The politics of foreigners in Yemen
July 4th, 2007 by Torstein Schiøtz Worren
For the first time since 1998 foreigners have been killed on purpose in Yemen. Whereas kidnapping of foreigners was everyday business throughout most of the 1990s when more than 100 were kidnapped, this was mostly in order to pressure the government to free jailed tribesmen or implement social projects in peripheral areas. This meant that very few foreigners were killed except when being caught in the crossfire in shoot-outs between the kidnappers and government forces. This was almost a matter of pride to Yemenis, who would tell the stories of foreigners being treated like guests by their kidnappers, being allowed to move freely in the villages where they were being held, and eventually showered with gifts when they were released after the government gave them what they wanted.
One example was the german Mark who studied at the same centre where I have studies several times and who was kidnapped in 2000. He was picked up by some fellows in fake police uniforms in the main square in Sana’a and brought to a village in the desert a few hours east of the city. According to my teacher who used to teach him, he was never afraid, only bored, and got to practice his Arabic and was released with both gifts and memorable photographs of himself on a camel carrying a Kalashnikov machine gun. What they forget to mention is that these cases usually aren’t as joyful as described, especially not for their families at home.
After the suicide attack on a column of tourist cars in Ma’rib two days ago, though, Yemenis are appalled about what has happened. The following day people seemd more subdued than usual and there were none of the usual friendly comments one normally gets when walking the streets. Not only are people ashamed that something like this can happen in their own country, but the future of Yemen as a tourist destination is also in peril. Almost every single group coming to Yemen would pass through this particular area in their roundtrip around the most interesting sites in the country and trips are being cancelled from all over Europe.
For Yemeni politics, what is worse, is that the government was quick to blame ‘foreigners’ for the attack. Just as in Iraq, all the suicide bombers are “foreign arabs/infiltrators”. As is the case in all parts of the world, be it crime in Norway or extremism in Yemen, it is much easier to blame outsiders as that means we do not have to look for mistakes made at home. I therefore hope that they will conclude that the suicide bomber was Yemeni as that will force them to look to their own society for answers to why it happened.
Not that Yemen is free of extremism. Far from it. It was a gathering place for all kinds of weirdos until the beginning of the decade when they got on the American side of the War on Terror and were supplied with advanced weapons and military advisors. Yemen is full of Americans hunting for “Al-Qaeda” and I bet they can use whatever means they want as they are outside the boundaries of the US constitution.
Some of you might remember my story from late 2002 when a car was blown up in Ma’rib province where the latest attack took place. It was one of the first (publicly admitted) attacks by an unmanned drone and they killed four or five Yemenis who were supposedly terrorists. As this was in the early days of their self-proclaimed war, this attack was actually a desperate attempt to get those people as they had wanted them alive. According to a source of mine, it was actually supposed to be the first operation of the American trained Yemeni anti-terror forces and they had just surrounded the village where these men were hiding. However, a Yemeni pilot, having heard that an operation was going on in the area over the radio took his jet low over the village “to see what was going on” warning the men of the impending attack. In the ensuing chaos they all got in a car and escaped, and not wanting to let them get away, the American sent in their drone to remove the problem.
I bet they pumped some more money into the organisation of the Yemeni forces after that.
On another note, I am all settled in my house now blissfully sleeping throughout the night with my earplugs in. This means that I have trouble hearing my alarm though, so I will just have to get up later so that will not be a problem. Today is the 4th of July and my American flatmate is looking forward to a cup of coffee at the 5-start hotel nearby after the embassy cancelled the celebrations following the attack on the tourists. Not that it would be difficult getting drunk as the access to alcohol in Yemen is easier than ever for foreigners. More and more of them are turning into alcoholics as the lack of things to do means that they turn to drinking instead.
Patience, patience
June 30th, 2007 by Torstein Schiøtz Worren
It’s funny being back in Yemen. Nothing much seems to have changed other than the number of foreigners. They’re everywhere these days, especially at the language institutes. It’s quite a change from my first time here in 2002 when we were about six students at CALES – my school. Even though most of the passenger on the flight got off in Riyadh, about half of those remaining were non-Yemenis of some sort. It made me feel less different than earlier visits.
The Yemeni authorities have streamlined the bureaucracy since my last visit two years ago. I now got my visa in two minutes from a little window at the airport and they didn’t ask any questions when stamping me through. Even the guy who picked me up, Mohammad, was the same – and so was his car. I thought it was pretty slow five years ago, but this time around it was hardly moving at all.
At the moment I’m crashing at a friend’s, but I’m moving into an old house in the old city. The landlord has apparently refurbished the bathroom and kitchen, but a week ago the bathroom was only a hole in the floor and nothing else, so Yasmin, one of the people I’m moving in with, has been a bit dubious to the whole project. The house has been pre-paid for three months, though, so hopefully it will work out. We’re supposed t0 move in tomorrow as the house is ’95 percent complete’… As long as we have running water…
As always, my first night here was quite tiring as I arrived on a Wednesday, the evening before the weekend and weekends mean weddings. And as weddings are a communal affair taking place outside in the streets, the noise is unbearable. When you’re in the middle of it, it’s worse than being at a concert, especially since the sound systems favour the squeakiest tones in the spectrum. Some kinds of Yemeni music are ok, but that does definitively not go for wedding music. Of course, you think how much noise can men (who do not drink alcohol) make considering that weddings are segregated. Instead, they have invented a system whereby men and women sing together by means of microphones and speakers. The men sing on the streets and the women, packed up inside in their beautiful dresses (from what I hear from the girls who have partaken) answer by singing into microphones broadcasting into the street outside – at a much louder volume I should say. In any case, this went on all of my first night, but thankfully they have gotten rid of the noisy packs of dogs they used to have here. Now there are only cats and although they can be noisy too, they usually finish up quickly.
From what I hear, our new house is pretty noisy too, but this time I am prepared and have brought earplugs. There will be more writing and less studying this time, so I can organise my days pretty much as I want and can keep my earplugs in and not worry about hearing the alarm clock if I chose to work during the silent hours. Maybe I should mention, for those of you who haven’t heard, that one of my main plans down here is to write a book, a travel account (in Norwegian), about my visits to Yemen based on my earlier e-mails. I’m doing some Arabic classes with my old teacher to keep from forgetting everything, but I will need to write quite a lot each day to finish in October. Now that I have told absolutely anyone who will ever read this, I have enough pressure on me to actually go through with it, inshallah.
Yemeni politics are as entertaining as ever and very little ever escapes the country. Although Yemen is fairly democratic and has a reasonably free press, very little information ever comes out of Yemen and few people have heard of the civil war that has been raging in the northern part of the country for the last six months, which is a continuation of a conflict that has lasted for the past five years. Some crazy tribes in the north are trying, according to existing information at least, to recreate the Imamate, the religious state ruled by the Imam, which was the state of affairs in Northern Yemen until the Republican revolution of 1962. As always when the government is battling tribes, many more soldiers are killed than tribesmen, but due to the ferociousness and how protracted it has been, it has brought a lot of suffering to the civilians in the area. I met a guy yesterday who is a conscript in the army and was sent up there to fight. He was wounded and is on leave at the moment, but from what I understood, all his closest friends in his unit have been killed during the last couple of months. At the moment there’s supposed to be a Qatari mediated cease-fire, but it’s unknown whether it is in effect and some say there is still fighting. What all this means for me is that the whole north is closed off and no foreigners are allowed in, which is pretty useless as this was one of the places I haven’t been and wanted to go. Furthermore, I now need permits from the government wherever I want to travel. Hopefully it won’t be too strict or need too much planning beforehand as my plans tend to be flexible and dependent on the people I meet on the way.
Tonight, a friend of mine, Kåre, is arriving. He’s been in Yemen a lot more than me and he speaks much better Arabic as well. He’s only here for a month so we plan to do some trips off the beaten track while he’s here. He’ll be staying in our (inshallah) new house so should be fun.
Until next time…
A little story on the state of blogging and free speech in the US
June 19th, 2007 by Torstein Schiøtz Worren
Copied from Yaman’s Amateur Ramblings:
The danger Kaplan v. Salahi poses to bloggers and activists everywhere
As a student at UC Berkeley, the center for the Free Speech Movement, I never thought I’d find myself at the receiving end of a politically-motivated libel lawsuit. I am the creator of a blog called “Lee Kaplan Watch” which focuses on analyzing the integrity of Kaplan’s published articles. When he discovered the website, Kaplan began a campaign of intimidation, including e-mail threats of legal action and various online smears alleging that I was a Nazi, a Ba`athist, and a member of al-Qaeda. He threatened to harass me and members of my family, and even went so far as to contact the Dean of Student Life at the university. After asking me to stop writing about his work several times, he finally filed a lawsuit against me in small claims court for “tortious business interference,” libel, and slander.
