Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (13 page)

Otherwise, his accession to power caused few ripples and even brought some benefits. While he soon demonstrated little appetite or time for the great state-building and modernising project al-Hamdi had embarked upon, he understood that any dramatic change of al-Hamdi’s reforming course would be bound to halt the torrent of western aid that the country was beginning to rely on as much as Saudi aid. Like the twentieth-century imams and al-Hamdi before him, he solicited and accepted any aid, from any quarter, as long as it came without strings attached. From the Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc allies came military advisers and training and weapons, from the West and international agencies came development aid and technical know-how.

With solid Saudi backing - he had immediately received $570 million in direct aid from the Saudis - al-Ghashmi had plenty of money to dispense. Shortly after a governor of Hajja turned down a job in his government and asked the president instead for the wherewithal to improve Hajja’s roads and bridges, he was startled to receive a suitcase ‘filled with several million dollars worth of Saudi riyal notes’
²⁸
from al-Ghashmi. Even a twelve-year-old school girl who had played a starring role in a ceremony held to welcome the president of Algeria on an official visit to the YAR, found herself summoned to al-Ghashmi’s home the following day to receive a Rolex watch and the equivalent of $1,200 for her pains. This kind of disarming open-handedness, plentiful largesse, dispensed in the traditional manner of a good sheikh, served to mollify many of his domestic opponents, but it could not shield him from becoming a pawn in the lethal domestic power game going on in the Marxist south.

Despite Saudi opposition to the idea of uniting the two Yemens, the old ideal remained powerful and important enough to Yemenis to ensure that the leaders of both parts of Yemen continued to make time for six-monthly unity talks. So it was that towards the end of June 1978, al-Ghashmi prepared to receive an envoy from his Marxist counterpart, Salim Rubaya Ali, in Aden. The most colourful account of what ensued is to be found in Khadija al-Salami’s
Tears of Sheba: Tales of Survival and Intrigue in Arabia
(2003). Her version of al-Ghashmi’s assassination relies on the eyewitness report of a newspaper editor, a close friend of al-Ghashmi, who had been entrusted with the task of meeting the Adeni envoy at the airport and driving him to the president’s office. The editor noticed immediately that the southerner was nervous, distracted and very unwilling to be parted from his briefcase:

I bent down to take the briefcase from him - just to be nice - and he jerked it away from me. But I was polite and insisted. I guess he felt confident I wasn’t going to open it and he finally handed it to me. It was a beautiful briefcase, brand new, and when he wasn’t looking, I tossed it up in the air, studied it in the light, spun it around to get a good look at the quality of the leather … I looked at the guy and smiled and told him ‘I’d like to have a case like this one.’ I had hoped he might promise to send me one when he got back to Aden. But he didn’t say anything; just stood there wiping the sweat from his forehead. I left him in the reception room and went to inform the President of his arrival.

‘He has a briefcase with him,’ I told al-Ghashmi, ‘Should I open it before he comes in?’

‘That won’t be necessary’ the President said, ‘Just show him in.’
²⁹

Why would al-Ghashmi - as suspicious as al-Hamdi, to the extent that he would barely taste food outside his own home for fear it was poisoned - waive the most basic safety measures in this case? One explanation of the event has it that he was not expecting any vital communiqué about unity from Aden, only payment for a consignment of qat which he had been regularly purchasing for his opposite number in a gesture of Yemeni brotherliness. While easily available in the north, qat - judged an opium of the people - had been restricted to weekend usage in most of the Marxist south and banned altogether in Hadhramaut. Al-Ghashmi may have waived the usual search for the simple reason that he did not want his guards seeing a briefcase stuffed with cash
³⁰
and, putting two and two together and making five, spreading rumours that he was in the pay of southern Marxists. Noting that the envoy was not the southerner they had come to know on previous occasions, two of the president’s guards moved to search him and his beautiful briefcase, but the editor impatiently shooed them away. Ticking them off for insulting a visitor, he ushered the southerner straight into the president’s office and was still on his way out of the building when he heard the bomb go off. The booby-trapped briefcase killed both the president and the envoy.

Al-Ghashmi’s demise was neither tragic nor noble. He was collateral damage in a war being waged among the leadership of the south. It seems that either the envoy or the briefcase, or possibly both, had been switched, probably at Aden airport, by supporters of Abdul Fattah Ismail - a fervently pro-Soviet Marxist - who was intent on first blackening the name of and then replacing the more Chinese Maoism-inclined party chief, Salim Rubaya Ali. The transfer of power was smooth. In spite of its brevity al-Ghashmi’s term of office could be seen as marking the consolidation of the tribal military republic; al-Iryani’s
qadhi-
run republic had failed and so had al-Hamdi’s
qadhi
and military-run republic. The experience of the YAR’s past thirty years has proved the winning formula to be the al-Ghashmi one, the military-tribal republic. In other words, the barely disguised traditional supremacy of Zaydi highland tribes in military costume.

Within a week a tribesman army officer was installed as the YAR’s president. He was a member of the small Sanhan tribe belonging to the Hashid federation which paramount Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar headed, the man widely believed to have played an active part in al-Hamdi’s murder thanks to being a close friend and protégé of al-Ghashmi. A handsome, bull-necked thirty-five-year-old military commander of Taiz in the southern highlands, a man rumoured to be heavily involved in the lucrative business of smuggling alcohol over the border from the Marxist south, he was Lieutenant-Colonel Ali Abdullah Salih. Few believed Salih would last any longer than his predecessor. In the summer of 1978, a year in which the YAR rejoiced in no fewer than three presidents, a good black joke was doing the rounds of Sanaa’s afternoon qat chews: on arriving in heaven and meeting up with al-Hamdi, al-Ghashmi shrugs off his predecessor’s angry complaint that he has forgotten to bring any qat with him, saying, ‘President Salih has promised to take care of the qat - and he should be joining us any time now.’
³¹

More than thirty years later they are still waiting for that qat. Within two months of his accession to power in July 1978 Salih had proved his mettle by scotching an attempt to assassinate him by die-hard al-Hamdi loyalists, and trying and executing its leaders within a matter of days. By early spring of the following year he had introduced compulsory military service and was fighting a war against the Marxist south. Because both Yemens had massed troops along their border in the wake of al-Ghashmi’s assassination, it had not taken long for border tensions to boil over again. The United States, hitherto only interested in the affairs of the Yemen Arab Republic in so far as they affected its relations with Saudi Arabia, was galvanised into action, terrified that this border skirmishing, when viewed alongside the recent toppling of the Shah in Iran, was a sure sign that, via its proxy, south Yemen, the USSR had grand designs on the entire Middle East. An American aircraft carrier steamed into the Gulf of Aden and gigantic cargo planes flew in and out of Sanaa loaded with tanks and anti-tank missiles, paid for by Saudi Arabia.

For a couple of weeks it looked as if the line dividing the two Yemeni republics might be shaping up into an important Cold War front, but it was not long before the rest of the Arab world, desperate to maintain a show of unity after what they perceived to be Egypt’s treacherous defection to the West at Camp David, exerted themselves to lower the temperature. In the space of little more than a month the crisis had passed. Just as in 1972 - peace was restored with pious mutual declarations in favour of uniting all Yemenis in one country one day.

Although no one could have guessed it at the time, Salih was embarking on a period of rule as long as (perhaps longer than) Imam Yahya’s.

If independent north Yemen was firmly under the rule of Zaydi military tribesmen by 1978, the south, under Marxist rule for the past decade, had been doing its best to ensure the word ‘tribe’ was never heard again.

Although all Yemenis continued to recall their ancient unity as a people and dreamed of being, as they thought of it, reunited, the leaders of the two Yemens were very far from agreeing on what a unified Yemen might look like. No real progress was made. In the south, increasingly dogmatic Marxists, the backbone of the old National Liberation Front (NLF), made aggressive attempts to spread their creed north, while the north never relinquished the old Zaydi imams‘ claim to Aden. Each side even supported armed dissident movements in the other, each hunted down and persecuted those dissidents, and demonised the other. Southerners were infidel atheists, hell-bent on destroying Arab customs and Islam with their imported infidel creed, while northerners were simply primitive barbarians, a bunch of lawless and greedy tribes. The financial need for both states to choose sides in the superpowers’ Cold War was another polarising factor. While the YAR was mainly subsidised by Saudi Arabia and western aid, southerners were tackling the ambitious project of building the People’s Republic of South Yemen,
^e
the only Marxist state on the Arabian Peninsula, with mostly Soviet-bloc backing.

In 1968, the year after the British departed, the Soviet Union discovered to its delight that, without having to lift so much as a finger let alone mount a military expedition, it had made the first (and only, it turned out) Arab convert to its ideology, expanded its sphere of influence onto the Arabian Peninsula, and gained a useful port from which to conduct its Indian Ocean naval manoeuvres. ‘We wanted to prove that a small under-developed Arab country, a former British colony, would advance with seven-league strides towards the bright future provided it was armed with the slogans of scientific socialism,’ recalled one former Soviet ambassador to south Yemen.
³²
Another Russian diplomat who served in Aden described his country’s involvement in the furthest corner of the Arabian Peninsula to me with more world-weariness: ‘South Yemen was a great asset to us at the time, simply because it proved our ideology was right, but we soon understood that we had to pay for this result.’

That payment was never enough as far as the Yemenis were concerned. Fraternal feeling towards Moscow was generally in short supply and the Kremlin soon tired of its little Arab brother’s pestering demands. In the eyes of the Soviet leadership, the PDRY was never a fully-fledged ‘Marxist’ country, like Cuba or Vietnam, only ever ‘a state of Marxist orientation’, on a par with Nicaragua, Angola and Mozambique. As Yevgeny Primakov, a Soviet-era diplomat who served as Russia’s foreign minister after the fall of Communism, recalls in his memoir,
Russia and the Arabs
(2009), ‘the example of Southern Yemen showed the perils of making the “leap” to socialism without taking account of the country’s socio-economic and political situation’.
³³

The Marxist NLF had inherited a country that was one-and-a-half times as big as the YAR thanks to Hadhramaut and Mahra, but with a population totalling only two million to the YAR’s approximately five million. They had also inherited economic chaos, caused by a sudden impoverishment for which they were not to blame. The closure of the Suez Canal in June 1967 reduced traffic to the port of Aden to a quarter of what it had been in its colonial heyday and the dismantling of the British base had left 25,000 people out of work. The level of direct British aid to its former colony plunged abruptly from accounting for almost 70 per cent of its revenue to accounting for none at all.
³⁴
But, unlike the YAR under President al-Iryani after 1970, the south’s NLF leadership made little attempt to heal the divisions in the population by gathering together the most constructive elements in society, whatever their political colouring. There were more pressing concerns. Thanks to the cultural and economic gulf dividing Aden from the protectorates, the threat of the territory completely disintegrating was very real. A strong totalitarian state and the binding force of a brand new ideology had to be the priority, especially after the Maoist branch of the Hadhramaut NLF’s early attempt to secede from the rest of the country.

Since Egypt’s defeat by Israel in the Six Day War had taken all the shine off the glamorous figurehead of Arab national-socialism, it was soon abundantly clear that anyone opposed to the project of turning the new state into a laboratory for a hard-line Marxist experiment that took no account whatsoever of existing conditions and ancient customs, was more or less superfluous. An elderly Adeni lawyer of Muslim Indian extraction named Sheikh Tariq Abdullah recalled for me what the end of British colonial and beginning of NLF rule had meant for him. ‘It took us about a year to start regretting the departure of the British.’ Here and there one could still find faint traces of their presence, he remembered. The waiters at Aden’s Crescent Hotel still addressed each other in English as ‘Boy’. A small army of Somali women whom British forces families had employed as nannies begged in the streets, among the scavenging stray pets the British had abandoned. ‘We all understood that the NLF was more violent than FLOSY; most of us educated Adeni intellectuals had supported FLOSY for that reason alone, but when the NLF took power we assumed they’d need us.’ Sheikh Tariq recalled, ‘I was personally naïve enough, unfortunately, to very much believe that every single educated person would be fully exploited, because there was such a shortage of such people with standing in the community.’

The former trades-union leader and leading light of FLOSY, Abdullah al-Asnag, was a lot less starry-eyed than Sheikh Tariq. Invited by his old school-friend, Feisal ash-Shaabi, to join the new government in 1969, al-Asnag joked that since he valued his life he would only accept the post of his country’s ambassador to Mauritania. Thousands were slung in jail, thousands of civil servants - the sturdy backbone of the former colony - fled north where their British-honed skills were appreciated in the YAR’s new banks and government offices. Salih Farid, a member of an old ruling family in the former West Aden Protectorate, returned from his scholarship studies in Britain in 1968 only to be jailed for four years for being ‘a stooge of the imperialists’, a ‘semi-feudal bourgeois’. On his release he also fled north where, armed with a law degree gained by a correspondence course he had completed in jail, he soon arranged to leave for Saudi Arabia.

An estimated quarter of south Yemen’s population - principally its educated elite - fled, meaning that the country was in no fitter state than its northern counterpart to tackle the nuts and bolts job of establishing a functioning modern state. ‘People here are not even used to reporting facts and evaluating data,’ complained a finance minister who had been trained in India.
³⁵
The entire first year of the first three-year plan had to be devoted to planning. ‘We educated Adenis all felt that the barbarians had taken over,’ Sheikh Tariq recalled. Southern Yemenis learned to fear their new East German-trained security service and grew accustomed to their new leaders’ alien mode of speech which was stripped of any references to Allah and his will but peppered with neologisms like
brulittariyah
[proletariat]. NLF stalwarts were soon gamely parroting variations on statements like: ‘Making the Marxist revolution means transforming the existing social relations and installing revolutionary social relations, in other words, destroying the old state apparatus and building an entirely new one in its place’
³⁶
and ‘The compromising petty-bourgeois leadership in the epoch of imperialism is even more dangerous for the national popular democratic revolution than the explicit counter-revolutionary policies of the semi-feudal, semi-bourgeois alliance.’
³⁷

But there were plenty of advances too. After three years of independence the southern half of Yemen had leapfrogged over its northern counterpart again, at least in terms of the civil order and social development. The PDRY boasted more than double the number of clinics it had in British times by 1972, the 199 primary schools and eight secondary schools in existence when the British departed had been augmented by a factor of more than four; there were 910 primary schools, ten secondary schools and almost four times as many teachers.
³⁸
School children were required to wear uniforms like those worn by children in the Soviet Union. There are tales of schoolboys hurrying to school in their
fiitas
with pairs of trousers bundled under their arms, quickly changing at the school gates.

A universal literacy campaign involved thousands of women government employees and schoolteachers in supplementing their regular work with lessons in reading for adult women. Women organised themselves in a General Union of Yemeni Women, joined the NLF militias and demonstrated against wearing the veil. But, although a Family Law of 1974 substantially improved their status in divorce settlements (allowing them to retain custody of their children), regulated the payment of dowries and outlawed polygamy, their position remained glaringly unequal. There was always a yawning gulf between the law and its practical implementation. One woman complained to a visiting westerner: ‘Here, too frequently, the progres-siveness of some men in the Front [NLF] stops at their doorsteps. They still consider women as property. We don’t blame men personally for this. We recognise it as an illness that pervades the whole society.’
³⁹
Only one in five of those privileged to attend primary school were girls.

One did not have to venture far outside Aden to see the changes being wrought among the ‘poor people’. On a visit to Lahej, just to the north-west of Aden, in 1972 a visiting American academic found one of the former sultan’s palaces transformed into an agricultural college and watched men of all ages finishing their seven-hour shifts in a fruit farm and gathering for lessons in reading, writing and arithmetic. ‘They are impetuous and eager and frustrated at this recent encounter with knowledge and the dignity which this whole act, this almost ceremony, confers’,
⁴⁰
he observed approvingly, mentioning that the walls of the local NLF headquarters were plastered with magazine photos of Lenin and Mao Tse Tung. What he was witnessing was the implementation of a nation-wide programme aimed at securing tribesmen’s support for the new regime.

Because spending on the army was gobbling up half the state budget by 1971, it was decided that regional NLF centres should take the risk of establishing militias of armed tribesmen and just hope that they would not turn their guns against their political masters. Under the supervision of Cuban and Chinese advisers, tribesmen were required to undergo a three-month training period that included a crash course in literacy skills, basic Marxism and modern farming methods. Ideally, it was hoped, they would return to their villages and spread, not just their learning and know-how, but their freshly acquired grasp of Marxist dogma.

In practice, Yemeni tribesmen were not nearly as biddable as either Cuban or Chinese peasants; their loyalty to the NLF and Marxism was usually conditional on adequate tribal representation in the higher echelons of the ruling Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP, the renamed NLF), the government and the army. A Russian anthropologist who spent much of the 1980s in the PDRY described to me the way in which the southern tribes easily accommodated themselves to the new regime without ever troubling themselves with the philosophical implications of Marxism: ‘If a tribesman settles successfully in the capital he constitutes a vanguard for other members of his tribe to follow and position themselves gradually in the economic, military and political spheres. It has nothing to do with individual success or any political ideology - it’s just reinforcement of the overall position of the tribe.’

Despite concerted attempts to demolish the old tribal order by branding it ‘sectarianism’, it survived. From the start the NLF had promoted Yemeni and Arab nationalism and denigrated tribalism, and the country was speedily re-divided into six governorates whose boundaries bore no relation to the old tribal ones, but none of these measures eradicated millennia of custom. A five-year General Truce Among the Tribes in 1968, followed by the outlawing of tribal justice in the form of murder in 1970, only succeeded in curbing tribalism’s more violent manifestations. Tribal divisions and loyalties continued to dictate the country’s true political geography, a truth that would be brutally exposed in a coup d’etat in 1986, but one about which the thousands of Soviet military and civilian ‘advisers’ who poured into the PDRY within weeks of the British departure were always acutely aware.

Professor Vitaly Naumkin, now Director General of Moscow’s Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies, began teaching history at the Yemeni Marxist Party school in Aden in 1972, a position that afforded him easy access to the PDRY’s leadership, some of whom attended his classes and revealed themselves to be a good deal more dogmatic than he was. Salim Rubaya Ali, a former Radfan rebel with strong Fadhli connections who emerged as the Maoism-inclined leader of the country in 1969, was responsible for the most doctrinaire excesses. ‘He was tribal,’ recalled Professor Naumkin, ‘very cruel and very devoted to the violent change of society.’ Naumkin vividly recalled a meeting with Rubaya Ali at which he urged him to learn by the Soviet Union’s mistakes and not set about nationalising every aspect of the country’s economy, illustrating his point by extolling the virtue and value of a hard-working owner of a small bakery near where he was living. Rubaya Ali’s response was immediate and unhesitating: ‘We’ll nationalise him!’

Dr Veniamin Popov, who served as the Soviet chargé d’affaires in Aden in the 1970s, observed, ’They understood that power was the important thing. Looking back now, I don’t think we did them any favours by telling them how only 10,000 of our Bolsheviks were able to convert millions to their cause by means of good organisation and discipline. They listened to those kind of stories
extremely
attentively.’