Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes Page 6
Imam Yahya travelled around his capital either by a nineteenth-century horse-drawn carriage with outriders and a bodyguard singing and dancing alongside or in a black Ford the British presented him with early in his reign, as a goodwill gesture. The highlight of every week was his visit to the mosque. If commendably friendly to the environment, his Sanaa may have been a pungent place; the walls of many houses displayed traces of sewage passing on its long open-air drop down to ground level and one visitor discovered human excrement being sold by the donkey-load for heating the water in the city’s hammams. The stink of that merchandise might account for the fact that many Sanaani women wore sprigs of basil or flowers dangling off ‘two hat-pins poked like carpenters’ pencils behind their ears’, to hold their veils out in front of their faces to a distance of two or three inches.4
Traces of Turkish rule lingered on, though sadly not in the form of a large girls‘ school, which Yahya immediately closed. He had requested that the Turks leave behind some cooks and some of their German-trained military musicians to teach Yemeni soldiers how to play German marches, which they adapted by speeding up the tempo and adding an accompaniment of clapping and stamping. Yahya’s attempts to introduce sharia law were not as much appreciated. Sanaanis complained that sharia was like a mountain, ’a magnificent monument of past ages but a terrible and overwhelming disaster to those on whom it falls’,5 and one foreigner observed that the capital’s inhabitants spent far too much of their time ‘watching for minute contraventions in the hopes of paying off old scores’.6 In general, the old Ottoman law had proved more practical.
Although the quintessence of a righteous Zaydi ruler - brave, physically fit, well-versed in Koranic learning, pious - it took Yahya a good decade to establish himself firmly in his land. Always sympathetic, the Syrian-American Rihani detailed Yahya’s chronic insecurity: ‘He is at war openly with the Idrisi [Asir], at war secretly with Shawafe [Shafai Muslims of Tihama]; at war periodically with the Hashid and Bakil [the main Zaydi tribes]; at war politically with the English - also with those Arabs around Aden who enjoy English protection [the colony’s tribal hinterland] - to say nothing of the Saiyeds [sayyids], his cousins, who aspire to his high place.‘ Rihani concluded that ’Not at all soft is the royal couch.’7
The most warlike tribesmen of Tihama, the Zaraniq, were not neutralised until 1925 and the Marib desert region to the east of Sanaa not secured until the 1930s. In 1925 Yahya had conquered the northwestern Asir region, which had been thriving under the charismatic rule of the chieftain Muhammad al-Idrisi since 1909, but went on to lose it in a war with Saudi Arabia in 1934. The tribes accounting for the bulk of the Zaydi highlands, the Hashid and Bakil federations, sporadically rebelled until 1928, even treacherously allying themselves with al-Idrisi in Asir from time to time. Yahya forbore from taxing them and treated them as honoured allies when they co-operated with him. These means, and the old resort to carrots (bribes) and sticks (taking sheikhs’ sons hostage), eventually brought a semblance of peace to the northern highlands. By the late 1920s he was reputed to have rounded up 4,000 boy hostages,8 some of them under lock and key but many of them receiving an education that would instil in them a proper love of the imam. There are some who say that the man in Yahya’s shoes today, President Salih, has had to dispense with this highly effective, if cruel, means of keeping Yemen’s more troublesome tribes in line, but it has left him with only two unsatisfactory levers of power; either he can dance on the heads of snakes and run the risk of not ruling at all, or he can emulate his old friend, Saddam Hussein, by relying on brute force and terror.
For all the hardness of his ‘royal couch’ Yahya developed into a strong and confident ruler. His repeated forays into Aden’s tribal hinterland to lure the tribes away from British protection with offers of guns and gold made him an aggressor as well as a defender. Those incursions were only temporarily halted when the British retaliated with cross-border air-raids. It was 1928 before Yahya agreed to respect the border that the Turks and British had agreed in 1914, but still he did not relinquish his early eighteenth-century-based claim to be the rightful ruler of all Yemen - Aden included.
