Brains Like a Shoe

The Christmas shoe-bomber brought two weeks of furious media attention to Yemen that has now largely receded back to pre-holiday levels – except, of course, for the occasional story about Al Qaeda and the radical American cleric who has allegedly joined the terrorist group. So if you read one news story this week about Yemen, it’s likely to be: Al Qaeda in Yemen issues new warning against the United States.

So what else happened in Yemen last week? A lot – and it’s quite troubling for the Yemeni people as well as American foreign policy objectives in this Arabian peninsular state and the region.

To begin, new clashes between Yemeni soldiers and the Houthi rebels in the north – the most recent evidence that a truce signed between the two parties in February may be fraying. As part of this military jockeying, both sides are seizing schools in the Sa’ada region – parts of which remain inaccessible to the United Nations and humanitarian organizations. These worrying reports come as the International Committee of the Red Cross stated that hundreds of thousands of people continue to suffer from the effects of the last round of fighting.

Moving to the south, political tensions continue to fester. On Thursday, Yemen’s deputy prime minister for internal affairs escaped an assassination attempt, after an exchange of gunfire between his guards and armed militants. Two people also died when the military intervened to end a dispute over water rights. As this Reuters story points out, the incident underscores how a looming water crisis – Sana’a could be the world’s first capital to run dry because of a chronic shortage of ground water – could exacerbate existing and unresolved political grievances.  

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Cross-posted at a great new blog venture Poets and Policymakers.

Is it just me or have the number of Yemen “experts” in the United States increased exponentially in the last two weeks? Before the thwarted Christmas Day terrorist attack, if you wanted daily analysis on Yemen, the Waq al Waq blog was one of the only reliable sources. Now its hard to keep track of the self-proclaimed experts popping up on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and across the media spectrum. Waq al Waq thankfully is now receiving the attention it deserves (they reported 3,000 hits today alone).

I am still scared, however, of the collective narrative being formed by all these other talking heads. Joe Lieberman led the way with the Yemen hysteria. Days after Christmas, he told Fox News: “Iraq was yesterday’s war, Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war.” Discussions about putting boots on the ground in Yemen, even if still very unlikely, are now appearing more and more frequently.

These “experts” though rarely mention the humanitarian crisis associated with the conflict in North Yemen between the Houthi rebels and the central government. Likewise, few commentators ever mention the human rights abuses committed by President Ali Abdallah Salih’s government – our partner in the war against Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula – in its efforts to silence dissent in South Yemen. Largely ignored, Human Rights Watch put out an extensive report on December 15, entitled “Yemen: End Harsh Repression in the South” that stated:

Based on over 80 interviews with victims in the southern Yemeni cities of Aden and Mukalla, the report finds that security forces used lethal force against unarmed demonstrators on at least six occasions. Over the past year the authorities arbitrarily arrested thousands of people for exercising their right to peaceful assembly, suspended independent media critical of government policies, and detained journalists and writers on spurious charges.

With an insurgency/counter-insurgency that has resulted in mass displacement of civilians and recurring secessionist problems, the interlocking crises in Yemen appear remarkably similar to those in Sudan and Somalia. The news coverage unfortunately in the American media on Yemen more closely resembles that of Somalia than Sudan. Al Qaeda and pirates make headlines; humanitarian crises, civilian casualties and displacement, root political causes, human rights, and gripping poverty are generally ignored or are of only peripheral interest.

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