Free Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes by Victoria Clark Page A

had needed smuggling out to Aden to have a baby. I learned that Tariq was frustrated at having his phone tapped and at not being able to move out of his fortress on the roundabout for weeks, but that the place was not under siege. Government forces were two kilometres away, so that visitors and supporters like Haidara were free to come and go. Clearly, if Tariq was topping Yemen’s most wanted list, his capture was not sufficiently urgent to risk enflaming the southern insurgency by turning him into a martyr. ‘If they really want me, they will have to come and kill me here in my house,’ he had told Haidara.
    Small wonder President Salih was more preoccupied with his two domestic insurgencies than with what al-Qaeda might be plotting next. Like the Yemeni man-in-the-street, he had good reasons to rank the jihadist threat to his country a distant third to the independence movement in the south and the al-Huthi rebellion in the north. It seemed to me that these two more urgent priorities also went a long way towards accounting for Yemenis’ frequent dismissal of bin Laden and al-Qaeda as merely the inflated bogeyman of a western imagination that seems always to have needed an enemy of supernatural dimensions to test its mettle. When in Yemen I was often politely reminded that the Cold War-era West had created the ’terrorist problem’ for itself back in the 1980s by choosing to fund and arm Afghan mujahideen in the belief that their radical Islam was a lesser evil than Soviet Communism. I had soon discovered that any mention of al-Qaeda to a Yemeni was more likely to elicit the quietly humorous observation that a small, poor town in the southern highlands bore the same name than any opinion or fact about bin Laden’s global jihad. Long before western analysts like Jason Burke set about modifying the average westerner’s view of al-Qaeda as a tightly controlled, efficient and hierarchical organisation, Yemenis were perceiving it rather as an emotion-led climate of political opinion that waxed and waned in response to a number of factors - anger and humiliation felt at the West’s foreign policy in the region, the economic situation, an individual’s treatment by state authorities, the energy generated by the charisma of a leading jihadist, and so on.
    It seemed important to remember too that long before the Yemeni man-in-the-street worried about what might be happening in Zinjibar or Radfan or Saada or what AQAP might be plotting against oil pipelines and foreign tourists in Marib or Hadhramaut, he would be worrying about who and how much he would have to bribe to get his mother or wife into hospital or how he would manage to feed and house his extended family on a single salary, or even where the next meal was coming from.
    Busy securing his own grip on power by the only two means he understood - ‘dancing on snakes heads’ or resorting to force - Salih had run the country and its minimal resources into the ground. During his thirty years in charge of the military tribal republic he inherited, he had not promoted the development of Yemen into a modern nation state which the majority of its people were content and proud to inhabit. The Prophet’s reported high praise - ‘Faith is Yemeni, wisdom is Yemeni’ -had been twisted into a bitterly funny joke: ’Rumour has it the author of that hadith is still under investigation in Heaven for its fabrication.’
    If a large number of Yemenis were beginning to wonder if the integrity of their modern state was worth preserving, if the risk of a power vacuum and even a jihadist takeover seemed worth taking, Salih was at least partly to blame.

    a Released after tour months, Ahmad bin iend left Yemen to claim political asylum in Austria. Dr al-Affifi’s car was returned after two days.
    b Yemen’s Aden Ports Company and Dubai Ports International (35 per cent) and Abdullah Buqshan (15 per cent) announced the creation of a 50/50 joint venture company in April 2009.

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