Armies of Liberation

Armiesofliberation.com readers now have the option of searching the 5000 posts on this website for specific information by keyword, date and topic. Dates on Yemen run from late 2004 through current although category topics have been added over time and may not encompass all of the earlier posts. Click on the category button on the right sidebar to see a listing of the 157 available categories. Click on the archives button to select a specific month and year. (Read on …)

I will now predict the future of Taiz, Yemen. A small popular movement in Taiz emerges, striving to address legitimate grievances, for example the government’s neglect of a Dengue Fever outbreak. The security forces beat and arrest dozens at a protest, triggering more protests, which trigger more arrests. Then security forces start shooting in the air, and later shooting and killing protesters. The rest of the country has no reaction. The Yemeni regime blames saboteurs in military uniforms for the civilian deaths. The movement’s numbers grow from of the community’s sense of injustice and boredom. In a speech, the President accuses the people in Taiz of being al Qaeda, Houthis, secessionists, and apostates. The international community has no reaction. Medicine sent by the UN gets stolen from the Health Ministry’s warehouse and re-sold in pharmacies in Sana’a.

Journalists and civil rights leaders who discuss civil rights violations are arrested on charges of undermining stability and insulting the President. Some are tortured badly. The President accuses Iran, Israel and/or Yemeni expatriates of funding the movement. The military increases checkpoints on the road to Taiz where the soldiers are rude to women, rough up men and block people from entry when there is a protest scheduled.

Someone sets off a small bomb at an empty building in the early morning. The president announces it is an al Qaeda attack and asks the US for more for counter-terror funding. This is the only story about Taiz that makes it into the western media, except for one article on Yemeni women in the police department. Nasir al Wahishi takes credit for the bombing in his al Qaeda Internet magazine. Several top level US security officials visit, and the official Yemeni media says they came to Yemen to praise democracy .

Sana’a moves some tanks to Taiz. The protests get bigger but consist of only men. The leaders of the popular movement argue among themselves about who is the actual leader and split into factions. They never create a mechanism to hear the people’s opinions and preferences, instead their own children get top positions.

The governmental media never mentions the protests in Taiz, except to accuse the opposition JMP of undermining stability. The opposition parties issue a statement in Arabic denouncing the violence and that’s all they do. A journalist gets kidnapped, and the police say he beat himself up trying to embarrass the regime. The ruling party wins all the local and Parliamentary seats in Taiz, and the EU applauds a free and fair election.

After the election, democracy advocates among teachers and government workers are fired or jailed. The price of water and food triples. Western analysts conclude the Yemeni government needs more development funds. The Health Ministry never addresses the outbreak of Dengue Fever that triggered the protest in the first place.

What a total disaster. You know who I really feel sorry for are the dozens of people already killed, like Wadhah, who were sold out by a bunch of opportunists who prefer to win even if it means sacrificing their principles. But when you sacrifice your principles, you don’t actually win.

That’s likely the end of any hope of international support, and al Qaeda will slowly metastasize yet another valid nationalistic conflict into a fundamentalist quest. Its a shame, the movement was both peaceful and pro-democracy up until the point al Fadhli joined. Its difficult to discount as unrelated al Fadhli’s defection to the opposition and the up tick in violence against northern civilians and the security forces. At least now we have an answer about where he is standing.

The ready acceptance of al Qaeda also points to the erosion of respect for civilian immunity in war and the growing acceptance of violence targeting civilians to achieve political ends. The Yemeni government is overtly targeting civilians both in Sa’ada and in the South. Tribal conflicts often result in injuries to women and children. The Houthi rebels, although they mingle with civilians, don’t target them. Previously, the Southern movement had explicitly rejected violence and denounced terrorism in particular as an attribute of the regime. (Read on …)

Yemeni super-sleuthing uncovered an international conspiracy in the Gulf of Aden – the US is the source of Somali piracy! The US in a devilish plot created the pirates as a power play against the Islamic Courts, officials announced. The pirates’ true identity was probably discovered because they were wearing those American X-ray sunglasses or something.

As reported in Al-Sahwa, “The advisor of Yemen’s cabinet Salim Hussein said that the Somali piracy was produced by the U.S. because…it failed to control Somalia and when the Islamic Courts could get rid of warlords which were Unites states’ agents in Somalia.”

Back on planet earth, Yemen is the primary supplier of illegal weapons to Somalia, fueling ongoing instability (and piracy), the UN monitoring committee on the Somali sanctions reported in December. However, Israel’s total control of the planet is so all encompassing that the UN Monitoring Committee’s report was issued to divert attention from the existence of Israeli spies in Yemen. It’s all so fiendishly complicated! Its a good thing we have Naba News to explain it all to us.

Similarly, the recent report that Yemen smuggled Chinese missiles to Gaza was nothing but an Israeli diversion created to obscure the trial of the Mossad spies in Yemen. Or at least that’s what the Yemeni stooge newspapers are reporting.

Yemen’s president said the Islamic Jihad terror cell emailed Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, offering to spy and blow things up. “We are the Jihad Organization and you are Jews but you are honest and we are ready for anything,” the email said according to Yemeni security officials.

Olmert replied (also by email) that the arrangement would be just peachy, “We are ready to support you to be a stumbling block to the Middle East and we will support you as agents.” Aha!

There must be a government department in Yemen dedicated to concocting false trial evidence and cloning newspapers and NGOs to confuse the public. It probably clocks a lot of hours thinking up new insults for its critics and new enemies and new plots against Yemen and other ways to distract the public and confuse the international community.

When the spy story first broke in October, there were 40 Israeli spies “from different Arab nationalities spying for Mossad” according to the National and Political Security Units. Now its down to three on trial for espionage and threats against foreign embassies.

Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility the September terror attack on the US embassy in Sana’a that killed 12 people including an American. They threatened other western and Arab embassies. The attending implication in the stooge media is that Israel somehow orchestrated the bombing. Yemen’s scramble to blame Israel raises doubts about the level of collusion by regime officials in the bombing.

The Yemeni regime is quite consistent and Stalinistic in its broad deployment of outrageous propaganda. In 2006, Field Marshall Saleh publically accused the US of perpetrating the terror attack on the USS Cole that killed 17 sailors. The US wanted to invade and establish a naval base in Aden, the president said.

The funny part about the unending spew of small and large lies is they can’t keep track of what they said before. One of my favorite stories involves Abdulkhaled Nabi, leader of the Abyan Aden Islamic Army. The Yemeni regime told the US in 2003 that they killed al-Nabi in a shoot-out. In 2004, Yemeni officials admitted that they let al-Nabi go after he was spotted breathing. In 2005, top Yemeni officials claimed Nabi was completely rehabilitated and living the life of a peaceful farmer. In 2006, local media reported Nabi and his band of fanatics was training a tribal paramilitary for the government to battle Shiite rebels in Sa’ada. In 2007, the newspaper (Al-Sharie) was brought up on charges of revealing state secrets, and the editor faces the death penalty. In 2008, the Yemeni government announced with great fanfare that they had captured the dangerous terrorist al-Nabi after an intensive five year manhunt. The tickers all said, “Yemen captures al-Qaeda terrorist after five year hunt.”

Some Yemeni propaganda is designed for the domestic audience and some for the US policy makers. Abu Bakr al-Reibi, convicted in the 2002 maritime bombing of the French tanker Limburg, was sentenced to ten years. But his father said in an interview that Abu Bakr never spent a day in jail. Field Marshal Saleh called Abu Bakr at the beginning of the trial and asked him to go along with the charade and assured him that all would be well. The security officials would come to the house with a set of prison clothes and accompany him to court where everyone pretended (for the benefit of the US) that Abu Bakr had come from jail. Field Marshal Saleh is a compulsive liar. The sad and sorry thing is the US often buys it.

With American pirates in the Gulf of Aden and Mossad spies in Sana’a, who can focus on the abject failure of Field Marshall Saleh to spend any government money on the people? There’s no medical care, few schools, little clean water, no jobs given by merit and no electricity, but plenty of guns and drugs imported, child smuggling, prostitution by starving girls, missile purchases and tribal wars. However poor Ali Abdullah Saleh is a victim of circumstance, doing the very best he can and entirely sincere. Some believe that, really.

Another funny pattern is Saleh’s use of democratic terminology to legitimize his battle against basic civil rights including free speech and free association. “Democracy is the rescue ship of all regimes,” he says, therefore security forces slaughter protesters in the street, kidnap journalists and torture children. There are ten million literally starving children in Yemen. Poverty in Yemen exceeds poverty in Africa. Each one of the ten million is an actual kid, and its pretty damn sad.

(Read on …)