The Water Crisis in Yemen

Despite its remoteness, ancient South Arabia was always closely linked to the Mediterranean

For more than three millennia the Mediterranean has been prosperous and its peoples adept at creating wealth and trading goods. Yemen has always provided rare products to this rich market. In ancient times, Yemen’s chief exports were frankincense and myrrh, gold and gems, exported along the desert trade routes. In addition, Yemen lay like a hinge across the routes between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, importing and passing on tropical products from India and beyond. This entrepôt trade, largely in spices from India, came in through the southern Yemeni ports. From there, the costly goods joined Yemen’s own products on the long overland march to the Levant.

Like all Muslims, Yemenis today call their early history, before Islam, the jahiliyya, the time of ignorance. It was a time when, unlike today, southern Arabia was dominant in the peninsula, and the Arabs of the north moved in the economic and political orbit of the powerful southern city states, which enjoyed a well-organized political life and a high material culture.¹

Irrigation was practised in the desert margins as early as the late third millennium BC. Soundings in the silt deposits in the Marib area show that intensive irrigated agriculture was taking place there from at least 2000 BC. By 1000 BC, more advanced civilizations had emerged. Writing and monumental architecture appear – temples, palaces, dams – and sculptures of high quality: powerful and well-executed bull’s heads and ibex figures. Vast numbers of inscriptions in Old South Arabian attest to an evolved society.²

The exotic products of frankincense and myrrh were in strong demand for embalming and for temple incense in all the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean. Production was in the Hadramawt and Dhofar in the extreme south of the Arabian Peninsula. From there, the trade went to Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean by the desert routes (Box 2.1).³

As with the city states of classical Greece, each of the old Yemeni states was organized around a city, which drew its food from its agricultural hinterland. Treading the trail from the south, first came Hadramawt, with its capital at Shabwa. Next was the state of Qataban, with its capital of Tamna’. Then the famous Saba (Sheba), with its capital at Ma’rib. Finally, the state of Ma’in and its capital Qarnan. These city states lay on the desert margins, athwart the trade routes and at the end of the wadis that brought run-off from the highlands as the source of irrigation water.⁴

Box 2.1: The spice trade and the civilizations of ancient South Arabia⁵

Frankincense probably reached the East Mediterranean in the ninth century BC, but commerce was sporadic until around the seventh century BC. Camel breeding reached South Arabia at around the same time, so that camels were available to shoulder this long-haul trade.

With the growing stability and wealth of the Mediterranean, demand grew for frankincense to burn in temple offerings and for myrrh as scent and for embalming. By Pliny’s day, in the first century AD, 1,500 tons of frankincense and 500 tons of myrrh were delivered each year to the Roman Empire. Nero is said to have burned more than one year’s production of frankincense at the funeral of Poppaea.

The Hadrami capital was at Shabwa, located at an oasis on the trade route. Hadramawt served as the entry point for the Indian Ocean trade, with Qana on the bay of Bir Ali as the naval station and commercial port. The Hadrami state supervised production of frankincense and myrrh and controlled the marketing. Pliny writes that all frankincense had to be collected at Shabwa, where it was taxed. From there it began the long and costly itinerary up the desert margins, paying taxes and protection monies to each of the city states along the way in return for services and security for the caravans.

Saba, the largest and most powerful of these states, lay on the trade route north, living off the ‘services’ it provided to traders. Its capital, Ma’rib, with its 4.5 km of defensive walls and its enclosed area of 90 ha, was the largest city in Arabia,⁶ and its prestige was known beyond the peninsula. To irrigate their fields, the Sabaeans built the famous Ma’rib dam, to divert the floods in Wadi Dhana onto their fields. This famous dam was rebuilt several times, but lasted more than 1,000 years, making it one of the longest lasting hydraulic structures in the world.⁷

When Greek and then Roman empires dominated the Mediterranean and its hinterland, the Yemeni states long retained their independence and their commercial wealth

These old Yemeni states were remarkably durable – Saba survived for 1,000 years with little change. Their remoteness was part of the secret of their longevity. However, they were far from unknown to the Mediterranean world, and the reputation of ‘blessed Arabia’ spread through the known world. Gradually, however, Yemen’s advantages began to wane. In the Hellenistic era, the Ptolemies of Egypt discovered the use of monsoon winds for speeding ships to India and back, beginning a shift from the caravan to seaborne trade. The Romans subsequently established naval supremacy in the Red Sea and occupied Aden, from where they helped Greek convoys sailing between Egypt and India. Yet, despite this competition, Yemen long kept its status as a trading centre. In fact, once Rome took full control of Egypt in 30 BC, trade in the Red Sea greatly increased, and the Roman Empire maintained friendly relations with the Yemeni rulers. Yemen never suffered the fate of annexation that befell Nabataea and Petra. As late as AD 230 the King of Hadramawt still received missions from Palmyra and India.⁸

When change came, it came from shifts in both the economic and political balance. The interest of the Mediterranean in frankincense and myrrh waned as Christianity took hold. Internal competition between the Yemeni states led to war and conquest. In the end, the whole paradigm changed, as the political, economic and military balance swung north when Islam emerged on to the world stage.

