Yemen 1st-Hand: "They Want to Turn the Revolution into a Tribal War" (Worth)

Freedom Square, Taiz, YemenRobert Worth tours Yemen and writes for The New York Times:

On May 29, a young woman named Bushra al- Maqtari joined a group of several thousand protesters marching down a trash-strewn boulevard in the Yemeni city of Taiz. The Arab world’s democratic uprising was five months old, and patience among the protesters in Taiz — Yemen’s second largest city — was wearing thin. Maqtari had been one of the first and most fearless leaders of the movement. She is a remarkable figure: a 31-year-old university administrator and fiction writer, she is also a childless divorcee who refused, until recently, to wear the abaya, the all-covering gown that is practically mandatory for women in Yemen. Tiny and frail, she has a round, lovely face, with level brows and tranquil brown eyes.

On that afternoon, Maqtari was standing in a crowd gathered around the city’s General Security building — an imposing six-story edifice flanked by guards — when she heard cracking sounds. She looked up and saw that the officers on the building’s roof were not just throwing rocks, as they had in the past. They were firing straight down into the crowd below. Within minutes, at least four people were dead and about 60 were wounded. Maqtari began running back toward “Freedom Square,” the intersection where thousands of protesters had been camped out for months demanding the resignation of Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s strongman president. Then the real assault began. Armored vehicles, tanks and bulldozers began converging on the protesters’ tent city from all sides. They fired tear gas and water cannons into the square and began shooting protesters at point-blank range. They doused the tents, which extended for hundreds of yards in every direction, with gasoline and lighted them on fire. None of the protesters had weapons. “People were dying all around us, and there was nothing we could do,” Maqtari told me. Some were burned alive. At around 11 p.m., Maqtari fled to her sister’s house, about 200 yards uphill from the square. There, she and other protesters watched as flames engulfed the entire square, raging for several hours. Officers stormed through the local hospital and several field clinics where protesters were being treated, firing tear gas down the corridors, shooting up the ceilings and arresting doctors and nurses. Some thrust their gun butts into patients’ wounds. Others were laughing hysterically, as if they were on drugs, Maqtari and others told me, and shouting into the darkness, “Ali is your god!” The next morning, amid the charred remains of the tents, someone had scrawled a sardonic reversal of the protesters’ chants on a wall. “The regime wants the fall of the people,” it said.

The massacre in Taiz received little attention in the West, blending in with the larger chaos and violence enveloping the Arab world. In Syria, tanks were rolling through the streets of several cities, as months of protest evolved into a bloody national insurrection. In Libya, the civil war was festering into a grim status quo, with NATO airstrikes unable to dislodge Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi from his Tripoli stronghold. Even Egypt and Tunisia seemed endangered, with fresh violence breaking out and their economies in tatters.

Yet the events in Taiz took on a tragic dimension that went beyond the numbers of dead and wounded. Taiz is Yemen’s least tribal city, home to the highest number of educated people, professionals and traders. The city was “the heart of the revolution,” in one popular refrain, and its protesters were less politicized and more rigorously nonviolent than elsewhere in Yemen. The attack on May 29, with its deliberate cruelty and excess, confirmed what many Yemenis feared: that Saleh sees the democratic uprising as a greater threat to his power than Al Qaeda. The burning of the Taiz square, after all, coincided with the collapse of all government authority in large areas of south Yemen, where heavily armed jihadist groups have captured two towns and several villages. In the northwestern province of Saada, too, a militia movement now reigns supreme; they recently elected Yemen’s biggest arms dealer as their new governor. All this has implications that go well beyond Yemen’s remote mountains and deserts — the chaos in the north, for instance, threatens to set off a proxy conflict between the region’s two great nemeses, Saudi Arabia and Iran — and the Yemeni military has done little to oppose any of it.

Even after Saleh was flown to a hospital in Saudi Arabia in early June, wounded in a bomb blast at his palace mosque, his government — or what is left of it — seemed determined to crush the unarmed protesters while leaving the rest of the country open to some of the world’s most dangerous men. After decades of backdoor collusion with jihadis and armed rebels of all kinds, Saleh and his generals may believe they can more easily defeat these warriors, or make deals with them. If so, they are taking an enormous risk, one that could have deadly consequences for the United States, which has become the chief target of the Al Qaeda franchise in Yemen. It could also prove disastrous for the greater Middle East, now faced with the prospect of a Somalia-style collapse on its southern flank. For 23 million Yemenis, the risk is even greater. If the country continues to disintegrate, they will lose a chance to finally rise above the violence and chaos that have ruled their lives for so long. “They are still attacking us every day, targeting the activists’ houses, arresting people,” Maqtari told me. “It’s as if they are pushing us and pushing us to take up violence, so that we will be like them. They want to turn the revolution into a tribal war. And this will tear the country apart.”

In a sense, the counterrevolution in Yemen began with a single word: baraghala. It is an old Yemeni word, used by northern tribesmen to denigrate the citified, unarmed people of Taiz and its environs. Its meaning is something like “weakling,” but with the negative force of “nigger.” Starting in early February, Saleh and his subordinates began sending out flocks of young thugs to the protest sites, where they would shout, “Baraghala!” at the demonstrators as they beat them with batons. The word did not come as a surprise. Saleh is himself a northern tribesman with an elementary-school education, a manipulative ruler who has shredded his country’s few civil institutions during his 33 years in power. He is widely said to resent Taiz, which was once Yemen’s capital, for its role as a beacon of education and enlightenment. By attacking it, he and his commanders seemed to be deliberately provoking Taizis to abandon their moral high ground and fight back.

“Some of us were thinking of calling it the Revolution of the Baraghala,” Maqtari told me when I met her for lunch on my first day in Taiz. We sat at a long table loaded with roast chicken and a spicy lamb stew called fahsa, in a bustling restaurant owned by a sympathetic businessman who had helped feed the protesters. She wore a black-and-white-flecked head scarf wrapped tightly around her face, and she had with her a group of fellow protest organizers whose polite, manicured appearance and career profiles all hinted at the city’s distinct identity: a doctor, a lawyer, a graduate student, an engineer. Taizis are intensely proud of their civil roots, Maqtari told me. The city is an ancient center of trade, cradled by high green mountain slopes where coffee grows. It is just northeast of the ancient Red Sea port of Mokha, for which the coffee drink is named, and the relative cosmopolitanism of its merchant classes helped dissolve the power of the tribes long ago. The area is known to Yemenis as balad al aish — the country of living — in contrast with the north, which is called balad al jaish, or the country of the army. It has always been vulnerable to raids by tribesmen from the arid northern mountains. Taiz was once an attractive city, but it is now battered and decayed, even by the standards of Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country. For three decades, Maqtari told me, Saleh has systematically starved the city of capital, while focusing his patronage network on Sana. “It is like a kind of racism,” Maqtari said. “He wants Taiz to suffer because of who we are.”

After lunch, one of Maqtari’s friends drove us to the square. The streets reeked of overflowing garbage; residents told me the government had barred municipal workers from collecting it. The lines of cars waiting to buy gasoline went on as far as the eye could see, blocking the city’s main roads. We passed several checkpoints where the guards were dressed in plainclothes; many are said to fear assassination since the attack on the square. Only one checkpoint had a full complement of uniformed soldiers, near a huge poster of the president. “They are here to guard the poster,” Maqtari told me as the guards waved us through. “It’s the only one left in Taiz.”

We stopped near Freedom Square and walked the rest of the way. The streets were littered with blackened tent fragments, chunks of concrete and shell casings. Even the trees had been burned, their trunks charred and their uppermost leaves shriveled and brown. As we reached the center of the square, a few dozen teenagers and children ran up to us, greeting Maqtari as if she were the Pied Piper. Then something remarkable happened: The Yemeni national anthem began playing from a tinny loudspeaker nearby. Instantly, everyone in the square stood at attention, raised their right hands in a peace symbol and sang along. I had never seen this anywhere in Yemen. Afterward, Maqtari explained that this had been a regular ritual during the sit-in, along with moments of collective silence. “We wanted to show that patriotism does not belong to the regime,” she said.

Moments later, thick clouds darkened the sky, and a heavy rain began pelting the streets into mud. We ran for shelter under the eaves of a burned building, and one of Maqtari’s colleagues drove up in a battered brown sedan. They wanted to take me up to the mountains for a view of the city. Eight of us piled into the car, four men and four women, packed in tightly together — a shocking breach of decorum for most Yemenis, but here in liberal Taiz, it was, apparently, perfectly natural. As we drove through a blinding downpour, Maqtari talked about her love of the novels of José Saramago, Jorge Amado and Milan Kundera. She has published one story collection of her own and is working on her first novel. “I’m a bookworm,” she said, and described to me how she flies to Cairo whenever she can afford it and comes home with suitcases full of books in Arabic translation. One of her recent favorites — to my amazement — was the letters of Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, the twin idols of 20th-century literary erotica. It is difficult to convey just how unusual this is in a country where many women are married off by age 13 and most cannot read.

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