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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What an interesting week.  I was not able to blog on much of it, but here is what I was reading:

It’s not just Sudan…more on China in Africa: The New York Times highlights political implications of a Chinese scholarship program for Namibia’s elite; China and Senegal hope to enhance military cooperation; and at the Globalist, two authors convincingly argue that “China is currently pursuing oil resources in unstable countries without regard for the political risk entailed. While that might play well in the short- to medium-term, it could cost China dearly down the line.”

It’s not just China increasing influence in Africa: Saudi Arabia held the first meeting of the Saudi-East Africa Forum in Addis Ababa this week. Representatives from seven East African countries attended: Ethiopia, Djibouti, Tanzania, Kenya, Somalia, Uganda and Rwanda.  A Saudi minister stated, “Saudi Arabia is committed to combating hunger, to provide support for the host country but also to generate exports. We are not to impose our needs above the needs of local population.” Sudan did not participate in the forum; however, the Saudi Development Fund announced this week that it was donating 15 million dollars for development and rehabilitation in Darfur.  The money will go to the “model villages” that the Arab League has pushed as an effort to help IDPs in Darfur return to normal lives.

Whither Yemen? Thats the title of a good blog summarizing the current challenges facing Yemen’s leadership.  It concludes that “the period ahead for Yemen is likely to be, to paraphrase Hobbes, ‘nasty and brutish.’” Another blog challenges the notion that Saudi Arabia’s recent intervention in Yemen’s conflict with the Houthi rebels could be good for the US because it will lead to the further militarization of the Gulf and a strong Sunni and Gulf alliance against Iranian encroachment throughout the Arab world. Ian Bremmer at Foreign Policy tends to agree that greater militarization and more proxy wars are usually not constructive anywhere and argues that a failed state next to the world’s largest oil exporter is reason enough for Americans to care about the conflict.

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Its been a crazy last two weeks, so my blogging schedule has been curtailed…but here is an attempt to get back on the horse.  Just a few items of interest…

Waq-al-Waq has “the scariest thing you will read today”: that Yemeni are now asking al-Qaeda to teach in their schools because of a lack of teachers.

… if al-Qaeda in Yemen ever turned itself into a positive organization, by which I mean an organization that could be for something instead of only against things, if it could provide services and be a force for good in people’s daily lives in Yemen then its growth potential would be nearly unlimited. I have always added the caveat to that statement that there was no evidence to support the idea that AQAP was looking to go that way, and this is a pretty flimsy piece of evidence but it is still evidence. Whether it is a one-off item or a precursor is impossible for me to know, even with my magic 8-ball.

The always insightful Hannah Allam based in Cairo and Baghdad has a great piece on Beyonce versus the world famous Egyptologist Zahi Hawass.

In the Darfur file, Ethiopia announced that it would send 5 long-awaited attack helicopters to Darfur.  This is good for the UNAMID force and helps Ethiopia’s already stellar image in the eyes of the West.  Such moves are one reason why the international community, as the Sahel Blog explains, ignores the repressive politics at home.

Bec Hamilton writes about Save Darfur’s partnership with the State Department this week to launch AskUS — a web 2.0 initiative to connect the Obama administration with citizen activists.  Jerry Fowler asked a number of incisive questions to the US Special Envoy for Sudan Scott Gration.

Finally, Khalid Nur responding to a post by Alex de Waal at Making Sense of Darfur provides a good summary of the coverage of the Mbeki report in the Sudanese press.  His analysis matches up with my own scouring of the Sudanese newspapers everyday:

Thumbing through the papers this is what I find. On 25 October Sadiq al-Riziqi who is the owner of Al-Intibaha the most strident paper against the SPLA and the Darfurians, rejected the Panel and especially the hybrid courts proposal. Al-Riziqi is exceptionally well informed about the goings on in the inner circles but he has his own views too. For the ordinary citizens of Sudan, al-Riziqi’s rejection is a good endorsement! But read the same paper three days later and we see a columnist hinting that if the procedures in the hybrid courts are correctly done then the NCP will accept.

This is pretty much the double line taken by other well-known columnists too. Ahmad Al-Sharif (Al-Watan) lambasts Mbeki’s report as targeting national sovereignty and going beyond its mandate by putting into question the competence of the Sudanese judiciary. Kamil Idriss (formerly of the World Intellectual Property Organisation) in Al-Sudani, says that the idea of hybrid courts strike to the heart of the credibility of the Sudanese judiciary and is a humiliation. But read carefully what others are writing. One government spokesman, writing in Al-Ahdaf on 1 November, says that ICC Prosecutor’s welcome of the Panel’s proposal for hybrid courts should be bracketed: any mechanism set up in the wake of the AU decision will proceed without reference to the ICC. That is a way of setting the Mbeki recommendations apart from the joined-up three pillar process that the ICC is helping to set up in Kenya. In the Kenyan case, the ICC is joined at the hip to the hybrid courts and so also to the local courts, but this isn’t the case for the Darfur proposal. And most interesting, the leading Islamist Tayib Zain Al-Abdeen, writing in Al-Sahafa on 2 November advised the NCP to accept the hybrid courts proposal, saying that its own failure to prosecute anybody gives it no credibility to object, and it also cannot accuse the African Union of being a colonial conspirator.

One of the best commentaries was done by Khalid al-Tijani, for Al-Sahafa. He put his finger on the government’s basic dilemma. On the one hand, Khartoum cannot reject the Mbeki Report because any such action will threaten the cohesive African stance supporting Khartoum’s position on the ICC, while on the other hand the acceptance of the report would equally conflict with the latter’s principled rejection of the intervention of the ICC. This puts the front men for the government policy in an awkward situation and luckily the two men in question, Ghazi Salah Al-Din and Ali Osman Muhammed Taha are able to exercise self-restraint and avoid either outright acceptance or outright rejection, playing the game of watering down the recommendations in the implementation stage.

Just a few items of note…

First, the problems in Yemen have escalated quickly.  Waq al Waq reports:

The news that Saudi Arabia is bombing targets inside Yemen and is becoming much more intimately involved in the Huthi conflict is sparking, as it should, a great deal of speculation and numerous stories.

The Yemeni government is denying that Saudi Arabia is bombing targets in Yemen, although I have my doubts. The border is demarcated, but the lines tend to be drawn in sand and I think the potential for Saudi bombs straying across the border whether intentionally or not is high.

This is, as numerous people suspect, a major escalation in the war. What Saudi Arabia will do is still an open question, but sending ground troops across the border would be, in my opinion, a huge mistake.

Second, Michelle at Change.org hits the perfect note on what at first seems like a great story…

Did the UK just endorse racial profiling of refugees?

According to a decision announced on Tuesday by Britain’s Interior Ministry, all “non-Arab” Darfuri asylum-seekers will be allowed to remain in the country, contingent upon periodic reviews of the situation in Sudan:

“All non-Arab Darfuris, regardless of their political or other affiliations, are at real risk of persecution in Darfur and internal relocation elsewhere in Sudan is not currently to be relied upon,” the Interior Ministry’s UK Border Agency concluded in its operational guidance note.

Yes, non-Arab Darfuris were the targets of Sudan’s genocidal violence, and return from abroad is a very dangerous prospect. But while the situation in Darfur is perilous for those groups singled out by the government, the human rights situation is pretty crummy (in my professional opinion) across the entire country — for Arabs and non-Arabs and mixed races and foreigners and really anyone who happens to be there.

I’m certainly no lawyer, but I thought that an individual’s asylum claim should be evaluated on the specific merits of his/her case. While its laudable for the British government to recognize the need to ensure of asylum to Darfuris, that protection should be extended to all Sudanese fleeing abuse in their home country.

Also read her piece about the shameless new movie, entitled Darfur:

The man “widely considered to be the worst working director today” + Darfur = Disaster.

You don’t even need to see the full film to tell — here’s all you need to know: White journalists in a gun battle with the Janjaweed.

Finally, my friend Maggie at ENOUGH has a great post from south Sudan about how the voter registration process is going.  It just started on November 1.

(Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

On this Halloween weekend, I have been catching up with some reading in between watching the Gators take down the Bulldogs and partaking in some of the weekend festivities.

Here are a few items of interest and a few interesting pieces I have collected over the last week:

• In yesterday’s post, I mentioned the great coverage that the J Street conference received. Before the conference, a former AIPAC and Israeli embassy official Lenny Ben-David questioned “Why do so many Arabs contribute to an organization that purports to be ‘pro-Israel?’” A friend of mine, Rebecca Abou-Chedid, wrote an exceptional response in Foreign Policy to the distasteful accusations that her donation, because she is of Lebanese descent, “clearly indicates that…[her] dollars must be intended to advance some pernicious anti-Israel agenda — and that J Street must be the vehicle for those aims.”

• Ken Silverstein has ‘Six Questions for Desmond Travers on the Goldstone Report.’ Travers was one of four members on the UN fact finding mission that produced the report. A retired Colonel of the Army of the Irish Defence Forces, he discusses the criticism and reaction to the report.

• Concerning another issue of international justice, the Confirmation Hearing of Bahr Idriss Abu Garda, a Darfuri rebel leader, continued this week at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. He is being tried for attacking an African Union peacekeeping base in 2007.  His defense lawyer is making  the case that the AU base by that point in time had lost its protected status under international humanitarian law and had become a legitimate military target. Bec Hamilton is also following the case.

• Michael Kevane writes a post taking on the claim by J. Stephen Morrison and Jennifer G. Cooke at CSIS that ”Lack of consensus within the [Obama] administration has confused potential partners who have for some time seen the United States policy as hostage to zealous domestic pressures (emphasis added).”  It’s always amazing to me how much clout some people think that the Save Darfur Coalition and other Darfur organizations and activists have in the creation of U.S. policy.

• Fighting continues in Yemen, as The New York Times highlighted this week.  The paper also ran a great story this morning on the country’s unsustainable addiction to qat. The blog Waq al-Waq notes the better late than never acknowledgement by the U.S. State Department of the Yemeni government’s conflict with Houthi rebels in north Yemen.   A Yemeni humanitarian aid worker in an Emirati paper wrote a moving essay about his experience over the last few months: “I never thought I would be trapped in the place I call home, but all I can do is try in my own way to help those who have lost everything and pray that peace comes sooner rather than later.”

• Lastly, I continue to follow the rumblings surrounding Egyptian presidential elections in 2011.  The big questions, of course, are (first) will Hosni Mubarak run again;  and (second),  if not, will his son Gamal take his place.  This week, the noted Egyptian historian and philosopher Mohammed Hassanein Haikel expressed the common opinion of most Egyptians whom I know –  Gamal is “unfit” to be the next president.  He added, “They tell us we have elections, but is it a coincidence that the president’s son is portrayed as the most worthy to be the leader of Egypt?” Laura Rozen at Politico and others commented about intriguing statements from both Amr Moussa, the current head of the Arab League, and Mohamed El Baradei of the IAEA regarding their interests in running in 2011. Al Ahram Weekly (an English language state-owned newspaper) though ran a “news” story revealing that most ordinary Egyptians aren’t concerned about rumors or even who there next president will be.