by Theo Padnos
On afternoons like this, all business in the newsroom stopped. Clouds of airport duty-free perfume lay over the computers. The visitors murmured politely to each other as the graphic designers escorted them through images of Yemeni mountains and islands. It was nice to have the attention but it seemed strange to have so many big shots so focused on such trivia. One would have thought that big shots would have been interested in the news. In fact, they handed the copies of the newspapers we gave them to their guards or deposited their copies on messy countertops when no one was looking. They coveted only the tourist magazine. Why?
11
I HAD BEEN working at the newspaper for about five months when an insurrection broke out in the streets. The ostensible cause was that the president, following suggestions from the World Bank, had ordered the lifting of a fuel subsidy. There had been rumours that he would do this and then one day, quite suddenly, he did. Overnight, petrol prices rose by a third. The next morning, citizens armed with shovels and with lengths of steel rods pulled from construction sites poured on to the boulevards. They tipped over police cars and littered the streets with flaming tyres. The better-armed citizens shot out the windows of the oil ministry. As chaos spread out of the capital, Yemen held its breath for two days. Then the president’s son’s Republican Guard, an elite troop that trains in the mountains above Sana’a, was called in. Tanks rolled down the streets. Helicopter gunships hovered over the dirtier neighbourhoods. A peace that felt – and continues to feel – rather temporary descended on Sana’a.
When calm had been restored, Faris called me into his office. He wanted our forthcoming editorial to suggest that the disturbances had been the work of directionless teenagers. I mentioned that they had looked like normal citizens to me – not just teenage ones or poor ones, but the inhabitants of the city – grocery store workers, clerks, neighbours, bus drivers. ‘No, they were teenagers,’ he said. They had been out for a thrill. ‘Write that.’ I wrote that. ‘Say that complete order has been restored.’ I wrote that order had been restored to the streets. ‘Say that Iran has been known to stir up trouble in Yemen.’ I wrote, ‘Iran has been known to stir up trouble in the Arabian peninsula.’
But as I was writing, a frightening possibility lingered in the streets. It was that there had been a religious element to the violence, that it had been hatched in the mosques of the people (not by foreign agents) and loosed at an auspicious moment by local religious figures. The further possibility which seemed, at least, worth enquiring into was that the people had lived for a little too long under their petrol-obsessed ex-tank-commander-turned-president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and were interested now in a new dispensation. We didn’t know much about the motivations of the rioters because we didn’t interview them. But, even without interviews, it didn’t require much imagination to suppose that under a new dispensation, the old tank commander would find his way into a spider hole somewhere and from there to a gallows, a chopping block, or the bloodstained wall at the back of a prison yard.
Now that tanks were in the streets, the newspaper went into shutdown mode. Faris saw to it that the reporters filled the paper with the news that fills other Arab papers: the president’s five-year plan for agriculture, the arrival of a delegation of ministers from Malaysia. The reporters wrote straight from the scripts supplied by Saba News, Yemen’s bedraggled Minitruth. They never left the office. Neither did the photographer. Why should he? He had been prohibited from photographing.
In the privacy of his office, I asked Faris if he thought there had really been an organising force behind the violence. He shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t know.
‘How deep is the frustration?’ I asked. He waved off the question.
‘Not deep,’ he said. He looked out the window: ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. After that conversation it was clear to me that whatever was occurring out in the streets, he didn’t want to know. My job that summer was to photograph a French beekeeper as he ambled across the beaches of a Yemeni island. Above all, Faris wanted to know, and wanted everyone else to know, that there was delicious honey to be eaten in Yemen.
Now, in the wake of the violence, a new theory concerning the workings of our paper occurred to me: Faris, the counsellor, exercised control over the office grounds, when he wanted to, and over his employees. Outside of this, he didn’t control much. Neither were the VIPs from the palace particularly in control. That’s what the retinues of armed guards were for. Faris – or really the office of the president – was paying $80,000 a month to publish the Observer because the president and his aides wanted to see pretty pictures more than they wanted to see reality. The president loved illusions. And bling. So did the apparatchiks.
I had thought that $80,000 a month was a kingly sum for a nation of street children and qat addicts. But it wasn’t really. The office of the president made few domestic investments and drew profits on 350,000 barrels of oil a day. In that sphere, $80,000 a month was petty cash.
As for my role: I had been assigned to tourist articles because they actually were important. The tourists were proxies for the Western embassies and the oil companies. Just like the tourists, who wandered about, being welcomed into humble dwellings, drinking tea and scattering their money across the landscape, the other foreign guests in Yemen (that is, the oil companies and the diplomats) were expected to behave. Were the tourists sometimes kidnapped? Yes, they were. The embassies and oil companies were to take the appropriate cue. We can do this the nice way or the brutal way, my articles had said, between the lines, though I had been too naïve to guess. The Yemeni government officers much preferred to divorce Westerners from their money by means of a show: the magical kingdom, the pliant natives, the cascading waterfalls, and the admiring tourists. That’s what the cabinet officers came to the newspaper to see, and when they did see it, they smiled and afterwards filled their mouths with qat. In the end, the qat and the tourist articles accomplished the same thing: they offered soothing illusions – in other words, lies.
It seemed to me that there might also have been a purpose behind the rudderless management style, which was not at all an uncommon technique in Yemen. As long as the employees were squabbling among themselves over who was in control, nobody was in control. With no one in control, the squabbles worsened into rivalries and the rivalries hardened into factions. As long as the factions disliked each other, they were not uniting to demand higher wages, education and opportunities for career advancement. They made no such demands.
As I was putting the pieces of the newspaper puzzle together, I thought a lot, during my workdays, about Zaid, and the other reporters who had welcomed me to the newspaper. Their lot was to be frustrated. They couldn’t marry because they didn’t have enough money, and had difficulty advancing as journalists because they had had only inadequate, on-the-job training.
They lived in a state of state of sexual, financial and professional blockage.
But this system worked. As long as the blockages were relieved intermittently – and they were – the journalists remained hopeful. As long as they were hopeful, they were easy to control. They were exceptionally easy to control.
12
BEFORE I MOVED into the mosque dorm, I lived on the sixth floor of a tower house in the old city of Sana’a. In the early mornings, a gritty hot wind picked up and banged against the windowpanes. It blew all day, flinging a fine red silt, like tennis court clay, against the glass. In the summer, when the monsoon rains came to Sana’a, the wind had real destructive power. By midday plastic bags and little bits of hay and sweet wrapper were being carried aloft by updraughts. They swirled round outside my sixth floor windows, then drifted away, over the tops of the other tower houses. In the late afternoon, heavy globules of rain like pebbles began to pelt the windows.
But the wind was strange. Often in the monsoon season, it would rage at midday, promising a typhoon-like deluge, and then subside in the afternoon into a soft gentle wind that the locals called a nasseem – a cat’s paw. For
the rest of the day, the doors and windows of the tower houses would tinkle in a gentle, musical way as if they had been made rickety on purpose to murmur to the inhabitants.
In Sana’a, the wind had worn its way into the habits of the people. You could see it in the black acrylic gowns of the women and the silken shawls the men wore around their shoulders. Everyone loved breeze-responsive material. The wind also turned up in the poetry, in tall tales, and in the songs of the oud player, Abdul Rahman al-Akhfash.
A week after the riots, I rode my bike out to a village on the outskirts of Sana’a to confer with the newspaper’s oldest reporter, Muhammad al-Kibsi. He had a veteran reporter’s intuition about the direction of public events, and was a subtle interpreter of all those things in the local landscape, like the mood of the crowds and changing winds, that confounded me. I was hoping that Muhammad would help me understand more about the violence that had recently swept through the streets of the capital. What was really behind this anger, I wanted to know, and was he at all worried about what would come next? The riots had made me believe that the citizenry was concealing a dangerous outrage beneath its solemn, pious outward aspect. What, I wanted to know, were the people really feeling?
At first, Muhammad spoke to me about the news business as it had been in Yemen when he was a young man. Back then, in the early sixties, the Imam of Sana’a had been the country’s spiritual and temporal ruler. His news had been boring but it had been honest. Every few months he met a foreign leader. Several days after the colloquy, he issued a statement to the effect that there had been a colloquy and that it had been productive. To be a newsman in this environment was to be like a messenger working on behalf of the king. There was a status and a dignity attached to delivering pronouncements. Furthermore, a new awareness of modern statehood and nationalism was rising throughout the Arab world. To serve the imam had been to participate in the Yemeni awakening of these sentiments.
At that time, news from the outside world was not a big factor in the job of a Yemeni journalist. Regular flights to Yemen didn’t begin until the 1970s. Until then, working in the Yemeni media had been like working in the last telegraph station in the longest, most distant telegraph line in the Arab world. The bulletins came at irregular intervals, and described a world so far away, in which so few Yemenis held a stake, that few people actually understood – or cared, for that matter, to read – the bulletins.
Back then, Muhammad said, when Yemenis wanted direct information about the world around them, they went to their imams, whom they trusted to have a comprehensive knowledge of the Koran and the hadith. This was where practical news you could use was to be found.
Nowadays, with 300,000 barrels of oil being pumped from the Yemeni ground, day in and day out, plus terrorism, plus nascent democracy, there was news everywhere. There were press conferences, speeches, bulletins from the Saba News agency, and events that were not quite news and not quite advertisements staged by the cellphone companies and car dealerships. A veritable storm of news swirled over Sana’a all day and all night. It huffed and puffed but one thing it did not do, Muhammad felt, was supply the people of the nation with information about changes in the world around them. Where did the oil money go? How much of the national wealth was being spent on weapons? Why exactly were the Shia in the north being bombed and how many of them had been killed to date? No one knew the answers to these questions, nor was anyone going to know, because when the news mattered, the office of the president preferred to keep it secret. The task of the journalist at that point, like that of the citizen, was to shut up.
There was almost no light at all left in the room by the time I got around to asking Muhammad about the riots. Soon there would be none, because the electricity had been cut: a consequence of too much demand, and too little government capacity to plan, build and pay. In other words, to govern.
‘Nobody knows how widespread that violence really was, right?’ I asked. ‘Or exactly how many people died.’ Some reports had said eighteen people had been killed across the country, but reports tended to pull random figures from the air. I wondered what the real number was.
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Only God knows.’
‘And does anybody really know whether this violence was organised? And if it was organised, by whom? And how and to what end?’
‘How would we know?’ he said.
‘Good point,’ I said. ‘We’d have to trust the newspapers for that sort of thing.’
A boy (a servant? a son?) brought a candle. Muhammad lit it and nibbled at his qat. There wasn’t much more to talk about after that. I had my iPod with me. In Yemen, the iPod is still a miraculous invention. Yemenis are delighted by how clear the sound is, and how much musical junk it can hold. I plugged the headphones into his ears and turned on the worried lament about the man, alone in his mountain house, whose door was being battered by the Sana’ani wind.
Every time the wind knocks at my door, it tells me that my lover has come. But the wind and the door are liars, liars. They have come to test me, to test me.
I had heard the song hundreds of times by then and had understood little but that afternoon, for the first time, the lyrics produced a picture I could read. The man in the song was at his wits’ end. The lover he was waiting for wasn’t coming. But why not? Did she have another man? Had wagging tongues lied to her about him? Maybe she had forgotten that he was alone and waiting for him. But that couldn’t be. She loved him. Did she not? Why was the wind making such an incredible racket at his windows?
The religious term for this state of internal division and self-doubt is ‘fitna’. In the presence of fitna, Muslims, it is thought, become befuddled, and their commitment to the Straight Path disintegrates. Satan takes the upper hand.
Towards the end of the song, the singer concludes that wind itself is made of lies: ‘the air around me, you are fitna,’ he sings, ‘and life is a lie into which one falls.’
The meaning of the song, Muhammad said softly as he took the iPod headphones from his ears, is that this is how we live now. The public side of life in Yemen, in his view, was a whirlwind of lies. We don’t trust one another. We have no one to trust. The nation was now a collection of mutually suspicious individuals who lied to one another and were lied to by their government. In such an environment, he felt, there wasn’t much left for someone to whom faith mattered. You could lie in Yemen nowadays and you could be paid for this but one thing you could not do, he felt, was trust.
Now he wanted to move to America. He believed that the job of journalists in America also involved lying but at least they were well compensated, drove expensive cars, and travelled the world. Some time in the future, perhaps soon, he hoped to apply for a Green Card.
13
A WEEK LATER, on returning from a lunch with European journalists, Faris summoned me to his office.
He picked up a telephone. ‘Two coffees, quickly,’ he said in Arabic.
When the servant woman had come and gone, he lowered his eyes to me. He spoke in a solemn voice in English. ‘I’d like you to write a letter for me.’
‘Okay,’ I said.
‘Now, I want you to be in the picture.’
‘Okay,’ I said. The picture was that the chancellor of Germany was arriving by plane that afternoon at the Sana’a International Airport. We were going to meet him. When we got there, we would deliver a letter to him.
‘Now, just because you’re in the picture, this doesn’t mean that anybody else is, right?’
‘Right,’ I said. It was a rare privilege to be invited into the picture in Yemen. From a distance, decisions often seemed random, or counter-productive, and to try to understand was to stare at a collage of seeming facts and shadows. Now I was going to be in the picture.
‘What we’re trying to do here,’ Faris said, ‘what we’re going to be doing is asking for some equipment.’
‘Okay,’ I said.
‘Why don’t you write this: “Dear Gerhard.”’
‘Dear Gerhard,’ I wrote.
Faris continued: ‘“As you know, we – Yemen – our government of Yemen …”’ He paused. ‘No. “The government of Yemen has, over the past five years …”’ He stopped again. ‘No, “My government of Yemen has, over the …” no – make that ten, “for ten years been a big partner in the war on terrorism.”’
He stopped. I rewrote his line a bit and read it back to him. He focused on it. His brow furrowed. ‘Okay, good. But now … I don’t know,’ he said. ‘What next?’
This was where my job kicked in. It wasn’t such a hard job, really. It involved a few sentences in plain English, plus typing. It was the sort of job that ought to have gone to the foreign ministry but the president didn’t trust it. Or he did trust it, but not all the time. No one knew.
The situation was this: the Yemeni president, Saleh, needed the German chancellor, Schroder, to facilitate the sale of a batch of high tech eavesdropping equipment. Religious extremists out in the Yemeni deserts were ramping up their operations. How could he fight the war on terror with RadioShack walkie-talkies? He couldn’t. The Republic of Yemen needed a certain kind of high grade sonic hardware manufactured in Germany. The Yemenis would pay. But they needed the red tape on sales of this equipment to go away. In a hurry. A letter to this effect had to be drafted. Now.
Write. You’re in the picture now?’
I nodded.
‘Write something. Anything. You got the idea?’
I nodded. ‘Go ahead then and write.’
I listed instances of progress Yemen had made in the war on terror: no major attacks in Yemen since the one on the USS Cole in 2000. Terrorist cells had been disrupted. Kidnappings had been almost eliminated. Then I wrote:
