- YEMEN
UPDATE
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- YEMEN ARTICLES
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- Recollecting
Aden
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- By Ethan
Chorin
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Yemen Update
44:(2002)
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- It's January, 1998. The U.S.
and Britain are set to bomb Baghdad for the second night in a row.
Ramadan, the Islamic month of atonement, is fast
approaching. Many wonder if the West will risk heightened Islamic
rage by continuing the barrage over the Holy Days.
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- Having spent the previous nine
months on a Fulbright researching the development effects of
investment in Aden port, I am leaving tonight for home, via Amman,
Jordan.
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- I loiter on the curb for a few
minutes, under a large sign in Arabic that reads "Departures",
marveling at the savagery of the midnight heat. Around me,
twenty red-faced Englishmen. Together we stare into a crowd of
jambiyya and Kalashnikov-toting Yemenis, who, under
different circumstances might have offered us cigarettes or sticks
of a Spearmint-gum knock-off. "They say we'll be in for some
fireworks on the flight", someone quips.
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- Once on the plane, the
atmosphere is singularly giddy. On everyone's mind, escape to
calmer ground. As the plane gathers speed and the undercarriage
absorbs shock from potholes large enough to throw the alignment of
a Cadillac, I recall how, in 1994, at the time of the last
North-South civil war, this flight had almost been hit by a
missile.
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- The better part of the day I
had spent at the Pearl Hotel, perched precariously on a rocky
promontory along a single-lane road, midway between Tawahi town
and the Gold Mohur Club, popular in the 1960's as a watering spot
for British colonial officers. There's never anything going on at
the Pearl. Ever. Never any guests, never any children playing,
never a blaring radio. At this time of year, there's not even
surf. Just the hollow sound of the wind, and a blazing sun.
Every so often, a languid breeze knocks over a broom, or one of
the six plastic deck chairs that rest gently on the tiled surface.
The sun and wear have twisted their frames to such a degree that
at most three legs touch the ground at any time. The breeze isn't
sudden; there's no force to it. When it encounters an object of
resistance, it as if a negotiation must ensue between the air and
the chair. The object queries: will I drop, or skitter forward a
few paces? When I hit the floor, should I make a noise, or will
you cushion me? Fifty meters below where I now stand, an azure sea
laps at the sides of a hundred sparkling aluminum cans.
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- Saleh, one of four Palestinian
handymen in permanent residence, pushes his large head and
shoulders out from the shadows, walks over to the edge of the
verandah, from which one can see the curious rock formation giving
the inlet its name, Elephant Bay. As usual, few words pass between
us. Saleh stands and stares ahead with me, out over the flickering
forms scurrying over a small fleet of wooden sambucs, setting
invisible fishing nets with buoys. Farther and farther out, the
line separating the sea from the sky, the aqua from the ochre,
becomes less and less distinct.
- Saleh's posture radiates
sadness. He doesn't want to talk about how he ended up here, in
Yemen, at the Pearl. It is possible he worked in the Gulf, in
Kuwait or Saudi Arabia as a day-laborer. The Gulf States expelled
many Palestinians as punishment for the support lent Iraqi leader
Saddam Hussein by Yasser Arafat, once Iraq invaded Kuwait.
Unable to return home, to Gaza or the West Bank, most wound up in
farther-flung parts of the Arab world, 'open' countries like
Yemen, which didn't much care where one was from or what one was
up to. In addition to Palestinians, one can find many Iraqis.
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- Something makes me think at
one time Saleh cared for someone: "It was one of the happiest and
saddest moments of my life," Saleh tells me, "the day it finally
sunk in that I was stuck here, on this rock," gesturing to the
crumbling white stucco face of the hotel. "I decided then to make
the best of my life here. I married a Yemeni woman, and we have a
small child. My life is here now. It doesn't matter what
was. It's gone, 'out there somewhere'," he says, flapping his hand
now at the setting sun. "I must go where Allah leads me. If
it is truly His will…"
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- A bronzed torso pokes out of
the kitchen and says something approximating "Grub's up", to which
the crowd nods and groans in feisty approbation. Much of the meat
in Yemen is imported on rafts from Somalia and Ethiopia for local
consumption and for transport overland to Saudi Arabia. There's a
moonlit scene for you.
- The price of lunch is a
tirade. The conspiratorial litany never changes; from the deserts
of Tunisia to the duty-free shops of Dubai, the Arabs' problems
are attributed to the Elders of Zion, Jews in Hollywood, Jews and
Clinton…Suddenly, I am very conscious of how well I represent
the forces my companions now perceived to be aligned against them:
I am an American. I am half-Jewish. I am mobile, free to come and
go as I please.
- Later in the evening, Saleh
and I spent half an hour picking out a good dinner fish from a
haphazard collection of marine extracta, laid out by kind, color,
and cut on rocks by the beach. Orange Roughy, a small fleet of
squid in a puddle of their own ink, a lobster, several large tuna;
smaller, multicolor fish which, alive, would look at home in
someone's aquarium.
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- "I hope you return," Salah
pronounces, almost a non-sequitur, as we pass a group of ten kids
playing soccer in the street with a makeshift ball. "For Allah can
take you like that." (Snaps his fingers), "bi-lahza [in
an instant]"
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- Aden is no stranger to
violence: The Brits were kicked out of Aden by South Yemen rebels
at gunpoint in 1967; infighting among the communists spilled much
blood in the mid 1980s; in 1994, the North invaded Aden, pursuant
to an ill-cemented Unity agreement between North and South Yemen.
The Aden-Abyan Islamic Army, linked to Al-Qaeda before the
organization became notorious, announced recently it would kill
any British or American citizens it found lingering in Aden and
its environs.
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- Four years later, the security
situation in Aden remains precarious. In 2001, the USS Cole was
bombed by agents-provocateurs using speedboat full of explosives.
More recently, the same technique was used to torpedo a French
tanker. The U.S. is again poised to strike Iraq. Amidst all this
chaos, the more positive developments are hardly ever mentioned.
Aden, slowly but surely, is becoming a major container hub. New
jobs are being created, old bombed-out buildings are being
replaced by modern hotels, optimistically awaiting businessmen and
tourists, absent since 1967. Some two hundred fanatics aside, all
that most people here in Aden want is to get on with life, and out
of the headlines.
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- Ethan Chorin received his
Ph.D. in Agriculture and Resource Economics from the University
of California at Berkeley in 2000. He lived in Yemen on a
Fulbright-Hays fellowship during the years 1999-2000. This is
an excerpt from an upcoming book on Yemen and the Middle East,
entitled "Aden/Arabia The Search for Identity and Collective
Consciousness in Yemen and the Middle East."
