In Yemen’s South, Protests Could Cause More Instability

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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/wo...20yemen&st=cse


ADEN, Yemen — Less than an hour’s drive outside this dilapidated port town, the Yemeni government’s authority is scarcely visible, and a different flag appears, that of the old independent state of South Yemen.

The New York Times

Signs of the legacy of British rule are visible around Aden.


The flags are one sign of a rapidly spreading protest movement across the south that now threatens to turn into a violent insurgency if its demands are not met. That could further destabilize Yemen, already the poorest and one of the most troubled countries in the Arab world, and create a broader haven for Al Qaeda here.
The movement’s leaders say the Yemeni government — based in the north — has systematically discriminated against the south, expropriating land, expelling southerners from their jobs and starving them of public money. They speak with deep nostalgia of the 128-year British occupation in South Yemen, saying the British, who withdrew in 1967, fostered the rule of law, tolerance and prosperity. The north, they say, respects only the gun.
In recent months, calls for secession have grown louder after a harsh government crackdown on demonstrations and opposition newspapers. The movement’s leaders say that they believe in peaceful protest, but that their ability to control younger and more violent supporters is fraying.
“It is too late for half measures or reforms,” said Zahra Saleh Abdullah, one of the few Southern Movement leaders who agreed to be identified in print. “We demand an independent southern republic, and we have the right to defend ourselves if they continue to kill us and imprison us.”
Another movement leader, sitting across the room, held up a coin minted under the British in 1964 and pointed to the words engraved on it: South Arabia.
“This is our true identity, not Yemen,” he said. “A southern republic or death.”
Public outrage swelled last month after Yemeni security forces laid siege to the house of a prominent newspaper editor in Aden, setting off a barrage of rocket-propelled grenades and gunfire as the editor and his young children cowered inside. (The government said he was stockpiling weapons.) They were not injured, but the clash left at least one of the family’s guards dead and others wounded, fueling more demonstrations. All told, more than 100 people have been killed in clashes with the police since the movement began in 2007, its leaders say, and about 1,500 supporters remain in prison.
In some rural areas of South Yemen, police officers refuse to wear their uniforms for fear of being shot, according to several accounts from local residents.
The Yemeni government has largely dismissed the movement as a small band of malcontents and has repeatedly accused its leaders of being affiliated with Al Qaeda.
The movement’s leaders call that an outrageous perversion of the truth: they say that they stand for law, tolerance and democracy, and that it is the north that has a history of using jihadists as proxy warriors. But some human rights workers say a shared hatred of the government could be creating a sense of unity between some members of the movement — which is broad and very loosely organized — and members of Al Qaeda.
Perhaps a greater danger, some say, is the spread of lawlessness across the south if the movement’s demands for greater equity are not addressed and it grows more violent. The movement’s own internal contradictions also pose a real threat.
“There is no clear leadership, everyone wants to be the boss,” said Afra Khaled Hariri, a lawyer here who has represented arrested members of the movement. The movement’s leaders include socialists and Islamists with wildly different goals and unresolved disputes dating to internal conflicts between socialist factions that left thousands of southerners dead during the 1980s.
“If the movement succeeds in making a separate state, I expect disaster because of our bloody past,” Ms. Hariri said. And Aden — the heart of the British protectorate and the base of the south’s intelligentsia — would be the chief victim, she added.
For that reason, some in the south say, the best solution is not secession, but a political accommodation in which the north agrees to address some of the movement’s main grievances about land expropriation and job discrimination. Many also say that moving away from Yemen’s highly centralized system of government and granting the provinces more power to govern themselves would ease tensions.
So far the government has shown little sign it intends to do that.

The New York Times