Other external relations were more easily managed, generally by keeping them to the barest minimum. French offers to revive Mocha, to buy lots of coffee from Yahya and sell him lots of guns, were rebuffed. There could be no cosying up to Britain while she still occupied Aden, of course, or to America, Britain’s close ally. Proudly suspicious of any outside interest in his realm, he once asked the Dutch explorer Daniel van der Meulen what his queen wanted from Yemen - ‘gold, or other minerals, the white gold of oil perhaps?’ Reassured to hear that she only wanted a friendship treaty, he confided that an American mining company had recently offered him two million dollars for the right to prospect for oil. When van der Meulen asked if he had accepted such an advantageous offer, Yahya’s firm negative was couched in a rhetorical question: ‘can you tell me how many millions it would cost me to be rid of them again?’9 The Ford Corporation’s offer to build Yemen an entire network of roads, in exchange for Yemen importing only Fords, was similarly rebuffed.
Without the services of a venerable Ottoman diplomat known as Raghib Bey the grandly named Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemena would have remained utterly isolated until after the Second World War. Raghib Bey understood post-First World War realities and, given that the European powers remained intent on carving up the world between them, how best to position the new state on the world stage. The best an impoverished and insignificant country like Yemen could hope for, he calculated, was an alliance with anyone prepared to offer material assistance with no strings attached.
Imam Yahya did not always appreciate his efforts. On one occasion, during negotiations with an American envoy in 1947, Yahya drove Raghib Bey to the point of resignation. The American visitor witnessed a scene which seemed to ‘out-Hollywood Hollywood’.10 Negotiations had reached an impasse after seventeen days because the Imam had seen fit to replace Raghib Bey as chief negotiator with one of his sons who knew nothing of diplomacy. Sobbing and gesticulating, almost grabbing the Imam by his beard, Raghib Bey berated Yahya in the most disrespectful terms for ruining the ‘international masterpiece’ of diplomacy he had worked so hard on. Convinced that the old Turk was about to harm his master, Yahya’s bodyguard reached for his jambiyah and tiptoed up behind him, awaiting Yahya’s signal to cut Raghib Bey’s throat. But Yahya gave no such signal. Instead, smiling in a fatherly fashion, he merely told the old man, ‘Do not upset yourself, Raghib Bey; things will come out all right.’11 The Turk often bitterly regretted his decision to stay on in Yemen, once complaining to a foreign visitor that he felt ‘surrounded by ruffians who had no conversation and filled their endless hours of laziness with that stupid, animal-like habit of chewing qat’.12
With Britain and America both off the menu of possible alliances, Raghib Bey had no choice but to steer Yahya in the direction of the rising totalitarian powers. After one of Yahya’s sons and his foreign minister travelled to Rome to meet Benito Mussolini in 1927, a few Italian airplanes arrived in Sanaa and a small flying school was opened. Soon after that two more German planes arrived, but Yahya’s aeronautical enthusiasm waned when the latter pair collided with each other, killing the two German pilots and two sayyids. With the advent of a handful of Italian doctors the following year, Yahya acquired a lasting taste for Italian health-care. The mid-1920s witnessed the arrival of a large Soviet mission, chiefly composed of aviation experts and doctors. By a treaty of 1928 the Soviet Union recognised Yemen as an independent kingdom, paving the way for a one-way trade in Russian grain, sugar and soap. A sizeable Soviet mission was housed in politically incorrect luxury in the old Turkish quarter, but only functioned for a decade, until 1938, when Stalin recalled and ‘purged’ all but two of its members. A year earlier, Mussolini’s envoy, the Fascist governor of Eritrea, had visited Sanaa to sign a treaty of friendship, and Hitler’s Germany had despatched 50,000 rifles - which the Poles h
ad already rejected as faulty - to Yahya for payment in gold. Commercial links with Japan were so good throughout the 1930s that the Imam sent his eldest son all the way to Tokyo to attend the opening of the country’s first mosque.
