In Yemen’s South, Protests Could Cause More Instability

By ROBERT F. WORTH

ADEN, Yemen — Less than an hour’s drive outside this dilapidated port town, the Yemeni government’s authority is scarcely visible, and a different flag appears, that of the old independent state of South Yemen.

The flags are one sign of a rapidly spreading protest movement across the south that now threatens to turn into a violent insurgency if its demands are not met. That could further destabilize Yemen, already the poorest and one of the most troubled countries in the Arab world, and create a broader haven for Al Qaeda here.

The movement’s leaders say the Yemeni government — based in the north — has systematically discriminated against the south, expropriating land, expelling southerners from their jobs and starving them of public money. They speak with deep nostalgia of the 128-year British occupation in South Yemen, saying the British, who withdrew in 1967, fostered the rule of law, tolerance and prosperity. The north, they say, respects only the gun.

In recent months, calls for secession have grown louder after a harsh government crackdown on demonstrations and opposition newspapers. The movement’s leaders say that they believe in peaceful protest, but that their ability to control younger and more violent supporters is fraying.

“It is too late for half measures or reforms,” said Zahra Saleh Abdullah, one of the few Southern Movement leaders who agreed to be identified in print. “We demand an independent southern republic, and we have the right to defend ourselves if they continue to kill us and imprison us.”

Another movement leader, sitting across the room, held up a coin minted under the British in 1964 and pointed to the words engraved on it: South Arabia.

“This is our true identity, not Yemen,” he said. “A southern republic or death.”

Public outrage swelled last month after Yemeni security forces laid siege to the house of a prominent newspaper editor in Aden, setting off a barrage of rocket-propelled grenades and gunfire as the editor and his young children cowered inside. (The government said he was stockpiling weapons.) They were not injured, but the clash left at least one of the family’s guards dead and others wounded, fueling more demonstrations. All told, more than 100 people have been killed in clashes with the police since the movement began in 2007, its leaders say, and about 1,500 supporters remain in prison.

In some rural areas of South Yemen, police officers refuse to wear their uniforms for fear of being shot, according to several accounts from local residents.

The Yemeni government has largely dismissed the movement as a small band of malcontents and has repeatedly accused its leaders of being affiliated with Al Qaeda.

The movement’s leaders call that an outrageous perversion of the truth: they say that they stand for law, tolerance and democracy, and that it is the north that has a history of using jihadists as proxy warriors. But some human rights workers say a shared hatred of the government could be creating a sense of unity between some members of the movement — which is broad and very loosely organized — and members of Al Qaeda.

Perhaps a greater danger, some say, is the spread of lawlessness across the south if the movement’s demands for greater equity are not addressed and it grows more violent. The movement’s own internal contradictions also pose a real threat.

“There is no clear leadership, everyone wants to be the boss,” said Afra Khaled Hariri, a lawyer here who has represented arrested members of the movement. The movement’s leaders include socialists and Islamists with wildly different goals and unresolved disputes dating to internal conflicts between socialist factions that left thousands of southerners dead during the 1980s.

“If the movement succeeds in making a separate state, I expect disaster because of our bloody past,” Ms. Hariri said. And Aden — the heart of the British protectorate and the base of the south’s intelligentsia — would be the chief victim, she added.

For that reason, some in the south say, the best solution is not secession, but a political accommodation in which the north agrees to address some of the movement’s main grievances about land expropriation and job discrimination. Many also say that moving away from Yemen’s highly centralized system of government and granting the provinces more power to govern themselves would ease tensions.

So far the government has shown little sign it intends to do that.

Behind the Southern Movement’s protests is an old belief that North and South Yemen are fundamentally different societies, and that their unification — achieved with great fanfare on both sides in 1990 — has been a failure.

The differences are apparent even to a first-time visitor. Aden has churches, parks, a smaller model of Big Ben and a stately garden where a statue of Queen Victoria presides. The roads, though a little faded, are generally better than those in the north. It is a commonplace that people respect red lights and driving lanes here, unlike in the north.

The people of the south are generally better educated, a legacy not only of the British but of the Socialist government that ruled here during the 1970s. Although they shattered the economy and suppressed their opponents brutally, the Socialists also put an end to harmful tribal practices like child marriage, championed women’s equality and achieved some of the highest literacy rates in the Arab world.

All those achievements have since collapsed: literacy and education have dropped precipitously across the south, child marriage has returned and lawlessness prevails.

Many here blame the north for all that. A brief civil war broke out in 1994, during which the north used jihadists who had fought in Afghanistan as proxy fighters.