In the early Islamic period of expansion and conquest, many Yemenis left for the wars and spread their stock in the furthermost posts of Islam⁹ – one of the commonest names in Morocco is Lamrani, el-Amrani, from the town of Amran in the Yemeni highlands just north of Sana’a. In the eighth and ninth centuries, the Abbasids in Baghdad maintained a vague sovereignty over Yemen. In the northern highlands, however, tribal leaders based in Sana’a had effective control. During this time the Zaidi sect of Shi’a Islam spread from Iraq to the Yemeni highlands. Thereafter (until 1962), there was always a Zaidi imam ruling in some part of Yemen. By contrast, southern areas of Yemen remained Sunni, predominantly following the Shafi’i school.

In the later Middle Ages, the Rasulids of Zabid re-established Yemen’s trading wealth and prestige

After a confused period, the Ayyubid, Turan Shah, brother of Saladin, invaded Yemen in 1173–4, and Yemen became a province ruled from Cairo, with its capital in Ta’iz. Fifty years later, in 1229, following a pattern repeated endlessly in the Islamic empires, the local Ayyubid governor declared independence of the failing Ayyubids in Egypt and founded the brilliant Yemeni Rasulid dynasty, centred on Zabid. Trade flourished and Aden became an important port, trading again with India. Administration was strong, and the Rasulid court fostered literature and architecture. Marco Polo said that al-Muzaffar Yusuf, the second Rasulid sultan, was one of the world’s richest men, thanks to his four tax collections a year on the Aden trade.¹⁰ At times, the Rasulids even disputed the guardianship of the twin Holy Cities with the Mamelukes of Egypt.¹¹

When European traders began to enter the Indian Ocean, the Ottomans moved into Yemen

The early sixteenth century saw rapid change. Taking the new Cape of Good Hope route, Portuguese navigators penetrated the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, threatening the dominance of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire in controlling trade from the Indian Ocean. In 1516–17, first the Mamelukes and then the Ottomans, sent expeditions to Yemen to ward off the Portuguese. The Ottomans first seized Aden and Sana’a, but later established their base on the coast at Mocha. Aden’s importance dwindled.

In the seventeenth century, the Ottomans initiated the export of Yemeni coffee from Mocha. At the time, Yemen was the sole source of coffee exports in the world. Powerful Cairene merchants imported the beans via the Egyptian Red Sea ports for distribution throughout Egypt and the Ottoman Empire.¹² The English, under the auspices of the East India Company and with a firman from the Ottomans, built a ‘factory’ (i.e. a trading agency and warehouse) at Mocha. The French and the Dutch also established factories there.¹³ Later, the Dutch spirited coffee plants away to Java, and the importance of Mocha coffee began its long decline.

During this period, the imam and the highland tribes drove out the Ottomans, and by 1635 the imam became ruler of the whole country. But as always in Yemen, tribal allegiance was conditional on self-interest, and by 1720 the highland tribes had largely re-established their autonomy.

In the nineteenth century, Britain’s occupation of Aden created economic and social dynamism – and drew the Ottomans back into Yemen

As their interests in India grew, the British prospected the South Arabian coast in search of a suitable staging post. After considering and rejecting Mukalla, they settled on Aden in 1839. This prompted the return of the valetudinarian Turkish Empire. In 1849, the Ottomans reoccupied the Red Sea coastal plain, and in 1872 took Sana’a. However, the Zaidi highlands fiercely contested this reoccupation. Although the Ottomans remained in Sana’a until the end of the First World War (and the end of the Ottoman Empire), their control of the highlands remained limited.

Meanwhile, Aden developed rapidly under the British as a coaling station on the steamship route to India. With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the Red Sea became the most important trade route to Asia, and Aden became one of the busiest ports in the world. To protect the port from Yemeni incursions, the British first developed treaty relations (1882–1914), and then a protectorate, over the tribes of southern and south-eastern Yemen.¹⁴

The dynamic effect of Aden on Yemeni society and economy was huge. All Lower Yemen supplied labour to Aden, and many Yemenis became traders or provided other services there. The impact of remittances and education on the economy and society of Lower Yemen is still evident today. Even the universally popular game of football made its way into Yemen from Aden. The population of Aden swelled from 1,289 people in 1839 to 140,000 by 1955. Yemenis sailed the world, settling in Tiger Bay in South Wales and throughout the Empire. Yemenis even served in the Indian army.

