Waiting for a war

by

Siris Hartkorn

It is not often that you find yourself waiting for a war, but these days I do along with the rest of the Yemeni population. We are in a stand off caught in a power game far beyond our control. A game that involves a global and a regional superpower, two families and one tribe. Ourselves, no matter if human rights activist, protesters, Islamists, secessionists or just normal citizens trying to live our lives are nothing but pieces in a puzzle so complex that there is reason to fear it will not be solved anytime soon.

Copyright Melany Markham

A fragmented snapshot

If all actors in Yemen where to freeze in this exact moment and somebody take a snapshot of the country it would look like this: The president and most of the government is out of the country. They are in Saudi Arabia recovering from an inside attack on the presidential palace back in early June, killing seven and wounding 87, including the president himself. In their absence the vice president is officially ruling the country, but without much real power he is exercising a cautious balancing act from his office at the Ministry of Defense, under the protection of Ali Mohsin and 1. Armored Division. Ali Mohsin is an old alley to the president and origins from the same tribe, but turned his back on the president and joined the revolution after the killing of 51 youth protesters in Sana’a on March 18. He has taken half the military with him and Sana’a is currently divided between the checkpoints of 1. Armored Division and the Republican Guard still loyal to Saleh. While loyal to the revolution, Ali Mohsin and his soldiers remains on the payroll of the government, money they spent on giving military training to the peaceful youth protesters. The president’s son, Ahmed Saleh, has moved into the presidential palace from where he together with his cousins continues to exercise the real power – or at least the power the government has left. In the southern province of Abyan militant Islamists are fighting against the military and local tribesmen. The Islamists has seized control over the city Zinjibar and while the soldiers of the 25. Brigade fighting against the Islamists are no longer receiving salaries, most people believe that the Islamists are funded by the government to prove Saleh’s point; that without him as ruler Yemen will be consumed by chaos. USA has launched an extensive drone program in the south, a program which legal fundament remains questionable. North/east of the capital in al Jawf province Houthi rebels from Sa’ada are fighting against local tribes loyal to the opposition party Islah.

Not far from the fighting, at the revolutionary square in Sana’a, Houthis are sitting together with Islah party members, chewing qat and planning the revolution. A tribal alliance consisting of sheikhs from all of Yemen’s powerful tribes have announced that Saleh will not rule Yemen again, as long as they are alive. Yet splits exist within all tribes, especially the president’s own, and loyalty is divided. Just outside the capital in Arhab district the government is bombing local tribes, yet has not managed to defeat them. The government says the tribes of Arhab are trying to take over Sana’a International Airport and the strategically important Sama military base, while the opposition argues that the tribes are fighting to block Republican Guard soldiers from reaching the capital. The bombs can be heard in Sana’a and the airport is frequently closed for flights. Confused yet? Then it might not help to mention the interference from the regional superpower Saudi Arabia or the global, USA. Both remains deeply involved in the conflict, USA driven by a counter terrorism narrative and Saudi Arabia by a combination of concern for national security and domestic legitimacy. It is not in the interest of neither Saudi Arabia nor USA that Saleh returns, yet he is determined to do so. Saleh’s has openly stated his plan for Yemen; to leave the country as it was 33 years ago, when he resumed power, meaning a country fragmented by conflict and lack of a central state. Why would he want that? Would be a reasonable question, and the answer is as absurd as everything else in Yemeni politics; to prove that he, and only he, can rule a country where half the population owns a weapon, tribes are in de facto control most places and where the everyday life of the majority of the population, who remains the poorest in the Arab region, is dictated by a mixture of religion and consumption of the mildly narcotic plant qat. Half the population is illiterate and unemployed. Malnutrition levels are comparable to sub-Saharan countries and the country is running out of water as well as oil, the last making up 75 pct. of the state income. This was the statistics before the crisis started earlier this year, since then there has been an acute shortage in fuel, leading to an increase in prices on basic goods such as water, food, cooking gas and fuel reaching as high as 400 percent on some goods. How the regular Yemeni survives remains a mystery.

This snapshot is not just complex it is also pessimistic leaving little hope for Yemen’s prospect as a united country heading towards democracy and rule of law – the objectives of the youth revolution. Nobody knows what will happen next, but most seem to accept that full blown civil war is a likely scenario. But even with this accepted, the war remain a semi reality. It is not here yet, but it is still affecting our lives. It might never come, but we will only know for sure when it comes. It is a distant circumstance of our lives yet a very real part of our future. So while we are waiting for the war that might, might not, come, maybe tomorrow or maybe in a year, we continue to live our lives. And life in Yemen these day mainly consist of two activities; overcoming practical challenges and gathering in qat sessions discussing politics.

Enemies gather in the mafraj

The practical challenges might seem trivial compared to the bigger picture, yet they take up a lot of time, planning and resources. Take for example an easy task such as having a functional cell phone. There are three main cellphone providers in Yemen; Sabafon, MTN and Yemen Mobile. All three used to have their share of customers, but then the revolution came and with Sabafon owned by a key opposition figure and businessman, it was sabotaged by the government. Having Sabafon you can no longer call landlines or receive international calls. So the customers shifted to MTN, which in turn doesn’t have the capacity for that many active phones, resulting in poor coverage and frequent shut down of the network. That leaves Yemen Mobile. Having been unable to use my MTN phone for a couple of days, I decided to get out and buy a Yemen Mobile phone card. First step was to find a friend with fuel enough to take me to an ATM and then a teleshop. Having found a friend willing to help, next stop was an ATM. Yet my international visa card only works in one ATM in Sana’a and this happens to be a bank owned by the same opposition figure owning Sabafon. For the same reason the bank is short of cash, and to prevent people from withdrawing too much, they frequently turn of the power to the ATM. Simple solution, a lot of headache. It took me three days of going back and forth to the bank, until I finally had luck and managed to withdraw some cash. Right away my friend and I went out to buy the new phone card, only to find out that most teleshops where closed due to power outage. After a two hours search my friend and I found an open teleshop with a generator and I delivered the cash, a copy of my passport and my visa plus fingerprints and got a Yemeni Mobile phone card in return. Problem solved, until I got home and put my new phone card in my phone, only to learn that Yemen Mobile only works on certain phones and mine where not one of them. Next day’s project was then to repeat the procedure, but this time to buy a new phone. A trivial practical matter of getting a new phone card thus took me a week and the procedure would be the same for almost everything. With no electricity, fuel or gas moving around, making a photocopy, getting fresh food, cleaning, doing laundry, making a cup of coffee, checking your email and almost all other daily activities turn from routine to projects.

When not engaged in solving the challenges of everyday life people meet in qat sessions to exchange the latest rumors and discuss political ideas. The growing and transportation of qat demands a lot of water and fuel, yet the price on qat has gone down during the crisis. As most other things this is blamed on the government, not because people are very unsatisfied with the cheap qat, but because qat keeps people calm and thereby prevents the public protests from escalating. Yet qat also serves to keep the political discussions alive and bring together people from fighting fractions. It is not unusual to sit in a qat session where half the mafraj supports the president and the other half the opposition. Discussion can be heated, but after the initial hours of loud exchange of opinions the qat will kick in and bring people into more intimate and low conversations one to one. By the end of a qat session political enemies put their guns back in their belt, grab their flashlight and leave back out in the dark night where the sound of machineguns can be heard in the streets. In qat sessions without competing political interests among the attending the subject of debate will instead be the many rumors surrounding almost every event. In a country where free media has been interpreted as free fantasy depending on the political affiliation of the owners, nobody really trusts any media. Instead information flows through informal networks and personal contacts. In Yemen there is no such thing as one political reality or one truth. It is the rumors that shape peoples life and creates powerful imperatives. And they travel fast. You might hear a certain rumor in a qat session with politically connected and well educated Yemenis, only to hear the same rumor being retold by your illiterate neighbor later the same evening. When presented to a Western audience, most rumors would appear to be nothing but fantasy driven conspiracy theories. Yet in the history of Yemen there is no conspiracy theory unlikely enough to later turn out right. No matter the subject, there is always more to it than the official story which also is the reason, that international media tends to get Yemen wrong.

So is it all black everything? No, it’s neither black nor white. Yemen is neither going to turn into a new Somalia nor a new Saudi Arabia. Yemen needs to be taken for what it is, an ancient civilization with a long tradition of mediating conflict, managing competing power interests and overcoming crisis. A country currently facing the biggest political and financial problems in its history and therefore urgently needs the assistance of the international community, not to fight Al-Qaida, but to feed it’s children. A country so complex that nobody, not even the Yemenis, will ever be able to fully grasp it. And while the future looks everything but bright, we will continue to live our lives – in the vacuum waiting for the war, through the fighting and destruction during a war and in the new reality that will follow a war. Not because it is possible, but because giving up is impossible. And from what we hear, the war might never come.

Siris Hartkorn is currently working as a security consultant and political analyst. She is now permanently based in Yemen but it is her fifth time in Yemen since 2009, the other times she has been there to do research. In the fall she was based in Somalia and Kenya for DDG.

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Flying the flag of freedom: Even the young in Tobruk are swept up in the revolution

by

Justin Marozzi

(Photos Jabril Darwish)

Dr Rida ben Fayed, a Libyan orthopaedic surgeon back from Denver, Colorado, introduces his team like an announcer rallying the audience at a live Hendrix concert.

“We’ve got Ahmed on ground information, Walid on IT, Abdullah on medical supplies, Majdi on press, Ahmed on logistics, Colonel Farah on air defence, Colonel Sanusi on naval affairs…”

Midnight in Tobruk and the daily digital diwan is in full swing. Around 20 men, cross-legged on cushions, are gathered in a ground-floor sitting-room. There’s no one on drums tonight, but that doesn’t mean there’s no music. From a bedroom in Manchester a Libyan girl is singing live online about the Libyan fight for freedom. Smoke, laughter and revolution in the air. Tiny glasses of tea so sweet they remind you why diabetes is endemic in the Arab world. Surfing across satellite news channels.

These men are doctors, engineers, businessmen, human rights activists, military types, many from abroad, others entirely home-grown. Half have laptops. Facebook and Twitter to the fore. The familiar underwater jangle of an incoming Skype call regularly punctuates the hubbub. My neighbour is editing a video cartoon mocking a typical, fist-pumping Gaddafi harangue. Others upload and download photos, coordinate medical supplies, pass on information to colleagues across Libya. A former colonel is planning a dangerous 50-hour mission on a fishing boat to take weapons to opposition forces in the besieged city of Misrata.

“This is our digital operations room,” says Dr Rida with pride. “We’re all volunteers.” He thrusts a laptop and a pair of headphones into my hands. “Here, speak to Perdita in Benghazi. She can tell you what she thinks about all the reporting on al-Qaeda infiltrating the Libyan revolution. Her husband was killed three weeks ago by Gaddafi’s forces. She’s eight months pregnant.”

Perdita’s husband, Mohammed Nabbous, was the 28-year-old founder of Libya al Hurra (Free Libya) television station in Benghazi. He was shot in the head by Gaddafi’s forces on March 19, barely a month after the channel was launched, after transmitting videos and pictures of regime forces suppressing the uprising with indiscriminate brutality.

A young voice cuts through the ether, dignified and precise. How many more women have lost their husbands to the widow-maker since Nabbous’s assassination? Perdita’s first experience of life after Gaddafi, what it could be like in the future, was intoxicating. “When Benghazi was liberated, we started rebuilding our city. We started to live, to be free for the first time in our lives. Women have taken up positions in the media and are looked up to. We are living in a totally different atmosphere. For us to go back to how it was before is impossible.” She says the first time Gaddafi mentioned the al-Qaeda threat in Libya during the uprising, everyone laughed. Libyans are used to the lies of “The Great Thinker”. They have had to listen to them for 41 years, seven months and counting.

There’s fierceness in Perdita’s new-found freedom. Like thousands of her fellow Libyans since February, she has already paid a savage price for this challenge to the regime. “It was my husband’s dream that our son would be born in a free Libya. Now I’m going to do everything in my power to support the revolution and make this dream come true.”

Foreign visitors in eastern Libya, especially those from the UK, US, France and Qatar, receive daily, often exuberant, expressions of gratitude for their countries’ support. Travelling to Libya for more than 20 years, I have always been humbled by the hospitality of its people. In the 19th century, British explorers and campaigners against the Saharan slave trade remarked upon the same trait. I was constantly struck by this self-denying generosity years later, during a 1,500-mile journey by camel across the Libyan Sahara. The only sour note came from Gaddafi’s security thugs, uneducated, intimidating cowards who arrested us for a week in the storied desert oasis of Kufra. My father, who used to do business in Libya in the Eighties and Nineties, died a decade ago after introducing me to this fabulous country. A great Libyan family friend, whose family’s whereabouts and security in Tripoli are unknown as Standpoint goes to press, still calls my mother regularly to ask after my family. This is what Libyans are like.

Dawn in Tobruk. Under a sliding sky we plunge south on the desert road that leads only to Jaghbub, the remote oasis town, once impenetrable to foreigners, that was the former seat of the Sanusi Order. The Sanusi story — compelling, romantic, ultimately tragic — began in the Arabian desert, where in 1837 Sheikh Mohammed ibn Ali as Sanusi, known as the Grand Sanusi, established an Islamic revivalist movement, a fiercely orthodox order of Sufis.

It quickly spread to North Africa and seeped as far west as Senegal, through a network of zawias or religious lodges. The first zawia in Libya was founded at Baida in 1844. In 1856, the Grand Sanusi founded one at Jaghbub. In time it grew into Africa’s second greatest university, after Cairo’s Al Azhar. The Sanusis derived strength, respect and affluence from their role mediating tribal and trade disputes in the Sahara in the days of the desert slave trade, and for providing education for the unschooled masses.

The sun rises, blazes overhead. The road runs across the desert like a pasted ribbon, blurring off in the distance into a pool of steaming mercury. After an hour, a black smudge drifts in and out of sight on this sun-bludgeoned plateau. The tall, triple- barbed-wire fence, a surreally disfiguring structure amid these wide horizons, was constructed in 1931 by General Rodolfo Graziani, despatched by Mussolini to bring Western civilisation to Italy’s “Fourth Shore”. Libyans called him Butcher Graziani. Rome preferred Pacificatore della Libia. This was, in the Italian’s words, “una guerra senza quartiere”. Graziani herded tribesmen into desert concentration camps behind barbed wire and machine guns, poisoned their wells, condemned men to excruciating deaths in roasting salt pans, and dropped canisters of poison gas on to desert oases. Between 40,000 and 70,000 were killed.

Sanusi fighters led the heroic, doomed resistance to the Fascist occupation under their charismatic chief Omar al Mukhtar. He was captured in 1931 and, after a 30-minute show trial, hanged in front of 20,000 tribesmen. Today his face appears on flags, street hoardings and car stickers throughout eastern Libya, a symbol of the post-Gaddafi order. His call to arms: “We will never surrender. Victory or death.” The picture of a handsome old man in profile, with white beard and white skullcap, was taken by Mukhtar’s Italian captors.

Jaghbub is an unremarkable little cluster of concrete houses. Its heart is an extraordinary expanse of rubble laid bare beneath a pitiless sun. Shattered blocks of white stone, smashed slabs of marble, sections of date-palm trunks, ancient nails, rusting spikes of wire. This is all that remains of the great zawia, architectural jewel of the oasis, that Gaddafi razed in 1988. The local preacher, Sheikh Mohammed Sanusi, a follower rather than a family member, says it took bulldozers 11 days to destroy everything within a compound measuring 47,000 square metres. “Then they finished it off with 17 explosives.”

For Gaddafi, the Sanusi name was anathema, forever associated with the benign, if somewhat ineffectual, pro-Western monarchy of King Idris Sanusi, which he overthrew in the military coup of September 1, 1969. He had the body of the Grand Sanusi disinterred and removed to an unknown   location. The sheikh says the body was miraculously preserved.

The interview with Sheikh Mohammed, a trim, slightly stooped figure of 76, begins awkwardly. He reprimands Christians and Jews for their supposed scriptural inconsistency, invites me to read the Koran, convert to Islam and earn my place in paradise. Some traditions live on. When the Egyptian diplomat, explorer and writer Ahmed Hassanein Bey travelled across the Libyan desert during an epic, 2,200-mile journey by camel in 1923, he described the order as “an ascetic confraternity [...] intolerant of any intercourse with Jew, Christian or infidel”.

As Libyans ponder a future without Gaddafi, some wonder whether a constitutional monarchy might yet return, using the widely praised 1951 constitution as some sort of basis for a future settlement. This was the document, drawn up with the UN’s assistance, with which Libya declared independence as a democratic, federal and sovereign nation with a constitutional monarchy and bicameral parliament.

The sheikh shakes his head. “After King Idris, the Sanusi family involvement in politics is over. No more king.” The otherworldly veteran would rather relate famous miracles of the Grand Sanusi and the Prophet Muhammad than discuss the Libyan revolution. “I don’t care about Gaddafi or politics. I am only interested in God.” In Tobruk’s digital diwan, opinions range from an emphatic “No way” to “It’s up to the people to decide”, a line also taken by the exiled, London-based Crown Prince Mohammed Sanusi.

The next day we arrow fast down the coastal road towards Benghazi, headquarters of liberated Libya, along a shoreline that has seen a succession of foreign invaders come and go across the millennia. The Greeks were the first, Herodotus tells us in his swashbuckling masterpiece Histories, when a settlement was founded at Cyrene in 630 BC, following divine instruction from the oracle at Delphi. Berenice, the Benghazi of today, followed four centuries later, around 250 BC.

As Gaddafi has never tired of reminding his countrymen — one of the few things with which they would agree — the history of Libya is a relentless procession of colonial invasions and occupations. After the Greeks came the Romans and the foundation of provincia Tripolitania —province of the three cities of Sabratha, Leptis Magna and Oea (as Romans knew Tripoli) — created by the Emperor Diocletian in 284 AD. Then there were the Arabs who surged across North Africa in the mid-seventh century, whose Islamising influence proved longest lasting of any invader. The firebrands of Islam were succeeded in turn by the stultifying embrace of the Ottomans (1551-1911) and the wretched, blood-filled interlude of the Italians (1911-1943). During the fighting in the Western Desert in the Second World War, the Germans, French and British joined the fray until independence was achieved at last in 1951. After 18 years of monarchy, during which time Libyans of a certain age will tell you there was just one execution, the Gaddafi occupation began.

Canine carcasses line the road at intervals. I count five between Tobruk and Benghazi. Dead dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. Mad Dog and his puppies snarl 800 miles to the west. The road winds through the astonishingly beautiful, verdant landscape of the Jebel Akhdar, the Green Mountains, and at once one understands the invaders’ age-old, land-grabbing appetite, from ancient Greeks to the Italians who saw in Cyrenaica’s fine red soil and fertile fields a Tuscany on African shores. With rolling slopes, slanting cypresses and enchanted orchards and citrus groves, it is hard to imagine that such a gentle environment, with shades of pastoral Italy or carefree Switzerland, could belong to a dictatorship.

Through the city of Derna, piled on to the shoreline like a shipwreck, and the outpouring of roadside graffiti, daubed in English, French and Arabic: “We are freedom addicts not drugs”; “No to extremism”; “Yes to pluralism”; “Libya is a unified country, Tripoli is our capital”; “Our struggle is for democracy”.

At the next town of Baida a banner hangs from a partially burned-out former regime building on the far side of the square: “Tout le monde doit savoir que les insurges Libyens n’appartiennent pas à Al Qaida. Nous nous sommes sacrifiés pour la liberté.” Opposite is an open-sided crimson tent whose sides are covered with photos and stories of the many victims of Gaddafi’s serial outrages, from this latest conflict and the wars he sent Libyans to fight across the continent in exercises in lunatic adventurism. Here are the dead from Chad, Egypt, Algeria, Uganda and the ongoing revolution. Cartoons of Gaddafi strapped to a rocket, as devil-horned, forked-tailed monster. This is the beginning of the long reckoning ahead.

A group of young men Bluetooth me photos of the recent protests in quickfire succession. One plays a mobile-phone video which he says shows Khamis Gaddafi, who runs his own brigade of killers, training African mercenaries. Hapless black recruits approach a table where they are cuffed over the head and forced to eat large chunks of dog flesh. One by one, they grimace, retch and vomit. Then they are shoved across to the back of a truck and made to French-kiss the dogs’ severed heads.

Night-time in Benghazi. City lights twinkle, doubled in the dark waters of Benghazi Lake. Until a few weeks ago it was known as July 23 Lake, in honour of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1952 military coup in Egypt. Soon Libyans may call it February 17 Lake.

Precise details of the post-Gaddafi government to come are yet to emerge, understandable amid the chaos and Twitterfog of war in the west. The quietly spoken Mohammed Fanoush, former director of the National Library in Benghazi, is the local director of communications. He says the National Transitional Council (NTC) is working on a proposal for a new constitution, to be drafted by an elected committee and then submitted to Libyans in a future referendum. No one envisages a five-year government of national unity or anything so protracted.

“I used to be optimistic, even in the darkest days,” Fanoush says. “My brother was hanged in the streets. We were always determined to get rid of Gaddafi but we worried it would take 20 years or more.   Now things are changing immensely, and quickly.”

Underpinning his confidence in the future is a demographic quirk, an unexpected consequence of dictatorship. “Unintentionally, Gaddafi did us a great favour by emptying the country of its people. We have 100,000 intellectuals, professionals and young people who left Libya to live and work all over the world. They have expertise in so many areas and now they’re coming back.” I recall a cigarette break on the road to Benghazi when a Libyan stranger offered to translate for an impromptu conversation with a rebel soldier manning a checkpoint. He was a PhD student studying biology from Sheffield.

To tread the corridors of provisional power in Benghazi is to encounter an inspiring corps of Western-educated doctors and lawyers, engineers, human rights activists, businessmen, former political prisoners. Unlike in Iraq, where fears of the returning diaspora’s venality were all too often justified in displays of brazen klepto-cracy, so far the attitude towards the stream of exiles appears overwhelmingly positive. If revolutions could be won on goodwill alone, this one would have triumphed already.

Dr Abdulkadr al Gnein, a hyperactive Danny DeVito lookalike, returned from Ottawa a year ago, sensing the end of the Gaddafi regime. Nowadays he’s busy helping fund the opposition, setting up a humanitarian NGO, arranging medical supplies and assisting the media.

He says Gaddafi crossed a “red line” with Iman al Obeidi, the law student who burst into the Rixos Hotel in Tripoli and publicly declared she had been gang-raped by Gaddafi’s men. “Women and children are sacred here. This united everyone in Libya against Gaddafi. Every free city in the west accepts the Council is the legitimate government of Libya. We won’t be split.”

The unquestioned chief of the political prisoners, a godfather of the Libyan revolution, is Haj Ahmed Zubair Sanusi, the world’s longest-serving political prisoner. Now 77, he spent 31 years in prison from 1970-2001. His greatest crime was his surname. Libyans may not want another constitutional monarchy, but their respect for the family’s distinguished reputation endures.

We meet in a VIP suite in Al Fadhil Palace, where members of the NTC gather daily. Acres of white sheets on a kingsize bed. A tasselfest of sumptuous soft furnishings. Every bit of furniture in sight is covered in the sparkling decoration so beloved of Arab furniture designers. It is as far removed from his prison cell as possible.

Ahmed Zubair says his death sentence was never commuted during this unfathomable captivity. “Every time a door opened, I never knew if it was going to be someone taking me to my execution,” he says, unbowed in pinstripe suit and tie. The work ahead is immense. “Now we are trying to build a new country under the rule of law. We are united. Tripoli is our capital, Benghazi is our city. It will be difficult after 42 years of Gaddafi. It will take a long time. But the Libyan spirit is there. The people understand. They can wait.” A friend suggests that with his uniquely painful backstory, Haj Ahmed would be the perfect successor to Gaddafi. A Mandela moment in the offing?

Benghazis still smart from the violence meted out by Gaddafi’s forces on March 19, the final catalyst for Nato’s more muscular intervention. Adel Ibrahim, a Benghazi hotelier who owns the Al Fadhil Palace, has a ringside seat at the revolution.

“You know what Gaddafi told the soldiers before they attacked? ‘Kill every man under 50 and the women are yours. Do whatever you want with them’.” He describes a confrontation he witnessed on the streets. “Three men walked up to a machine-gunner with their arms outstretched. The first man said, ‘Shoot me’. The soldier shot him dead. Then the second went up and said the same thing. The soldier shot him in the knees, then the chest. Dead. Then the third man came up, arms open wide. The soldier dropped his gun, turned round and fled.”

At this stage, the al-Qaeda threat appears negligible. Gaddafi poses a far greater menace, both to his people and to the West, whose credibility diminishes with every day he is allowed to remain in power. Noman Benotman, a former senior member of the jihadist Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, says al-Qaeda has no “real presence” and “few, if any, active operatives” in Libya.  Dr George Joffé, Middle East and North Africa expert at Cambridge University, argues that fears of a significant al-Qaeda presence in Libya are “totally” overblown. “I think al-Qaeda has been completely marginalised by the recent upheavals in the region,” says the terrorism expert Peter Bergen, a programme director at the New America Foundation. “No one’s burning American or Israeli flags or carrying placards of Osama bin Laden. Al-Qaeda is losing the battle of ideas in the Muslim world.”

When Gaddafi is gone, it is only a matter of time before the enormity of the crimes his regime committed over four decades is revealed. History’s verdict will not set much store by former Labour Party MP Tam Dalyell’s 1993 prediction: “I believe that in the 21st century, Colonel Gaddafi’s government will come to be seen as one of the most effective ‘ecologically imaginative governments’ of the 20th century.” Nor will it agree with Gaddafi’s delusional braggadocio of 1987: “History should show that if there was any mould, I have contributed towards its destruction. If there has been any shackle binding the Libyan people, I have participated in its demolition until the Libyan people have become free.”

Instead, future historians, less distracted by his eccentricity and sartorial pomp, less seduced by Libya’s black gold, will elevate Gaddafi to the top tier of 20th-century tyrants. His regime vies with Saddam Hussein’s for murderous supremacy.

A new and very different Libya will emerge after Gaddafi. However great the uncertainty, whatever the risks of an east-west split, however vicious the predictable tribal disputes that will follow his departure, the prospect of any future government — or even governments if Libya became two Libyas — being worse than this regime is unthinkable.

The country has the potential to become a model for North Africa and the Middle East, open to the world after its traumatic removal from the community of nations. The foundations for success, which will be a tumultuous test of will, can quickly be discerned. Rich in oil, with a tiny population of seven million, Libya has been blessed by nature with favourable resources, demographics and geography, yet under Gaddafi a third of the population lives at or below the national poverty line. Libyans do not have the devastating Sunni-Shia divide, with the resulting bursts of bloodshed that have plagued Baghdad, City of Peace, ever since it was founded by the Abbasid caliph Mansur in 762. The flow of talented, highly educated Libyans returning from exile could become a stampede.

If the words of politicians in the liberated east of Libya are anything to go by as harbingers of a settlement emerging from the wreckage of Gaddafi’s Libya, the desire for national unity is formidable and the aspiration to build a modern nation sincere. That said, expectations, will be unrealistic and major disappointment is inevitable. Many Libyans isolated from the world since 1969 will equate more democratic governance with full employment and a short path to riches generated from the lake of oil on which the country sits.

At present it produces around 1.6 million barrels a day, though after Gaddafi’s attacks on eastern oil installations and the mass exodus of expatriate workers this has slowed to a trickle. Failure to see quick benefits will destabilise the fledgling state. Any new government will therefore need to communicate to its people a realistic assessment of the many challenges ahead. You do not quickly recover from the scorched-earth abuse that has been the hallmark of the Gaddafi regime. “As for the future, with no formal mechanism in place to ensure a smooth transition of power, the post-Gaddafi era, whenever it occurs, can be expected to be a time of considerable tension and uncertainty, with numerous socio-economic and political groups vying for power,” writes Ronald Bruce St John in his 2008 history, Libya: From Colony to Independence. It is difficult to counter such an argument. Ultimately what will be needed, both to remove Gaddafi in the short term and rebuild the country in the long term, is something Libyans have had to demonstrate for far too long already. A senior army officer taken prisoner in Benghazi, terrified for the lives of his family in Tripoli, puts it in one word: “Patience.”

By complete coincidence, my father bumped into Gaddafi on the day of the military coup in which he dethroned King Idris and seized power. It was a year before I was born. The then 27-year-old army captain eyeballed him and gave a brusque warning to get out of town. “You better leave Tripoli before you get killed,” he shouted. “This is a revolution!”

More than 41 years later, it is immensely moving to see — and share — the delight of the countless brave Libyans whose revolution is bringing this unspeakable regime to an end.

Justin Marozzi is a travel writer, historian, journalist and political risk and security consultant. He has travelled extensively in the Middle East and Muslim world and in recent years has worked in conflict and post-conflict environments such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Darfur. Justin is a regular contributor to a wide range of national and international publications, including the Financial Times, Spectator, Times, Sunday Telegraph, Guardian, Evening Standard, Standpoint and Prospect, where he writes on international affairs, the Muslim world and defence and security issues, and has broadcast for the BBC World Service and Radio Four.

This article have been published in Standpoint Magazine.

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I am writing to you from a long, white sands beach under swaying palm
trees on the south coast of Arabia, in Yemen. The sun is setting over the Arabian Sea in a blaze of orange and gold.  These days my sun also rises in Yemen.  In fact, Yemen has been the place I call home for
most of the last ten years.  I met Mikael here last year and we became
immediate friends; sharing a love of adventure and expanding our
horizons through travel.  It might surprise you to think of some of the world’s most pristine and beautiful beaches in Yemen.  It might also surprise you to know that the country is not a giant sand pit but a mountainous country, incredibly green in the rainy season, with incredible gorges and vistas throughout. So, when Mikael asked if I might write something about Yemen I grabbed paper and pen and headed straight for the beach.  It is here, where the blue waters of the Arabian Sea meet the white beaches and rocky headlands of Arabia that the story of Yemen and its people begin.

Rub Al-Khali - the biggest sand dune desert in the world....

Yemen has often been described by scholars as an ‘island’ surrounded by the Arabian /Indian Ocean to the south, the Red Sea to the west and the vast sands of the Rub al-Khali – the Great Arabian Desert – to the north.  This geographical isolation has kept Yemen apart and misunderstood by the rest of the world since ancient times.  And it has also spurred the people of Yemen to look across seas and sands in search of trade and resources.  The ancient Greeks called this place, ‘Arabia Felix,’ in the mistaken belief that Yemen, and not India and the far east, was the source of spices.  In fact, Yemen was the center of the spice route from the far east and its geographical position allowed for the Kingdom of Saba (reported home of the Queen of Sheba) to benefit from the spice trade through taxes collected on the spice caravans travelling through her land.  Yemen was relatively little known to the outside world until the 1960s, when the secretive and feudal ‘Imam’ or king was overthrown for a republican government.

Yemen has remained little known and misunderstood since the revolution. The recent barrage of international media attention Yemen has received is testament to the world’s lack of understanding regarding this country.  The international media is currently in the habit of calling Yemen a ‘hotbed of terrorism,’ ’the ancestral homeland of Osama Bin Laden,’  (So what???  He wasn’t born here and did not grow up here.) and a place of ‘widespread anti-American sentiment.’  Regarding the Bin Laden issue I pose this to readers.  I am a citizen of the United States and I was born there. Ireland is my ancestral homeland.  If I committed crimes against humanity would the media report anything other than that I was a citizen of the United States?

Yemenis, some of the friendliest and most peaceful people on earth.

Yemen is, in fact, a place of moderate, tolerant Muslims, both Shia and Sunni, and a place where the great majority of the population strive for a better life for themselves and their families and a better future for Yemen.  Yes, there is a small (and I would call it very small) percentage of the population here for whom the words ‘anti-American,’ ‘extremist,’ or even ‘terrorist’ apply.  It would be naive to deny this.  However, I am sure that the world could use a dose of reality right now concerning the real situation of Yemen and her people.

Yemen is a developing nation with many problems, a government struggling to cope with meager and dwindling oil resources and a booming population (up to 3.5% by international estimates), a severe water crises for which there is no easy solution, a severe lack of food security causing 50% or more of the country’s children to suffer from malnutrition and stunted growth and a struggling economy which relys heavily on imported trade and not enough on domestic production.  The literacy rate in the country hovers around 60% for men and women.

Yemen’s isolation has, since ancient times, caused her people to look abroad in search for resources and  trade riches.  The arches over the windows and the doors of buildings in Mukella, the city behind me, bear the unmistakable stamp of the orient, brought back to Yemen by traders who ventured from India to Malaysia over the Indian Ocean.  The people of this country also bear the diverse characteristics of populations from the coast of East Africa, the interior of Arabia and all the way to the far east.  This diverse mix has made Yemen a place of a very unique and distinct culture.  And this diverse mix of people, culture and their history may also  help to explain why the majority of Yemenis are surprisingly tolerant with a love of music,  art and dance all their own as well as a tolerance for and interest in foreigners.

So what does Yemen need now?  The country is facing political instability with a rebellion stirring in the north and an independence movement awakening in the south.  Political support and a degree of military support are welcome and probably necessary at this time.  However, the real need Yemen is facing is in development support and aid to help the nation through this period of economic change and population growth.  What’s needed is real development aid funding government, international and local non-governmental development organizations focusing on education, food security and income generating projects and training - especially for rural areas where 70% of the population live.  A sincere effort at supporting development in this country is the only way we can hope to bring about the stability the nation needs through increased educational standards and outputs, increased access to health care, rising levels of nutritional intake and increased economic production leading to increased income levels for the poor and middle classes.  No amount of military assistance can bring about the development and change that the people of this nation seek and deserve.

Right now Yemen needs to be seen in the right light and needs the right assistance, according to the writer.

Kyle Foster’s Arabian Notes. Regular updates from one of America’s wildest. High Arabian adventure including a few excerpts from his book in progress. fosterarabiannotes.blogspot.com

Eyes That Speak:  Lifting the Veil of Yemen

By Tricia Nellessen

Lifting the veil of Yemen....

The day after Christmas 2009, I was surprised to find dozens of messages on my phone.  How nice, I thought.  People know that I’m home in the U.S. for Christmas.  I’d been away for many months, and I had not yet turned on the television.  I went about my daily routine intending to listen to the messages later.  I sat down in front of the TV and switched on CNN.  Suddenly all of the calls made sense.  Yemen was being discussed on every channel.  One, lone Nigerian man now had my country of temporary residence in the news because he had traveled to Yemen and then attempted to blow up an airliner.

Since then, everyone has become an expert on Yemen.  I watch the news and smile as I imagine producers scurrying to find video footage that will capture the essence of the nation.  Usually this includes the ever-exotic photo of a fully veiled woman with only her eyes peering out from behind the black cloth.  As the images flash across the screen, journalists constantly stumble over names while interviewing experts who seem to have gotten much of their information from Wikipedia.  The facts are basic.  Yemen is the poorest country in the Middle East.  It sits south of Saudi Arabia and has the highest percentage of detainees from any nation housed in Guantanamo Bay.  The gender roles are strictly segregated, and women veil their faces in public.  Al Qaeda is growing in the region.  Oh yes, and Osama Bin Laden’s father was from an area called Hadramawt (which somehow seems to be pronounced Had-ra-mat, as if it were a laundry, on the news).  These are the facts that keep being repeated.  These are the basics, not the humanity.

I was first introduced to Yemen a couple of years ago at 2am after a number of long flights.  I was a thirty-two year old American woman traveling alone.  After years as a journalist, I had returned to graduate school for my doctorate in anthropology.  Yemen was to be my field site and a perfect place for further language training.  As I stepped from the plane, I took a deep breath and wondered what to expect.  I climbed down the steep stairs from the 747 to the tarmac and walked across the pavement through the glass doors lined by soldiers with rifles slung over their shoulders.  The majority of travelers were Yemenis coming home from trips abroad and my exhausted brain tried to comprehend the foreign words I heard.  As I went through customs, the man sitting behind the desk smiled as I spoke to him in Arabic.  “You are here to study?” He asked.  “Yes”, I replied.  “Welcome to Yemen,” he stated in perfect English as he smiled and handed my passport back to me.  I walked through the next set of doors and into what would become one of the favorite times in my life.

Tricia with a young Yemeni girl. One of many fantastic Yemenis she continually comes across and falls in love with.

When I’m asked about Yemen, I struggle to explain the spirit of the people.  How do I say that I wore a burqa because I chose to?  No one would ever think of forcing me to do that there.  How do I explain that Hadramawt is a beautiful, historic area with a library filled with ancient documents and some of the world’s best honey and dates?  How can I explain to those that have never been there that not everyone identifies themselves as Al-Qaeda, and in actuality Yemen is a nation living in poverty and simply struggling to survive.  I’ve traveled around the country and lived with the people, and the only way that I can tell you about Yemen is to tell you of my friends.

I met Noor at a women’s party.  These afternoons lasted for hours and were filled with music, dancing, and lots of conversation.  We would take our black robes and veils off as soon as we entered the house.  Then, the women would drink tea and eat different types of cookies.  It was during one of these parties that I met Noor.  She was a petite woman close to my age.  She smiled sweetly and offered me a seat next to her on the long pillows lying on the floor around a rug in the middle filled with tin trays of food.  Noor only spoke Yemeni Arabic, and we struggled to communicate between her dialect and my American accent.  Still, we became friends.  Once the food was cleared and the music began, Noor pulled me to the middle of the rug.  She was the first woman in Yemen to teach me belly dancing.  We danced for hours and everyone tried to help my American hips learn the foreign rhythms as we laughed the evening away.

After many such gatherings, I finally learned Noor’s story.  We sat drinking sweet Yemeni tea as others danced and I asked her about her family.  She said that she had a daughter and her eyes lit with pride.  I was surprised to learn that her daughter was seventeen years old.  She must have seen my look of confusion, because she quickly explained.  Noor had come from a poor village far outside the city.  Her father arranged her marriage to a neighbor when she was eleven, and a few years later she gave birth to her daughter.  I sipped my sweet tea and digested this information.  I asked her delicately about her husband.  “He’s dead” was the quick reply.  Noor’s face hardened and I knew that the conversation was over.  Months later she told me that he was fifty years old when they were married.  A few years ago, he passed on.  Noor retained his wealth and now remains single.  She is proud and intelligent and amazingly independent.  She moved her family to the capital city of Sana’a and her daughter attends the university there.  Noor even hinted that she might remarry in the future, but this time it would be a man of her choosing.

The window of Yemen, Tricia looking out at life outside her room...

The capital city of Sana’a which hosts the university is a fascinating mix of old and new.  I love walking the streets past the ancient walls of Bab Al-Yemen.  Bab Al-Yemen literally translates to the “door of Yemen”, and indeed it once was truly this.  Two gigantic wooden doors rest eternally open in the middle of a tall stone wall.  The wall used to encompass the entire city of Sana’a, but now it only contains what is lovingly referred to as the Old City.  I have wandered Bab Al-Yemen for hours.  Sometimes I’ve worn the abaya (black robe) and niqab (face veil), and sometimes not.  It really depends on whether or not I want to be noticed as a foreigner.  When fully veiled, I can blend into the crowd.  Why might I not want to be seen as a foreigner?  It is certainly not out of fear, but rather because of all the shouts of “Welcome to Yemen” and “Hello, how are you?”  If I walk the streets as an American, the children run up and scream “soora, soora?” Soora means photo, and the children always want theirs taken.

On the street where I live in Sana’a, the children from the nearby houses run and play in front of my door.  I live on a side street running perpendicular to a main road.  The children of my neighborhood know me well.  When they are out of school, they play marbles and soccer on the cobblestoned alleyway between our buildings.  Mustafa is twelve and is the oldest.  He is respected by the others because of this, and sometimes brings his three year old baby brother out with him.  Mustafa and his brother were orphaned when their parents were killed in a car accident.  His grandfather is raising the boys on a cab driver’s salary.  Ahmed is ten and always full of spunk, ready to play soccer.  He saves bits of change that he finds and sometimes buys me plastic necklaces.  I wear them and he smiles and tells the other boys that I am his wife.  Nabil is ten as well and shares his fireworks with me whenever they have them.  We toss the little caps on the ground and laugh as they pop.  The children’s laughter and shouts are always present outside my door.

Across the street from my house is a café set into a thick mud brick wall.  Its pink, metal doors beckon you in for kabob (fried meat balls) and fool (bean soup).  Ramsey runs the place and is sits by the door to welcome you.  When water became scarce in the countryside, he moved to the city to earn money for his family.  Ramsey is the father of six.  His wife and children still live on the farm, about four hours away.  He works for a month or more before being able to travel the distance to see them.  He doesn’t own a car, and the business needs him in order to stay open.   I always ask him how his family is, and he’ll pull out his cell phone and show me pictures.

"The capital city of Sana’a which hosts the university is a fascinating mix of old and new. I love walking the streets past the ancient walls of Bab Al-Yemen."

So, you see, as the exotic images of Yemen appear on television screens across the world, I can only think of my friends.  There are so many other stories that I could tell which would humanize the stark photos being shown across the world of the tiny little country that no one knew of but that now is in all the headlines.  The scenes the news agencies show are from streets that I have walked dozens of times.  As others see only mysteriously veiled women and foreign landscapes, I see my friends and paths full of memories.  It is true that Al-Qaeda exists in Yemen, but it is also true that the majority of people are simply trying to make a living in a country which was forgotten until this Christmas when one man suddenly brought the spotlight of the world to bear.  Yemen has faced Al-Qaeda attacks for years.  It sits on the brink of civil war as the South threatens to secede once again, and rebels to the north of Sana’a continue to fight the government forces.  Amidst all of this, Yemen is projected to become the first country in the world to suffer a complete lack of groundwater as its aquifers drain and the rains move away from the Arabian Peninsula.  Yemen and its people have been, and will continue to be, facing serious challenges.

I sat in Sana’a sipping tea with Michael a few months ago and he asked me what it was like to be a woman living in Yemen.  I remember telling him tales of my friends and experiences.  Michael understood, as explorers do, that societies are complex and varied.  To truly understand a people, one has to delve beneath the obvious and experience the everyday and mundane.  To me, the veil has yet to be lifted from Yemen in the eyes of the world.  Rather, the information coming out of Yemen from the outside media is vague and unsubstantial because of lack of attention in previous years and the newly escalating security situation with Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.  It is my hope, as days move forward, that a distinction will be made between the people and the destructive elements driving Yemen towards becoming a failed state.

Tricia can be contacted here!

I was woken early today by the muezzin calling for the beginning of the first days fast and I just realized, that I am in a country, maybe on the brink of a civil war, dominated by aggressive hatred from all involved, and every day, the local newspapers are filled with stories about violence, hatred, bitterness and reports about loosely knitted Al Qaeda build ups, external countries interfering and, suddenly, I remembered all the local people I have come across lately, from the poorest to the powerful, who believe in this upcoming Expedition and vision and who will do their best to help me pass through Yemen.

This piece was initially written a year ago in Yemen, but, unfortunately still stands like a fact of life, still today in October 2010, well it has been going on since early 2006:

I am in Yemen at the moment studying Arabic and I am also trying to understand Islam and the Arab world better, not only as preparation for life, but also for the preparation of the Big Expedition! It is slowly coming to life…..

Why have I than created another blog? Well, as you understand of the title of this report, it has to do with hate.

Ramadan has arrived to the Arab world and Yemen and I wouldn´t like to be at any other place at the moment. It is an exiting time when Moslem’s rejoice in a festive mood interlinked with spirituality. I was woken early today by the muezzin calling for the beginning of the first days fast and I just realized, that I am in a country, maybe on the brink of a civil war, dominated by aggressive hatred from all involved, and every day, the local newspapers are filled with stories about violence, hatred, bitterness and reports about loosely knitted Al Qaeda build ups, external countries interfering and, suddenly, I remembered all the local people I have come across lately, from the poorest to the powerful, who believe in this upcoming Expedition and vision and who will do their best to help me pass through Yemen. And they all say that they are inspired by what I want to do and it makes them think good and they see a future. They see hope. So, this morning, as a kind of revelation, I woke with the muezzin and realized that I have, the last two and a half years of my life; I have been dominated by one person’s hatred and only wish in life, to destroy every hope I have to do good things in life. To make a difference. To inspire and educate in the overwhelmingly good things in life.

Every time I have written something on my blog, this person have phoned, written or personally visited most people I have described or written about, telling them all about all mistakes I have done in life, what an awful and evil human being I am. This person has even written to newspapers all over the world to inform them about my evil side. It has caused me an enormous amount of worries, loss of work and damaged reputation and at times I have been so scared stiff of this persons hatred, bitterness and stalking that I have been paralyzed. It has been very difficult to do my job. But, suddenly I realized this past night, if I am going to help to inspire people who are really suffering, well, than I can’t hide away like a sissy and let one single person ruin my life. So my life in hiding just ended a few hours ago.

So, if you, or anyone, get mentioned in any of my blogs, you might be harassed with a call or email from the messenger of hate and bitterness. Please tell me if. It will help me continue to live a dream and at the end of it all, make a world easier to understand!

Why hate when life is so short, instead of living and love?