In early February, a car made its way
along the winding road from the southern Yemeni port city of Aden to Dhale, a
dusty mountain town of traditional mud-brick houses. As the car sped toward its
destination, the flags and checkpoints increased in regularity with every
passing mile.
Yemen's flag is made up of three
horizontal stripes of red, white, and black. Those flying from the rooftops
along the roadside sported an additional blue triangle dotted with a single red
star. The flags, a remnant of the south's independent past, are a symbol of
defiance; the checkpoints, manned by soldiers from Yemen's north, a source of
simmering tension.
"See," said Fatima, an Adeni college
professor, as the car stopped at yet another checkpoint so that a uniformed
youth, his cheek bulging with the narcotic qat
leaf and an AK-47 casually slung across his shoulder, could take a look inside.
"How can they say that this is not an occupation?"
On the outskirts of Dhale, the military
checkpoints came to a sudden halt. The government had no jurisdiction beyond
the town's borders. At the top of a hill in the center of Dhale, Shalal Ali
Shaye'a, a top leader in Dhale of Hirak, squinted into the sun. "Look," he
said, pointing to another blue-triangled flag painted onto the mountainside
opposite him. "This is the free south."
----
Shaye'a is a leading member of one of the
more radical factions of Hirak al-Janoubi
("the southern movement," better known in Yemen as Hirak), a loose coalition of
southern rights groups formed in Yemen in 2007. Since a popular uprising
unseated former President Ali Abdullah Saleh -- a hated figure for many
southerners -- in 2011, secessionist sentiment has been on the rise in the
south and the pro-independence wing of Hirak has been gaining confidence. While
politicians and diplomats in the northern capital of Sanaa have been focused on
the peace plan that led to Saleh's ouster, Shaye'a and his cohort have been
planning their "peaceful intifada" which they hope will end with talks in
Geneva, an end to the checkpoints, and the arrival of U.N. peacekeepers.
But if recent events are anything to go
by, southerners' attempts to extricate themselves from their two decade-old
union with the north could prove to be a messy affair. Tensions between Hirak
and the government had been rising for months when, on February 20, security
forces raided the Aden home of Qasem Asker Jubran, Yemen's onetime ambassador
to Mauritania, now a committed secessionist. Juran was arrested, accused of
planning to disrupt "by any means possible" a rally planned for the next day by
Islah (Yemen's biggest Islamist party) to celebrate the first anniversary of
the man who replaced Saleh as president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. Over the next
week, Hiraki protesters clashed again and again with security forces. By the
end of February, members of the southern movement estimated that up to 20 of
their number had died in the violence, while the Islah's party headquarters in
the southern city of Mukalla had been set on fire in just one of a series of
attacks on northern political parties and businesses.
----
Dhale and nearby Radfan hold an important
place in Hiraki and southern mythology. It was in Habilayn, a village in
Radfan, that British troops shot and killed seven men in October 1963, sparking
the uprising that ended British rule in the south. The revolt was launched
from the craggy, volcanic mountains of Dhale, and the People's Democratic
Republic of Yemen (PDRY), the socialist state that succeeded the British,
populated its military with men from the area.
In 1990, bankrupted by the fall of the
Soviet Union and a bloody 1986 civil war, the PDRY merged with its northern
neighbor, the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR), led by Saleh. But four years later Ali
Salem al-Beidh, the PDRY leader who took the south into the unity deal,
declared the foundation of a new state, the Democratic Republic of Yemen.
Southerners had complained of an unequal partnership and of a campaign of
assassinations targeting their leaders since the north-south merger. Fed up
after a series of inconsequential talks, they had decided to quit the union.
The militaries of the PDRY and YAR, which
were not integrated after unity, went to war. Dhale was a key battleground
during the fighting, which the northerners won, backed by tribal militias,
mujahedeen recently returned from Afghanistan, and even former PDRY soldiers
who defected after a bloody civil war in the south in 1986.
Many southern officers and civil
servants, including Shaye'a, were forced into early retirement after the war,
and most accounts of the life in the south after1994 run down similar lines: of
northern tribal, military, and economic interests taking over vast swathes of
land and businesses; of soaring unemployment among southerners while
northerners arrived to take juicy government jobs; and of brutal repression of
any kind of secessionist sentiment or expression of southern identity.
"Before unity," Shaye'a said, "I was a
student at military college. I graduated in 1990, into unity. I practiced for a
few years and then the war started. They kicked all our soldiers out, and I
fled. I came back six months later. After they kicked us out, we lived in a
miserable situation."
In 2006, former military officers from
the region began to organize protests at home and in Aden over low pensions and
lack of jobs. A year later, Hirak was formed as an umbrella organization to
bring together the plethora of southern rights movements that had sprung up
since 1994. Today, it is made up of around seven major groups and many more
splinter organizations, loosely formed around the Supreme Council of the
Southern Movement, led by Hassan Baoum, a popular pro-independence activist.
----
Hirakis are not just disappointed former
government workers. Many of the group's most vocal supporters are so young that
they cannot remember life before unity. At one of the weekly marches the group
holds in Crater, a volcanic outcrop of the Shamsan mountain which towers over
Aden, Nour, 20, tried to explain her involvement in the movement.
"I was born inside unity; I don't like
it. I want separation," she said. "It is unfair. I don't like the poverty. I
want to get back the country. We need to support the demonstrations."
Unemployment is a big issue for young
southerners like Nour. Even those who do not actively support Hirak believe
that the best state jobs go to the friends and families of Sanaa's political
elite. This is frustrating and baffling to those who believe that most of the
country's resources are located in the south -- two of Yemen's biggest oil
fields are to be found in the former PDRY, while Aden was once one of the
busiest ports in the world.
Other Hirakis have only recently come
around to the secessionists' way of thinking. "I am from those who wanted to
correct the road of the unity," said Nasser Mohamed Al-Khubaji, one of Hirak's
top leaders in Lahj, as he reclined in the cushioned mafraj of his simple home in Radfan in mid-February. "I thought we
could do something through parliament. But when we took up the case of the
south, we faced aggression. People became angry with us."
Al-Khubaji quit parliament after the 2007
shooting of southerners preparing for a rally to celebrate the anniversary of
the revolt against the British by the central security forces. As a member of
parliament for Lahj governorate, he had taken part in the preparations. "When
we were preparing for our revolutionary activities, the military from the north
came. They killed four and injured 20," he said. The opportunity for
negotiation with the north died then, he said: "The time was over for talk."
----
If Nour had been born to the north, she
would probably have taken part in the protest movement that unseated Ali
Abdullah Saleh in 2011, voicing frustrations about Yemen's northern elite
similar to those heard across the south. But like many Hirakis, after initially
supporting the revolution she came to see it as a largely northern affair.
Yemen's 2011 uprising started as a
nonviolent movement in the big northern cities of Taiz and Sanaa. But it soon
descended into a violent elite power struggle, fought between military units
loyal to Saleh and his son Ahmed Ali; those with ties to the powerful general
and former Saleh ally Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, and militias loyal to the tribal
leaders and brothers Hamid and Sadeq al-Ahmar.
The deal brokered by members of the Gulf
Cooperation Council (GCC) to end the fighting in November 2011 was an elite
peace accord, Nour said, not a solution to southerners' problems -- the GCC
deal explicitly references the problems in the south, but does not go far
enough toward addressing southern grievances for many Hirakis. "I don't care
about 2011; that was just a fight between Ali Abdullah Saleh and Hamid
al-Ahmar," she said. "It has nothing to do with the south."
----
Yet if foreign diplomats involved in
brokering the accord are to be believed, the GCC deal presents a unique
opportunity for southerners, in the form of a much-vaunted national dialogue
conference. The deal's brokers have effectively staked Yemen's future on the
dialogue's success and President Hadi has said that the country could descend
into civil war if it fails.
During six months of talks, which are due
to start on March 18, the conference's organizers hope that working groups will
be able to draft a new constitution and discuss solutions to the country's many
problems, including the "southern question" as it is often described in Sanaa.
Delegations from Yemen's many fissiparous factions have been invited to the conference
and Hirak has been offered the second-biggest allotment of seats, 85 in total.
Yet for many Hirakis, the conference is a non-starter.
Despite diplomats' best efforts to
convince them that attending the talks is in their best interests, a number of
Hiraki groups have said that they will not go to the dialogue. Most vocal in
rejecting the talks have been factions linked to Baoum and al-Beidh, one of the
main architects of unity in 1990 and, since 1994, one of its biggest critics.
They want bilateral negotiations between the north and the south over
separation, not to discuss the shape of the unified state.
----
Other southern movement leaders are more
open to the idea of the talks. In March 2012 Mohamed Ali Ahmed, the former
governor of Abyan governorate, returned to Aden after nearly two decades in
exile in Britain. Diplomats overseeing the GCC deal, who describe him as a
moderate, say that he has become a key point of contact in Hirak. Speaking at
his home in Aden in February, he told Foreign
Policy that he would go to the dialogue even though Hadi is yet to meet a
series of demands that he helped southerners to formulate in 2012 as a
precondition to taking part in the conference.
"We will go so that the international
community does not say that southerners do not cooperate," he said. "We cannot
ignore the international community. We will [get our demands] from the inside.
We cannot ignore the will of the people, but we want to use peaceful means."
Ali Ahmed believes the creation of a
two-state federal union between the north and south followed by a referendum
after five years could be the best path to independence, an idea first floated
by Hirakis in 2009. But the al-Beidh factions of Hirak, many who mutter that
Ali Ahmed is working for Hadi to maintain rather than end unity, has become
increasingly hard line.
----
The differences between al-Beidh and Ali
Ahmed run deep -- much deeper than mere strategy. On January 13, 1986, the
bodyguards of then-President Ali Nasser Mohammed opened fire on a meeting of
the PDRY's politburo. Former associates say that he hoped to consolidate his
power by assassinating the leaders of a faction loyal to his predecessor, Abdul
Fattah Ismail, who was killed soon after the fighting started. But Ismail
loyalists led by al-Beidh gained the upper hand in the ensuing civil war and
after a month of fighting Mohammed fled to the north along with tens of
thousands of his followers. Among those who fled north with him were Ali Ahmed
and Hadi -- Yemen's current president.
Hirak's leadership has worked in recent
years to reconcile the differences between the Toghma -- the winners of the 1986 war -- and the Zomra -- Nasser Mohammed's "desperate
band" of followers -- hoping that the common goal of independence will be
enough to patch over past rivalries and resentments. Since 2009, Hirak has held
reconciliation marches every January 13 to mark the anniversary of the civil
war. The 2013 rally was the biggest ever, according to the local Yemen Post. A number of Hirakis, who see
the march as a watershed moment for the independence movement, claim that one
million people attended (more reliable estimates run to the tens of thousands).
But many Toghma still view their Zomra counterparts with suspicion. Some
of the bloodiest fighting during the 1986 war occurred between militias loyal
to Ali Ahmed and Baoum in Abyan; Shaye'a still recalls how his father, ministry
of interior at the time, was killed by Nasser Mohammed's men at the January
1986 politburo meeting.
Hirak is unified in its quest for
independence, said Jubran, who is widely seen as al-Beidh's man in Aden (the
former president lives in exile in Beirut) during an interview at his home in
the southern capital a week before he was arrested. "There are a lot of
disputes between the different parties of Hirak," he said. "But the main goal
is freedom. We are unified. In some other parties they want five years and a
referendum but they will not prevail. When we got independence in 1967 no one
told us to make freedom or a referendum and we don't need a referendum now."
"Ninety-nine percent" of southerners are
behind the al-Beidh faction of Hirak, Jubran argued. While this figure is
likely some way off -- and a of number Hirakis say that they support the
equally pro-independence Baoum, who is based in Yemen, rather than Beirut-bound
al-Beidh -- it is fair to say that a growing number of southerners are falling
in behind the two men's uncompromising approach. And at rallies across the
country, it is al-Beidh's image that is most visible on placards and banners.
In Dhale and Lahj it is not uncommon to hear him described as "the president,"
a title he still bestows upon himself. Analysts estimate that support for the
al-Beidh and Ahmed factions is split about 70 to 30 among Hirakis.
----
Some southerners had hoped that the
northern revolution would lead to improvements in life in the former PDRY, and
worried that independence would require a long, potentially bloody, and hugely
costly struggle. Others thought that having Hadi, a southerner, as president
might see Hirak treated with more leniency and were encouraged when the huge
reconciliation march in January was allowed to pass unmolested. But the
violence in February proved a tipping point for even more moderate southerners.
"I don't support Hirak, I am not a
Hiraki," said Anas, a young southern woman who lives in Aden, in March. "But I
no longer support unity either."