All along the prosperous trade routes of Asia, Yemeni merchants established themselves. There was a diaspora of Yemeni people and traders throughout the Indian Ocean, both in Asia and along the Swahili coast of Africa. Zanzibar was a Yemeni settlement. Hadrami merchants traded in India and Indonesia, and Hadramawt was home to great Yemeni merchant families. The province prospered on the rich flow of remittances from the east.¹⁵

When Ottoman power collapsed, the imam built a fiercely independent but not very effective state

In the First World War, Ottoman forces entered the Aden protectorate but were pushed back. Immediately after the war, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed, Imam Yahya was able to conquer all the territory of Yemen north of the protectorate. Yahya was a strong ruler with a keen sense of political and strategic realities. He developed an administration, communications and a military, together with efficient collection of zakat (religious tithes) and customs dues. Very aware of the fate that had attended other parts of the dismembered Ottoman Empire, and seeing the entire Fertile Crescent under British and French rule, he pursued isolationism as a means of resisting colonization. He also fought with his bigger neighbour, the emergent Saudi Arabia, but lost and had to surrender territory in 1933–4.

Yahya created some semblance of a centralized Yemeni state. In the tribal highlands, he acknowledged the virtual autonomy of the tribes in return for military support. Rudimentary municipal services like education, roads and water supply were the responsibility of a well-endowed and managed waqf (religious endowment) administration. Nonetheless, institutional development was extremely limited. Bureaucracy existed but ministers and commanders were typically members of the imam’s family, foreign trade was essentially a family monopoly, and justice was the private affair of the imam and the sheikhs. As Mundy says, the ‘model of rule was that of the dynastic house’, not a civil service.¹⁶

Meanwhile, the British extended their zone of influence throughout southern Yemen

In the south, the British pacified and, to a limited degree, developed the protectorate. In Wadi Hadramawt, the famous resident in the 1930s, Harold Ingrams, although lacking any formal powers and with only the threat of a small squadron of Sopwith Camels to back him up, managed to bring 1,400 feuding tribal and clan leaders together to sign the ‘Ingrams Peace’. In Aden, commerce developed apace, with some effort at education. The radicalization and unionization of dock workers began at this time.

The 1960s saw rapid and radical change, with civil war resulting in a republic in the north…

In the revolutionary atmosphere of the 1960s, Egyptian-trained Yemeni army officers revolted and invited Egyptian troops in to help establish a republic. Saudi Arabia backed the imam and a bruising civil war ensued. Although Egyptian troops withdrew in 1967, after the Six Days War, the republicans had the upper hand. In 1970, a national reconciliation between royalists and republicans brought a settlement and confirmation of the Yemen Arab Republic. The early political history of the republic was turbulent. In 1978, President Saleh succeeded two murdered predecessors.

…and the departure of the British and the creation of a communist-leaning state in the south

In the south, the British struggled to create a federation from the tribal protectorates and the Aden colony. Businessmen, labour leaders and tribal leaders consented but, when Britain announced in 1965 that independence would be granted in 1968, there was a violent struggle to gain the upper hand, and the British left precipitately. At the same time, the closure of the Suez Canal after the Six Days War, and the secular decline of the canal traffic with the advent of the supertanker, undermined Aden’s viability as a port. The new country, the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY), with a socialist government and heavy dependence on the Soviet Union, entered on two decades of internal political struggle and economic crisis. With the break-up of the Soviet Union from 1989, the political rationale and the economic underpinning of the southern state dwindled and the two Yemens merged in 1990 to form the Republic of Yemen.¹⁷

In a speech in Exeter in 1998, Abdul Karim al-Eryani, then the Foreign Minister of Yemen and later Prime Minister, spoke of his country as ‘homogeneous in terms of its people, with little stratification of society and with easy mobility, an open and extraverted society where change is easy and readily taken up, as much in rural areas as in towns’. This view stands in contrast to what most people would guess about Yemeni society, which is usually seen as traditional, tribal, and intensely conservative. Where does the reality lie?

Large parts of Yemen are traditionally tribal, but feudal relations existed in the southern uplands and coastal plains

Yemeni society in the past was far from homogeneous, and today’s fast evolving social landscape can trace its roots to several sources. One vital distinction is socio-geographical. The north and east, and parts of the south were organized along tribal lines since time immemorial, with relatively autonomous political and administrative units of arms-bearing tribesmen loosely organized under sheikhs. By contrast, the Tehama (the coastal plain bordering the Red Sea), the western foothills, the southern uplands and parts of the south have been, at least in the past two centuries, largely non-tribal areas of settled farming, subject to landlord/tenant relations.

A second distinction is religious and cultural, which again follows much of the highlands/lowlands geographical divide

The tribal highlands are Zaidi Shi’a, the lowlands, the coast and the south are largely Shafi’i Sunni (see section 2.1.2 above). Historically, there is little difference in law or ritual, although Zaidism is strict in its prohibition of the cult of saints, of the veneration of tombs and of Sufism. By contrast, the tombs of saints dot the landscape of the Shafi’i south, where Sufism and the veneration of saints are practised.

Yemen is often thought of as a tribal country, including by Yemenis themselves, who talk half proudly, half disparagingly of behaviour as ‘tribal’. The appeal of traditional tribal values is immediate and can best be felt from the old poetry of the Arabian Peninsula:

She was reproaching us, that we were few; I said to her, indeed, noble men are few.

Not one sayyid of ours ever died a natural death; nor was any slain of ours ever left where he lay unavenged.

Our souls flow out along the edge of the sword blades, and do not flow out along other than the sword blades.

We have remained pure and unsullied, and females and stallions who bore us in goodly frame kept intact our stock.¹⁸

Nowadays we have to ‘dimension’ tribalism both in space and in time in order to keep a sense of proportion of its importance. Even for foreigners it is hard to keep a balance, as tribes are loud and active, their values are attractive, they are what people expect and want to see in Yemen.

Geographically, the tribal areas cover perhaps half the country, including the north and east and important parts of the southern governorates of Abyan, Shabwa and Hadramawt. In the areas of landlord/tenant relations mentioned above, tribal influence is also often strong, particularly in Lower Yemen (the southern uplands of Ibb and Ta’iz) and in the foothills of the mountains and the western coastal plain, where tribal fiefdoms were established under the imamate.

The traditional tribesman is a warrior – but also a farmer – possessing deep-seated values and imaginative perspectives

The Yemeni qabili – the tribesman – wearing his jambia at his waist and his rifle loosely slung over his shoulder epitomizes much of the Yemeni self-view (see Figure 2.1). The qabili sees himself as courageous, generous, loud, aggressive, virile, proud, and self-reliant.¹⁹ However, like many self-views, while the images are persuasive the reality is more complicated. There is an ‘oscillation between an ideal model and reality’.²⁰ First, let us fix the qabili in time, say in the 1960s, at the time of the republican revolution, at the moment when tradition was uppermost and profound change lay still in an unknown future. Then fix him in place, the northern highlands, between Sana’a in the south and Sa’ada in the north, and between al-Jawf in the east and the western escarpment. Here is the home of the two great tribal groupings of Hashid and Bakil that trace their lineage back to the jahiliyya before Islam.

Figure 2.1 Self-confident and well-armed tribesmen attending a village wedding (near Kuhlan, Hajjah Governorate). Photograph courtesy of Peer Gatter.

This tribesman lives in a poor dry land and, surprisingly, he is a farmer not a bedu. Every qabili at this time has his plot, like yeoman freeholders of mediaeval England. With rainfall of only 150–300 mm a year, elaborate systems of water harvesting – and age-old patterns of water rights – are needed to ensure his crop. He grows noble crops like sorghum for his own consumption, never sordid vegetables. He raises sheep and goats that graze on the dry stubble of the terraced fields. He farms for his own consumption and may barter with his neighbours. He will never disgrace himself by selling in a market; he can only sell through a low-status middleman. He is also a warrior, at the service of his family, his clan, his tribe. Serjeant, the great British scholar of Yemen, calls these tribesmen ‘an arms-bearing aristocracy’. So the qabili is a farmer – but an arms-bearing farmer.²¹

How does this tribesman tick? His fundamental value is sharaf (honour), which is broken by ‘eib (shame). In character, he is ‘light- blooded’, quick to rouse. Once honour is broken, mizan (balance) must be restored by offering and receiving acts of contrition, cash payments and so on. The sum of individual honour is tribal peace. This can be shattered at any moment by individual or collective shame. A disturbed balance may last for a long time and become very hard to resolve. Ingrams found 1,400 clans and tribes out of balance in Wadi Hadramawt in the 1930s, some nursing centuries-old grievances. In the same period, Freya Stark records the devastation caused to assets. Tribesmen had dug trenches to be able to walk to their fields without being shot, all over some half-forgotten slight to honour suffered decades ago.²²

Dresch has two luminous vignettes that light up the whole thought and life of the tribesman. In a tribesman’s mind, ‘east is best, towards the desert, furthest from control and urban values. The west is the land of prosperity – but also of hierarchy and order imposed by culture.’²³ Dresch also describes the satisfying ritual attached to tribal life, with a marvellous portrayal of ‘tribes advancing towards each other chanting zawahil (collective ditties) that enshrine the values of the tribe’.²⁴

All of this is a vast simplification at the level of an individual, and that simplification multiplied up to the level of the clan or tribe may be a complete distortion, but what I have written at least bears some resemblance to how a Yemeni tribesman of 40 years ago would have liked to see himself. And how would he have seen himself in relation to his world?

The tribesman’s basic loyalty is to his beit (clan). This is physically embodied in the huge fortress-like houses which dominate the landscape of the highlands. The house is the home and castle, the centre of the domestic economy, the protection of women and children, the source of justice and morality.²⁵

Above the household is the tribe. ‘Tribes’ can be quite small groupings, associations of families, clans, etc. The famous Ingrams Peace in Wadi Hadramawt (see section 2.1.4 above) brought together more than 1,000 sheikhs and tribal fragments, some of them only a handful of people, who had been continuously at odds with one another for years, even centuries. Tribes and groupings may be federated into largish units, or they may be highly fragmented. Al-Jawf is the ‘land of 200 sheikhs’, a disorderly area of free spirits.²⁶

…with loyalty to a ‘modern’ state conditional, subordinate to higher loyalties to family and tribe

The tribe also functions as the basic administrative structure. Traditionally, the tribe saw itself as autonomous and sovereign. It was not governed but would mobilize militarily on behalf of whoever supplied sufficient quantities of arms and money. Over time, this conditional feudal loyalty evolved into a conditional acceptance of government sovereignty. When the civil war ended in 1970, the tribes named the price of their adhesion to the new state. Weir records that the Razeh tribes set 15 ‘conditions’ for adhesion to the state, including a telegraph system, roads, schools, and a hospital…²⁷

Nowadays, some of this autonomy combined with conditional acceptance persists. The tribe may now function more like a devolved local government, imperfectly overlapping with and cooperating with more formal local government institutions. The tribe may also withdraw into illegality – especially into hijacking cars and kidnapping foreigners or government officials – in order to make its points.

The sheikh is selected by consensus and can be changed. Serjeant records a case where a sheikh was selected, deselected and then reselected.²⁸ The sheikh leads as primus inter pares. Traditionally his job was to protect and to represent the tribe. His character was at once dignified (with wazn or gravitas) and subtle, problem-solving, able to ‘find the form of words that allows talk to move forward’.²⁹ The sheikh must also be open-handed, giving patronage. Traditionally, the source of this patronage would be subsidies received from the imam. In return for these subsidies, the sheikh provided military backing from the tribe to the imam when required.

Within the tribal grouping, the sheikh may have organized administration along traditional lines. In Wadi Dahr, for example, the sheikh in the 1970s was both leader and legal representative, with a structure of delegates (‘aqil) under him in each ward. Nowadays a major job of the sheikh is to maximize the flow of subsidies, projects and pure gifts from the government. The quid pro quo, what the tribe returns to the government, may be no more than acquiescence in the continuation of the regime or, in the case of border tribes, acquiescence in adhesion of the tribe to the state of Yemen.

The great tribal groupings of Hashid and Bakil select a ‘paramount sheikh’. The recently deceased head of the Hashid, Abdullah al Ahmar, was at the same time leader of the Islah Party and speaker of the parliament – a nice example of the interpenetration of tribes and government.

Sheikhs now straddle the traditional and modern structures of power and wealth

Great sheikhs now move easily between traditional and modern power structures. Another example is the mighty sheikhly family of Abu Ras, from the north. In the nineteenth century, the Abu Ras family became landlords of great estates in Lower Yemen and the west. Nowadays members of the family are spread all over their holdings, functioning as local sheikhs, but with the family head prominent in government in Sana’a. Sadiq Amin Abu Ras was successively Minster of Agriculture and then of Local Government.

Within tribal society were special groupings enjoying varying degrees of status. The sayyid – descendants of the prophet – were traditionally respected scholars, whose moral authority could arbitrate tribal disputes, and create amnesty and sanctuary. They largely lost their influence in the early republic, as their fortunes were closely associated with those of the imam. Nowadays, however, they are prominent in the civil service, thanks to their tradition of education. The qadis were the lawyers and teachers.

Also within tribal society were numerous dependent, service-providing people. The tribesmen – the arms-bearing farmers – protected these dependent classes. Some of these low-status groups – the nuqqas or ahl al-suq – were artisans in the market. In origin they might be Jews, or freedmen or slaves. In the past, there was an almost caste-like structure, with specialized hereditary groups being barbers, butchers, qat sellers, or greengrocers. In Ibb in the 1970s, Messick mentions the traditional ‘stratum endogamy’: that each group would marry only with their own kind – sayyid with sayyid, qadi with qadi, butcher with butcher, qat seller with qat seller.³⁰

In recent times, social and economic changes have produced anomalous reversals of apparent status. Dresch mentions the high-caste tribesmen of Hadramawt who might be living in hovels next to the fine houses of the supposedly ‘weak’ but rich tradesmen under their protection. The notion of ‘honourable protector’ and ‘protected without honour’ dwindles before such realities.³¹

In some cases, protection descended into a racket. In Wadi Hadramawt, Serjeant noted that the tribes, describing themselves euphemistically as ‘palm wardens’, used to offer ‘protection’ in return for 10–50 per cent of the date crop. The vulnerability of the trees of the settled oasis dwellers to such depredations is patent.³²

Non-tribal areas often came under the domination of tribes or of external masters

The Shafi’i areas of Lower Yemen, including the Tehama and the southern coastal plain, were characterized by small villages, weak or absent tribal structures, and predominantly landlord/tenant relations. In history, both the topography and the socioeconomic structures of Lower Yemen made these areas and their peoples more prone to external domination. The Zaidi tribes living in the poor dry lands at higher elevations traditionally dominated these Shafi’i farmers in the better watered valleys of the western escarpment and the southern uplands. Between raids and ‘protection’, the tribes from the desert margins would appropriate what surplus they could. Tribesmen might also settle in the protected lands. There was continual out-migration from the poor tribal lands to these richer lands in the south and west.³³

The development of modern politics, the growth of the market economy, urbanization, emigration, education – all have been powerful vectors bringing change to the old social polity and to the contracts which underlay it, to the traditional hierarchy of alliances between houses, regional groupings and national leadership.³⁴

The old agricultural economy declined in relative importance as new wealth came flooding in from government salaries and bribes, remittances and a sharp increase in foreign trade. New social types became important – bureaucrats, migrant workers, and traders. This drove social mobility. A new generation, whole new classes, have sprung up with no vested interest in the tribal system. These new Yemenis are instead dependent on the market economy for their chance to establish status through wealth. This can even lead some nouveaux riches to play the sheikh.³⁵

The development of modern politics has allowed tribal leaders to integrate into new institutions of power, wealth and authority.³⁶ The current went in both directions: tribal leaders grew rich and powerful in the new urban-centred environment, but the influence of urban power and wealth on the countryside also grew. As early as the 1970s, the local development associations which had sprung up and that were channelling government subsidies to rural infrastructure projects were made up as much of ‘new’ people – merchants, townsmen, young migrant workers – as of tribesmen.

In the past, literacy was limited and little regarded by tribesmen. In the 1970s there were only four qualified Yemeni engineers in the entire northern republic. Since that time, education has undergone explosive growth. There are now 30 universities in the country, with 330,000 students, 13 per cent of 19–23 year olds. Sana’a University alone has 130,000 students.³⁷

The status of women has undergone enormous change, although not always for the better

Female participation in education has risen dramatically, yet even today only one-half of girls attend primary school, and only one-quarter go to secondary school.³⁸ Rising incomes and investment in modern technology have removed or reduced many of women’s traditionally onerous tasks – milling, carrying water, fetching wood. Improved healthcare has also contributed to a marked decrease in perinatal mortality for both mothers and babies. At the same time rising incomes have contributed to an increase in seclusion, as men take this as a badge of economic achievement.

Although tribalism as a system of political, social and administrative organization has waned, it remains an important factor in Yemeni life

Yemeni society today is a mixed phenomenon. First, we understand that underlying modern Yemeni society is a social and ethical map, drawn from older relations and values, that is indistinct, fading, changing, but that it nonetheless represents a powerful influence on behaviour.³⁹ This map can be seen as a series of contrasts, of upper and lower Yemen, Zaidi and Shaf’i, free tribesmen and tenant farmers, honourable protector and protected without honour, high-status qabili and low-status service provider. Within this map can be detected another old contrast seen from a different, urban perspective. This is the distinction between the ‘wild tribesman’ and the ‘civilized’ city dweller.⁴⁰ Overlaid on this map are many traces of other, modern influences stemming from the profound political, economic and social changes that have influenced Yemen in recent times and made it the fast-changing, complex and often unpredictable social organism that it is.

Knowledge of the composition of this map helps us to understand significant aspects of Yemeni behaviour: for example, the origin of the violent, excessive acts that plague modern Yemen – the kidnapping, the extortion, or the easy acceptance of what to an outsider seems like corruption but which to a tribal Yemeni is not bribery (rashwa) but a ‘facilitation payment’ (tashilat).

Today’s more fluid society and its manifold sources and motives drawn from the past can be illustrated by the qat phenomenon

Weir characterizes the explosive rise of qat consumption as an emblem of social change and the new pluralism of Yemeni society.⁴¹ Qat, she says, is at once a factor in social change and an example of it. The easy social intercourse of the qat ritual allows social mobility (Figure 2.2). Everyone can participate in an activity where wealth and new power have become more important determinants of social status than birth. The ubiquitous qat chewing session has become, in a fast evolving but still traditional society, the prime platform for easy social intercourse between all Yemenis – at once a mechanism for social mobility and the best example of it. When foreigners view qat chewing as a waste of time, or as a veil for drug addiction, they miss the point: qat chewing is an emblem of modern Yemen, the traditional evolving under the influence of a fast-changing society in a distinctively Yemeni way.

The culture and institutions of a constitutional democracy are forming only very slowly in Yemen

The attractive picture of a homogeneous and flexible society that Abdul Karim al-Eryani drew in his Exeter speech in 1998 (see section 2.2 above) was darkened, he went on to say, by the poverty of the country, by a weak economic system, and by what he termed weak ‘constitutionality’, by which he meant an uncertain rule of law, tensions between tradition and modernization, low participation in institutions, and a weak parliamentary tradition. Democracy was ‘emerging’, he added, coming surely but very slowly. So how has government developed in modern Yemen?

