Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes Page 7
One eyewitness recalled Ahmad losing his temper after a beheading because people came jostling too close around him. Thundering at them to back off, he drew his sword: ‘The screech of grating steel echoed across the square and all of us in the crowd recoiled, collapsing onto our backs like dominoes one on top of the other. No one drew so much as a breath until the Imam had safely departed.’16 He was said to have drowned his dwarf court jester for a joke and then, overcome with remorse, to have fasted, prayed and played with an electric train for a fortnight. Ahmad’s murder of four of his nine brothers and his frequent and lengthy absences from public view on account of depression, only enhanced his supernatural image and earned him the grim sobriquet, al-Djinn - the Devil. A gigantic portrait of him, framed in neon lights, graced the square outside his palace.
As far as his style of ruling went there was little change to report. Just like his father, he micro-managed the kingdom - dealing with 200 telegrams at one sitting, sanctioning a school’s purchase of ten inkwells, deciding the daily schedule of the national airline, authorising the internment of a sheikh’s son - in the belief that to have done things any differently would have detracted from his dignity. Various brothers and a son formed a ‘Royal Cabinet’ of ministers answerable only to him, but he kept a tight personal hold on the treasury which one foreigner recalled as ‘a profusion of money sacks, each containing 1000 [Maria Theresa] thalers, as well as an enormous safe full of foreign currencies, tins of petrol, tinned goods, spare parts for motor cars and filters for drinking water’.17 Two councils, one of merchants - described by an American diplomat as ‘elderly individuals with hennaed beards, dirty clothes, several endemic diseases (notably malaria) and a complete distrust of all foreigners’ - the other of religious elders who were ‘more conservative than Ahmad’18 ensured that time stood almost as still in 1950s Yemen as it had in the 1920s.
Unsurprisingly, given the manner of his accession to power, Ahmad’s relations with the northern tribes were closer than his father’s had been, but he followed Yahya’s lead again, neutralising any rival by never promoting talent. Under Ahmad ‘informality and improvisation’ remained the ‘cornerstones of government’.19 Defiantly trumpeting his responsibility for keeping Yemen as isolated and pure as it had been under his father, he early in his reign told a gathering of schoolteachers that he could have ‘opened the gates to [Yemen’s] enemies and told them, “Enter and extract the country’s fortunes and minerals”’ and have given them in return for this Yemen’s ‘religion, dignity, land and bravery’. ‘Do you want this?’ he asked them. ‘No, no, no!’20 they shouted back.
Nevertheless, with the aged Raghib Bey’s assistance, he did open up the country a little, while ably maintaining it on the geo-strategic course it had embarked on under his father and has not deviated from since. Anyone prepared to grant Yemen material or financial aid while demanding nothing in return was a valued friend and ally. Given the Cold War superpowers’ determination to infect other peoples with their ideological rivalry, there was no shortage of generous offers, the majority of them from Marxist countries. Some 2,000 Chinese arrived to build a 250-kilometre modern road from Sanaa through the mountains all the way down to the port of Hodeidah. An American Time reporter observed them labouring in the heat and dust alongside Yemenis, ‘singing the great ballads of the Chinese proletariat, e.g., “We Will Not Allow United States Imperialists to Ride Roughshod over the People” ’.21 On the edge of Sanaa, a small cemetery, with some fifty Chinese graves and a pagoda-style monument, still marks the start of the road.
