What’s going on in Yemen: Is it just men wearing daggers as symbol of manhood?
Posted by: adonis49 on: March 20, 2011
There is mass uprising in Yemen; it has been going on for over a month now. The upheaval has reached every city and town. A couple of days ago, 52 Yemenite citizens were shot to death in the Capital Sanaa. The President dictator for three decades, Ali Abdullah Saleh, declared a day of mourning for this Sunday!
The people do not care was this President wishes or wants. Today, the people have said: “Enough is enough”. Ministers and ambassadors are resigning in protests. The President decided to fire his government. The army is taking over the security of peaceful demonstrations. Hundreds of generals and officers have joined the people.
On November 6, 2009, I published a post “There is a devastating civil war in Yemen: Is it of any concern to the UN?”. The post is very current and I am republishing it with minor editing.
The UN did it again! Civil wars in non oil-producing Arab States are left to run its natural steam until the State is bankrupt and ready to be picked up at salvage price. The UN tends to get busy for years in collateral world problems when civil wars strike Arab States.
Occasionally, the UN demonstrates lukewarm attempts for a resolution in oil-producing States as long as it is under control. Lebanon experienced 17 years of civil war. Morocco still has a civil war in south Sahara for three decades. Sudan has been suffering of a rampant civil war for four decades. Algeria is experiencing a resurgence of a devastating civil war that started in 1990 because Europe refused to accept a democratically elected Islamic majority in the parliament. Iraq was totally neglected while Saddam Hussein was decimating the Shiaas and Kurds in Iraq for three decades.
Even after the US coalition forced the Iraqi troops out of Kuwait, the UN instituted an embargo that killed 2 million Iraqi babies for lack of milk and needed medicines. Somalia never got out of its miseries for four decades so far. Mauritania is rope jumping from one military coup to another. The other Arab States are in constant low-level civil wars overshadowed by dictators, one party, oligarchic, and absolute monarchic regimes.
A week ago, a few trucks were allowed to cross Saudi borders carrying tents and necessary medicines to stem generalized diseases where hundred thousands of Yemeni refugees huddled in refugee camps on the high plateau of North-West Yemen, by the borders with Saudi Arabia that closed its borders and chased out any “infiltration” of refugees.
The most disheartening feeling is that you don’t see field reporting of this civil war by the western media. The written accounts are from second-hand sources and decades old. They abridge the problem by stating it is a tribal matter. They feel comfortable blaming Iran; and you wonder: “how this land-locked region in North-West Yemen can be supplied by Iran?” Blaming Iran for every social uprising in the Gulf States needs to be clarified.
The western media is easily convinced that Al Qaeda moved from Saudi Arabia and was ordered to infiltrate the Somali refugee camps in South Yemen. Question: How Sunni Moslem Al Qaeda members got to be located in a region of North West Yemen with Shiaa Yazdi population? Is that question totally irrelevant?
The population of North-West Yemen forms the third of the total; the “citizens” are of the Yezdi Shiia sect that agrees to seven Imams and not 12 as in Iran; the Yazdi sect does not care that much about the coming of a “hidden” Mahdi to unite and save Islam. The western media want you to believe that this war, which effectively started in 2004, is a power succession problem to prevent the son of current President Abdallah Saleh from inheriting the power. Actually Saleh’s son is the head of the Presidential Guard which has been recently involved in the war after the regular army failed to bring a clear-cut victory in this “civil war”.
Yemen was a backward States even in the 60′s. South Yemen had a Marxist regime backed by the Egyptian troops of Jamal Abdel Nasser; it was against North Yemen ruled by an ancient Yazdi Imam; a hereditary regime labeled the “Royalists” and backed by Saudi Arabia.
After the Soviet Union disintegrated, Yemen unified in 1990. Since then, South Yemen and North West Yemen were deprived of the central State financial and economic distribution of wealth. President Saleh could present the image of a “progressist” leader as long as Yemen was out of the screen and nobody cared about this bankrupt State.
Yemen is on the verge of being divided into three separate autonomous States, the South, North West, and Sanaa the Capital. The problems in the Horn of Africa have migrated its endemic instability into Yemen: refugees from Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Sudan have been flocking into the southern shores of Yemen. Heavy influx of contraband products are keeping the people of these two regions precariously afloat.
The deal between Hillary Clinton and Israel foreign affairs Levny to patrol the Indian Ocean was not just meant for Gaza but mainly to supporting President Saleh for his 2009 military campaign against the rebels in North Yemen by monitoring contraband arms shipments.
Saudi Arabia, during the duo power brokers of Prince Sultan and Neyef (respectively Ministers of Defense and the Interior) did their best to destabilize Yemen on account of fighting the spread of the Shiaa sect in the Arabic Peninsula. Yemen has no natural resources to count on and the population is addicted to “Qat” that they chew on, at lunch time for hours.
Yemen was the most prosperous region in the Arabic Peninsula for millennia; land caravans started from Taez and then passed by Maareb from which town the caravans split to either Mecca (then to Aqaba and Syria) or took the direction to Persia and Iraq. All kinds of perfume, seasoning, and textile landed by sea from India and South East Asia; incense was produced from a special tree grown in Yemen and Hadramout.
The British colonial Empire didn’t care about this region; all that it wanted to secure were sea ports for commerce and to defend the entrances of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea to Egypt.
The UN is inheriting the same lax attitude of the British Empire; as long as the US bases are secured in this region then the hell with the people. Qatar arranged for reconciliation in 2007 and Saudi Arabia interfered to fail it. The disseminated propaganda is of “Archaic tribes fighting one another wearing daggers as symbol of manhood are all that there is in Yemen”.
Saudi Arabia is involved in this war and using its airforce to stem the “rebel hawthees”; it blocked the satellites in the Arab world that cover this civil war. Is CNN willing to come to the rescue for the world communities to get coverage of the mass massacres going on in this poor country?
This post sounds so current in its content that I cannot but wonder: Have the western nations understood anything about the current “Arab” mass upheavals? Is Libya to be implicitly redivided among the previous colonial powers? Are the absolute monarchs in Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain, and the Arab Gulf States to retain their powers? Hell no; not this time around. Enough indignity and humiliation!
Adonis Diaries 
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