Figure 2.2 Qat chewing in a traditional setting in the old city of Sana’a. Note the hubble-bubbles. Photograph courtesy of Peer Gatter.

As will be clear from the discussion above on the tribal system, the pre-republican system was a government of conditional consent, comparable to the kingdoms in Europe in the Middle Ages, when local control was maintained by feudal lords who owed allegiance to kings and provided them with military support, conditional on a flow of benefits from the monarchy – treasure and loot, protection under secular and religious rules, respect for local autonomy and jurisdiction. The imam’s government was a balancing act between the secular and religious powers of the centre and the tribes. Depending on shifting ascendancies and alliances, the imam shared power with local political, military and legal structures and sometimes dominated them, but never supplanted them.⁴²

The arrival of the modern republican apparatus from the 1970s nominally installed a quite different system of democratic participation. In practice, things were slow to change, and as the actual character of governance evolved, old patterns of power relations adapted to the supposedly modern structures in a characteristically Yemeni set of adjustments.

The northern sheikhs and the rural elite from other areas entered government. At the same time, tribesmen were actively recruited into the army, especially the Hashid, where they could exercise old tribal instincts while forming a bulwark for the new regime and gradually absorbing new patterns of organization and behaviour. Big transfers were made to the sheikhs – in 1971–2, subsidies to sheikhs were three times the agricultural tax, zakat, which was the main source of fiscal revenue.⁴³

Economic and social change and the establishment of a modern administrative apparatus have gradually formed the semblance of a modern state

Over time, the polity evolved under the influence of three variables.⁴⁴ First, the Yemeni economy grew strongly from the 1970s onwards, and a structural transformation quickly turned agriculture from a subsistence to a market economy and reorganized patterns of production and land ownership towards an individualistic capitalist model. The old opposition between town and rural tribe that Ibn Khaldun so clearly analysed⁴⁵ was replaced by new economic partnerships between urban and rural elites. Essentially, a process of economic integration brought political and social change. Old tribal interests merged with urban commercial interests. Second, the republican governments rapidly established all the apparatus of modern bureaucratic government. Remarkably, in view of the lack of a history of colonial administration, the YAR essentially created a modern administration in two decades. The progress in human resource development to staff these structures was equally striking. Effectiveness has, however, fallen short, and from the start power relations and the administrative hierarchy mingled – already in the 1970s, there were 775 people with the rank and salary of minister.⁴⁶ Third, social class and relations evolved markedly. While the appearance of the old tribal structures persisted and retained a grip on the Yemeni imagination, the tribal system became of less social and political importance as the sheikhs became capitalist landowners and modern-style politicians, and the tribesmen became commercial farmers. Millions of Yemenis worked abroad in Saudi and the Gulf and came back empowered by their share of Arabian oil wealth. New class relations and patterns of social intercourse were established, based more on wealth and ownership than on birth or traditional social status.

The state today is characterized by oligarchic rather than democratic government

Under the influence of these three vectors, the nature of the Yemeni polity evolved and today exhibits some quite striking interrelated characteristics. The state today is characterized by an oligarchic elite with a relatively small pool of ruling people who may be tribal leaders, military officers, rich traders or from a few families of sayyid or qadi with enduring influence. Entry to the group is by an accumulation of power and wealth. Despite the rapid growth of a modern-seeming bureaucracy, governance is weak. Standards of public morality are low, the legal apparatus is untrustworthy, and the civil service performs poorly in terms of efficiency and probity.

Democratic institutions in Yemen are taking a very long time to develop. In fact, politics is still practised almost entirely outside the democratic institutions. Political parties are essentially interest groups, and they have no real political vision or agenda. Parliament has little power. The press is scattered and ineffectual: the most extraordinary articles are published, but even if they are true – and many probably are not – either nobody believes them, or that brand of truth has little power in Yemen today. There is scant development of all those other institutions that de Tocqueville noted as so essential to democracy – clubs, societies, associations, NGOs, etc.

One striking characteristic has been the hitherto secular nature of public life

Religious institutions have little influence, although religion may be mobilized when it accords with political interests. For example, the Islah Party in parliament, formed in 1990 around some very loosely defined conservative values and essentially representing northern tribal interests, draws support from the conservative values of Zaidi Islam.

These characteristics all interact in a complex way that may produce behaviour quite at variance with ‘constitutionality’

The lack of a generally oppositional political system and the absence of the usual safeguards of democratic systems stem from the oligarchic nature of the alliances that exercise real power in the country. It is beyond the scope of this book to analyse all the interactions, but two examples will illustrate the point.

