Samir Sanbar, a UN Expert, Says to Go Easy on Yemen

By Barbara Crossette

Yemen, the latest battleground in America’s war on terror, is a poor but proud nation coping with political instability and malnutrition. Unicef.

Feb. 3 -- The newest backdrop for the migrating war against Al Qaeda may look familiar: a country with rough, ragged peaks for sanctuary; tribal and sectarian divisions of head-spinning complexity; a land of great strategic importance that for years served as a theater of cold-war US-Soviet rivalry; and an opportunistic president whose manipulation of elections and suppression of dissent is well known in Washington.

Samir Sanbar was a young Lebanese journalist when he was recruited by the United Nations in the early 1960s to go to Yemen during a civil war and be the eyes and ears of a special envoy sent by Secretary-General U Thant. The UN envoy was an Italian, Piero Spinelli, and Sanbar’s assignment was to read for him every Arabic language newspaper he could find and listen to radio broadcasts and street conversations, absorbing a sense of the place through the opinions of its people.

Half a century later, Sanbar is now retired after a long career in the UN, which included negotiating the stationing of a UN force between Lebanon and Israel and overseeing a referendum in Eritrea that granted its independence from Ethiopia. But Sanbar never forgot the lessons he learned in that first UN assignment in Yemen and how they are still valid.

Yemen, a Troubled Tale

“Basically you have to talk to people, find out what is going on, and have a clear picture of who is who and what is what,” he said in an interview. “You have to have a human map, not just a geopolitical map. You have to make contact with influential players, either to cajole or persuade or assure – or threaten, if you wish. You have to do it at several levels.”

Sanbar is not convinced, from what he has seen and heard of American experts (who talk to Yemenis adept at influencing foreigners), that the US has done all it could yet. Indeed, he warned that hasty intervention in Yemen could bring turmoil to the country and its already volatile region.

Indeed, US military teams and intelligence agencies already began operations with Yemeni troops weeks ago, tracking and killing suspected Al Qaeda affiliate terrorists.

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Yemen remains a very poor country with a modern history of coups, assassinations, political extremes and shifting loyalties. When Sanbar was there in the 60s, a civil war was being fought between republicans who had overthrown Imam Muhammad al-Badr, a Shia of the Zaidi sect and the last of a line of theocratic rulers in power since the ninth century, and the less popular ousted royalists hoping for a restoration -- ultimately a failed cause.

Egypt supported the stronger republicans with troops. Saudi Arabia was a conduit for British military aid to the royalists (apparently with the knowledge if not the connivance of the US). Sanbar recalled that tribal fighters floated from one side to another as mercenaries, demanding payment in gold because they didn’t trust money.

He described Yemenis as a shrewd and practical people who can be “very cutthroat” at times. But he also said that it is a proud country with more than a thousand years of history, stunning architecture and a pervasive belief that Yemenis hold a special place in the Arab world. “Yemenis are very proud of being Yemeni,” he said. “They think they are the origin of all Arabs.” The Bin Laden family has its roots in Yemen.

Yemen’s current president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, emerged from the 1962-1970 civil war as the leader of north, the Yemen Arab Republic, with its capital at Sana. In 1990, the north joined the previously independent south, the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, which included the former British outpost and port of Aden. Saleh, a military officer, became president of a united Republic of Yemen, an unsteady federation of an essentially socialist south (seen as a Marxist menace and a Soviet proxy by Washington) with a loosely capitalist north.

Yemen set off alarms in the US in 2000, when the USS Cole was attacked off Aden, killing 17 Americans. The Yemenis weren’t too cooperative in the investigation that followed; some of the convicted attackers later “escaped.” Nevertheless in 2001, after George Bush laid down his “with us or against us” ultimatum, Saleh (who had flirted earlier with Al Qaeda as a potentially useful tool against his enemies) rushed to Washington to sign up for the war on terror.

Washington’s Recent Focus on Yemen

Jump to 2010, and Barack Obama’s declaring Yemen an ally against Al Qaeda and the recipient of tens of millions of dollars in US military aid. At the beginning of this year, Gen. David Petraeus, chief of the US Central Command, went to Yemen to meet with Saleh and talk about the road ahead.

Exercise caution, Sanbar said, in reference to the US. Saleh, who has his own agenda, needs help, boxed in, as he is, between a still sore south and a restless north, where a rebellion simmers among Zaidi Shias (called Houthis, after the clan leading the fight). Pockets of Al Qaeda scatter the country.

“He’s been in power for 25 years, and he apparently wants his son to succeed him,” Sanbar said of Saleh. “If he appears like a bastion of democracy and freedom, he would seek to get support for his continued rule.” Many Yemenis, he added, would not welcome one-sided US backing and weapons for the president.

Edward Prados, who directed international educational exchanges in Yemen for the Fulbright program and others, wrote a prescient essay for the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University in 2005. Titled “The US and Yemen: A Half-Century of Engagement,” it was a primer on recent Yemeni history while also an assessment of American policy. Nearly five years before a lone Nigerian with Yemeni connections, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, tried to blow up an American jet on Christmas Day 2009, setting off a race to militarize Yemen, Prados could see that the course had already been set in the Bush years.

“Saleh has been able to leverage US support for counterterror operations into silencing internal opposition, co-opting tribes with payments and strengthening his political base,” he wrote in his essay. “Thus, America seems to be acknowledging that regime maintenance—not democracy—better serves US interests at this time. In 1990, Yemen lost its role as Cold War proxy state; however, like Pakistan, it has found a new role as one of America’s partners in the war on terror.”

Barbara Crossette is the United Nations correspondent for The Nation and a former New York Times UN bureau chief.