Lee Kaplan, for those who are unaware, is a journalist for David Horowitz’ right-wing, anti-Muslim, and anti-Arab publication, FrontPageMag.com. He is also associated with a number of regressive organizations like the Bruin Alumni Association, the United American Committee, StopTheISM, Dafka, and the Northeastern Intelligence Network. Kaplan chooses easy and weak targets and he chooses them well, focusing on students who mobilize on campuses throughout the country in opposition to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. He is more relevant in the San Francisco area, where his extreme and annoying behavior has often come under scrutiny. He has widespread financial and organizational backing at his disposal, a privilege that others and myself, as college students, are sorely lacking.
So it goes that Kaplan cleverly decided to sue me in small claims court, where standards for evidence are virtually non-existent, procedures occur at the discretion of the judge, and no record of court proceedings are kept. These low standards allowed Kaplan to present misleading and false material as “evidence” that I had defamed him and cost him a job offer writing for SportsBlogger.com, a website which does not even exist and has not for at least the past 2 years. Even more troubling, I had never written the very things he claimed were defamatory. One of the statements was taken from a spoof of my blog on a third-party website that I have no control over. The other simply does not exist. In addition to the lack of evidence, nearly arbitrary procedures meant that three witnesses, including a computer expert who could attest to the fact that my website did not contain those statements, were not able to testify during the 25 minute hearing, and my lawyer was asked not to present legal arguments in my defense.
Despite all of these problems with the evidence, the judge, for reasons I will never know, bought one of Kaplan’s many claims and ordered me to pay him $7,500. I will never know which ones or why because judges in small claims court do not release written opinions explaining their rulings. Furthermore, as far as I know, the decision is not appealable to a higher court. That means I have no recourse against a judgment given without justification despite the fact that it punishes me for exercising my first amendment rights to political speech.
Dave Johnson at SeeingTheForest was right to call this “a freedom of speech and right-to-blog issue.” Ann Althouse, a professor of law at the University of Wisconsin, commented on the lawsuit saying that “thinking small [as in, small claims court] looks like an effective way to squelch speech.” But she poses the more serious question regarding the fact that this suit was brought before a court that doesn’t write opinions: “if the court’s opinion doesn’t explain what you did wrong, how can you keep writing? You have to worry about the next small claims lawsuit.”
What does this mean? It means that this lawsuit is not only about me, and is not only about Lee Kaplan. It is about the real danger that underhanded legal tactics like these pose to all bloggers and those without the resources to protect themselves from abusive litigation that is aimed at silencing them. For now, it looks like small claims court is a convenient and reliable route for anybody who can dish out $75, the cost of filing a claim, to harass and intimidate those they disagree with. Real evidence and a credible story might not even be necessary to make a hefty return on that small investment. At least, that is what I have learned with this experience.
In the meantime I continue to investigate my legal options to see if there is any way to salvage my free speech rights. To that end I have established a fund to collect donations that will go either towards paying legal expenses in case of an appeal or paying off the lawsuit if there are no other options. But I will also continue to blog about this and other contentious issues, despite the enormous pressure that this abusive lawsuit has put my family, friends, and myself under.
For those who might be fearful to speak up due to cases like this, you have every right to be weary. Indeed, this case is very ominous in its implications. But the worst thing we could possibly do is shy away from continuing to publicly take firm, principled, and dedicated political stands. We should remain courageous enough to embrace and confront contentious political issues, especially those regarding the cause of the Palestinian people in particular and American involvement in the Middle East in general, despite what we have faced and, no doubt, what will continue to come our way.
I have written extensively about my reaction to the ruling and my thoughts on Kaplan’s claims on the blog here and here for those who would like more information about the case. You may also browse the court’s record of documents and filings by clicking here. If you would like further comment from me regarding this case, please feel free to contact me at ysalahi@gmail.com.
I would also like to make a small request that those who are in the least bit outraged by this story please do what they can to publicize it by e-mailing it to friends and listservs, writing about it on blogs, or sharing it on websites like Facebook and MySpace. People need to know about this new method of shutting down dissent so that steps can be taken to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Fear and Resistance: The Construction of Alawi Identity in Syria
June 19th, 2007 by Torstein Schiøtz Worren
My Master’s thesis on the Alawis of Syria was finished in February. It is fieldwork-based and focuses on ‘normal’ Alawis and how they express their identity through their construction of Syria’s other sects (abstract).
It can be found here.
EDIT: The thesis sparked some feedback on Joshua Landis’ Syriacomment blog: http://joshualandis.com/blog/?p=287
Feature article in Dagbladet
September 20th, 2006 by Torstein Schiøtz Worren
about demonising Syria (in Norwegian obviously)
Home page
April 5th, 2006 by Torstein Schiøtz Worren
Looking for my homepage? You will find it here: