One of Yemen’s 3 Insurgencies Flares Up

By ROBERT F. WORTH

BEIRUT, Lebanon — An intermittent rebellion in northwestern Yemen has flared up again in the past 10 days, leaving dozens dead and wounded and adding a new element of instability to a country that is already facing a violent separatist movement in the south and an increasingly bold insurgency by Al Qaeda.

After a series of armed clashes with the military, Shiite rebels led by Abdul-Malik al-Houthi appeared to be in control of several areas of Saada Province, the remote, mountainous area in the north where an insurgency has raged on and off since 2004, witnesses and local officials said. Efforts toward a cease-fire were under way on Sunday and Monday, with no clear result.

Yemen, a poor, arid country in the southern corner of the Arabian peninsula, has gained new attention in recent months from American military officials, who are concerned about Al Qaeda’s efforts to set up a regional base there. Late last month, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top United States commander in the Middle East, visited Yemen and pledged to support its counterterrorism efforts.

The New York Times

The military has clashed with rebels in Saada Province.

Al Qaeda’s growing presence in Yemen — where it took credit for a deadly attack on the American Embassy last year — is especially troubling because the country’s fractious tribes and rugged geography make it notoriously difficult to control.

In recent months, President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has expertly played Yemen’s various tribes and factions against one another for decades, has faced more serious threats to his authority.

In the south, a simmering protest movement has burst into open rebellion, with armed rebels raising the flag of the formerly independent South Yemen. In late July, at least 20 people were killed after demonstrators in southern Abyan Province threatened to break open a local prison where detainees were being held. A series of ambushes by rebel forces has left a number of police officers dead; details are difficult to ascertain because the government has clamped down on news coverage.

As important as the violence has been the defection of some leading political figures. In April, Tareq al-Fadhli, an important ally of Mr. Saleh, joined the southern secessionist movement. Mr. Fadhli is an influential tribal figure who fought with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and helped organize former jihadists to fight against a southern secession movement on Mr. Saleh’s behalf in 1994.

North and south Yemen were unified in 1990 after years of turmoil, but many southerners, including former military officers, say they are treated as second-class citizens. Rising unemployment has fueled the discontent.

Last week, in an interview on Al Jazeera, the Arabic news network, a member of one of Yemen’s most powerful families surprised the country’s political establishment by calling for Mr. Saleh to step down. The man, Hamid al-Ahmar, whose father was one of Mr. Saleh’s most important allies, brazenly said he could speak out against the president — something scarcely anyone dares to do — because his tribal confederation would protect him.

Yemen has long been a haven for jihadists, and the turmoil of recent years — along with a severe crackdown on terrorism in neighboring Saudi Arabia — has led some Qaeda figures to resettle there. Several former Guantánamo detainees fled this year to Yemen from Saudi Arabia and pledged to mount attacks on Saudi Arabia and other countries from their Yemeni redoubt. The Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda has an active propaganda arm and appears to have built relationships with tribes in the Marib region that have helped protect it, analysts say.

Despite the Yemeni government’s periodic claims that all three insurgencies — in the south, the north and by Al Qaeda — are united against it, there is no evidence that they are working together. Still, the convergence is troubling.

“All of these problems are coalescing and exacerbating each other in ways that are not completely knowable at this time,” said Gregory D. Johnsen, a Yemen expert who is currently in the country. “The three crises have combined, along with the economy, to make things look bleaker here than they have in a long time.”

Although Yemen has had some notable successes in fighting jihadists and has built a crack counterterrorism strike force, the government has been hampered by a lack of money and by widespread corruption. The country’s small oil supplies are rapidly disappearing, a water crisis is growing worse and the population of 22 million is swelling.

Yemen has also long suffered from violent tribal feuds, banditry and kidnapping, much of it beyond the control of the central government. In June, nine foreigners were kidnapped while on a picnic in Saada Province, and three soon turned up dead. Six remain unaccounted for: three toddlers and their parents, who are German, and a British engineer.

In that context, the renewed violence in the north — where a truce last summer seemed to have ended the war — bodes ill for Yemen’s stability. The conflict has already left thousands dead in the past five years and produced tens of thousands of refugees. It also has troubling sectarian overtones: the rebels are Zaydis, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, and the government has sometimes used hard-line Sunni tribesmen as proxy warriors.

The media office for Mr. Houthi, the Shiite rebel leader, issued a statement on Friday saying government helicopters were dropping leaflets calling on the people to take up arms against his supporters. The statement called on the government to stop its attacks and to release Houthi supporters being held in prison.

The rebels and the Yemeni military appear to be building up their forces in the area, and some military officials have predicted that if another round of conflict breaks out in Saada, it will be bloodier than any of those in the past.

Baloch Separatists Attack Traders

One person has been killed in an attack in Pakistan's Balochistan province, the latest in a spate of attacks against non-Balochi people in the region.

Police said three others were also injured when a group of rice traders from Punjab province were attacked.

An armed separatist group, the Balochistan Liberation United Front (BLUF), has claimed responsibility.

Officials say nearly 40 people have been killed by Baloch separatists in the province since the start of 2009.

The killings are part of a campaign by armed groups to drive non-Balochi people out of the province, according to officials.

The traders had come from Punjab province to sell rice at a weekly market in Quetta, the capital of Balochistan province, police said.

They were shot near the market on Sunday by assailants on two motorbikes.

Six people have been killed since Friday in similar targeted killings, police said.

After Sunday's attack, police arrested dozens of suspects in overnight raids.

'Political autonomy'

Balochistan accounts for nearly 40% of the country's area but it has less than 10% of its population.

The province is rich in natural resources but has almost no representation in the central bureaucracy or the army, the two groups that have for the most part ruled Pakistan, says the BBC's Ilyas Khan in Islamabad.

As a result, Balochistan remains a province steeped in poverty and with an undeveloped infrastructure, our correspondent says.

Since 2001, armed groups have been conducting a violent campaign to prevent the army from setting up garrisons in the province and to discourage major development projects that they believe would benefit businesses and workers in other provinces.

They have been demanding political autonomy and greater provincial control over their natural resources.

Hundreds of Baloch political activists have been detained in "undeclared custody" and activists claim that a number have been tortured and killed.

Officials say the targeted killings are part of a strategy on the part of these groups to drive non-Balochi settlers out of the province and to discourage people of other provinces from taking up jobs or setting up businesses in Balochistan.

Initially, it was mainly Punjabi's - Pakistan's biggest ethnic group - who were targeted.

But in recent months armed separatists have also targeted ethnic Sindhis and Pashtuns from the North West Frontier Province, police say.

China, Uighur Groups Present Conflicting Accounts of Unrest

By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 25, 2009

BEIJING -- Three weeks after the riots that left nearly 200 people dead and more than 1,700 injured in the capital of the far western Xinjiang region, the Chinese government and Uighur exile groups have been circulating dueling versions of what happened, in an emotional global propaganda war with geopolitical implications.

According to the version of events offered by China's Foreign Ministry and state media, the ethnic unrest that erupted in Urumqi on July 5 was a terrorist attack by Uighur separatists. Women in black Islamic robes stood at street corners giving orders, and at least one handed out clubs, officials said, before Muslim Uighur gangs in 50 locations throughout the city simultaneously began beating Han Chinese.

In the account being circulated by Rebiya Kadeer, a U.S.-based Uighur leader who has emerged as the community's main spokesman, Chinese security forces were responsible for the violence that night. According to Kadeer, police and paramilitary and other troops chased peaceful demonstrators, mostly young people protesting a deadly factory brawl elsewhere, into closed-off areas. Then they turned off streetlights and began shooting indiscriminately.

Clear Details Absent

Chinese authorities have allowed foreign reporters access to the area where the clashes occurred and unusual freedom to conduct interviews, and they have provided evidence verifying the brutal attacks on Han Chinese. But few details are clear, and many witnesses who might be able to answer other questions -- Who set off the initial violence? Why were the police unable to stop the attacks? -- are either in jail or dead.

"The narratives of both the Chinese government and outside observers about what happened are hobbled by the lack of independent, verifiable accounts," said Phelim Kine, a researcher with New York-based Human Rights Watch, which is calling for a U.N. investigation into the incident.

Both sides face huge obstacles in trying to convince the world of their stories.

The Chinese government, after decades of covering up and denying such incidents, has a major trust problem, many analysts say. Chinese officials have said they will release video footage of the attacks, phone records and other evidence to support their view of the events in Urumqi, but have not yet done so.

For Kadeer, a 63-year-old former business mogul from Xinjiang who was exiled in 2005 and now lives in the Washington area, observers say the main challenge is convincing people that she can give an authoritative account of events that happened in a country she has not visited in years. Uighur exile groups have declined to provide information about their sources in China, saying they fear that those people will be arrested or worse if they speak out.

Resentment has been building for years between Han Chinese, who make up 92 percent of China's population and dominate its politics and economy, and Uighurs, who once were the majority in the far west, but whose presence there has shrunk in recent decades because of migration by Han Chinese.

Although the Chinese government says its policies have improved Uighurs' educational and job opportunities, some Uighurs say its goal is to assimilate them at the expense of their language, religion and culture.

In the past, the government has linked Uighur separatism to a group known as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which it characterizes as a terrorist organization and blames for some recent attacks. Some analysts say that China exaggerates the influence of this group.

When it comes to the events of July 5, Dong Guanpeng, director of the Global Journalism Institute at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said he thinks China is being honest this time, but that doubts have been cast on the information it is releasing because Kadeer is "doing a better job than the Chinese government in public relations."

"Of course, Rebiya's statements have won sympathy in foreign countries," Dong said. "They contain beautiful lies."

Kadeer's version of events appears to have gained traction abroad. In Turkey, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has expressed solidarity with China's Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking minority group, and described the riots as "a kind of genocide." Protesters in Tokyo, Washington, Munich and Amsterdam have descended on Chinese embassies and consulates demanding a full account of what happened to Uighurs. A top Iranian cleric condemned China for "horribly" suppressing the community, and al-Qaeda's North African arm vowed to avenge Uighurs' deaths.

Zhan Jiang, a professor of journalism and mass communications at the China Youth University for Political Sciences, contends that the Chinese government inadvertently elevated Kadeer's status and gave her an audience that she does not deserve. Beijing has accused Kadeer of being the "mastermind" behind the clashes in Urumqi, accusations she denies.

"The government should haven't portrayed her as a hero by condemning her. She was unknown at first, and she is a well-known person in the world right now," Zhan said.

Gaps in Both Stories

Meanwhile, China has hit back by assigning some blame to third parties. The Communist Party's People's Daily newspaper said that the United States backed the "separatists" who launched the attacks. It also said that Kadeer's organization received funds from the National Endowment for Democracy, which in turn is funded by the U.S. Congress. Separately, the official China Daily has played up the terrorism angle, saying that the riots were meant to "help" al-Qaeda and were related to the continuing U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.

Some analysts say there are holes in both sides' narratives.

For instance, according to Kadeer's timeline of events, the violence was triggered by police who "under the cover of darkness . . . began to fire" on the protesters. But witnesses have said the rioting began about 8 p.m. Beijing time, when the sun was still up in Urumqi, 1,500 miles west of Beijing.

Chang Chungfu, a specialist in Muslim and Uighur studies at the National Chengchi University in Taiwan, said "the two parties -- the government and Kadeer -- are choosing the parts of the stories that favor their own agendas," in efforts to win foreign sympathy.

He said he considers it "unlikely that a peaceful protest turned into violence against innocent people just because of policemen cracking down," suggesting at least a measure of organization to the Uighurs' attacks on Han Chinese that night.

On the other hand, Chang said, he is skeptical of the government's assertions that Kadeer instigated the attacks because she lacks that kind of power. Furthermore, he said, "the government hasn't released detailed information of those who were killed, such as their ages and identities, so even the number of dead is in doubt."

Li Wei, a terrorism expert at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, which is affiliated with China's national security bureau, dismissed allegations by state media of involvement by outside terrorist groups. "I have not found any proof that points at linkage between the riot and other terrorism groups, including al-Qaeda," he said.

Li did say, however, that he believes Kadeer is in contact with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement.

Rohan Gunaratna, a Singapore-based terrorism expert, blamed some of the tension on Beijing's failure to differentiate "between terrorists who attack and the political activities of separatists."

"If China is too hard on the Uighur people, then support of terrorism will grow," Gunaratna said. "The Chinese government must be hard on terrorists but soft on the Uighur people."

Researchers Liu Liu, Wang Juan and Zhang Jie contributed to this report.