In early March, as tens of thousands of people were calling for revolution, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has been the President of Yemen for the past thirty-three years, staged an enormous celebration of himself. Uprisings across the Middle East had already swept away two of Saleh’s peers and were threatening to bring down his own regime. In the capital, Sanaa, thousands of Yemenis filed into the Stadium of the Revolution, their loyalty insured by the promise of payments after the rally. Some climbed into the bleachers; others gathered on the field, where an array of blue and white plastic lawn chairs faced an elevated stand reserved for the President and his men. Outside the stadium, about a mile away, protesters, who had been gathering for weeks, condemned Saleh, chanting “Leave!” For an hour, Yemenis in the stadium held newspapers over their heads to protect themselves from the sweltering heat. Then the loudspeakers blared, “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of all the Yemeni people, the Preserver of Unity, Savior of the Nation, peace be upon him, His Excellency Ali Abdullah Saleh!”
The crowd cheered, and thousands of people raised their arms, some holding up posters. Men blew kisses; women, wearing jet-black chadors, clapped their gloved hands. Saleh, dressed in a dark business suit and Ray-Bans, lowered himself onto a hand-carved chair inlaid with ivory. Applause rolled for several minutes; every moment or two, Saleh lifted his right hand. Then the crowd, led by a man on the viewing stand, began to repeat, “Our blood, our souls, we’ll sacrifice for you!”
Before the American invasion of Iraq, in 2003, Iraqis chanted an identical paean to Saddam Hussein, who was Saleh’s mentor and friend. Yemenis used to call Saleh “Little Saddam.” In 1990, when the United Nations Security Council voted to expel Saddam’s forces from Kuwait, Yemen was the only Arab state to vote no. In retaliation, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states kicked out a million Yemenis, depriving the country of remittances—one of its primary sources of money. Yemen’s economy collapsed, and it never fully recovered. Nearly every aspect of Saleh’s rally echoed the parades once staged for Saddam—even the posters, which depicted a leader far more youthful and virile than he actually is.
While Yemenis offered adoring testimonials, Saleh fidgeted in his chair, repeatedly turning to chat, first with his Prime Minister and his Vice-President, then with a group of aides behind him. Saleh is said to possess a savvy intelligence and the attention span of a teen-age boy. Finally, after glancing at his watch, a bejewelled square of violet glass, he rose to speak.
Saleh is a short, stout man, with a thick-necked demeanor and a sandpapery voice. In a speech weeks earlier, he had practically spat at the people assembled before him, vowing to fight the protesters “with every last drop of blood.” During a subsequent speech, he laid blame for the protests on the United States and Israel. “There is a control room in Tel Aviv for destabilizing the Arab world,” Saleh said. “It is managed by the White House.” It was the sort of remark that used to serve him well.
But this time Saleh’s tone was soft. “My fellow-citizens,’’ he began—a concession remarkable in itself. He thanked the Yemenis who had gone into the streets to support him and even those who denied the legitimacy of his government. Saleh said that he had ordered Yemeni security forces to continue to protect demonstrators on both sides. The word “continue” made the sentence a lie: since the start of the protests, gangs of men, sometimes joined by police and soldiers, had attacked demonstrators with sticks, truncheons, and guns.
Now Saleh seemed to be offering a truce. He outlined several proposed changes to the Yemeni constitution, promising to transfer many of his powers to the parliament. This was the second time that he had offered concessions since the troubles in the Middle East began. In early February, when the demonstrations were just starting to attract international attention, Saleh announced that he would retire at the end of his term, in 2013, and promised that his son Ahmed, the chief of the Republican Guard, would follow him out the palace door. Now he said, “I ask God to guide all of us in the interest of our nation.”
At this, the Yemenis streamed out to board their buses and pick up their money.
Yemenis had been debating for weeks whether Saleh would fight like Qaddafi or go peacefully like Mubarak. The consensus seemed to be that Saleh would fall between these extremes, but nobody knew exactly where. He wasn’t crazy, but he wasn’t a tired old man, either.
In response to the speech in the stadium, John Brennan, President Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, issued a statement from the White House praising Saleh and declaring, “All sectors of the Yemeni opposition should respond constructively to President Saleh’s call to engage in a serious dialogue to end the current impasse.”
No deal was struck. Opposition leaders rejected the President’s initiatives and called on him to resign.
The following morning, police and soldiers attacked a group of anti-government protesters at Sanaa University, firing tear gas, rubber bullets, and live ammunition. The protesters threw rocks at the soldiers. When the clash was over, four Yemenis were dead and more than three hundred were wounded, nearly all of them protesters. The next day, police and soldiers rushed the demonstrators again, killing two and wounding more than a hundred. The revolt in Yemen had entered its bloody phase.
The White House says that Brennan’s statement was not intended to grant Saleh permission to attack the protesters. But, since the unrest began, the Saleh regime has received unusually strong support from the Obama Administration. The White House has made clear it believes that in Yemen abrupt change must be avoided, even at the cost of Yemeni lives. Brennan, a former C.I.A. station chief in the Middle East, maintains a close relationship with Saleh, and has visited Sanaa four times since taking the counterterrorism post, in 2009. After the lurid speech blaming Israel and the United States for the protests, Saleh called Brennan to apologize. The Obama Administration scolded Saleh after the attack on the Sanaa University protesters, but it didn’t urge him to step down. A senior American military officer explained why: “If Saleh goes, the two likeliest outcomes are anarchy or a government that is not as friendly.”
Either result, U.S. officials believe, could embolden Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has established a foothold in Yemen. A senior Administration official said that between a hundred and two hundred hard-core Al Qaeda fighters are in Yemen, and that hundreds of Yemenis provide them with support. Along with Pakistan’s tribal areas and Somalia, Yemen is now considered one of the most likely places from which Al Qaeda could mount an attack on America. Two recent failed plots appear to have originated with Al Qaeda members in Yemen: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempt to set off an in-flight bomb, on Christmas Day, 2009, and the loading of explosive printer cartridges onto America-bound cargo planes, in October, 2010. U.S. officials say that they have linked Abdulmutallab to Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American cleric who is now the most prominent spokesperson for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Last spring, President Obama authorized the killing of Awlaki, who is believed to be hiding in Yemen.
America’s relationship with Saleh was once tense. In 2000, after Al Qaeda’s bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, in the port city of Aden, American officials complained that Saleh’s government had all but stymied their investigation, and that senior members of his government seemed to be aligned with the terrorist group. Saleh himself, however, is not considered to be an Islamist, or even particularly religious; like Saddam before him, he is most interested in maintaining power. Indeed, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Saleh, dependent on Saudi and Western aid, promised to coöperate with the war on terror.
Since then, he has allowed the U.S. to fire missiles at suspected militants, ordered his forces to detain terrorist suspects at the behest of the U.S., and facilitated intelligence-gathering operations, including surveillance by Predator drones. The U.S. jointly mans a military-command center in Yemen.
In recent years, the U.S. has dramatically increased its aid to Saleh’s regime. The focus has been on training and equipping Yemeni counterterrorism troops with modern weapons, night-vision cameras, and helicopters. This program, which was negligible as recently as 2008, had a budget last year of a hundred and fifty million dollars. The U.S. has also substantially increased its economic and development assistance to Yemen, most of it intended for areas populated by extremists.
As officials in both Washington and Sanaa repeatedly reminded me, Yemen is not Egypt: it has virtually no middle class, a weak civil society, a marginal intelligentsia, and no public institutions that operate independently of Saleh. The Yemeni opposition includes notable Islamists, among them Abdul Majeed al-Zindani, a cleric whom the U.S. has designated a terrorist.
A Western diplomat in Yemen said, “O.K., fine, Saleh goes. Then what do you do? There is no institutional capacity—in the bureaucracy, in the military, or in any other institutions in this society—to really step in and pick up the pieces and manage a transition.” A failed state in Yemen, coupled with an already anarchic situation in Somalia, could provide Islamist militants with hundreds of miles of unguarded coastline, disrupting the shipping lanes that run from the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean.
The senior Administration official put it bluntly: “Our goal is to help prevent a coup or a usurpation of power by Muslim Brotherhood types or by Al Qaeda.”
Even in a state of turmoil, Yemen is a place of austere beauty. In Sanaa, the grand Ottoman gate at the entrance to the old quarter leads to a maze of alleys and stone tower houses studded with akmar, or “moons”—crescent-shaped windows filled with multicolored glass. The alleys give Sanaa an almost medieval feel. Men walk the streets carrying jambiyas, curved two-sided daggers tucked into bright-colored sheaths and worn directly over the stomach. The women, in flowing black chadors, sometimes wear conical straw hats, giving them the profile of witches.
After a few hours of activity in the morning, the tempo in Sanaa ebbs, as Yemenis sit down with their daily bag of khat—a narcotic evergreen shrub whose softest leaves are stuffed into the cheeks. Until the early evening, many of the city’s residents enter a collective haze. Ali Saeed al-Mulaiki, a Yemeni journalist, joked to me that Saleh should be grateful for the phenomenon: “If the Yemeni people didn’t chew khat, they would think about their future and about their lives, and there would be a revolution.” Not only is khat sapping Yemen’s work ethic; it is sucking the country dry. Each daily bag requires about five hundred litres of water to produce, and some scientists predict that Sanaa will begin to run dry in the next decade, around the same time as its oil disappears.
Outside the cities, the landscape unfolds in wadis, ravines, and escarpments, from which treeless stone villages appear to rise without a break. In the rural areas, the government’s writ runs out, and tribal tradition takes over. Skirmishes erupt regularly among the tribes, with some tribal armies wielding machine guns and mortars. Indeed, Yemen has essentially been at war with itself since 1962, when a group of Army officers overthrew the monarchy that presided over what is now the northern part of the country. The southern realm, much of which was under British rule until 1967, became a satellite of the Soviet Union before merging with the north, in 1990.
Saleh has presided over the Yemeni states—first the north, then the unified nation—since 1978, when, as a young lieutenant colonel with virtually no formal education, he seized power after the assassination of President Ahmed al-Ghashmi, who was killed by an exploding briefcase. (The bomb was planted by an envoy from South Yemen.) At the time, Saleh was stationed in Yemen’s commercial capital, Taiz, where he commanded the local garrison. When he heard the news, he flew immediately to Sanaa. Within days, he had persuaded the Yemeni parliament and the Army to approve his ascension.
Over lunch, an aide told me the unofficial version of Saleh’s rise: “The story is, the generals decided to give him power because he was the only one who was willing to take charge.” The aide went on, “Look, he’s a nobody. He’s this guy from the village with no education. But his personality is very strong.” Posters of Saleh from the time, which still adorn Sanaa’s streets, show a confident young man with a large mustache and bushy hair bulging from his officer’s hat, looking remarkably like Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, who had taken power in Libya nine years earlier. Since assuming control, Saleh has survived several assassination attempts and fought and won a civil war; he is currently battling an insurgency in the south and a rebellion in the north mounted by the Houthis, Yemen’s Shiite minority.
Saleh, who is in his sixties, is considered a master at keeping Yemen’s tribes away from one another and, more important, away from him. “The President’s emotional intelligence is off the scale,’’ a Western official in Yemen who regularly meets with him said. “He balances all the forces, works all the personal connections, manages somehow to keep it from spinning out of control. He has no fixed positions. His character is entirely situational.”
American officials described Saleh to me as unsophisticated, brilliant, and erratic. He appears to be focussed only when he’s talking. “Generally speaking, he’s more interested in transmitting than in receiving,’’ the Western diplomat in Yemen told me. Diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks last year document Saleh’s mercurial temperament, which seems to simultaneously reassure, entertain, and terrify American officials. One cable described Saleh as “bored and impatient”; another said that he veered from being “disdainful and dismissive” to “conciliatory and congenial.” On one occasion, General David Petraeus, then the head of the Central Command, spoke with Saleh on the subject of smuggling from Djibouti, which is across the Red Sea. Saleh told Petraeus to send a message to Djibouti’s President: “I don’t care if he smuggles whiskey into Yemen—provided it’s good whiskey.”
Saleh has consistently told Americans that Yemen is dangerously close to being taken over by Al Qaeda. “I have given you an open door on terrorism,’’ Saleh warned John Brennan during a meeting in 2009. “If you don’t help, this country will become worse than Somalia.’’ In the WikiLeaks cables, Saleh is depicted as constantly asking the U.S. for money, and unsatisfied with what he gets. He is quoted saying that “the Americans are hot-blooded and hasty when you need us” but “cold-blooded and British when we need you.”
Saleh has dominated Yemen for so long that he has vitiated whatever independent institutions used to exist, largely through cronyism. In addition to Ahmed, the son who runs the Republican Guard, at least two dozen family members hold key government positions. They oversee the oil ministry; run the national airline, Yemenia; occupy jobs such as Deputy Prime Minister and Ambassador to the United States; and head security agencies that help quell internal dissent.
Saleh has held Yemen together largely through bribery—a nationwide system of direct payoffs to tribal leaders. American and Yemeni officials say that the regime hands out tens of millions of dollars a year. Tribal leaders receive even more money from the Saudi government, which is determined to maintain stability in Yemen, its southern neighbor. Abdullah Rashed al-Jumaili, a sheikh in the Baqil tribe, told me, “I take a salary from the Saudis as well as from the Yemeni government. Well, it is not so much a salary as a gift.” Jumaili said that he received about twenty-seven hundred dollars a month from the Saudis and twenty-three hundred dollars from the Yemeni government. The typical Yemeni earns less than three dollars a day. “All of the sheikhs receive this money,’’ Jumaili said. “It’s the system.”
Little is expected in exchange for these payments except peace—and, when the time comes, votes. The payments have helped Saleh win reëlection in contests that many Yemenis consider farcical. Abdul Rehman Ali Barman, a lawyer with the National Organization for Defending Rights and Freedoms, one of Yemen’s few non-governmental organizations, said, “In 2006, the European Union came with their observers and declared that the vote was fair and open. But by the time they got here the result had already been assured. People had been paid.”
Though Saleh has proved deft at maintaining power, he has accomplished little else. Forty per cent of Yemeni adults are illiterate, and more than half the country’s children are malnourished. In addition to the bribes—one of Yemen’s largest expenditures—there is corruption. The government in Sanaa makes even the Karzai regime, in Afghanistan, seem like a model of propriety. Mohamed Ali Jubran, an economist at Sanaa University, told me, “Any resources that the government is able to get its hands on are siphoned off by the people around the President. What is left over is not enough to meet the demands of the Yemeni people.”
Jubran cited the oil industry, which now provides about seventy per cent of Yemen’s revenues. Members of the Saleh family own most of the businesses that provide transportation and other services to the companies that extract and process oil. One of the largest oil-services firms, for instance, is controlled by the President’s nephew Yahya Mohamed Abdullah Saleh. According to Jubran, the firm charges the Yemeni government extraordinarily high fees for routine services. “So Yahya’s firm charges the government twelve hundred dollars a month for a truck driver, while paying the driver himself only about two hundred dollars,’’ Jubran said. “The company takes the rest.” (Yahya Saleh did not respond to requests for an interview.)
The Saudi government is apparently aware of the Yemeni government’s corruption, and has tried to work around it. According to a diplomatic cable obtained by WikiLeaks, in 2009 Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the Saudi deputy interior minister, told the U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke that Saudi assistance to Yemen was rarely “in the form of cash. . . . Cash tended to end up in Swiss banks.”
Since the upheavals in the Middle East began, Saleh has raised the salaries of most civil servants, police, and soldiers. Jubran told me that government spending in 2011 is projected to exceed revenues by a perilous margin. Saleh has also begun boosting his payments to tribal leaders, in an attempt to keep them from bolting to the opposition. “It’s money season,’’ a Saleh adviser told me.
Even if this rash of spending helps Saleh survive his immediate crisis, an economic catastrophe appears inevitable. “The wheels are going to come off,” the Western diplomat in Yemen told me.
What happens then? Jumaili, the leader of the Baqil tribe, said that few tribal leaders would remain loyal to Saleh after the cash ran out—if that long. “Buying is forever,’’ Jumaili told me. “Renting is just temporary.”
On the evening of January 15th, the day after Tunisia’s dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, fled the country, Tawakkol Karman—a thirty-two-year-old woman who runs an organization dedicated to protecting journalists—decided to seize the moment. She enlisted several of her friends to meet in the square in front of Sanaa University, and they soon collected around a modernist statue called “The Wisdom of the Yemeni People.” Karman and the others cheered the Tunisian revolution.
The next night, more Yemenis showed up, and they marched to the Tunisian Embassy, calling on Saleh to resign. After a week, Karman had become the movement’s leader, and hundreds of Yemenis—mostly students and recent graduates—stood with her in the square, calling for Saleh’s downfall. (It was a convenient time for the students, who were finishing their midterm examinations.) Karman felt exhilarated; revolution seemed to be spreading across the Middle East.
On the evening of January 22nd, as Karman was driving home from work, her car was forced to the side of the road by unmarked vehicles. A group of men, with no uniforms or I.D. cards, got out and took her away. But the demonstrations at Sanaa University kept going. After thirty-six hours, Karman was released unharmed—but not without a warning. Saleh spoke to Karman’s brother Tariq. “Control your sister,’’ the President said. “Anyone who disobeys me will be killed.”
The first time I saw Karman, she was climbing onto a makeshift stage that the demonstrators had erected in the square. She wore a head scarf and a long-sleeved gown instead of a chador. It was a warm evening in mid-February, and she had just returned from Taiz, where the demonstrations were larger than those in Sanaa. On this night, perhaps two thousand protesters had assembled, still mostly students and other young people. Most of them were men.
As Karman grabbed a microphone and began speaking, a pair of young Yemeni men standing next to me began to whisper to each other. Karman was a spectacle in Yemen—a woman in an ocean of men, presuming to lead. Even at the gates of its premier university, Yemen is a deeply conservative society. But Karman did not hesitate. “The Yemeni people have had enough!” she cried, to roars of approval. She began to chant—“The people want an end to the regime!”—and the crowd followed her.
A few days later, I visited Karman’s house, in central Sanaa. On the mantel in the sitting room were framed photographs of four people: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Hillary Clinton. Karman had met Clinton in January, just before the uprising began. Her organization, Women Journalists Without Chains, receives funding from the U.S. government. The meeting with Clinton was arranged by the U.S. Embassy, she said. Looking at the picture of Clinton, she added, “I don’t want to be foreign minister, but she is my role model.”
Karman’s face, framed by a bright-pink head scarf, betrayed no fatigue. A few days earlier, at Friday prayers, some of the imams in Sanaa, presumably at the government’s urging, had singled her out, accusing her of degrading the morals of Yemeni women. Karman laughed off the criticism. She said, “My husband encourages me, so does my father—most of the time! Sometimes my husband tells me to stop, my father also. They are worried about me. I ignore them, of course.”
The few grass-roots women leaders in the Middle East tend to be a combination of willfulness, education, and high social standing, which provides them with the confidence required to challenge tradition, and the connections to keep them safe. Karman, a mother of three, is the daughter of Abdul Salam, who was the minister for legal and parliamentary affairs in an earlier Saleh government. (He resigned in 1994, when Saleh used military force to crush a secessionist movement in the south.) Her brother Tariq is a poet; until he delivered the message to his sister, he was a Saleh supporter.
Karman, who has a degree in public administration from Sanaa University, learned her halting English in a four-month course there. She found intellectual inspiration in Mandela’s memoir, “Long Walk to Freedom,” and in Gandhi’s autobiography. In 2005, with the help of grants from foreign governments and aid organizations, she founded Women Journalists Without Chains.
By the time she started calling for Saleh’s downfall, she had become a familiar nuisance in Yemen. In 2006, she set up a text-messaging system that disseminated political news and messages to thousands of people. After a year, the regime shut it down. Karman and other Yemenis began picketing in Liberty Square, across the street from the Presidential Palace, where they demanded democracy and human rights.
“On some days, it was just my friends and I,” she said. “Sometimes it was thousands.”
The revolution in Tunisia galvanized her. Before then, she had always sought incremental improvements in Yemen: more press freedom, more licenses for newspapers, the release of jailed journalists. “Tunisia was our solution—it hit me just like that,’’ she said. “The problem in our society is the regime, just as in Tunisia. The whole regime has to go.”
In January, when the protest movement was still very small, Karman and her compatriots were beaten repeatedly by pro-government thugs. As her movement grew, she was disappointed by the wary reactions of many Westerners. After her release from prison, Karman said, European Union officials and friends at the U.S. Embassy beseeched her to halt the protests. Karman said of one E.U. official, “He told me, ‘Tawakkol, this will be bad for Yemen, this will bring chaos.’ ’’
I asked about Saleh and the forces arrayed against her. At the time, the protests outside Sanaa University were impressive but hardly large enough to threaten the regime. She responded with bracing overstatement. “We are in the final stages now,” she said. “You will see! It will take a little longer. But we will make our revolution. We will make it, or we will die trying.”
I brought up the promise Saleh had made, a week or so earlier, to leave office in 2013. What, exactly, was there left to fight for?
“No one believes him,’’ Karman said. “He has lied before. We cannot rely on the opposition parties, either. They have compromised too much. No change is possible as long as Saleh remains. Our first demand, and our last demand, is that Saleh step down.”
Karman was referring to the last time Saleh announced his intent to retire—in 2005, just before a Presidential election. He ran anyway and won, with seventy-seven per cent of the vote. Karman worried that if Saleh did not leave office immediately he might later insist on staying beyond the end of his term, or transfer power to his son, or arrange for a handpicked successor to take over.
Karman’s freewheeling attacks on Saleh highlighted one of the central curiosities of the Yemeni regime: it is not uniformly repressive. Karman had been detained, but she had not been killed or even left to languish in jail. Newspapers have been closed, and political opponents tortured or killed, especially in the south. But the Yemeni state has been relatively tolerant of dissent. This past winter, Saleh, in contrast to some other Middle Eastern leaders, did not execute opposition leaders or block access to the Internet. When I raised this point with Karman, she scolded me. “Please do not compare us to other countries in the Middle East,” she said. “When you do that, you will conclude that Yemen is not so bad, because we are better than Saudi Arabia. I reject that. We need more freedom here, more democracy.”
Yemen, unlike some Arab countries, has an official opposition. It is a coalition united under the banner Joint Meeting Parties, or J.M.P. The J.M.P.’s two main components are Yemen’s Islamist party, known as Islah, and the Yemeni Socialist Party.
In the months before the protests began, the J.M.P. had been negotiating with Saleh’s party, the General People’s Congress, to enter his government or to secure limits on his powers. The talks had not yielded clear results. Then revolution broke out in Egypt and Tunisia. The uprisings took the J.M.P.’s leaders by surprise, as did the demonstrations within Yemen. Yet, instead of joining the movement, the opposition attempted to outflank it, by trying anew to cut a deal with the regime. In this effort, the J.M.P. had the backing of the Obama Administration.
The J.M.P.’s leaders apparently feared that an abrupt end to Saleh’s rule would bring anarchy, and they did not seem to believe that they were cohesive enough themselves to run the Yemeni state. Their fears were echoed by many Yemenis in the merchant class. One day in February, at the protest site outside Sanaa University, I spotted a well-dressed man standing at the edge of the scene, frowning. His name was Yahiya Ali al-Habbari, and he was the chairman of a large Yemeni food-importing company. “This will not work,’’ Habbari said. “There will be chaos here. We can’t have this, not in Yemen.”
For a while, that worry helped to limit the size of the demonstrations. In the first six weeks, the protests in Sanaa, a city with a population of two million, drew no more than ten thousand people. Even on Fridays, when the demonstrations tended to peak in size, they did not affect everyday life in the capital.
Some Yemenis were concerned that, if Saleh was thrown out, the opposition coalition’s Islamist leaders would dominate the next government. Most of the anxiety focussed on Abdul Majeed al-Zindani, the Islamist whom the U.S. has called a terrorist. Zindani is a senior leader of Islah and the head of Yemen’s largest association of Sunni clerics. American officials say that he has been a mentor to Osama bin Laden, has recruited Yemenis into Al Qaeda training camps, and has helped the group buy weapons. Yet many Yemenis consider Zindani a mainstream politician. After all, before the protests began, Zindani had been one of Saleh’s most reliable supporters.
By the end of February, the crowds outside Sanaa University had grown considerably. On March 1st, word went around that Zindani was going to speak. Until then, the demonstrations had been dominated by relatively secular Yemenis, and the fact that Zindani was to speak seemed to mark a turning point in the revolt. A group of men with guns mounted the stage. Then Zindani appeared, his beard dyed orange with henna, and his hand grasping the same microphone that Karman had held a few weeks earlier.
“The caliphate is coming!’’ Zindani cried. “The caliphate is coming!” He noted that, as an Islamist and a member of the official opposition, he was a latecomer to the movement. “You shamed the old people like me,’’ he told the protesters. “You shamed all the people who said they wanted change but weren’t willing to do what they had to do to make it happen.”
He went on, “Our Prophet predicted that, one day, a ruler will oppress his people, and the people will take the power from him. We are now living with a leader who rules by force, and we need to get him out. After we get rid of this oppressor, there will be justice—and the caliphate.”
The crowd cheered, though it was impossible to say whether it was for all of Zindani’s remarks or just some of them. Zindani climbed down from the stage and departed with his gunmen.
A few minutes later, I spotted Karman, and we ducked inside a tent next to the stage. She was furious. “We had a big argument about Zindani—about whether to allow him,” she said. “I was opposed. This is a youth movement, not a religious one.”
The demonstrators who had gathered outside Sanaa University faced a dilemma: on their own, they did not represent the aspirations of Yemen’s twenty-three million people, but, the more the movement grew, the more Islamist it threatened to become. Seventy per cent of Yemenis live in rural areas, and most are deeply religious.
Karman speculated that Zindani had volunteered to speak at the demonstration at the behest of the Saleh regime, in order to discredit the movement. The assertion, though conspiratorial, seemed plausible. For all the zeal in Zindani’s speech, he did not call for Saleh to resign. Karman considered it absurd that Westerners had branded Zindani as particularly Islamist. “The real Islamists are in the government,” she said. “Saleh keeps Al Qaeda alive because it gets the attention of the Americans. He meets with Al Qaeda. He helps them. Saleh and Zindani are so close it is disgusting! What has the government been saying about me for the past six weeks? That I’m ruining the morals of Yemen’s women—that I am going against God’s law. You want Islamists in office? You already have them.”
Until his death, in 2007, Abdullah al-Ahmar was the head of Yemen’s most powerful tribal confederation, the Hashids, whose members live primarily in the north. For decades, Ahmar, known as the “sheikh of sheikhs,” acted as a shadow President, working with Saleh to pacify tribal leaders. Most Yemenis assumed that Ahmar had received millions from the Saudis to help keep Yemen quiet. In some respects, he had been as powerful as Saleh—he was the speaker of the parliament for more than a decade—but he purposely remained in the President’s shadow. As a prominent northerner, he was wary of tipping the balance of power between the north and the south, which could lead to civil war.
Since Ahmar’s death, his nine sons have taken on leadership roles in the tribe, and they do not appear to feel restrained by their father’s traditions. When the revolt in Yemen began, two of the sons, Hussein and Hameed, threw their support to the protesters and joined the call for Saleh to resign.
The son who harbors the deepest ambitions is Hameed, the third-eldest, who is thirty-nine. In February, I visited him at his house in Sanaa. It looked like a warlord’s lair in Afghanistan: a brick-and-marble villa surrounded by twenty-foot-high sandstone walls and a hundred men with guns. Guards stationed outside the house were encircled by an outer perimeter of guards with mounted machine guns. Only a week before our meeting, Hameed’s guards had driven by the home of Noman Dowaid—the governor of Sanaa and a Saleh ally—and machine-gunned his house. Violence always lingers at the edge of Yemeni politics.
An aide led me into a cavernous stone mafraj—the traditional hall where Yemeni men gather to confer and chew khat. The floor was marble, and my steps echoed as I crossed the hall. After a few minutes, Hameed appeared in a turban and a white thawb, the customary Yemeni male robe; a massive jumbiya sword, in a brilliant-green sheath, had been tucked into a yellow sash. Hameed’s traditional appearance, I had been told, could be deceptive. He is an avowed Islamist, but he also speaks perfect English, having spent summers in London as a boy. He is one of Yemen’s few billionaires. Not only are he and his tribe thought to receive enormous subsidies from the Saudis; he has built, with the help of the Egyptian communications giant Orascom, Yemen’s most successful cellular-phone network. (Hameed eventually expelled Orascom’s people from Yemen and terminated the partnership.) One Yemeni political leader told me that Hameed might become Yemen’s equivalent of Rafik Hariri—the construction magnate who helped rebuild Lebanon after its civil war.
It was late afternoon, the time of day when khat is traditionally chewed, and Hameed’s right cheek bulged. Sitting next to me, he spoke carefully about his ambitions. “It is not my goal to be President,’’ he said. That job, he said, should be reserved for someone from the south, to insure that Yemen didn’t split apart again. His main political goal was to help build “a strong democracy, with real institutions and the rule of law.”
When the conversation turned to Saleh, though, Hameed’s reserve dissolved into florid psychoanalysis. “This man, Saleh, he never had any sort of strategic thinking or vision—his strategy from Day One was to remain in power,” Hameed said. “His cleverness was to make the tribes always need him, to make them fight each other, so that they would need his weapons. This tribe against the other tribe, and Saleh the only one who can help them. So clever.”
A courtier set down a platter of almonds and baklava. The food was for me; Hameed’s mouth was still occupied with khat, which suppresses the appetite. He went on, “I believe the President had a very unhappy childhood—perhaps the most unhappy childhood in history. And he has spent his entire life taking revenge on people for this miserable childhood. This explains Saleh’s character. Saleh is never so happy as when he has a powerful person before him, on his knees, begging for his life. This is what makes Saleh truly happy.”
Hameed’s excoriations seemed to reveal more about himself than they did about Saleh. “When you sit with him, he is a nice guy, you have good relations with him,’’ Hameed continued. “He’s a nice character. He likes to enjoy himself—he likes to go to a place where he can have fun. He drinks. He’s in his sixties, but if he travels abroad he always carries Viagra in his pocket.”
Soon, he said, he would not be able to keep members of the tribe from coming to the defense of the Yemenis in the streets. (A couple of days later, Hameed’s brother Hussein spoke before thousands of tribesmen at a rally in Amran, a town northwest of Sanaa, calling on them to go to Sanaa to protect the demonstrators.)
“It’s not easy to push people to want to be killed, but the President has done that,’’ Hameed said. “When the President starts making chaos in the streets, that will be the point of no return.”
In Yemen, the most common assumption about Hameed is that he would try to become Vice-President or Prime Minister, a post that could allow him to wield immense power from behind the scenes. Whatever the case, Hameed seemed to be preparing himself for change. “You don’t know how things will move,’’ he said. “There could be a sudden vacancy. And a need for a strong leader.”
On December 17, 2009, in the lawless terrain of southern Yemen, the village of Al Majalah was destroyed by a series of military strikes. In a statement released the same day, the Yemeni government declared that its Air Force had carried out attacks against suspected Al Qaeda camps, killing thirty-four militants. The government noted that the U.S. had shared intelligence with the Saleh government, but acknowledged no other American involvement.
In the following months, the Yemeni statement was exposed as a deception. In fact, the strikes had been carried out by Tomahawk cruise missiles. Moreover, survivors of the attack insisted that the victims were nearly all civilians.
The bombing of Al Majalah was one of a number of American operations against Al Qaeda that were carried out under a secret understanding with the Yemeni government. An American official with knowledge of the attack confirmed that, in 2009 and 2010, the U.S. conducted at least four air strikes in Yemen. These operations, two of which occurred the same month as the failed Christmas Day bomb plot, were the first significant U.S.-led strikes in Yemen since November, 2002, when Salim Sinan al-Harethi, a suspected Al Qaeda leader, was killed in his car by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone.
Meanwhile, about a thousand Yemenis are being trained in the American program designed to help the Saleh regime fight terrorism. Yemeni officials say that they are proud of their government’s efforts in the fight against Al Qaeda. Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, the Yemeni foreign minister, told me that in the past year the Yemeni security forces had lost seventy people in fights against Al Qaeda. “We are suffering real losses,’’ he said.
The exact terms of the agreement between the American military and the Yemeni government are murky. According to one of the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, in early 2010 Saleh met with General Petraeus and told him that he would continue to misrepresent operations such as the one in Al Majalah. “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,’’ he said.
Yet, despite Saleh’s promises of coöperation, he appears to have quietly reversed his position. This change can be traced to last May, after an air strike targeting Al Qaeda fighters killed Jabir al-Shabwani, the deputy of the Marib governorate, in central Yemen. According to Yemeni press accounts, Shabwani was killed in a village near his home, where he was meeting with Al Qaeda fighters.
At the time, the Yemeni government claimed to have participated in the operation and promised to launch an investigation. It has been silent ever since. Shabwani’s death so angered members of his tribe, the Abeida, that they fought several gun battles with Yemeni security forces.
The senior Administration official told me that Shabwani’s presence at an Al Qaeda meeting suggested that he had deep ties to the group: “We know that a number of local officials have maintained relationships to Al Qaeda and have given them safe haven.”
No U.S.-led operations have been undertaken since then. The Western official said that such efforts “basically stopped.’’ The senior Administration official told me, “We are trying to assess, in the current political turmoil there, how we can prosecute counterterrorism operations in a way that will not create more problems and more turmoil.” He added, “The concern is that the government is losing control in the outlying areas.”
Meanwhile, Saleh’s own counterterrorism units, for all the money and training they receive, are accomplishing very little, the Western official told me: “The problem is, they are really bad. It’s basically one group of thugs versus another group of thugs.” The senior Administration official said of the Yemeni forces, “They are not doing as much as they should,” but emphasized that the effort was still new. “This takes time,” he said. “It takes training and prodding and encouragement.”
This relative inactivity by American and Yemeni forces means that, for the past year, there have been almost no major military operations against Al Qaeda threats—at least, none that have been publicly disclosed. As for the seventy dead Yemeni troops cited by the foreign minister, the Western official said that most of the casualties occurred during Al Qaeda attacks on Yemeni forces.
Some observers of Yemen fear that Saleh’s real intention is to use the U.S.-trained counterterrorism forces against his domestic opponents, including nonviolent protesters. As an American military officer put it, Saleh is less interested in “going after the bad guys” than he is in “protecting the warden.”
In March, I spoke with several survivors of the attack on Al Majalah. We met in Aden at the Mercure Hotel, a seaside resort with panoramic views of the Arabian Sea. The hotel is owned by the bin Laden family, and is just around the bend from the spot where the U.S.S. Cole was bombed.
Hussein Abdullah, a herdsman, told me that he had been tending a herd of goats and camels when Al Majalah was hit. He recalled lying in his tent at sunrise, half-awake, when there was an enormous flash. “The sky turned white,’’ Abdullah said. “Everything suddenly disappeared.” He was knocked unconscious, and when he came to, he told me, he saw his wife running toward him. “And when she threw her arms around me I felt blood all over me,” he said. She died, as did his daughter; only his infant son survived.
I also met a fifteen-year-old named Fatima Ali, who rolled up the sleeve of her chador, revealing hideous burns. Another girl showed me her hand, which was missing a finger. She had lost her mother in the raid.
Six months afterward, Amnesty International released photographs of Al Majalah showing an American cluster bomb and a propulsion unit from a Tomahawk missile. A subsequent investigation by the Yemeni parliament found that fourteen Al Qaeda fighters had been killed in the attack, along with forty-one civilians, including twenty-three children.
Saleh bin Farid al-Aulaki, a member of the parliamentary commission, told me that he later met with Saleh, who apologized for the disaster. “He told me that the government had bad information,’’ Aulaki said.
The American official said that aerial surveillance had confirmed that Al Majalah was a training camp for militants. “I am very comfortable with that,’’ he said. But he was troubled by the civilian casualties. “It’s a terrible outcome,’’ the official said. “Nobody wanted that.”
Shortly after the strike, Abdulelah Hider Shaea, a journalist for the state-run news service, Saba, questioned the initial statements by the government. Appearing on Al Jazeera, Shaea claimed that civilians had been killed and that the strike had likely involved American cruise missiles. He made similar charges on subsequent broadcasts.
Last August, Yemeni authorities surrounded Shaea’s house and took him away. For a month, there was no information about his whereabouts. Finally, the government revealed that Shaea had been charged with being a member of Al Qaeda.
Shaea had published many articles about Al Qaeda, including an interview with Awlaki, the Yemeni-American cleric. (His questions were direct and betrayed no sympathies for the group.) Saeed Thabit, the Sanaa bureau chief for Al Jazeera, said that Shaea had maintained contacts with Al Qaeda operatives but was not an extremist: “He was just a good journalist.’’
After a very short trial, Shaea was convicted, and was sentenced to five years in prison. According to his lawyer, Abdul Rehman Ali Barman, and to several journalists who attended the proceedings, the evidence used to convict him was thin. Prosecutors claimed that they had found on Shaea’s laptop the transcript of a conversation in which he and an Al Qaeda member discussed helping recruits from Somalia. The court was also presented with photographs taken inside walled compounds, allegedly by Shaea; according to the prosecutors, the images confirmed that he had been casing places for Al Qaeda to bomb.
Members of the Yemeni journalistic community began demanding the release of Shaea, who, according to Barman, had been beaten in prison. In January, Barman said, he received unexpected good news: Saleh intended to pardon Shaea.
A month later, after Saleh announced that he was going to step down in 2013, President Obama called Saleh to wish him well. According to a White House statement, Obama also expressed “concern” about Shaea’s potential release. The statement offered no more details. Shaea remains in prison.
The American official familiar with the Al Majalah incident said that U.S. and Yemeni officials had worked together to assemble a case against Shaea. Classified evidence, the former official said, indicated that Shaea had indeed been coöperating with Al Qaeda. “I was persuaded that he was an agent,’’ the American official said. But this evidence was not introduced in court. The Shaea case may be the most disturbing example of the shorthand that exists between the Obama Administration and the Saleh regime.
Compared with events in Egypt and Tunisia, the climax in Yemen was slow in coming. From the beginning, the demonstrators mimicked the embracing attitude of their counterparts in Cairo: on the edge of the protest area, young men politely patted down anyone who wished to take part. The square outside Sanaa University was given a new name: Change Square. The protesters started using the word “revolution,” predicting—naïvely—that Yemen would lose its dictator in the manner of Egypt: peacefully, easily, and quickly.
For the first several weeks, the protesters did little more than sit around and chat. One day in February, I heard one of them idly ask his friends, “Has he resigned yet?’’ Every afternoon, young men brought wheelbarrows filled with khat for the protesters. Someone set up a trampoline just off the square.
But the demonstrators didn’t give up, and, eventually, the crowds grew—in Sanaa, in Taiz, in Aden, in Ibb. Attendance spiked after the week of February 13th, when police in Aden killed at least ten protesters. Over the next two weeks, thirteen members of parliament, all from Saleh’s party, resigned in protest.
One of them was Abd al-Bari Dughaish, a neurologist from Aden. In late February, I met him for tea at the Sheba Hotel, in Sanaa. Dughaish had grown up in what was then South Yemen, coming of age when it was a socialist state. He’d gone to medical school in East Germany, and witnessed the collapse of Communism. “I’m still a socialist,’’ he said. He was wearing a suit and tie.
For years, Dughaish had felt that representing Saleh in parliament was essentially corrupt. “I was a member of the fake democracy,’’ Dughaish said. “Whenever there was something to vote on, we would vote yes. Most of the other members didn’t care—they just picked up their salaries. I hated myself for it, but I did it anyway.”
Dughaish told me that he was possibly more sensitive to the brutalities of Saleh’s regime because he came from the south, where many Yemenis have pushed to secede, and because his experience in East Germany let him witness another autocratic regime desperately clinging to power. Despite his membership in the ruling party, Dughaish sometimes wrote opinion pieces for Al Ayyam, a daily in Aden that often pointedly criticized Saleh.
For years, Dughaish told himself that he was making the regime more humane. “I was one of those people who try to bring change inside the house where you are living,” he said. “But the truth is, I am not a brave man. I am a coward.”
A chain of events transformed him. In May, 2009, Al Ayyam was shut down by the government, and seven months later its publisher, Hisham Basharheel, was arrested on murder charges. The charges, Dughaish said, were widely believed to have been concocted by the government. In July, 2010, Dughaish’s brother, Mohammed, was murdered near Aden. Mohammed had been a critic of Saleh. Although Dughaish could not prove it, he believed that his brother had been killed by the regime.
Then the citizens of Tunisia revolted, and the protests outside Sanaa University started. At first, Dughaish watched them on television—not on the official state channel but on Al Jazeera and TV Suhail, a station owned by Hameed al-Ahmar, the billionaire Islamist, and beamed in from India. (Throughout the upheaval, state television ran panel discussions and wildlife documentaries.) “The young people gave me courage,’’ Dughaish said. “They brought us a new reality.”
On February 16th, riot police in Aden killed two protesters. Dughaish was enraged. But he was not yet ready to quit. Then he was summoned by the Vice-President, Abdo Rabo Mansour Hadi, who is also a southerner. Hadi asked Dughaish to go to Aden to help calm people down. “When I got to Aden, I saw what the regime had done with my own eyes,’’ Dughaish told me. “I saw people who had been killed. I saw their families. I saw burned-out buildings.”
Two days later, the police killed four more protesters in Aden. On the nineteenth, Dughaish submitted his resignation and braced himself for a wave of criticism. Instead, he told me, he was overwhelmed with praise, receiving hundreds of phone calls and thousands of e-mails saluting him. “People said, ‘Bari, we have been waiting for you. You were not in a good place.’ ”
The size of the crowds outside Sanaa University began to surge—from one to three thousand, from ten to thirty thousand. Saleh began sending in plainclothesmen with sticks, truncheons, and, eventually, guns. Protesters were beaten, stoned, and shot. But the brutality backfired, infuriating large numbers of Yemenis and sending them into the streets.
In late February, eleven young Yemenis were invited to visit Saleh at the palace and share their complaints. One of the guests was Shatha al-Harazi, a twenty-five-year-old reporter for the Yemen Times, an English-language newspaper. At a café in Sanaa, I met Harazi and two others who had attended the meeting.
Harazi seemed as modern and effusive as Tawakkol Karman. At first, she said, she hadn’t wanted to meet Saleh, thinking that it would be futile. After much discussion with friends, she decided to go, but she swore to herself that if she got a chance to speak directly to the President she would tell him exactly what she thought.
At the start of the meeting, Saleh was charming and self-deprecating. Then the visitors began to speak, and each of them gave the President the same message: his regime was corrupt, brutal, and unrepresentative, and young people had no prospects. At first, Harazi told me, Saleh said that he agreed with the protesters—too many of his officials took bribes, too few young Yemenis could find jobs. But as the discussion went on Saleh grew visibly annoyed. Harazi, who spoke third, was undaunted. “I told him that he should resign,” she said.
After the sixth speaker presented the same litany of complaints, Saleh seemed to snap. “O.K.!” the President cried. “I am corrupt. Everyone around me is corrupt. I like corrupt people!” He suddenly stood up. “I’m not changing anything,” he said. “Everything stays the way it is.”
But Saleh was losing control. Even his favored tactic—payoffs—began to fail him. One night in March, as I walked among the demonstrators, I went into a large tent and sat down with a group of tribal leaders. They had come to Sanaa from Marib. Their presence indicated that the protests were no longer drawing only the young, urban, and educated. Saleh and people close to him claimed that the tribesmen streaming into Sanaa had been paid by wealthy benefactors—in particular, by Hameed al-Ahmar.
Ahmed al-Zaidi, a leader of the Bin Jaber tribe, said, “I am here because there has been no development in my district—no electricity, no schools, no water, nothing.’’ Marib is one of Yemen’s main oil-producing regions. “Where does all the money go?” he asked.
Zaidi sat in a semicircle with about a dozen followers. Though his group was small, it was a symbol of wider discontent, and it frightened the authorities. A day earlier, he told me, an emissary from Saleh’s office had called and offered him ten million rials—about fifty thousand dollars—to leave the capital. He refused. The next day, he was approached in the square by another emissary; this time, the offer was half a million dollars. “I told him I wasn’t for sale,’’ Zaidi said.
Zaidi said that some of the elders in his tribe still received large payments from Saleh and from the Saudis. But taking money from the government was increasingly frowned upon. Zaidi explained, “The tribal leaders who do this are no longer respected by the people.”
On the other side of the tent, young Yemenis had gathered around an elegantly dressed man seated on the floor. He was an Army colonel named Murad al-Muradi, and he had defected just thirty minutes earlier. Saleh, he said, had been in power too long.
One of the most worrying possible outcomes if Saleh departs is the splintering of the Yemeni Army into rival factions, which could cause an all-out civil war. Colonel Muradi declared that cracks were already visible. “A lot of the officers are still with Saleh, but more and more are turning,’’ he told me. “The wheels of history are turning.’’ The Yemenis around him nodded. “The people will not go back.”
On March 18th, about a week after Saleh gave his speech in the Stadium of the Revolution, snipers carried out a massacre in the square in Sanaa, killing at least fifty-two people and wounding two hundred. Saleh supporters raced through the square, setting fire to the protesters’ tents. The snipers had taken up positions in buildings on one of the streets leading into the square. When the gunfire erupted, the crowd surged—toward the shooting.
Adel al-Shami, a protester who was wounded in his torso, said of the snipers, “They were shooting people in the head, neck, and eyes.’’
I found Shami, who is twenty-seven, inside the university’s mosque, where he was resting alongside other wounded protesters. Some of the shooters, Shami said, wore the uniforms of Yemen’s security agencies. “They were so professional,’’ he said. “They were so close I could look into their eyes.”
In the U.S., Brennan condemned the killings by the Yemeni government in “the strongest terms,” but he still did not call on Saleh to step down. Secretary of State Clinton told reporters, “With regard to Yemen, our message remains the same: the violence needs to end, negotiations need to be pursued in order to reach a political solution.”
But the White House, like Saleh, was being overtaken by events. At the beginning of March, the opposition finally went into the streets. The leaders of the J.M.P. stopped asking to join Saleh’s government and instead demanded that he quit. The American plan to defuse the demonstrations through political accommodation had collapsed.
Yassin Noman, the leader of the Socialist Party, told me, “Now Saleh is just maneuvering. The revolution cannot be stopped.”
In the days after the March 18th massacre, public support for Saleh plummeted and he was abandoned by the central pillars of Yemen’s political establishment: the Sunni clerics, the leaders of the largest tribes, even members of his own cabinet. The biggest blow came from the military, the foundation of Saleh’s rule. In a speech on March 21st, General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, the country’s most influential officer, who has been a partner of Saleh’s for thirty years, renounced the President, saying, “According to what I’m feeling, and according to the feelings of my partner commanders and soldiers . . . I announce our support and our peaceful backing of the youth revolution.”
Within hours, Army units loyal to the General had surrounded Sanaa University, in order to protect the protesters from attacks. Meanwhile, soldiers still loyal to Saleh, some of them driving tanks, took up positions around the palace. On March 25th, a hundred thousand Yemenis came together at Sanaa University—and perhaps a million others gathered in other cities—for a rally called Departure Friday.
Saleh opened discussions with the opposition and then promptly broke them off. “I will turn power over to safe hands,’’ he said in a speech. Three days later, he declared in another speech that he had the support of ninety-five per cent of Yemenis. “Who should leave?” he said. “Of course, the minority that threatens the nation.’’ He seemed tormented—aware that his grip on power was slipping, but unable, after three decades, to let go. In late March, he ordered most of his security forces into Sanaa to protect him, including the American-trained counterterrorism units.
Saleh’s ambivalence was mirrored in Washington. The senior Administration official told me that he was pushing Saleh to present a detailed plan for transferring power and then quit. “We have made it clear that transition needs to occur, and must begin now,” the official said. The Americans’ preferred scenario, the official said, was that Vice-President Hadi would succeed Saleh, as provided for in the Yemeni constitution.
It was hardly certain that Hadi would be strong enough to hold off Zindani, the Islamist cleric; or Ahmar, the Islamist billionaire; or an empowered Al Qaeda. “There is a potential power vacuum,’’ the senior Administration official said. “We want to make sure that this is not an abdication.”
In late March, anarchy began to spread across Yemen, and the government started pulling out of violent areas. In the southern town of Jaar, a group of Islamist gunmen briefly took over a government building after security forces departed; Yemeni officials later claimed that the gunmen were members of Al Qaeda, but that wasn’t clear. In the north, Houthi rebels took control of the city of Saada after the provincial governor and his aides fled. In the most spectacular incident, a government ammunition factory in Khanfar exploded after security forces retreated and looters descended on it; more than a hundred people were killed. Meanwhile, Yemen’s economic crisis appeared to deepen. The Western official told me that Saleh’s regime was no longer able to secure credit to import food.
It was difficult to tell how much of the chaos was real and how much of it was being assisted by the government, in order to arouse international concern. Saleh increasingly invoked the spectre of Somalia. “We are a tribal society,’’ he told the satellite channel Al Arabiya. “Everyone will side with his tribe, and we will then end up with a destructive civil war.” But there was little hard evidence that Yemen’s tribes were preparing for battle, or that Al Qaeda was taking advantage of Saleh’s collapse. The government would surely be weaker without Saleh, but it was weak to begin with.
In one sense, the revolt in Yemen has been extraordinarily peaceful. The Yemenis protesting Saleh’s rule have not, by and large, turned to violence, even after they were provoked, wounded, shot, and killed. One day in late March, I went to the square at Sanaa University to visit Tawakkol Karman. I found her sitting outside a tent where she’d been living for the past three weeks. Her husband was sitting with her.
“Saleh is very dangerous now,’’ Karman told me. “We thought he was going to resign last week”—on Departure Friday. “The American Embassy thought so—they told us. But he didn’t. The young people are very frustrated, very angry.”
On Departure Friday, the protest leaders had considered staging a march on the Presidential Palace—a blunt attempt to force Saleh’s hand. Many observers, including the Americans, worried that such a march would result in extensive bloodshed, so the protesters called it off. Now Karman and her compatriots were feeling that an opportunity had passed.
“We will escalate by all peaceful means,” she promised. “But no violence.”
Change Square now had a deflated feel. The crowds had thinned. A dust storm had settled over the city, covering everything in a dirty haze. People blamed the Saudis for the storm; they blamed the Saudis for many things, especially for propping up Saleh.
The talk turned to the Americans. “We are disappointed in Obama,’’ Karman told me. “We need a strong statement from him.” It was now ten weeks into the uprising, and the Obama Administration had still not publicly called on Saleh to leave.
Even if Karman and her comrades succeeded in pushing Saleh from power, it seemed likely that they would be pushed aside themselves by Yemenis better equipped to exploit uncertainty. “We have a plan for the transition,’’ she said, but it wasn’t terribly specific. She told me that she had no real interest in political power.
On Friday, April 1st, anti-government protesters drew their largest crowd to date, with tens of thousands of Yemenis pouring into Change Square to call for an end to Saleh’s rule. Just across town, Saleh staged a rally in his own honor, much like the Stadium of the Revolution event a month earlier. Participants were bused in from around the country and received a typical day’s wages, in the form of a meal, a handful of cash, and a bag of khat. (The Western official said that the government had spent as much as fourteen million dollars to stage a Saleh rally the previous week.) One Yemeni, when asked why he had travelled from the city of Al Mahwit to cheer the President, just shrugged. “Money,’’ he said.
For all the artifice, Saleh was said to be deeply moved by the event, which convinced him that he is still the object of Yemenis’ love. “He was leaning toward quitting,” the Western official said. “But he’s started to change his mind.’’
One day during the uprising, I met one of Saleh’s advisers for lunch at Zorba’s, a bistro in Hadda, a wealthy neighborhood in Sanaa. It was a busy time at the palace and I felt lucky to have secured the appointment. The adviser, who’d spent time in the U.S., ordered a platter of broiled shrimp and a Diet Coke.
President Saleh, he told me, had lost his desire to be Yemen’s leader. It was only his sense of duty that kept him in office. “He doesn’t want the job anymore,’’ the adviser said. “He’s tired.”
The adviser said that he was unimpressed by the demonstrations. “One million people doesn’t represent the will of the people,” he said. “The people don’t want Saleh to leave.”
A platter of shrimp arrived. The adviser looked at his food, but he did not touch it.
The adviser said he was gravely worried that Yemen would break up. He sketched out the scenario: the south would secede first, then the Houthis would leave; in the east, the Saudis would persuade some opportunistic tribesmen to break away, finally giving Saudi Arabia a land route to the Arabian Sea.
“The opposition wouldn’t last ten days,’’ the adviser told me. “Yemen would descend into civil war. And that’s what the Islamists want. Hameed al-Ahmar would drive straight into the palace.”
We returned to Saleh and his predicament. “He’s under pressure,’’ the adviser said. “The question is: how much can he stand?”
We walked out together. The shrimp were in a box. As we headed toward his car, he told me, “Only Saleh can hold Yemen. Remember that.” Then he drove back to the palace. ♦
