Rage, Rap and Revolution: Inside the Arab Youth Quake

At 6:30 p.m. on Feb. 15, as thousands of people gathered to protest against their ruler at a busy intersection in Manama, the capital of the small island nation of Bahrain, you could just about hear over the general hubbub the anthem of the young people who have shaken regimes from North Africa to the Arabian Gulf. It wasn't a verse from the Koran. It wasn't a traditional tune from the region. It was rap. A reedy female voice shouted out, several times, the first line of "Rais Lebled," a song written by the Tunisian rapper known as El Général. "Mr. President, your people are dying," the woman sang. Then others joined in. "Mr. President, your people are dying/ People are eating rubbish/ Look at what is happening/ Miseries everywhere, Mr. President/ I talk with no fear/ Although I know I will get only trouble/ I see injustice everywhere."

Bahrain, as it happens, doesn't have a President; it's ruled by a King, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa. No matter. The protesters in Bahrain knew that "Rais Lebled" was the battle hymn of the Jasmine Revolution that brought down Tunisia's dictator, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, and that it was then adopted by the demonstrators in Cairo's Tahrir Square who toppled Hosni Mubarak. Now it had come to Bahrain, as rage against poverty and oppression swept the Arab world from west to east. It isn't just songs that are being copied: in a nod to the Egyptians, organizers in several countries have dubbed their demonstrations Days of Rage, and the popular Tunisian chant, "The people want the regime to fall," has been taken up by protesters from Algeria to Yemen.

But the most important things 2011's protests have in common don't come from copying — they come naturally. All of the revolts are led by young men and women, many of whom are novices at political activism. All use modern tools, like social-networking sites on the Internet and texting over mobile phones, to organize and amplify their protests. And all have the same demands: a right to choose and change their leaders, an end to rampant corruption, the opportunity for employment and improvement. "Whether you're in Tunis or in Cairo or in Manama," says Ala'a Shehabi, 30, a Bahraini economics lecturer and political activist, "young Arabs are all on the same wavelength."

In less than two months, this generation has already wrought political change on a scale not seen since the end of the Cold War. The class of 2011 has felled two despots and forced other famously inflexible rulers to make concessions, some dramatic (Yemen's longtime President Ali Abdullah Saleh has promised not to run for re-election) and some desperate (King Hamad has offered every Bahraini household the equivalent of $2,700). And all this was achieved by largely peaceful demonstrations and despite the absence of clear leaders.

There may be more to come. Growing protests in Bahrain and Yemen could lead to greater concessions from their rulers. And the Arab uprising has already given a boost to the flagging Green Revolution in Iran. (That, in turn, has provoked a fierce crackdown by government forces.) There have also been demonstrations in Libya against the regime of "Brother Leader" Muammar Gaddafi. So who are the Middle East's new revolutionaries? Where do they come from, and what do they want?

Getting the Young People Wrong

Even those who have watched this generation come of age in the Middle East struggle to explain its sudden empowerment. "These young people have done more in a few weeks than their parents did in 30 years," says Hassan Nafaa, a political-science professor at Cairo University. "They are the Internet Generation ... or the Facebook Generation ... or just call them the Miracle Generation."

Yet not so long ago, these were the men and women who were being called the lost generation. For years, Middle East experts had described Arab youths as frustrated but feckless: they disliked and distrusted their authoritarian rulers, they keenly felt their limited economic prospects, but they were too politically emasculated to press for change. They were thoroughly intimidated by the Mubaraks and Salehs, together with their ubiquitous, Orwellian spies and secret police; they were disillusioned by the failed attempts at rebellion by their parents' generation. Western observers were not alone in misreading this generation's potential. "If you had said some years ago that my students would be responsible for democratic change in Egypt, I would have laughed," admits Nafaa.

According to the old narrative, the only outlet for youthful dissent lay in Islamic extremism and violence. A much cited 2003 Brookings Institution report on Arab youths warned that they were being raised in an environment of religious radicalism and anti-Americanism. "These values," the report argued, "thus become the formative elements of a new and dispossessed generation, auguring badly for the future."

The auguries were wrong. In reality, Arab youths were a big part of the silent, moderate majority. In virtually every Arab country, more than half the population is less than 30 years old. And like young people everywhere, most of them prefer the freedom that comes with democracy to the straitjacket of political autocracy or rule by religious conservatives. A survey of youths in nine Arab states released in 2010 by the p.r. firm Asda'a Burson-Marsteller showed that they ranked democracy as a greater priority than good civic infrastructure, access to the best education or even fair wages

Granted, these young people may not all have a clear vision of what kind of democracy they want, only that it is accompanied by free and fair elections. But that counts for a generation that has only ever known one ruler, the opportunity to kick one out every four or five years may be democracy's greatest appeal. "I don't care who ends up running this country," says Egyptian student Khaled Kamel, "as long as I have the ability to change them if I don't like them."

