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http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/03/13/yemen_s_southern_intifada
> Yemen's Southern Intifada
Posted By Peter Salisbury Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - 10:32 AM
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.
Peter Salisbury is an independent journalist and analyst.
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Received on Thu Mar 14 2013 - 18:19:15 EDT