By the time he was eighty, Yahya had buttressed his waning powers, not with well-trained and reliable professionals, but with a handful of his own sons whom he appointed to some rudimentary ministries and foreign embassies. His defiantly independent stance had looked noble and brave while most of the Middle East was still ruled by the western powers or their proxies, but in the era of imperial implosion it was starting to look dated, and there were other signs that his time had passed. Whether or not with the encouragement of Raghib Bey, he made two bad mistakes. For all his conservatism and wariness of ever being called a king, he was king enough to flout Zaydi tradition by declaring his son Ahmad his favoured successor and permitting him to be known as the Crown Prince. He was also king enough to establish his own army instead of trusting to tribal support to secure his rule. Both innovations mightily offended two pillars of the Zaydi order: the sayyid families who dreamed of replacing him and the northern highland tribes whom he was making redundant. The brains and the brawn of Zaydi Yemen were restive.
But it was a pair of non-sayyid young men who managed to receive an education in Cairo where they were influenced by the Muslim Brotherhoodb who began taking practical steps to press for reform and foil Yahya’s plan for a dynastic succession. The Sanaani poet and Zaydi member of the qadhi class Muhammad al-Zubayri tried convincing the Imam of the need for reform by intellectual argument, but the attempt landed him in prison for nine months. A switch in strategy, an attempt to win Crown Prince Ahmad for the reform cause, met with similarly discouraging results, so the movement’s leaders - al-Zubayri and the Sunni southern highlander Ahmad Numan - were forced to flee to Aden, where they could rely on funding and support from the 25,000 or so Sunni migrant workers from Yemen’s southern highlands, as well as take advantage of the colony’s relatively free press.
In 1943 a Free Yemeni Party was born with Numan as president and al-Zubayri as director, but it failed to flourish. On the one hand Imam Yahya wreaked a terrible revenge by hurling hundreds of Sunni southern highlanders who were in any way connected with Numan in jail. On the other, the British would not support the movement because, just at that moment, Aden was relying heavily on food imported from Yemen to feed vast numbers of troops transiting through the colony to and from the different theatres of the Second World War. Only with the establishment of the newspaper Voice of Yemen in 1945 did the Free Yemeni movement begin to gain real traction, so much so that when Crown Prince Ahmad visited Aden the following year he vowed to kill Numan and al-Zubayri. They both fled the city for the duration of his stay and gained some excellent publicity by the episode, but events soon took an even better turn when Imam Yahya’s ninth son, the thirty-year-old Ibrahim - a whisky drinker who had spent years in one of his father’s jails - pretended to be in urgent need of foreign medical expertise in order to defect to Aden and join the movement. The bagging of so important a Zaydi to counterbalance the majority Sunni membership was a significant success.
Meanwhile the rudiments of a clandestine opposition movement had been taking shape in Sanaa too. It comprised some respected Sunni southern highlanders from the Ibb region who had prospered under Zaydi rule as judges and administrators. Sections of the ulema, army officers whom Yahya had risked sending to Iraq for training and some leading tribal sheikhs were likewise inclined to sympathise with the Free Yemeni movement. But it was a grandson of the imam who had preceded Yahya’s father in the late nineteenth century, a former close adviser of Yahya’s as well as a friend of Numan’s, a sayyid named Abdullah al-Wazir, who finally emerged as a suitable alternative to Yahya. After spending eight years in Cairo al-Wazir judged himself fit and willing to rule ‘on the lines now followed by the most advanced nations in the civilised world’,13 to be a constitutional imam, in other words. He and a handful of others - members of his own family for the most part, but also an Algerian merchant member of the Muslim Brotherhood named al-Fudayl al-Wartalani, and a young Iraqi army captain named Jamal Jamil - hatched a plot to assassinate the Imam.
On the morning of 17 February 1948 the frail Yahya was being driven a short distance south of Sanaa to inspect a new well. With him were his prime minister, a couple of soldiers and four of his grandsons. Characteristically, the Imam had pared down his escort to save on expense. The plotters had employed a tribesman who had lost an eye and most of his nose to smallpox and been jailed by Yahya twenty years earlier to lead the attack. At a narrow point in the road Yahya’s tiny convoy was strafed with gunfire. It was said that no fewer than fifty bullets found their marks in Yahya’s frame.
Some 150 kilometres to the south, in Taiz, Crown Prince Ahmad acted fast on hearing the news from a brother who was Minister of Communications and therefore equipped with his own radio transmitter. Seizing as much gold as he and his retinue could carry and leaving a sister in charge of holding Taiz in his name, Ahmad fled to the Zaydi heartland north-west of Sanaa, towards the mountain fortress of Hajja, to bribe the northern tribes into rallying to the defence of his succession. To a polite condolence letter from al-Wazir, offering him ‘position, respect and peace’ in exchange for his stepping aside, Ahmad replied with a defiant missive, branding al-Wazir a ‘wretched and despicable traitor’ and warning of his warlike advance against him ‘with God’s helpers’.14
Delighted by the gold on offer but also disorientated by the sudden end of Yahya’s long rule, some 250,000 northern tribesmen rallied to Ahmad. Yahya’s assassin was soon caught and his one-eyed scalp tacked to Sanaa’s main gate, al-Bab al-Yemen. Within a month, five more members of the al-Wazir clan had been rounded up and executed and the would-be imam’s severed head hurled on a rubbish tip. Sanaanis bore the brunt of the tribesmens’ wrath. Their blood up and discipline lax, they gleefully and vengefully set about punishing the liberal urban-ites of Sanaa for their disloyalty to Ahmad by sacking the capital for a week. Like a plague of locusts, they stripped it of anything they could remove - jewellery, furniture, food stores, livestock, even doors and windows.
Wisely, given his ultimate responsibility for this heinous orgy of destruction, Ahmad moved the capital to the southern highlands, to Taiz where he had been governor, barely setting foot back in Sanaa for the ensuing fourteen years of his reign.
IMAM AHMAD’S HORROR SHOW
In spite of their dramatic topology the southern highlands around Ahmad’s capital, where crusts of stone villages cap every precipice, give the impression of being as densely populated as south-east England, a world away from their bleak northern counterparts. A visitor immediately recognises this verdant central region as united Yemen’s natural centre of gravity, as its real engine room and heartland, but a hunt for traces of Imam Ahmad in Taiz throws up little more than a search for his father in Sanaa.
A military policeman sitting on a low crumbling wall outside the museum that was once his palace, spooning broad beans straight from a can to his mouth, grudgingly admitted me to the first floor lobby of the museum. Its shabby green walls were dotted with blurred photographs of the public beheadings that had taken place in Ahmad’s reign, including one of a sword used for the purpose. No amount of pleading with the unveiled woman sitting idle at an empty desk could induce her to admit me to the rest of the museum, the cumulative effect of whose treasures a previous visitor had so invitingly described as being ‘rather like stepping into the imam’s living room with all the favourite possessions and souvenirs on show’. I was sorry to learn that neither I nor anyone else would ever again see Imam Ahmad’s bizarre collection of ‘hundreds of identical bottles of eau de cologne, Old Spice and Christian Dior, an electronic bed, a child’s KLM handbag, projectors, films, guns, ammunition and swords… passports, personalised Swiss watches and blood-stained clothes’.15 The entire exhibition, a unique hoard that decisively linked Imam Ahmad to some of his
similarly magpie-minded predecessors, had recently been dismantled in an even worse act of bureaucratic vandalism than the slow neglect of his father’s palace in Sanaa.
The missing display spoke volumes about the manner in which Imam Ahmad spent his reign debasing rather than updating the imamate. His version of the still venerable institution was a luridly burlesque imitation of his father’s, almost a parody. Gratuitously cruel rather than harshly just, extravagantly degenerate rather than frugal, paranoid rather than wary, Ahmad relied on base trickery, assisted by minor products of modern technology and his people’s credulous love of magic, to clothe himself in the charisma his father had earned by real piety and learning. With the aid of a pair of binoculars he could amaze the people of Taiz with his uncanny foreknowledge of a visitor’s arrival. When a lioness given him by Haile Selassie died, Ahmad had her stuffed and set on the wall of his palace to scare bystanders. Before a beheading he would carefully enhance his already prominent eyes with an extra application of kohl and slather so much cream on his dyed black forked beard that it stood out rigidly, ‘as if he had his finger in a light socket’.