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

British person - was permitted to leave town without an armed escort. I was surprised but pleased to discover that somehow, in this case, he qualified as my armed escort. As soon as Walid returned, with an unusually large bouquet of quality qat twigs wrapped in pink cellophane, we set off past the town’s gun market, a parade of about twenty tatty wooden booths where firearms that had cost only $150 five years earlier were now retailing for around $750 owing to a recent crackdown on arms smuggling across the long and hardly demarcated Empty Quarter border with Saudi Arabia. After retrieving Ibrahim’s gun, we headed out of town on a good new asphalt road. Soon, our way lay over sand so we stopped to deflate the Land Cruiser tyres before making for the distant speck of a Bedouin camp.
    Ibrahim’s Bedouin friend received us graciously in a large central tent spread with carpets and scattered with bolsters. A dozen or so children - the youngest of eighteen, by two wives - scampered about with thermoses of tea for us, while our host remembered his American friends from Hunt Oil Inc. - David, Dick and Bill and Ron, the Englishman - and how satisfied he had been with their treatment of him and his payment, and how all that had changed as early as 1985. In the year before Vice-President George H. Bush had obliged his Texan friend and sponsor, Ray L. Hunt, by travelling all the way to Sanaa and on, east into the Marib desert to open Yemen’s first oil field, ‘more powerful people - people from Sanaa’ had begun ‘arranging jobs for their family and friends’, which had angered the region’s tribes. He went on to explain that things got worse, that foreign companies soon found they could only get permission to work in Yemen if they had the protection of one of the big sheikhs in Sanaa, who might have nothing to do with any of the local tribes.
    ‘He’s right,’ interjected Ibrahim. ‘Oxy, for example, is protected by Sadeq al-Ahmar, one of Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar’s sons…’
    ‘Those big sheikhs take a big percentage for themselves as a kind of commission for acting as the local agent,’ Mohammed continued, ‘which means they behave as if they have the right to rent out the land to the oil companies when, of course, it doesn’t belong to them at all. The only benefit any of us locals see from our oil is the light we get from the oil flares!’
    Kidnappings of both foreigners and Yemenis and attacks on pipelines and oil company personnel by heavily armed tribesmen intent on extracting from the government what they see as at least their just deserts - a clinic, a school, a well, jobs, a road or legal redress - have long been drawing unwelcome attention to the fact that the writ of the state does not often extend here. Both before and after 9/11, Yemen’s al-Qaeda jihadists were less of a headache and a threat to the state than tribal disturbances in those desert wastes of Marib-Shabwa, in what is effectively - given that oil accounts for more than 70 per cent of the country’s revenues - an important engine room of Yemen’s economy.

REVENGE OF THE PREDATOR
    I wondered if the tribal law governing the sheltering of an outlaw with no questions asked for at least three days meant that even an educated young tribesman like Ibrahim, a person employed by a western company, would feel bound by tribal custom to shelter a person branded ‘a terrorist’ by Yemen’s western allies - bin Laden, for example?
    ‘What do you think of Osama bin Laden, Ibrahim?’ I asked him as we bounced on south across the sand into the former PDRY, in the direction of his family home where we were to spend the night.
    ‘Do you want the truth?’ he said, eagerly leaning forward from the back seat.
    ‘Yes, of course,’ I replied.
    ‘Osama bin Laden’s a hero, I think,’ said Ibrahim, cautiously adding that he was sure the need for global jihad would evaporate if only America could bring itself to be more even-handed in the treatment