Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes Read Online Free PDF

poorer, rougher and simpler the locals’ lives could be than they already were. The smells and the dust alone in that place would immediately have informed a blind, deaf and dumb person that the dream of oil wealth on a Saudi scale had never been and now would never be realised.
    ‘No one’s worried about that,’ Ibrahim answered. ’They’re thinking about the present. People say they wish no one had ever started pumping the stuff - far better that it stay underground than that it be exploited and the proceeds end up in the wrong pockets.‘ We spoke about where the oil money had gone, about Hadda, the Beverley Hills of Sanaa, about the gigantic new mosque President Salih had spent the past decade funding and building at a reported cost of $115 million but a suspected cost of $1.5 billion, and about the further billions being spent on Russian MiG fighters. Returning to the matter in hand, he suggested we visit a Bedouin friend of his who had worked as a foreman for the first American oil company to venture into Yemen in 1981, Hunt Oil Inc. from Texas. But, he explained, on our way out of town we would have to stop by the shop where he had left his AK47. ’They made a rule about six months ago; we’re not allowed to carry our guns into the capital town of any province any more. So now we have a choice; either we can risk leaving them at a checkpoint or we can pay a shopkeeper to look after them.’
    I wondered why he had not economised on both time and money by leaving it at home. As far as I knew, the more educated and urbanised Yemeni male was usually content to travel without a weapon but, equally, sure to own at least one. A member of the northern highland Abu Luhum tribe, an employee of the ministry of education, had recently informed me that any man who carried a gun advertised the fact that he was primitive, before admitting that he himself had five guns, one of them with telescopic night sights, which he had arranged neatly, in order of size, along his bedroom wall. Ibrahim told me that he had been given his first gun at the age of fifteen. There were plenty of tales of the lower floors of rural sheikhs’ residences serving as mini-arsenals, stocked with not only rifles and ammunition but with rocket-propelled grenades, and even heavier weapons. There was no way of ascertaining the truth, but it was often said that there were three times as many guns as people in Yemen.
    An insatiable appetite for firearms among tribesmen, first and foremost as a mark of both virility and wealth on a par with the jambiyah , dates back at least as far as the arrival of the British in Aden. Reinforced by both the British and the Ottoman habit of buying the tribes’ loyalty with gifts of weapons, the appetite continued to rage in the post-colonial era. Although ranged on opposite sides of the Cold War divide, both the YAR and the PDRY had been ravenously hungry for Soviet armaments with which to threaten each other. An attempt to clamp down on the thriving arms trade, to close Yemen’s handful of large arms bazaars and conduct a buy-back programme funded by America since 9/11, has not succeeded in stifling the old appetite. The domestic trade has become more furtive in Sanaa, for example, but it has continued and acquired an international dimension. As early as 2003, a United Nations report cited Yemen as the chief supplier of weapons to the more unstable areas of East Africa - Somalia, for example. 1 Many of the weapons and explosives used in regional al-Qaeda attacks have been traced back to Yemen; the missiles used to fire at the Israeli plane leaving Mombasa in late 2002 were acquired from Yemen via Somalia, and firearms used in the early 2005 attack on the American consulate in Jeddah were discovered to have Yemen defence-ministry markings.
    Ibrahim patiently explained that, unfortunately, we were obliged to take his weapon with us if we were travelling out into the desert. No foreigner - certainly not an American or