A Thousand Sparks

If most foreigners couldn't put the sheer numbers of Arab youths together with their political aspirations to measure their clout, neither did the young Arabs themselves. Jared Cohen, director of the corporate think tank Google Ideas, who until recently worked on online outreach at the U.S. State Department, says young people were the "de facto opposition in many of these countries, but they didn't see their own power."

As always, it needed a thousand little sparks to light the fire of revolt — to reveal to those who thought they were weak how much power they really had. Kamel, a university student from the Nile Delta village of Zawiyat Ghazal, recalls when he fell from a train at a station and a policeman came up to him. "Instead of helping me, he hit me because I was lying there on the platform, which you're not supposed to do," says Kamel. That sort of humiliation at the hands of authority was common-place in Mubarak's Egypt, but Kamel, 20, had an outlet for his frustrations: an ancient Hewlett-Packard PC and an Internet connection. He created a blog and chronicled his anger in sarcastic prose.

Then last summer, another instance of police brutality became the talk of the Egyptian online community: in Alexandria, a young businessman named Khaled Said was beaten to death by cops. A Facebook page entitled "We Are All Khaled Said" was created by an anonymous administrator. Kamel joined the Facebook group and became one of its lead organizers. He got to know the group's administrator online, and the two began an e-mail conversation. It wasn't until Feb. 7 that Kamel finally learned the identity of his correspondent: Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who has become the face of the Egyptian revolution.

Kamel's first sense that his activism could help change the entire system came when he worked with Ghonim and others to plan a day of protests on Jan. 25. While Cairo and Tahrir Square got the most international attention during the uprising, Kamel concentrated on rallying protesters across the country, marching with them in Alexandria and in the nearby town of Damanhur, where fleeing officials set fire to the state security headquarters.

Now Kamel walks through the burned and ransacked building, pointing to cells where security officers brutalized prisoners with dogs and electric prods. He exudes a sense of wonder that his generation put an end to these abuses. "We have forces now," he says. "And we're starting from right now to build Egypt the way we wanted to."

If Said's murder at the hands of the police spurred young Egyptians into action, in Tunisia it was the self-immolation of vegetable vendor Mohammed Bouazizi after he was slapped by a policewoman. In Yemen, activist Tawakul Karman was moved by the plight of 30 families expelled in early 2007 from their village when the land was given to a tribal leader close to President Saleh. The families are known collectively as Ja'ashin, after the name of their village, and Karman, 32, a mother of three, has made them her cause: every Tuesday since 2007, she and scores of others have protested in front of Sana'a University.

Her tenacity has yielded nothing: the government has refused to intervene on the Ja'ashin's behalf. Karman now believes that only Saleh's resignation — he's been in power three years longer than Mubarak was — will allow Yemen to start addressing its problems. Like activists elsewhere, she finds her spirits raised by what's happened in Tunisia and Egypt. The ranks of protesters at Sana'a University have swelled to the thousands. Several protests have been broken up by police or armed supporters of the regime, but Karman is undaunted. "Now there's a race between Yemen and Algeria to see who will be next," she says.

Not all the activist Arab youths are looking for regime change. In Ramallah, the capital of the Palestinian territories, Fadi Quran has set his sights on what are arguably more difficult goals: unification of the warring Palestinian factions of Fatah and Hamas, followed by an end to the Israeli occupation. Quran, 22, a Stanford University grad who runs an alternative-energy start-up, set up a Facebook account calling for a sit-in in front of the Egyptian embassy while Mubarak was clinging to power in Cairo. But he was forced to take it down by the Palestinian Authority's security services and was then questioned for hours. "It truly was obvious they had never had to deal with this type of activism before," he says

Quran and several other Palestinian activists are now planning a wave of demonstrations to demand that Fatah and Hamas reconcile, the better to "fight the occupation in a much more efficient and productive manner." Quran is counting on young Palestinians to brush aside the failed policies of their elders. "They can't find any answers because they're stuck in the box," he says. "But when the youth comes in, they're going to see a new vision, and we're going to achieve the goals of our struggle."

Doing It for Themselves

The revolution of the young generation in the Middle East is theirs and theirs alone — spokespeople have been specific in dismissing the idea that they have needed outside assistance or have looked much to the outside for inspiration

Even so, their actions have been such that policymakers far from the Middle East now have to react to a new reality, recalibrate policies long based on convenient relationships with despots and build connections with this new source of political strength. That's especially true for the U.S., which many Arab activists regard as the great power that enabled their oppressors. "The U.S. government was aware of the injustices in Egypt but continued supporting Mubarak because of self-interest," says a Bahraini activist who asked that his or her name be withheld. "No one can argue that Saudi Arabia is the home of human rights or democracy, yet America continues to support the regime."

Still, for the Obama Administration, there's good news too. So far, there have been few instances of President Obama being burned in effigy or of the U.S. flag being torched by angry mobs. The State Department insists that it has long been paying attention to the needs and aspirations of young Arabs. "This has been a key demographic for us for quite some time," says a State Department official. Funding for youth outreach has increased significantly in recent years. The U.S. now spends more to support democracy and governance in the Arab world every year than the $250 million it spent in total from 1991 to 2001.

(Read "Joe Klein: How the U.S. Should Support Middle East Reform.")

Many programs are deliberately low-key, in part because an open association with the U.S. can be politically damaging. "It's really been very hard for most people in the Arab world to work directly with the U.S. government," says Ethan Zuckerman, one of the founders of Global Voices, an international network of bloggers and citizen journalists that has hosted regional conferences for Arab bloggers.

As the old order crumbles, the U.S. will want these new relationships to strengthen into lasting bonds. But Arab youths are unlikely to feel the need for U.S. support as acutely as the leaders who came before them. After all, they didn't need U.S. help to get rid of those dictators. "People said it couldn't happen, because the U.S. supported Mubarak, but still he fell," says the Bahraini activist. "Now we know we don't need the U.S. on our side to get what we want. Now we know we can do it for ourselves." Faced with such self-confidence, the Obama Administration must manage the delicate task of maintaining support for regimes in the region while telling Arab leaders, in public and private, to address the turmoil with more urgent reforms — all while trying to increase direct contact with the youths leading the uprisings.

That will not be easy. Foreign policy considerations couldn't be further from the minds of most members of the class of 2011. For young Arabs in Yemen, Libya and Algeria, there are regimes still to topple. The revolution hasn't yet gotten off the ground in Syria and is still in its early days in Bahrain. And in Tunisia and Egypt, the gains from the past two months need to be protected: there are political parties to form, elections to contest. The military council that took over from Mubarak has promised constitutional reforms and elections in six months.

Many of the young men and women who helped make the revolutions happen are keen to hold on to the sense of blissful dawn they have experienced for the first time in their young lives. Ahmed Khalil, scion of a wealthy Egyptian business family and a veteran of Tahrir Square, hasn't returned to work even though his plastics factory reopened several days ago: there are more important things now than making money, he says. Khalil, 29, is part of the "Revolution Friends" Facebook group that is exploring ways to channel the revolution's momentum into a civic-awareness campaign. He has printed leaflets, now being distributed throughout Cairo, calling on his fellow Egyptians to work "for a better Egypt and to protect the victory that you and I achieved with our own hands." (Sample suggestions: "Don't litter, don't blow your car horn for no reason, don't pay bribes, don't allow a police officer to humiliate someone in front of you, don't harass girls on the street, know your rights, stay positive, respect other opinions.")

And what of the revolution's rapper? El Général — his given name is Hamada Ben Amor — is disappointed he missed some of the action: he was jailed for three days during the Jasmine Revolution, and when Egyptian protesters invited him to perform in Tahrir Square, he couldn't go because he has no passport. Instead, he's written a new rap called "Vive Tunisie!" that honors Tunisian protesters and those killed during the uprising. There are shout-outs, too, to other youth movements. "I also speak about the program of freedom in Egypt, Algeria, Libya and Morocco," he says. The youth of the Arab world are not done yet

Qat Got Their Tongues

By ALI AL-MUQRI

February 17, 2011

Sana, Yemen

IT occurs to me as I listen to the shouts of the young protesters in the streets here that they could use most of the chants of the Egyptian protesters verbatim — save for the ones about Suzanne Mubarak, the former first lady of Egypt. This is because the mere mention of any of the four wives of our president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, would be a shameful violation of a tribal taboo.

The state-controlled news media continue to assert that Yemen is neither Tunisia nor Egypt. But the president and his minions have been watching their backs since the success of the Egyptian revolution, as most of the revolutionary movements in Yemen have been influenced by earlier Egyptian events. The 1952 revolution in Egypt belatedly inspired the 1962 revolution in Yemen, which split our nation in half for nearly three decades. There is even a celebrated Tahrir, or Liberation, Square here in Sana, just as in Cairo.

It is not only the authorities who are nervous: most Yemenis are hoping to wake up one day and discover that the revolution has arisen earlier than they have; just like that, painlessly, with no losses. As much as they long to follow the path of Tunisia and Egypt, they are worried about the repercussions such a revolt might have, including a civil war should certain tribes align themselves with President Saleh.

In recent days, the president has met with tribal leaders in the Sana area and paid a visit to an army barracks. It’s a clear indication of his fears that the Islamist Congregation for Reform, or Islah Party, might infiltrate the two pillars of his regime, the tribes and the military. Islah, once a vital ally of the president’s, has thrown in its lot with the opposition.

For the last two weeks, members of Mr. Saleh’s party, the General People’s Congress, have set up large tents in Tahrir Square, attempting to pre-empt any protests. Hundreds of tribesmen take shifts at the tents, raising banners in support of President Saleh. Cars with government markings deliver their meals, along with handouts of cash that they spend on the stimulant qat. They sit in their tents for hours each day, chewing qat and listening to preachers on loudspeakers urging Yemenis to love their country and protect it against “troublemakers” and “foreign agents.”

Until recently, the protest movement had been quite tame. On Feb. 3, for example, an online call went up for a demonstration at Sana’s central mosque; one young blogger urged his fellows to “stop using qat for one week only, for Yemen’s sake, for the sake of change and dignity.” Yet when I joined the protest around noon, there were only about 20 people, chanting slogans. “Tens of thousands of people joined the protest in the morning,” one of them told me, “but they’ve left now and will come back in the evening.”

As angry as they were with the government, they were equally frustrated with Islah. “We’re here to free the Yemeni people from the bonds of darkness,” another protester told me, “and there they are with loudspeakers beseeching God to break the siege of Gaza and bring down the Egyptian Pharaoh.” I stood for a while, listening to their chants: “If the people decide one day to choose life/then fate must heed their call”; “Ali, enough, enough/Leave, let yourself out”; and, when a police car passed by, “The army, the police and we/are all connected by our need for daily bread.”

The most striking was, “We will not sleep until the regime falls,” which Yemenis understand means that the protesters had foregone qat that afternoon (users tend to become lethargic after its stimulant effect wears off). Still, the large crowd of the morning never returned, apparently having succumbed to qat’s temptations.

More recently, however, the perseverance of young people like those 20 at the mosque seems to have paid off. For the last seven days there have been a series of localized but violent clashes between protesters and supporters of the regime backed by the police. Fortunately, Western news reports tell us that the police have so far fired their guns only into the sky as a warning. And the protests have spread across Yemen, to Aden, Taiz and other cities.

I, like many others, don’t think that President Saleh’s hastily made pledges — including his promises not to run for president again, to create a fund to employ university graduates and to increase wages and reduce income taxes — will assure his regime’s survival. The virus of revolution that overtook Tunisia and Egypt has taken hold.

To many here, that is a troubling thought. Unlike Egypt and Tunisia, Yemen is tribal and could easily fall into civil war. Still, while I understand the risks, I believe that the future cannot be worse than the present. Yemen may be a fractured society, but I have faith that we can unite against a nepotistic regime that has plundered our resources and given us little but misery.

Ali al-Muqri is a novelist. This essay was translated by Ghenwa Hayek from the Arabic

Unhappy Yemen : Tariq Ali

I left for Yemen as Obama was insisting that ‘large chunks’ of the country were ‘not fully under government control’, after Senator Joseph Lieberman had cheerfully announced that it was a suitable target for war and occupation. The sad underwear bomber who tried to blow up the Amsterdam flight on Christmas Day had triggered a new interest in the country, and in al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), by claiming that while he was converted to hardcore Islamism in Britain, his crash course in suicide terrorism, mercifully inadequate, had been provided by AQAP somewhere in Yemen.

Yemen is a proper country, unlike the imperial petrol stations dotted across other parts of the Arabian Peninsula, where the ruling elites live in hurriedly constructed skyscrapers designed by celebrity architects, flanked by shopping malls displaying every Western brand, and serviced by wage-slaves from South Asia and the Philippines. Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, was founded when the Old Testament was still being written, edited and collated. It’s true that the new Mövenpick hotel in the heart of the city’s diplomatic enclave is reminiscent of Dubai at its worst – when I was there it was pushing its Valentine’s Day Dinner Menu – but in Yemen the elite is careful and doesn’t flaunt its wealth.

The old walled city was rescued from extinction-via-modernisation by Unesco (and later the Aga Khan Trust) in the 1980s, and the old wall rebuilt. The ninth-century Great Mosque is currently being restored by a team of Italian experts working with local archaeologists who are uncovering artefacts and images from a pre-Islamic past. Whether they will manage to locate a small structure said to have been built on the same site during the Prophet Muhammad’s lifetime remains to be seen. Sana’a’s architecture is stunning, like nothing else in Arabia or anywhere else in the world. Its buildings – skyscrapers eight or nine storeys high – were constructed in the tenth century and renovated 600 years later in the same style: lightly baked bricks, decorated with geometric patterns in gypsum and symmetrical stone carvings (wood was unavailable or in short supply). What is missing are the hanging gardens on every floor that gripped the imagination of medieval travellers.[*]

The net result of the West’s worries about the AQAP effect is that the US will send $63 million in aid to Yemen this year. A fifth has already been earmarked for weaponry, much of the rest will go to the president and his cronies, and some into the pockets of the military high command. What’s left will be fought over by the bosses of different regions. (The sum doesn’t include the Pentagon’s remittance for counterterrorism, which last year amounted to $67 million.) A Yemeni businessman told me that he’d been taken aback a few years ago when the then prime minister, an apparently respectable and moderate man, demanded a 30 per cent rake-off from a deal he’d been negotiating. Seeing the shock on the businessman’s face, the PM reassured him: 20 per cent of that was for the president.

I wondered how serious the threat from AQAP really was. How many members of the organisation were in the country and how many were visitors from the other side of the Saudi border? Abdul Karim al-Eryani, a 75-year-old former prime minister and still an adviser to the president, received me in the large library in the basement of his house. He spoke interestingly and at length about Yemeni history, stressing the continuities between pre-Islamic and Islamic cultures in the region. He complained that the Arabic dialect spoken by the bedouin of Nejd (an area now part of Saudi Arabia) had been the largest single source for the modern Arabic dictionary at the expense of the real root of the language, the dialect used by the Sabeans (who lived in what is now Yemen), 5000 words of which were excluded by the dictionary-makers. Later he told me that thanks to the Nigerian bomber he had been visited by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Friedman, having asked his questions, went back to the US and told his readers that the city ‘was not Kabul … yet’, but that AQAP was a ‘virus’ that needed urgent attention before the spread of the disease became uncontrollable. He didn’t speculate on the cause of the infection. But when I asked Eryani to estimate the size of AQAP, his response was a mischievous smile. ‘Three or four hundred?’ I pressed. ‘At the maximum,’ he replied, ‘the very maximum. The Americans exaggerate greatly. We have other problems, real and more important.’

His view was reiterated by Saleh Ali Ba-Surah, the minister for higher education, a grandee educated in East Germany, like many others from what until 1990 was the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, the southern part of the present state. The two parts of what now constitutes the Republic of Yemen – ruled over for the past 20 years by Ali Abdullah Saleh, who, like Mubarak and Gaddafi, is grooming his son to succeed him – were for most of the last century representatives of strikingly different sociologies. While armed tribes dominated the northern highlands where Sana’a is situated, workers, intellectuals, trade unionists, nationalists and, later, Communists were strong in Aden and its hinterland.

The country had been united centuries earlier under the leadership of the Zaidi Shia imams, whose temporal power was dependent on tribal loyalty and peasant acquiescence. Southern Yemen broke away in 1728; an expanding British Empire then occupied Aden and its coast in 1839 (the same year it began its occupation of Hong Kong). The limping Ottoman Empire snatched a chunk of northern Yemen soon afterwards, but had to give it up after the First World War. Under the benign gaze of the British, the imams of the Hamid-ed-Din family took back control of the North. In 1948 the ruler, Yahya Muhammad, was assassinated by one of his bodyguards and his son Ahmad, a fierce isolationist, took over. For him the choice was simple: his country could be dependent and rich or poor but free. As he became more and more eccentric – drugged on morphine and spending most of the day with his cronies in a neon-lit room playing with the toys he had been accumulating since he was a child – discontent mounted. There wasn’t a single modern school or railway station or factory in the country and scarcely any doctors.

