Abstract
Yemen’s image for most people, if it evokes one at all, is that of a backward tribal badlands. Most of the Western media attention that it receives quickly delivers two statements about the country: that there are some 60 million guns spread among 20 million people and that it was once home to the bin Laden family:
In the governorate of Ma’rib, a cigarette-smoking 10-year-old carries a Desert Eagle handgun in his belt, one of some 60 million weapons scattered throughout this country of 20 million people... Yemen, bin Laden’s ancestral home, is widely considered a war-on-terrorism basket case.1
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Notes
Jonathan Schanzer, “Sanaa Dispatch: Basket Catch,” New Republic, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, August 21, 2003. Available online at www.washingtoninstitute.org/media/schanzer/schanzer082103.htm. The ubiquitousfigure of 60 million weapons is almost certainly inflated. The 2003 Small Arms Survey found the figure more likely to be between 6 and 9 million—still one of the highest per capita figures in the world; Derek B. Miller, Demand, Stockpiles and Social Controls: Small Arms in Yemen, Small Arms Survey, Occasional Paper No. 9, May 2003. Osama bin Laden’s father was born in Yemen but he spent most of his life in Saudi Arabia, where Osama was born.
United States State Department, Yemen: Country Report on Human Rights Practices, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, March 8, 2006.
While oil holdings are difficult to quantify absolutely, a number of different reports pointed to 2012 as a likely depletion point. The origin of this figure seems to be the Yemeni Oil Ministry’s September 2004 estimation that the country’s remaining oil reserves amounted to only 1.3 billion barrels. See Srinivasan Thirumalai and Thilakaratna Ranaweera, Coping with Oil Depletion in Yemen: A Quantitative Evaluation, 2005. Available online at http://www.ecomod.net/conferences/middle_east_2005/middle_east_2005_papers/Thirumalai.doc.
Sarah Phillips, “Foreboding About the Future in Yemen,” Middle East Report Online, April 3, 2006, available online at http://www.merip.org/mero/mero040306.html.
These are not exact boundaries. Different authors classify these cutoff points in slightly different places. D. Thomas Gochenour, for example, places Dhamar outside the highland area because it is south of the Yaslah Pass, despite the fact that it is still quite arid, strongly Zaydi, and is organized along tribal lines. D. Thomas Gochenour, “Towards a Sociology of the Islamisation of Yemen,” in Contemporary Yemen: Politics and Historical Background, ed. B. R. Pridham (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), pp. 1–19. Parts of what is referred to in this study as Lower Yemen or the Lowlands are sometimes also referred to as the Southern Highlands (Ibb, and parts of Ta’izz and al-Baydah) as their altitude is still higher than that in the former PDRY and the Tihama Plain, which borders the Red Sea.
Zaydi Islam is commonly referred to as the “fifth school” of Sunni Islam. See Robert D. Burrowes, Historical Dictionary of Yemen (Lanham, MD and London: Scarecrow Press, 1995), p. 430.
Robert D. Burrowes, The Yemen Arab Republic: The Politics of Development, 1962–1986 (Boulder, CO: Westview; London: Croom Helm, 1987), p. 8.
Iranian Grand Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri was quoted by the AKI news agency as saying: “It is not acceptable that the Shiites be persecuted for their faith in a country which defines itself Islamic:” See “Yemen: Iranian GrandAyatollah Defends Yemeni Shiites,” May 18, 2005. Available online at http://www.adnki.com/index_2Level.php?cat=Religion&loid=8.0.168503326&par=0. Iraqi Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani reportedly accused Yemen’s government of waging “a kind of war” against Zaydis in Yemen. See Jane Novak, “Ayatollah Sistani and the War in Yemen,” May 2, 2005. Available online at http://www.worldpress.org/Mideast/2083.cfm. Novak incorrectly stated that Yemen’s government is Sunni.
Stephen Day discusses the importance of resource location throughout his dissertation, “Power-Sharing and Hegemony: A Case Study of the United Republic of Yemen” (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2001), pp. 430–33.
According to 2004 figures from the Yemeni Ministry of Oil cited in Denes, “Yemen Special Report,” Petroleum Argus, June 27, 2005,” 7.
Their rule extended as far south as the area around the dividing line between the former YAR and PDRY that was drawn up by the British and the Ottomans in 1904. Paul Dresch, A Modern History of Yemen, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 11.
Ahmed A. Saif, A Legislature in Transition: The Yemeni Parliament (Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001), p. 30.
William R. Brown, “The Yemeni Dilemma,” Middle East Journal 17, no. 4, (1963): 357.
Nineteen forty-seven marked the beginning of the “educational emigrants”— a group of several hundred young men (initially the “Famous Forty”) who were sent from their villages to travel abroad to learn about the outside world. This program was rescinded under Imam Ahmed in 1959. See Robert D. Burrowes, “The Famous Forty and Their Companions: North Yemen’s First-Generation Modernists and Educational Emigrants,” Middle East Journal 59, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 81–97.
Sheila Carapico discusses the LDA movement extensively in Chapter 5 of Civil Society in Yemen: The Political Economy of Activism in Modern Arabia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also Burrowes, Yemen Arab Republic, chap. 5. See also Sheila Carapico, “The Political Economy of Self-Help: Development Cooperatives in the Yemen Arab Republic” (PhD diss., State University of New York, 1984).
Burrowes, Historical Dictionary of Yemen, pp. 216–18. Kiren Aziz Chaudhry says that LDA spending between 1973 and 1980 was more than 300 percent government development project spending. Concerned by the overt independence of these organizations, the government combined them into the centralized Confederation of Yemeni Cooperatives in 1978. See “The Price of Wealth: Business and State in Labor Remittance and Oil Economies,” International Organization 43, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 133–34. The LDAs were eventually marginalized through this process. See also Sharon Beatty, Ahmed No’man al-Madhaji, and Renaud Detalle, Yemeni NGOs and Quasi NGOs,
Analysis and Directory. Part 1: Analysis (Sana’a, Republic of Yemen, no publisher listed, May 1996), p. 20.
Michael C Hudson, Arab Politics: The Search for Legitimacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 356.
Ibid., pp. 356–57.
John Ishiyama, “The Sickle and the Minaret: Communist Successor Parties in Yemen and Afghanistan after the Cold War,” Middle East Review of International Affairs 9, no. 1 (March 2005): 10.
Ibid., 11.
Ibid., 14.
Rafiq Latta, Yemen: Unification and Modernisation (London: Gulf Centre for Strategic Studies, 1994), p. 41.
Abdullah al-Faqih, “Yemen Between National Consensus or War,” Yemen Mirror May 18, 2006. Available online at http://www.yemenmirror.com/index.php?action= showDetails&id=19.
Al-Wasat, “Meeting between [the president and] all parties individually,” no. 55, June 8, 2005. Available online at http://www.alwasat-ye.net/modules.php? name=News&file=article&sid=736. For local commentary on the rising levels of Southern anger, see Sami Ghaleb Abdullah, “Internal Developments in Yemen,” in Gulf Year Book, 2005–2006 (Dubai: Gulf Research Center, 2006), pp. 371–78.
Sheila Carapico, “Arabia lncognita: An Invitation to Arabian Peninsula Studies,” in Counter-Narratives: History, Contemporary Society, and Politics in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, ed. Madawi al-Rasheed and Robert Vitalis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 28.
For more on this debate, see Robert Burrowes, “The Republic of Yemen: The Politics of Unification and Civil War, 1989–1995;” in The Middle East Dilemma: The Politics and Economics ofArab Integration, ed. Michael Hudson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 187–213; Stephen Day, “Power-Sharing and Hegemony,” pp. 219–57; Brian Whitaker, “National Unity and Democracy in Yemen: A Marriage of Inconvenience,” in Yemen Today: Crisis and Solutions, ed. E. G. H. Joffe, M. J. Hachemi, and E. W. Watkins (London: Caravel Press, 1997), pp. 21–27; Dresch, Modern History, pp. 187–214; and Joseph Kostiner,
Yemen: The Tortuous Quest for Unity, 1990–94 (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1996).
Kiren Aziz Chaudhry, “The Price of Wealth: Economies and Institutions in the Middle East” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 303.
Sheila Carapico, “How Yemen’s Ruling Party Secured an Electoral Landslide,” Middle East Report Online, May 16, 2003. Available online at http://www.merip.org/mero/mero051603.htm1.
This has been a common summation of the law. See Carapico, Civil Society in Yemen, p. 138 and Abdu H. Sharif, “Weak Institutions and Democracy: The Case of the Yemeni Parliament, 1993–1997,” Middle East Policy 9, no. 1 (2002): 84.
Sheila Carapico argues this consistently. See, for example Carapico, Civil Society in Yemen; Carapico, “How Yemen’s Ruling Party Secured an Electoral Landslide”; Carapico, “Elections and Mass Politics in Yemen,” Middle East Report 23, no. 6 (November-December 1993): 2–7. See also Iris Glosemeyer, “The First Yemeni Parliamentary Elections in 1993. Practising Democracy,” Orient 34, no. 3.
See Ahmed A. Hezam al-Yemeni, The Dynamic of Democratisation-Political Parties in Yemen (Bonn: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2003), p. 81.
Ahmed Abdulkareem Saif, The Yemeni Parliamentary Elections: A Critical Analysis (Dubai: Gulf Research Center, 2004), pp. 29 and 32.
Abd al-Aziz al-Saqqaf, “Sigha yamaniyya jadida li al-dimuqratiyya” [A New Yemeni Formula for Democracy], cited in Nazih Ayubi, Over-Stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East (London; New York: I. B. Tauris, 1995), p. 432. Most observers would disagree with his characterization of Bakil as “the main tribal confederation” and Hashid as “the second:” While Bakil members outnumber Hashid considerably, Hashid has been the more cohesive and influential of the two since the end of the Northern Civil War in 1970.
Holger Albrecht, “The Political Economy of Reform in Yemen: Privatisation, Investment, and the Yemeni Business Climate,” Asien Afrika Lateinamerika 30 (2002): 143.
Jillian Schwedler, “Islam, Democracy and the Yemeni State” (paper presented at the Conference on “Islam, Democracy and the Secular State in the Post-Modern Era,” Georgetown University, April 7, 2001), p. 26.
See interview with the former Yemeni ambassador to the UN Abdallah al-Ashtal, “Eventually there can only be an Arab Solution,” Middle East Report 169 (March-April 1991): 8–10. While advocating an “Arab solution,” Yemen maintained that it was opposed to the invasion of Kuwait. This was widely questioned at the time.
Stephen Day claims that “the YSP could still claim to represent the entire southern half of the country.” Other observers claim, however, that this wasdue more to systematic electoral manipulation by the YSP in the former South during the 1993 elections, than it was to genuine support for the YSP. See Saad al-Deen Ali Talib, who claims: “The YSP was guaranteed no competition from GPC and a free hand in the supervision and execution of the elections in the southern governorates’ fifty-seven constituencies... [the YSP’s] disappointment was the very few constituencies they were able to win in the north, where they were allowed to compete freely.” Saad al-Deen Mi Talib, A Decade of Pluralist Democracy in Yemen: The Yemeni Parliament after Unification (1990–2003) (paper presented at the Second Annual Conference of Parliamentary Program, “Parliamentary Reform in New Democracies,” Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt, July 15–17, 2003).
Fred Halliday, “The Third Inter-Yemeni War and its Consequences,” Asian Affairs 26 (June 1995): 138.
Abdullah M. al-Faqih, “The Struggle for Liberalization and Democratization in Egypt, Jordan and Yemen” (PhD diss., Northeastern University, 2003), p. 220.
Robert D. Burrowes, “Yemen: Political Economy and the Effort Against Terrorism,” in Battling Terrorism in the Horn of Africa, ed. Robert I. Rotberg (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2005), p. 151.
Ibid., pp. 151–52.
Charles Schmitz, “Transnational Yemen: Global Power and Political Identity in Peripheral States,” Arab World Geographer 6, no. 3 (2003): 155.
The number of seats that the GPC won varies slightly between the different reports because of the ambiguous nature of the affiliations of some of the independent candidates. The National Democratic Institution says it won 240 seats, National Democratic Institute For International Affairs, The April 27, 2003 Parliamentary Elections in the Republic of Yemen. Available online at http://www.ndi.org/worldwide/mena/yemen/yemen.asp. The figure of 229 is from the Supreme Commission for Elections and Referendum, The 2003 Parliamentary Elections: Electoral Documents, Results and Records (Sana’a: Supreme Commission for Elections and Referendum, December 2004, in Arabic).
Quoted by Brian Whitaker, “Salih Wins Again,” Middle East International, May 2, 2003. Available online at http://www.al-bab.com/yemen/artic/mei92.htm.
Omar Daair, “He Who Rides the Lion. Authoritarian Rule in a Plural Society: The Republic of Yemen” (MSc diss., University of London, 2001). Available online at http://www.al-bab.com/Yemen/pol/daairl.htm accessed November 11, 2005. Saleh’s “competitor” also used the fight against the use of qat as one of campaign themes, further cementing his detachment from voters.
Lisa Wedeen, “Seeing Like a Citizen, Acting Like a State: Exemplary Events in Unified Yemen,” in Counter-Narratives: History, Contemporary Society, and Politics in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, ed. Madawi al-Rasheed and Robert Vitalis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 257.
Discussions with several electoral observers, in Sana’a between June and September 2004. Lisa Wedeen suggests that only around 30 percent of registered voters actually voted. See Wedeen, “Seeing Like a Citizen,” p. 252. A member of al-Sha’abi’s campaign claims that figures of between 10 and 15 percent were common for his candidate. Interview, Sana’a, June 2004. Of the five governorates (from a total of 20) that officially registered more than 10 percent of the vote for al-Sha’abi, all are in the former South. Supreme Commission for Elections and Referendum, Final Results for the 1999 Presidential Elections, September 23, 1999 (in Arabic). Available from the Commission’s Head Office in Sana’a, Yemen.
Mohammed al-Qadhi, “Will the Opposition Challenge Saleh Next Year?” Yemen Times, June 20, 2005.
European Union Election Observation Mission, Republic of Yemen: Presidential and Local Elections—September 20, 2006, Preliminary Statement, Sana’a, September 21, 2006.
Mohammed al-Kibsi, “Bush: Yemen is a Beacon for Reforms in Middle East,” Yemen Observer, May 29, 2005.
Kevin Whitelaw, “On a Dagger’s Edge,” US News & World Report, March 13, 2006. Available online at http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/060313/13yemen.htm.
This is discussed in greater detail in Phillips, “Foreboding About the Future in Yemen.” See also Andrew McGregor, “Stand-Off in Yemen: The Al-Zindani Case,” Terrorism Focus, Jamestown Foundation 3, no. 9, (March 7, 2006). Available online at http://jamestown.org/terrorism/news/article.php?articleid=2369917.
In one of his bolder declarations, President Saleh said at the conference on Human Rights, Democracy and The International Criminal Court in January 2004, that democracy is a lifeboat for Arab regimes. See Joseph Nasr, “Yemen: Democracy is Life Raft of Arabs,” Jerusalem Post, January 13, 2004.
Dar al-Hayat, “Yemen to be a regional center for democratic dialogue in the region7 December 6, 2004.
Quoted by Brian Whitaker, Yemen Overview 2003–4, 2004. Available online at http://www.al-bab.com/bys/articles/whitaker04.htm.
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© 2008 Sarah Phillips
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Phillips, S. (2008). A Brief History of the Republic of Yemen: Electoral Politics, War, and Political Retraction. In: Yemen’s Democracy Experiment in Regional Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230616486_3
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