Arabia Felix: not so happy these days

by Mark Nicholson

A jambia - a Yemeni dagger

It must be difficult for news organizations to choose and allocate the time between different topics. Over the last week it has been mostly about the US mid-term elections. That was followed by the sad crash of a Learjet in Florida co-piloted by a 20-year-old Brazilian-American lady which resulted in over 5 million YouTube hits in the first few hours. Meanwhile the BBC International News spent 27 minutes of one news programme discussing the character and vices of Russell Brand despite the fact that 99% of the world would never have heard of him. Yet the recent appalling drone attacks on Sudanese villagers in West Kordofan, which killed over 300, and Saudi attacks on Houthi rebels over the last week killing forty, including women and children, have hardly been mentioned. I suspect most people In the West would be hard pressed to get close to Kordofan or Sana’a on MapTap.

It has been almost fifty years since I lived in what used to be North Yemen.  It was united with the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (the former British colony of Aden for over a century) in 1990 into what is now Yemen. The official capital of the country is Sana’a in the north but the city is now under the control of the Houthis so the de facto capital is Aden. The Houthi movement is a quasi-religious, quasi-political revival that originates from Sa’dah to the north of Sana’a near the Saudi border. They are Shias, while the Saudis are Sunnis, and the enmity goes back to the death of Muhammad in 630 C.E. They are financed by the Iranians and are tough and well-armed. They loathe the Saudis and they equally hated the Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh who was the strongman when I was there.

Yemen has an interesting history. The Sabaean kingdom covered both Yemen and Ethiopia. The monarch was Maqeda, Queen of Saba (or Sheba), who visited Solomon around 950 B.C.E. They had an affair, which led to Maqeda giving birth to the first Ethiopian Emperor, Menelik I. One thousand years later, the Romans gave three names to the Arabian peninsula: Arabia Deserta, Arabia Petrea and the mountainous south and southwest, known as Arabia Felix, or happy (or fertile/ wealthy) Arabia, which today covers mainly Yemen and Oman.

North Yemen was always the poorest country in the Middle East. The economy is rural, the country lacks oil, and the chief national pastime (other than fighting) is chewing qat[1]. In the 1980s, most young men would go north to Saudi Arabia to work in the oilfields. After a few years they would come back with their jacket full of thousands of dollars. Their shopping list in order of priority was usually i) an AK-47 ii) a rhino horn jambia iii) a Land Cruiser pick-up and iv) a wife.

There was a safe triangle in those days between Sana’a, Ta’iz in the south and Al Hodeidah on the Red Sea coast. When we drove to the north in a Government Land Cruiser, the first thing we had to do was remove the number plates. Having government number plates risked hijacking; driving without any was safe.

My job there was to set up and manage a sheep and goat research station. The sheep were known as Fat-tails and they lacked wool. Storing fat in the tails is an adaptive measure to reduce heat stress. They were also the most intelligent ovine breed I have ever worked with: you called them and they followed. No sheepdogs were necessary and the different flocks (grazed together by day) would separate according to the owner and go to bed every night in their respective stone stables. The winter months were surprisingly cold; hard frosts were common. Our research covered the different serotypes of Foot and Mouth and another mosquito-transmitted viral disease called Bluetongue, which has since spread into Europe.

The older Yemenis would work for projects like mine. Yemenis are fierce and combative: killing and being killed are part of everyday life, which is why the Iranians like to use the Houthis to goad the Saudis. The Houthi-led civil war in Yemen has been going for more than a decade and resulted in about 400,000 deaths. Yet as individuals, they were delightful. We had one rule: at 7 a.m. when work started, jambias, revolvers & AK-47s had to be locked away in the store till work ended at 1 pm.

Friday was Prayer time to which I was always invited. “Everyone from the village is there”, I was told. “Every single person?”, I asked. “Aiwa". I pointed out that I could not see any ladies. “Of course not”, was the reply.

My Oxford University Press atlas (revised in 1964) has been my ‘Go to’ reference for 50 years. The map on the right is from that atlas and has two special features of interest. First, the red line showing the border between what was then Yemen and Saudi Arabia just fizzles out into the desert. Second, to the northwest of Hodeidah on the eastern shore of the Red Sea is a small island marked Kamaran I. (Br.).

In 1981, the Netherlands Ambassador to Yemen came to inspect my project, which the Dutch were co-funding with the Kuwait fund. In the middle of his visit, he was contacted on his radio phone. After a very brief call, he apologized and said he had to rush back to Sana’a.  The following story was related to me later.

A Dutch couple had been sailing around the Mediterranean and got caught in a storm to the south-east of Cyprus. The mast had been broken and they hobbled to Haifa with their small engine, where the yacht was given a major refit. They stocked up with supplies and decided it would be fun sail through Suez and down the Red Sea. Ten days later they looked at their charts and found an idyllic island in the middle of the Red Sea. Their map, like mine, indicated Kamaran I. (G.B.) so they assumed it was a British Overseas Territory.  What they did not know was that the island had been ceded to North Yemen in 1967. They anchored near a deserted beach, lit a fire and slept on the beach. The next morning a motor torpedo boat appeared on the horizon bearing, not Royal Navy mariners, but Arab sailors who went aboard the yacht to find a huge cushion covered by the Star of David, a new mast with the plaque of a Haifa chandler and a galley full of tins of food in Hebrew. They were arrested, taken to separate prisons in Al Hodeidah and the man was placed in leg irons. It took considerable diplomatic time and effort to get the pair released.

One day the Minister of Agriculture paid a visit to our research station in Dhamar, 100 km south of Sana’a. After seeing our livestock, we invited him for tea in my office. On my wall I had a map of the Middle East on which I had blacked out Israel. He noticed it and politely asked me to take it down. “Why?”, I challenged him “I have erased Israel, Sir.”  “How can you erase a country that does not exist?” I took it down.

The Houthis in their mountain strongholds have the ability to make life tough for all their enemies - Israel, the USA and Saudi Arabia. They control the Bab el-Mendeb, the Gate of Tears, at the entrance to the Red Sea and along with the Strait of Hormuz, Iran and its surrogates can still have a stranglehold on a significant proportion of the world’s fossil fuels. The Saudis and the USA with all their combined wealth and military power may think it easy to destroy the Houthis quickly but I think they will be disappointed. Yemenis are exceedingly tough and brave and I would rather have them on my side.

The author in the Tihama coastal desert near the Red Sea

I hope that Yemen returns to peace because it is a fascinating country both culturally and scenically. So much of Sana’a and Ta’iz, with their beautiful Babylonian architecture will have been destroyed but the varied landscapes ranging from rugged mountains to coastal deserts will always be there. 

[1] Catha edulis is a tropical tree known as qat in Yemen, chat in Ethiopia and miraa in Kenya.  Chewing the young leaves causes amphetamine-like symptoms such as alertness, euphoria, inappetence and lack of sleep. There is a profitable (sometimes illegal) trade in the young leaves.