http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2010\05\11\story_11-5-2010_pg3_6Tuesday,
May 11, 2010
VIEW: Revolutionary stirrings in the Arab east - II -Raza Naeem
However moth-eaten and isolated from the people the aging leaders of the
Yemeni Socialist Party have become, one thing is certain: Yemen is a country
where the memory of revolution and resistance remains fresh
Although Yemen's unification snuffed out the only real revolutionary
alternative in the post-1967 Arab world, it was hoped that the former, in the
form of a new democratic state, would enable a hitherto passive citizenry in
the petrol stations of the Gulf to put pressure on their own autocrats. Not to
be. Since the unification, Yemen itself has become a byword for the same
malaise afflicting the Arab world that the revolution and then the unification
was intended to solve - a personalistic family-owned dictatorship under
president Ali Abdullah Saleh.
An attempted secession of a disgruntled south in 1994 was dealt with with
an iron hand. The pacification of the south meant extending northern control
over southern property, British colonial villas in Aden, and southern trade.
The Salehisation of the whole country has also meant that whereas once women
used to work and move around the streets of the south unveiled, the beards have
once again taken over. This is a legacy of the ugly compromises the Saleh
kleptocracy has made with the religious Islah Party in order to keep the Yemeni
Socialist Party (YSP) out of the power structure.
What is really happening in Yemen today is the unfolding of unfinished
historical baggage from Yemeni unification. The Huthi uprising in the north is
led by former allies of Saleh who were used as mercenaries in the re-conquest
of the south in 1994 and have now fallen out with the ruling elite. Far from
being a religious revolt, the aim of the rebellion in the north is not the
establishment of a heavenly kingdom on earth as the alarmist media would have
us believe; in fact, what started as an old-fashioned bar-room brawl over
resources and political influence has now taken on greater proportions because
of Saleh's vicious military campaigns against the rebels, midwifed since last
year by the US and now by its chief proxy in the peninsula, Saudi Arabia, whose
interventions in the country (as everywhere else) have always been self-serving
and expansionist.
The revolt in the south mainly comprises former socialist military
officers who have seen whatever little revolutionary gains they fought for in
the revolution being dismantled by the grotesque combination of military
officers and clerics imported from the north (and quite possibly Riyadh). So
what are the alternatives? Saleh, unlike Musharraf, Saddam and the Taliban, is
a wily dictator, who has managed to keep power only by juggling amongst the US,
Saudi and his own cynical interests on the one hand and by doling out oil money
to buy off a pliant opposition on the other. Of course what has also helped is
the ease with which a passive civil society has accepted the neoliberal
programmes shoved down their throats by the aging dictator. But that has not
stopped the people from taking risks. Jarallah Omar, the charismatic and
courageous former secretary-general of the YSP, was assassinated a few years
ago for advocating an end to capital punishment.
However moth-eaten and isolated from the people the aging leaders of the
YSP have become, one thing is certain: Yemen is a country where the memory of
revolution and resistance remains fresh. The mood in the south remains
especially militant: just two months ago thousands of people came out in the
streets in Aden to commemorate the anniversary of the British withdrawal, which
quickly became a protest against the misery of the present. The rebellions in
both the north and the south are thus a continuation of the old revolutionary
movements in the 1950s and 1960s that shook the British Empire and the forces
of reaction; and like the struggles of old, they have no truck with religion.
Only a jaundiced vision would fail to see them as such and ascribe to them the
views of a fanatical minority. For the rebellions reflect not only a sharp
memory of the country's revolutionary history but also a desire for a break
with whatever the unification entailed - much of which has not been tangible to
the people at large.
That is the history that Yemen's would-be occupiers in Washington and
their equally spineless satraps in Sana'a and Riyadh want to deny and
whitewash, acts that are not serving them well in the occupations in
Afghanistan and Iraq. As one of the songs of the revolutionary wolves of Radfan
(the south Yemeni Yunnan) from the early 1970s reminds us:
"We must support the workers,
We must support the peasants,
We must support the fishermen,
And the Bedouin and nomads,
We must eliminate illiteracy,
We must liberate women,
We must arm the women,
And we must eliminate illiteracy!"
It would be comforting to believe that such infectious enthusiasm extends
equally towards combating foreign occupation and its hired quislings; for those
who did not tolerate a British occupation will certainly not be content with a
possible American one.
(Concluded)
The writer is a Pakistani national working on his PhD in History from the
University of Arkansas in the US. He can be reached at [email protected]
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