In the hope of ending Yemen’s humiliating dependence on British Aden’s port facilities, Russia weighed in with some 300 technicians to develop Hodeidah, at a cost of 15 million dollars. In 1957, generous shipments of Soviet weaponry arrived - thirty T34 tanks, fifty self-propelled guns, twenty aircraft, seventy armoured troop carriers, a hundred pieces of field artillery and a hundred anti-aircraft guns.22 Sceptical of his people’s ability to work such new-fangled weaponry, the Imam stashed some of their vital parts under his bed for safekeeping. A Yugoslav engineer arrived to oversee the construction of a Yemeni radio station, for Ahmad’s personal use. Not to be upstaged by ‘the Reds’, the United States weighed in too, building another road from Taiz to Mochac and a water supply system for Taiz. Although he turned down a $5 million American development programme, Imam Ahmad was not averse to having ‘a squad of US Army and Air Force dentists’ secure his dentures with ‘US-made magnets’.23 An American doctor who took up residence in Taiz to tend the Imam recalled Ahmad as a ‘300lb heroin addict’ with a thirty-five-woman harem, as a sick old man who worried that if he failed to consummate his marriage to the thirteen-year-old daughter of a sheikh, the latter would consider himself dishonoured, ‘get mad, come down and raid the town and kill everybody’.24
But the Cold War warriors of East and West were wasting their time and money in Yemen in the 1950s. Much more appealing to all Yemenis than either the West’s capitalism or the East’s communism, and an influence Ahmad would prove powerless to counteract, was Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser’s non-aligned Arab nationalism, thrillingly disseminated by the new-fangled and portable transistor radios that were finding their way from Aden’s duty-free port to Yemen by the mid-1950s. One Yemeni recalled for me that while his educated qadhi family tuned in to the BBC for news, they looked to Cairo’s Voice of the Arabs for entertainment, ‘for excitement’.
Imam Ahmad played for time. Instead of combating the new ‘ism’ head on, as neighbouring Saudi Arabia was doing, he hastily espoused the fashionable creed, resolving to turn it to his own advantage. In 1958 Yemen became the third Arab state to join Egypt and Syria in Nasser’s pipe-dream of a United Arab Republic (UAR). Less than four years later, when Syria pulled out, thoroughly disenchanted by Nasser’s controlling style, Yemen followed suit. Ahmad felt empowered to broadcast a powerful verse salvo inquiring of Egypt’s ruler why he ‘pollute[d] the atmosphere with abuse’ and ‘shout[ed] over the microphone with every discordant voice’,25 reminding him that the nationalisation of property was a crime against Islamic law. Nasser’s Voice of the Arabs retaliated with a rich diet of anti-imam propaganda. The ludicrously anomalous inclusion of Yemen’s theocracy in the UAR in the first place had probably played a part in its failure to attract a larger membership.
UAR or no UAR however, the inspiring example of Nasser’s Egypt was forcing Yemenis to confront the reasons for the pitiful state of their country. They were beginning to wonder if rather than Ahmad in particular, the institution of the imamate in general was to blame. Discontent spread, especially after Ahmad foolishly fell into the same trap as his father by nominating his son Badr as his heir. His over-taxation of the Tihama was another sore grievance, and his almost pathological cruelty yet another. Ahmad had hundreds of dissidents slung into horrible fortress jails in Hajja, Taiz and Sanaa where many were beheaded. Occasionally, one might be reprieved and cast into exile. One Yemeni woman described to me how her grandmother, ‘a power in Ahmad’s palace’ on account of her beautiful renditions of religious songs, was forced to go down on bended knee to beg for the lives of two of her dissident sons: ‘Please forgive them,’ she pleaded with the Imam’s wives, ‘in recognition of the bread we have eaten together.’ Her sons were permitted to flee to Aden rather than be executed.
Plots to remove Ahmad multiplied. In 1955 his own brother and foreign minister, Abdullah, led a coup aimed at forcing Ahmad to abdicate in his favour. With the backing of a small group of army officers Abdullah seized Taiz and imprisoned the ailing Ahmad, before telegraphing the news of regime change around the country. For two weeks no one reacted, not even Cairo’s Voice of the Arabs. Then came the news that Crown Prince Badr was heading, like his father before him in 1948, up to the northern highlands to rally the tribes. Ahmad’s captors trembled at the vengeance they knew to expect. Relaxing their guard, they allowed Ahmad to seize one of their Bren guns and overpower them all and, by the end of the day, he was back in
charge.
Three years later the ailing Imam allowed himself to be persuaded to travel to Rome with his harem, a good deal of antiquated weaponry and plenty of gold bullion, in order to have his morphine addiction treated. Left in charge, Crown Prince Badr - a young man of reformist leaning who was thrilled by Nasser’s Arab nationalism - clumsily upset his father’s fragile equilibrium by raising the wages of the army and the stipends of the tribes and announcing a programme of reforms. An uncommonly wide assortment of merchants, intellectuals, army officers and even tribal sheikhs supported him, daring to hope that Ahmad was on his death-bed at last, dreaming of turning Yemen into a republic with Badr as a figurehead president perhaps. Most important among the tribal leaders was Hamid al-Ahmar, the son of the paramount sheikh of the Hashid tribes, Hussein al-Ahmar. Hamid al-Ahmar imagined a role for himself as prime minister in the forthcoming republic. But all those high hopes were dashed when Ahmad returned from Italy refreshed after four months away, furious at his son’s manoeuvrings, suspicious of Egyptian meddling and thirsty for vengeance. ‘There will be some whose heads will be cut off… and there will be others whose heads and legs will be cut off’,26 he promised. The two al-Ahmars were among those he beheaded, a mistake that in the longer term was to prove as serious as any Yahya had ever made.
Although there were reportedly seven attempts on Ahmad’s life in 1961 alone, the last one cemented his reputation as al-Djinn. In the spring of that year he travelled to a hospital in the Tihaman port of Hodeidah, home to the only two X-ray machines in Yemen, for a check-up. There, while he lay helpless on a trolley, a hospital worker and his accomplices shot him three times at point blank range. Although astonishingly Ahmad survived by rolling onto the floor and pretending to be dead, the rest of his life until his peaceful demise in Taiz in September the following year was spent in a morphine-fuelled fug.
To Imam Badr he bequeathed a country less developed than any other on the Arabian Peninsula. By 1962 coffee exports were less than half what they had been before the Second World War and the country could no longer feed itself. The Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen had no native doctors, no factories, a single paved road (thanks to China), and a handful of secular schools for boys but only one for girls, run by the wife of the American chargé d’affaires in Taiz.
ONE DARK NIGHT IN OLD SANAA
The fuse of revolution was finally efficiently lit in Sanaa a week after Imam Ahmad’s peaceful demise. On the night of 26 September 1962, Imam Badr, and the centuries-old imamate with him, were overthrown in a military coup d’etat.
It was an intimate, treacherous affair. A forty-five-year-old Colonel Abdullah al-Sallal - described by two French reporters as looking ‘absolutely like a comedy villain; smouldering coal-black eyes, bristling eyebrows, hard profile, sombre and distrustful’27 - a man who had twice been jailed by Imam Ahmad, once for seven years, but had recently been rehabilitated as chief of Badr’s personal bodyguard and trusted confidant - emerged as the president of the new Yemen Arab Republic (YAR). It was typical of Badr, a well-meaning but naive man with a pronounced fondness for foreign travel and whisky, that he failed to suspect that his friend’s military training in Iraqd might have inclined him towards republicanism after that country experienced a military coup against its Hashemite monarchy in the summer of 1958.
Al-Sallal who, at the age of thirty, had never slept in a bed and was so confused by the first pair of trousers he owned that he wore them as a shirt, was one of around 400 Yemeni army officers who had been infected with Republican ideals while receiving training abroad, in Iraq or Egypt. In the words of a fellow member of the clandestine Free Officers movement, he had long dreamed of being ‘the hope for our nation’ and rescuing it from ‘backward and dirty rule’.28 Yemen’s most famous living poet of the revolution, Abdul Aziz al-Maqaleh, a venerable old man today, was a member of an equally clandestine civilian organisation made up of intellectuals who all shared al-Sallal’s dream and had managed to avoid being hurled into jail for dissidence. Al-Maqaleh fondly recalled how they had all drunk qat tea together -‘qat was cheap back then, and the tea had the same effect’ - and how literature served as an excellent cover for their activities and ‘a great bond’, how ‘even the army officers’ used to write poetry and enjoy Shakespeare. Officers and intellectuals were also supported by some powerful sheikhs; Imam Ahmad’s execution of the al-Ahmars, father and son, in 1955 was still crying out for vengeance. If the average Yemeni remained in the dark as to what the Arabic word for republic, jumhouriya, actually meant - there are tales of tribesmen assuming from the word’s feminine gender that it must be a woman and descending in their hordes on Sanaa after the coup for a glimpse of a ravishing beauty - the likes of al-Maqaleh were soon whipping up excitement and enthusiasm for the new order over the airwaves. Almost half a century later, the elderly poet still basked in the memory of having been responsible for composing the declaration of revolution for broadcast on the morning after the coup.
Imam Badr’s account29 of events of the night of the coup suggests a surprising capacity for trust. After a late meeting of his Council of Ministers in his palace, Badr had been heading back to his living quarters with his father-in-law when one of al-Sallal’s men had tried but failed to shoot him in the back. The rifle’s trigger had temporarily jammed, but he had proceeded to shoot himself in the chin the instant another guard moved to arrest him. Not much alarmed by their lucky escape, the Imam and his father-in-law had repaired to the palace’s top-floor mandare to relax, agreeing that the failed assassin must have been sick or just drunk. Less than an hour later the lights had gone out, which was not a remarkable occurrence either since power cuts were common in Sanaa, but, when Badr picked up the phone to find out when the power would be restored, the line had gone dead. ‘By the light of another match, my father-in-law and I looked at each other for a long moment, then, without speaking, we both turned and walked across the room to the verandah, opened the French window and stepped onto the balcony’ The city was silent, until they had heard the ‘rumbling noise’30 of three or four tanks heading towards the palace. With the telephone exchange already under their control, the revolutionaries were seizing Sanaa’s radio station and the airfield, and Colonel al-Sallal overseeing operations from the city’s military academy.
Hurrying downstairs to the third floor of the palace because the lower floors were shielded by surrounding buildings and so out of range of tank fire, Badr and his father-in-law had called for Bren guns and rifles. Just in time. Within minutes the mandar they had occupied a moment before was crashing down into the garden and the narrow lane behind the palace. After sending some loyal guards out through the firing line in search of any remaining loyal officers, the Imam had organised others to fetch sandbags, douse them with petrol, set them alight and hurl them down onto the tanks, while he and his father-in-law manned the third floor balcony with their submachine gun.
The strategy worked. The terrified tank crews deserted their vehicles and the palace was not stormed. But the coup-plotters controlled the radio station so the news that the Imam had been killed in the assault on his palace was confidently broadcast through the land and, by early the following morning, eager revolutionaries were wreaking a terrible vengeance. Forty-six men, among them two of Badr’s uncles and his entire council of ministers were hauled to the main square and killed. Some were shot, some tied to army trucks by their feet and necks, some hacked to pieces with knives. Others were executed and their severed heads nailed to the city walls.
In the space of a single night the backward and isolated theocracy that had been the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen for the past forty-four years had leap-frogged over the British-ruled southern portion of Yemen into the modern world.
BRITAIN’S ‘FORWARD POLICY
The Age of Empires was ending but, far from loosening her grip on Aden, Britain had been tightening it since the end of the First World War. Among the factors dictating London’s new energy in the region was Imam Yahya’s lou
dly and constantly reiterated claim to be the rightful ruler of a Greater Yemen that included Aden, and his dispensing of free rifles and Maria Theresa dollars to any protectorate tribesman willing to betray the British infidel. One former tribal ruler told me he had been sorely tempted in the 1940s and had accepted a rifle, 400 rounds of ammunition and 400 Maria Theresa dollars from Yahya before thinking better of it and wasting all the ammunition on shooting birds, and all the cash on a battery charger for his radio.
For decades, if not centuries in the case of the British, the rulers of both parts of Yemen had been enjoying precisely the same sort of ‘carrots and sticks’ relationship with their tribes. In each case, carrots involved stipends, tax exemption and ‘gifts’ of guns. Anyone who dared to question the morality of Britain exercising a protectorate over an area it was arming to the hilt was asked if he would prefer to see a military occupation of Aden’s hinterland, and ‘if so, how many divisions of troops?’31 Britain was not about to fall into the trap the Turks had fallen into, so flooding the area with weapons - an arms race with the Imam, in effect - was the lesser of two evils.