“They want to push us into backwardness so we are like them,” said Ali Abdo, a professor of transportation engineering at Aden University and a member of a party that supports decentralization but not secession. “Aden was tolerant: there were Jews, Christians, Muslims all living together here. The North is not.”

The Southern Movement began in 2007 with protests led by former military officers who said they had been mistreated and denied pensions after the 1994 civil war. Gradually, it has grown to encompass other groups. Last year, it received a large boost when Tareq al-Fadhli, a former Afghan jihadist and ally of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, defected to the movement.

The movement now includes a substantial body of powerful tribal figures as well as Aden-based intellectuals and political figures. There is a 42-member leadership committee, though it is not clear how many of the movement’s supporters it represents. Most supporters seem to acknowledge Ali Salim al-Bidh, the exiled former president of South Yemen, as their leader. Mr. Bidh emerged from years of silence recently and began actively advocating southern independence.

The movement has its own songs, which can be heard blasting from the open windows of cars in southern towns. “We swear to God, we will not put up with this corrupt dictator and his gang, even if the whole sky erupts in fire,” goes one song by Aboud Khawaja, a singer now based in Qatar.

This month, a 27-year-old man named Faris Tamah was arrested near Aden while playing that song from his car stereo, and he was later shot to death in prison after being tortured, said several movement supporters who know his family and say they saw a medical report. Yemen’s government-run newspapers later ran an article saying that Mr. Tamah was arrested for drunken driving and committed suicide in custody by grabbing an officer’s gun and shooting himself. “The movement began with demands, but they were refused and the pressure grew,” Professor Abdo said. “Now, the movement is in every house in the south.”

U.S. Diplomat Urges Revised Sudan Policy

By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 31, 2009

President Obama's top Sudan envoy said Thursday that there was no basis for keeping Sudan on the U.S. list of states that sponsor terrorism and that it was only a matter of time before the United States would have to "unwind" economic sanctions against the Khartoum government.

Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Scott Gration's remarks before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee represented the most forceful critique yet by a U.S. official of the long-standing American effort to put economic and political pressure on Sudan's Islamic government. Sudan, which has harbored members of al-Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden, was designated a terrorism sponsor in 1993.

Gration's comments Thursday raised concerns among activists and Sudan's critics in Congress that the administration is offering to reward Sudan without securing assurances that the government will take steps to end conflict in the Darfur region and in the south.

The president's national security advisers have been locked in dispute over the right mix of rewards and penalties to persuade the Khartoum government to pursue peace in those regions. Susan E. Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has been pressing for a tougher approach, citing Khartoum's history of violating agreements.

The interagency feud became public last month, when Gration told reporters that Sudan's government was no longer engaging in a "coordinated" campaign of mass murder against Darfurian civilians. Two days earlier, Rice had said that Sudan was engaged in a campaign of genocide in Darfur.

"There is a significant difference between what happened in 2003, which we characterized as genocide, and what is happening today," Gration said Thursday.

Gration came under fire from human rights activists, who accused him of saying too little to the committee about the brutality of the Sudanese government, whose leader, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, stands accused of war crimes in Darfur.

Also Thursday, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, in partnership with Google Earth, released a State Department analysis of U.S. satellite imagery showing that more than 3,300 Darfurian villages were damaged or destroyed between 2003 and 2005, more than twice previous estimates. The images also showed that most of the destruction in Darfur occurred before 2006, with only a small number of villages apparently destroyed since then.

Gration told the Senate committee that the administration would "roll out" a new, comprehensive strategy on Darfur in the next few weeks that would include "both incentives and pressure" for Khartoum. The administration's priorities, he said, include negotiating a durable political solution in Darfur and averting a collapse of a U.S.-brokered 2005 peace accord ending a war between Khartoum and southern-backed rebels.

But Gration hinted at the tensions over strategy, noting that the State Department had rejected a proposal to fund more U.S. diplomats or private contractors to help support American mediation efforts in Sudan. He said he would raise the issue at a higher level.

Gration said U.S. economic sanctions had undermined American efforts to help implement the 2005 accord, barring the delivery of heavy equipment needed for road and rail projects in southern Sudan. He said the provision of such assistance would be vital in ensuring that southerners can establish a viable government if, as expected, they vote to secede from Sudan in a 2011 referendum.

"We're going to have to unwind some of these sanctions so that we can do the very things we need to do to ensure a peaceful transition to a state that is viable in the south, if they choose to do that," he said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/30/AR2009073004123.html