Bets were placed as to whether the imam’s exiled brother would return and bump him off or whether Nasser’s supporters in the army would lose their patience first. Ahmad was opposed to Nasser’s Arab nationalism and in 1960, at Saudi instigation, had the state radio station broadcast a denunciation of Nasser that was bound to elicit a reply from Egypt. Cairo Radio declared war, but before the issue could be decided Ahmad died. Within a week the chief of the bodyguard, al-Sallal, joined nationalist military officers to seize power. The imamate had ended. In Aden thousands demonstrated their support for the new regime, simultaneously making it clear that Britain’s continued colonial occupation of the South would be resisted. Fearful of both radical nationalism and its possible Communist backers, Washington and London decided that the imams must be restored to power. The British, desperate to teach Nasser a lesson to avenge the humiliation of Suez, were far more gung-ho than the United States. The Americans’ main worry was that the Yemeni infection might spread to the rest of the peninsula and that, if the Saudi intervention backfired, nationalist currents might sweep Saudi Arabia itself, severely damaging the monarchy. The Saudis began to nurture the imams’ supporters and woo conservative Northern tribesmen with a combination of primitive Islamism and cash.

The political and military leaders of the new state in the North were weak and confused. Nasserite intellectuals in the government took advantage of this indecision and finally persuaded the army to appeal directly to Nasser. The Egyptians, with Soviet and Chinese support, dispatched an expeditionary force of 20,000 soldiers. A lengthy civil war fought by Cold War proxies – to put it simply, Saudis v. Egyptians – followed, costing 200,000 Yemeni lives and leaving the North a complete wreck. The Egyptians were men from the Nile valley and the mountainous terrain was alien to them. Convinced of their invincibility, they failed to take advice, treating their local allies as both inferior and irrelevant; and as the civil war reached a stalemate and opposition to Egyptian methods that included the use of chemical weapons increased, working-class dissent in Sana’a and Taiz was brutally crushed. The war ended in an unsatisfactory compromise in 1970. The Egyptians had emulated the Saudis by trying to buy off the tribes, with the result that their power was greatly enhanced in the new dispensation, as was that of sundry divines and preachers. The war had cost the Egyptians a million dollars a day and the lives of 15,000 soldiers, with three times that number wounded. The subsequent demoralisation of the army may well have contributed to its defeat in the Six-Day War. In any case, Israel’s blitzkrieg in June 1967 sounded the death-knell of Arab nationalism.

The civil war caused many left-wing nationalists and Communists in North Yemen to flee to Aden. There, British soldiers, French veterans from Algeria and Belgian mercenaries were recruited by Colonel David Stirling’s company, Watchguard International Ltd, for operations behind enemy lines. In the South too the nationalists were divided, with Cairo backing the Front for the Liberation of South Yemen (FLOSY) and more radical groups congregating under the banner of the National Liberation Front (NF). Both were determined to expel the British, while the British, determined to hang on as long as they could to a strategically important base, increasingly resorted to imprisonment without trial and torture. In 1964 Harold Wilson had said that British forces would remain in the region but that power would be handed over in 1968 to the so-called Federation of South Arabia, in which he hoped that the Adenese would be kept under control by sultans from the hinterland.

The plan backfired badly after whole villages were bombed into oblivion by the RAF. As Bernard Reilly, a long-serving colonial officer who had spent most of his life in Aden, put it: ‘Pacification of a country unaccustomed to orderly government could not be effected without collective punishment of collective acts of violence such as brigandage.’ The leaders of these tribes were unwilling to be pacified. A ferocious struggle now began in the streets of the Crater, one of the oldest areas of Aden. By 1967 the NF were using bazookas and mortars in Aden and targeting military and RAF bases. The Labour government decided to cut its losses and withdraw. ‘Regretfully,’ a letter from the Colonial Office informed its native collaborators, ‘protection can no longer be extended.’ The Israeli victory in June 1967 did not help the British since the NF was not an Egyptian pawn, unlike FLOSY, which was gravely weakened. An NF-led general strike paralysed Aden and guerrilla attacks compelled the colonial administration to cancel the celebrations scheduled to mark the queen’s birthday. Six months later, on 29 November 1967, with the closure of the Suez Canal depriving Aden of much of its value to the British, the British finally left, after 128 years. As Humphrey Trevelyan, the last high commissioner, waved a hurried farewell from the steps of the plane returning him to London, the Royal Marine Band from HMS Eagle played ‘Fings Ain’t Wot They Used To Be’.

The National Liberation Front had won, but they had no plan for rebuilding the country. Its members came from different currents of the left: pro-Moscow, Maoists, supporters of Che Guevara, a few Trotskyists and orthodox nationalists. All immediately agreed to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and this was done on 3 December 1967. But disputes soon began. The NF Congress passed a motion put forward by the radicals that demanded agrarian reforms, an end to illiteracy, the formation of a people’s militia, a purge of the civil and military apparatus, support for the Palestinian resistance and close co-operation with Russia and China. The new elected leadership was dominated by the left. An attempted putsch by the army almost led to civil war as armed guerrilla detachments surrounded the military camps and disarmed the officers. By May 1968 it was clear that the right wing of the NF had no intention of implementing the conference resolutions. A 14 May Movement was created to mobilise support for the reforms. There were clashes with the military followed by a strange hiatus reminiscent of the July Days of 1917 in Petrograd. The right thought it had won and boasted that ‘the organisers of the 14 May Movement, having read a lot of Régis Debray, imagined that they were carrying out “a revolution within the revolution”.’ But within a year the left had triumphed.

The 1970 constitution proclaimed the country a socialist republic – the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen – against the advice of both China and the Soviet Union. (In October 1968 the Chinese foreign minister, Chen Yi, himself then under siege by Red Guards, had told a visiting South Yemeni delegation that ‘your every claim about constructing socialism and raising slogans which are impractical and provocative offer, by their nature, sharp weapons to your adversaries.’) What followed was tragically predictable. An economically backward state embarked on creating structures that institutionalised austerity and universalised scarcity. Promoting industrialisation via state enterprises might have been helpful had it not been for the imposition of a total ban on petty-commodity production. To this was added a state monopoly of all modes of communication, strict control over what was allowed to be said or published, and the exclusion of all parties other than the Yemeni Socialist Party. It was a mockery both of socialism and of the promises made during the anti-colonial struggle. What is undeniable is that the new system of universal education and healthcare as well as the advancement of women marked a huge step forward for the region. Saudi Arabia was not pleased.

In due course the neighbouring powers – North Yemen, the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia – set to work with Reaganite encouragement on a counter-revolution from within, of the sort then being attempted in Nicaragua with the Contras. In Ali Nasser, a crude, semi-literate apparatchik obsessed with absolute power, who became the PDRY’s president in 1980, they found an instrument. For more than a year the president plotted against the charismatic Abdul Fateh Ismail, his predecessor as president and a leader of the struggle against the British, who had resigned for ‘health reasons’ and taken a long break in Eastern Europe. Ismail still had many supporters among the leadership when he returned from Moscow in 1985, and was soon re-elected to the PDRY Politburo, where he commanded a majority.

On 13 January 1986, Ali Nasser’s car was seen outside the Central Committee building (a replica of similar monster structures in Eastern Europe), where a meeting of the Politburo had been scheduled. But Ali Nasser didn’t appear at the meeting. Instead his well-built bodyguard, on heavy drugs and carrying a Scorpion machine-gun, entered the room and shot dead the vice-president, Ali Ahmed Antar, before shooting everyone else in the room. Four key Politburo members, including Ismail, were killed, together with eight Central Committee members. Elsewhere, Ali Nasser’s men were creating havoc: Ismail’s house was destroyed by mortar shells and there was wild shooting around the city. At 12.30 p.m. Aden radio and TV broadcast that the president had circumvented an attempted coup by the right and that Ismail and his collaborators had been executed. Three hours later the BBC Arabic Service announced that the ‘moderate and pragmatic’ president of Yemen had foiled a coup attempt by hardline Communists. This was the line adopted by most of the Western media, which wrote of it as the defeat of a Moscow-backed attempt to further radicalise the country, this despite the fact that Gorbachev was now in power. As news of the killings spread in Aden crowds began to gather and troops recaptured the Ministry of Defence and its operations room from Ali Nasser’s men. Battles raged throughout the night. Numerous unarmed Party members, trade unionists and peasant leaders were killed by Nasser’s troops: lists had been prepared well in advance. But after five days of heavy fighting, the ‘pragmatic moderates’ were defeated. Ali Nasser fled to North Yemen and later Dubai. He now runs a ‘cultural centre’ in Damascus, where he has various business interests.

The shoot-out at the Central Committee meeting was the beginning of the end for the PDRY. The Western proxies in the region who had organised the whole affair now spoke of the socialist gangsters who were running the country. As the Soviet Union was collapsing negotiations began with the North and the country was quickly unified in May 1990 with a five-member presidential council representing both sides. The following year a new constitution lifted all restrictions on freedom of speech, press and association.

The unification did not work out well. The Southerners felt their interests had been betrayed, and constant bickering did not augur well for the future of the coalition government created after the election. Socialists from the South accused gangs backed by Ali Saleh, the former North Yemeni president, now president of the united country, of attacking their supporters in Sana’a and elsewhere. Relations rapidly deteriorated and there were skirmishes in the South between the remnants of the PDRY army and Northern troops. A short-lived but full-scale war erupted in 1994, with the full participation of jihadi groups and Osama bin Laden, who lent his support to Ali Saleh. The Southerners were crushed, not just militarily, but their culture and economy too. There were land grabs, urban property was stolen, women were pressured to veil themselves from head to foot (‘If we didn’t they called us prostitutes and there were many rapes. We were brutalised into this,’ a woman whose face was uncovered told me in Aden).