To understand the failure of the press to moderate and educate, consider the story of the editor of the Yemen Times who was beaten up for writing an article critical of the government. When the editor complained to the Speaker of Parliament about lack of freedom of expression, Sheikh al Ahmar simply remarked: ‘Of course, we have freedom of expression in Yemen. Some people express themselves with words and others with their fists.’

To understand how constitutionality is regularly set aside by the government that is supposed to be operating within it, consider government’s use of violence outside the law. I recall in 1998 sitting in my office in Sana’a interviewing a candidate for a job when a truck full of soldiers drew up outside and the men stood up to machine-gun the villa opposite. After a minute, the soldiers ceased fire and resumed their seats, and the truck drove off. The villa belonged to a sheikh who had returned inopportunely from self-imposed exile in Cairo, whither the government wished him to return. A few months later, a large bomb went off outside a house opposite the German Embassy. The street had apparently been ‘cleared’, but three chance passersby were killed. The problem was a sheikh called to give evidence to the boundary commission investigating the demarcation of the Saudi–Yemen border, who had given uncomfortable evidence about where traditional borders lay.

Unification of the two Yemens brought two very different political cultures together

In the 1990s, a new element arrived with the unification of the two Yemens and the attempted merger of the two political, legal and bureaucratic establishments. This proved difficult due to the widely different ideological and historical backgrounds of the two elites. At the political level, the south brought the heritage of its violent political culture, with its intermittently efficient apparatus of state terrorism, palace coups and bloody infighting, which had culminated in the massacre of most of the members of the Politburo in 1986. This violence was not entirely unfamiliar to the north, as both of the presidents who preceded Ali Abdullah Saleh were assassinated, and state terrorism was common as the examples above show. But violence within the elite itself was not so prevalent in the north.

Allied to this was the violent behaviour of the two Yemeni states towards each other: in the 1970s they had fought three bruising wars against each other. The last flicker of this culture of internecine violence was in the post-unification civil war of 1994. The wounds created by this history were apparently healed by political reconciliation based on short-term political interests. To the extent that violence remains within the establishment, this may not be a major problem. The tensions that caused the civil war, however, may be more widespread. During the confused political movements since 2011, separatism has again been a prominent rallying cry.

Problems of unification were not just ones of culture: a series of real problems presented itself. The nature and pace of the transition were the subject of extensive political negotiation with the Socialist Party, which was a partner in the government of the unified country and which remained a force up until the civil war of 1994. Transition measures included the return of expropriated land and property in the south and the provision of compensation; the divestiture of PDRY state-owned enterprises; and the reconciliation of the two legal codes. Ultimately, it has to be said that the process of transition was weakly managed. After some very Yemeni back and forth, and enormous procrastination, the unified republic essentially adopted the law and policies of the former northern state.

At the bureaucratic level, the merger of the two civil services created challenges because of their very different natures. The south had a well-disciplined cadre of educated staff, and systems of administration that had benefited in terms of discipline from both the British and the communist models.⁴⁷ However, the civil service and public enterprises had been used to mop up unemployment and were grossly overstaffed. The north had a relatively leaner establishment but one that had failed to establish good standards of administration. The result was that the combined civil service largely adopted the weaker points of its constituent parts: the civil service swelled in numbers, and the more lax administrative practices of the old north prevailed. Some of the well-educated staff from the south did, however, rise to key positions in the unified administration, where they have had a long-term beneficial impact.

Fundamentally, the Yemeni state in modern times has been more about control than about governance

The hold of the government on the country has always been slim. In the 1970s, the government was said to control Sana’a, Ta’iz and Hodeida – and sometimes the roads between them. In the summer of 1998, a party of foreigners travelling from Sa’adah to Sana’a counted 13 tribal and governmental roadblocks and avoided three attempts to have their vehicles hijacked.⁴⁸ In the 1990s, the World Bank-supported Northern Region Agricultural Development Project had, at one time, 18 vehicles missing, hijacked by tribes. Under these circumstances, simply staying in control became more important than good governance. This was the cause of many anomalies in Yemen. Government would give out patronage or dish out violence to retain control, even if it contradicted good governance.⁴⁹

In recent years, with the irruption of global political influences spilling over from regional conflicts, the situation has become even more fluid and dangerous. Where, before, kidnapping was a largely predictable and more or less regulated business, and part of a traditionally Yemeni process of political bargaining, other motives and methods now proved to be at work, and the outcomes became more unpredictable and dangerous. In 2011, unprecedented political turmoil and contradictory movements emerged – ‘the culmination of simultaneous political, social and economic crises situated within an overall difficult regional environment’.⁵⁰ The unrest was catalysed by the fragility of a social compact stressed by tribal and regional divisions and by worsening poverty and loss of confidence in government and the state. In November 2011, a Transition Agreement was concluded and a Government of National Unity formed. A two-year transition period and a National Dialogue were to lead to fresh elections. What sort of new political equilibrium is now emerging remains uncertain.