost, it will pale next to the price to be
paid for Yemen as a failed state.