When I arrived in Aden I realised that AQAP was the least of the country’s problems. Most people in South Yemen are desperate to regain independence from the North. ‘This is not unification but occupation,’ I was told on numerous occasions. The people are leaderless and there are strong rumours in Sana’a that the old killer Ali Nasser is being readied for a political return by Ali Saleh, who sees him as a ‘unifying figure’. Meanwhile demonstrations in villages and small towns see the Yemeni flag and Ali Saleh’s portraits defaced and the old PDRY standard raised. Repression inevitably follows, further increasing the bitterness. On 1 March the security forces surrounded and destroyed the house of Ali Yafie, who had publicly burned an effigy of the president on the previous day. Yafie and eight members of his family, including his seven-year-old granddaughter, were killed. Government propaganda accused him of being an AQAP member.

On the night of 4 January the security forces in Aden surrounded the house of Hasham Bashraheel, the publisher-editor of Al-Ayyam: the newspaper, founded in 1958, had regularly reported on and published photographs of state atrocities. It had, for example, carried photos of the dead after security forces opened fire on ex-soldiers demanding their pensions, and the paper was banned in May 2009, although its offices continued to be a meeting place for journalists, intellectuals and civil rights activists. When the security forces surrounded the building supporters of the paper gathered there too, and shots were fired in the air to disperse them. Then mortar shells were fired: the publisher and his family, including two young grandchildren, were inside. Miraculously they survived by sheltering in a basement room. The next morning Bashraheel and his two sons surrendered in public view, to make it harder for the army to kill any of them. A local activist informed me that ‘friends in the police’ had told him that the security forces had two unidentified corpses in the boot of an unmarked car. If Bashraheel and his family had been killed, the other bodies would have been planted inside and identified as AQAP members shot during the raid. One guard employed by the family was shot dead as he tried to surrender. His father was arrested at the funeral a few days later. The publisher himself was charged with ‘forming an armed group’. The British ambassador, Tim Torlot, has apparently sent a memo to the Foreign Office suggesting that the irresponsible independent media are the problem. My informant in Sana’a claims to have seen this document. Torlot is notorious in Yemen for having left his wife for a glamorous American who worked for the Yemen Observer, owned by Ali Saleh’s press secretary.

I travelled through the South, from Aden to Mukallah, and when I saw Shibam I forgot about politics for a moment. This walled city of mud-brick skyscrapers, some of them more than a hundred feet high, is a living museum. No wonder Pasolini filmed much of his Arabian Nights here. He did more. On his return to Rome he raved about the architecture till Unesco declared the city a World Heritage site. Last year, while they were photographing it from a hill overlooking the town, four South Korean tourists were killed by a suicide terrorist from the North. I asked locals about AQAP. One of them came close to me and whispered: ‘Do you want to know where al-Qaida are based?’ I nodded. ‘In an office next to the president.’ In both Sana’a and Aden I encountered similar views. On Christmas Eve the regime dropped bombs and released drones (with US guidance) on two Southern villages where, they claimed, Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American preacher who trained the underwear bomber, was hiding. They didn’t find him but more than a dozen civilians were killed.

The regime has also faced a rebellion in the Northern province of Sa’ada, which borders Saudi Arabia. The highland population there is irritated by Wahhabi encroachments and, getting no help from the Sana’a government, decided to defend themselves. Tribal militias captured a few Saudi soldiers with the result that on 5 November last year the world caught its first glimpse of the Saudi Air Force in action (it should be the most powerful air force in the region after the US and Israel, but its planes usually rust away in desert warehouses). Ali Saleh obligingly describes the revolt as a Shia rebellion backed by Tehran, which had to be put down with force. But few believe this. The Yemeni army had embarked last August on Operation Scorched Earth, which destroyed villages and drove 150,000 villagers from their homes. Because of the news blackout and banning of relief organisations, the scale of government atrocities is unclear. Muhammad al-Maqaleh, a leader of the Yemeni Socialist Party and editor of the party’s paper, the Socialist, managed to get some eyewitness reports and put them up on the web last September. He described a military air strike that killed 87 refugees in Sa’ada, and accompanied the reports with photographs. He was held without trial for four months, tortured and threatened with execution. Finally brought to court, he revealed what had been done to him. Sana’a is certainly not Kabul, but if the regime continues to use force on this scale new civil wars seem probable