Perhaps sensing the direction in which
popular opinion is going, southern movement leaders who had previously
expressed willingness to compromise have also been taking a more combative
stance of late. In February, Haydar al-Attas, prime minister of Yemen's first
unity government, said that he would reject an invitation to the dialogue and
demanded that Jamal Benomar, the U.N. envoy to Yemen, oversee a referendum on
independence.
"In the end, they will all come around to
our way of thinking or they will not matter," said one al-Beidh aligned Hiraki
leader in response to the news. Ali Ahmed, who is not as widely popular as
Baoum and al-Beidh, could lose the chance of a future role in the south if he
attends the talks, he added.
Many southerners are skeptical of the
international community's intentions meanwhile. At the Crater march, Mohamed, a
pro-independence activist, could barely contain himself. "Where is the
international community in all of this?" he asked, an often-repeated refrain at
the march. "Where are our rights? In the north, they fought for one year,
people were killed, and the international community gave them their peace. The
northerners have dominated us, killed us, stolen from us since unity. Where is
our dialogue with the north? We have been fighting for 20 years, but still they
ignore us."
----
Thus far, the southern movement has been
largely peaceful -- surprisingly so, given the availability of arms in Yemen
and the number of disaffected, unemployed young men in the south. The leaders
of even its more radical factions say that they are committed to peaceful
protest, and while violence flared up in February, it did not boil over into
the kind of devastating armed conflict seen in the north during 2011.
But a number of questions about Hirak's
more extreme wing remain to be answered, not least its commitment to a
nonviolent struggle. While Hiraki activists at marches like those in Crater are
unarmed, and it is easy to believe people like Nour when she expresses her
commitment to a peaceful uprising, al-Beidh's arm of Hirak has been accused on
a number of occasions of building its own militia, and has recently been linked
with arms shipments from Iran. Clashes have broken out between Hirak-aligned
armed groups and government troops in recent years, many of them in Dhale and
Lahj, a stronghold for the al-Beidh faction.
It is particularly hard to reconcile
Shaye'a with the idea of Hirak's peaceful intifada. A number of Yemeni analysts
say that he is one of the leaders of "The Movement for Self Determination," or
Hatam, a militia formed after the civil war which has fought with the Yemeni
military on a number of occasions in the past. In October 2010, a bomb placed
outside of Al-Wahda Sports Club in Aden killed four people. The attack was
blamed on Hatam, which planned to disrupt an upcoming football tournament, and
Hirak. The government named Shaye'a as the ringleader of the group that planned
the blast -- a charge he denies. "They are willing to say anything about the
southern people," he said. "It is far from my peaceful revolution. I love
sports."
Shaye'a remained tightlipped as to
whether Hirak has armed militias in and around Dhale, but when he left his
home, he clambered into a battered Toyota pickup, armed gunmen -- one man
wielding a rocket-propelled grenade launcher -- bouncing in the back as the
truck wound its way along the dirt road. Earlier, he had explained why he lived
in Dhale rather than Aden.
"We started here, in Dhale and in Radfan,
because we were safe here," Shaye'a said. "Here, all the people are active with
Hirak. Most of our army who were kicked out of their jobs came from here. Most
of the military forces who were retired came from here. Here, the community
helped us to start out activities. They were ready. The occupation forces were
here -- there was action and there was reaction."
Al-Khubaji, Hirak's man in Lahj, agreed
that his area was under Hiraki control but disagreed that the movement's
success in the area had been achieved through force. Hirak has spent much of
the past six years building a parallel state structure, providing public goods
to residents of the area, he said. "Most of our work is in enhancing
administrative and regulatory capacities," he said. "Politically the
governorate is under the rule of Hirak. But we are under occupation. Before us,
the courts were full of cases. Now, we have the councils of Hirak to solve
problems. We even solve security problems. I would say that 90 percent of Lahj
is under Hirak control. The occupation forces are still here; here, but not in
control."
But few moments later, he added a
familiar caveat. "Our movement is to get separation peacefully," he said. "But
I cannot guarantee that other interests and movements will not take action. We
insist on a peaceful movement. But we will not discourage anyone who wants to
take this path."
----
It might not be long before it becomes
apparent how, exactly, Shaye'a, Jubran, and others plan to move forward. Jubran
-- who was freed in late February having declared his commitment to peaceful
protest -- ended his interview with the promise that by the 20th anniversary of
the south's last attempt at separation, it would be an independent state once
again. "On 21 May 2013, you will see," he said. "The peaceful intifada will
begin."
Within a year, he said, it would all be
over.