The tribe in Yemen.. The movement of geography and the course of history

What should not be underestimated today is that the tribe’s present is different from its past... It remains, in reality, an institutional structure based on systems of strict customs, a nervous fabric of kinship and blood relations, and a strong connection to the land and environmental resources. This is why the different urban areas, clothing, and even dialects and lifestyles emerged from one region to another, and many conflicts and competitions erupted. However, all of this quickly subsided over the ages whenever mediations were called to address them and find “rules” to regulate neighborhood relations in a way that achieves mutual consent and acceptance of solutions, no matter how harsh and painful some of them were.

It is impossible to imagine Yemen without tribes, nor to imagine a tribe without weapons, which in the eyes of the tribes have remained a tool to deter internal tyranny, confront the ambitions of foreign interventions, and expel any presence thereof.

What about the tribe in Yemen?

But the general image of the tribe may now appear different from one region to another, and indeed it is, as the Hadhramaut tribes are less fanatical and severe than the western tribes in Shabwa, Abyan, Ad Dali, Yafa and others, and are relatively close to the central tribes in Taiz and Ibb, while in the north they are still rebellious, strong-willed and stubborn.

Is modernization of the tribe possible? Yes, it has happened to varying degrees over the past 70 years.

At the first level, successive governments in Yemen, in cooperation with neighboring Saudi Arabia, have usually dealt with the fierce northern tribes in particular with respect and affection. At a later stage, during the era of the late President Ali Abdullah Saleh, they attracted the leaders of the northern tribes, tamed them, and used them as votes in elections and rifles in wars. However, what happened after that was that the tribal leaders separated from their bases and became preoccupied with their interests with the authorities in Sana’a. They built houses and palaces and sent many of their sons to study in Europe and the United States at their own expense, while the sons of their tribes continued to suffer from the hardship of living and the scarcity of education, which encouraged some of their members to “think outside the box” and rebel against them, which led to their weakness, while the Houthis could only exploit the poverty and misery of some of their sons to throw them into the furnace of wars.

I used to ask myself a lot during my many accompaniments of the late President Saleh on his visits to some tribal areas and his long meetings with their leaders. I would ask myself and sometimes dare to ask him, why do you go to the tribal sheikhs and they do not come to you, even though you are the head of state? His answer would always be, “It is not possible to rule all the tribes of Yemen in one way.” In his opinion, there was more than one way to deal with the terrain of the social geography of the tribe.

But the situation today seems different, as it can be said that the tribe has begun to deal with the current situation with special awareness without the need for its traditional leaders, nor the leadership and government, nor the Houthis, of course, as neither the “formal” leadership of what remains of Yemen, the presidency and government, nor the elites and parties, in the opinion of the tribes, are capable of absorbing the grievances and demands of the majority of citizens.

“We don’t want a president who is an honorable man while many of his people live off the garbage,” a tribal sheikh I met recently told me. “Our national ID cards at home are worthless and our passports abroad are worth nothing,” he said.

What's happening today?

If the tribal movement now does not inspire and motivate everyone, then the reins of power are about to slip out of the hands of the leadership and the government, and after that any movement by them in international forums will be of no use. Rather, this threatens to eliminate their legitimacy in representing the national consensus at home and abroad.

The matter is extremely serious to the point of danger, unless the performance of the leadership, the government, and the remaining army forces supporting them are consistent with the demands of the general tribal, societal, and national popular movement.

Today, the tribe is breaking its silence, ready to fight, while the political parties and elites are waiting for the outside to intervene, even after they became certain that the region and the world have turned their backs on Yemen, and forgotten the conflict taking place there, and everyone in the region, Europe, the United States, and even the entire world is preoccupied with their own affairs and future visions for their own economic and political projects and ambitions.

The Yemeni situation is becoming increasingly filled with discontent and anger over the state of political division and the worsening of its living and security crises without any real, serious solutions.

The recent tribal movement reminds us of the epic of “Matareh Ma’rib” when its armed tribes and fierce warriors were mobilized to support the Arab coalition forces and the army to repel the Houthi attacks on Ma’rib, where thousands of simple people from the country’s tribes from both sides fell on its walls, along with officers and experts from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and the Lebanese Hezbollah on the Houthi side.

Tribal balance

The tribal movement also reminds us that tribes have a “precise and sensitive scale” to measure things in times of hardship and calculate their results, just as gold is measured, and how they cannot stand indefinitely with any party that is on the verge of loss and downfall.

We have examples of this in the history of medieval and recent Yemen, for example, when the tribes invaded Sana’a after the failure of the constitutional revolution in 1948 due to a “fatwa” issued by the Imam of Yemen at the time (Ahmed Yahya Hamid al-Din) against another religious fatwa that was implemented by his relative (Abdullah bin Ali al-Wazir), where Imam Ahmed’s father was killed in a semi-armed revolution on February 17, 1948 in the hope of drafting a constitution for the country... The one who killed Imam Yahya Hamid al-Din was the tribal leader, the revolutionary poet Sheikh Ali bin Nasser al-Qarda’i, in the Hizayz region south of the city of Sana’a.

Egyptian army intervention in the sixties of the last century

Several Yemeni tribes have risen up in an unprecedented manner, rejecting the presence of Egyptian forces sent by Gamal Abdel Nasser to aid the Yemeni revolution that broke out against the “tyrannical, backward and corrupt” Imamate regime... It is true that this was in the midst of two competing regional projects, but Yemen was ultimately its arena and fuel, and it lost many of its people and resources in a battle in which it had no stake. The matter ended after the setback of June 5, 1967, with Abdel Nasser handing over the reins of the solution and the knot in the Yemeni crisis to King Faisal bin Abdulaziz, who accomplished what could be considered a historic solution, at that time, to that crisis in which Egypt intervened, at a high human and material cost.

Assassination of Al-Hamdi

In the mid-seventies of the last century, when the late President Ibrahim al-Hamdi came to power, he worked hard to exclude the symbols of the tribal establishment with influence within the army and the security services, and the good relationship with Saudi Arabia and the "Baath Party of Iraq", and he also sought to create new foundations for the relationship between the state and the tribe, but the latter rebelled against him, especially in the northwestern regions where the "Hashid" tribe is concentrated, and in the northeastern, the stronghold of the "Bakil" tribe, which ultimately led to the killing of al-Hamdi at the hands of a tribal party from one of the clans of the first tribe.

The tribe's betrayal of President Saleh

Then the same thing happened when the so-called "Sana'a Ring Tribes" abandoned the late President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Saleh learned from the experiences of his country's previous presidents that his regime could not last even by passing it on to his sons or continue at the very least without challenges, opposition, and competition for prestige and wealth with the tribes.

He began to invest heavily in sponsoring new sheikhs in the tribes competing with his authority at the expense of the traditional leaderships of these tribes with the aim of weakening the latter and controlling them. The result was that he lost their prestige in front of their members, who he did not have the time or circumstances to make stand on their feet and impose themselves as influential "notables" with a binding word for the members of the tribe. When some of their sons became strong, he resorted to getting rid of them by throwing them into a conflict with the Houthi group with whom he had allied, and the end of his rule and person was at their hands.

Many today, inside and outside Yemen, believe that this time should be “the right moment to direct the compass towards a horizon for a political or military solution,” and to benefit from all the changes in the political scene locally, regionally, and globally.

The tribes excelled in playing a tributary and effective role in some stages of building the state project, but they often withdrew into themselves when this project carrying the dream of the national state disappeared, and they decided to preserve what they had in terms of land, capabilities, and position on the maps of conflict. If everyone wanted a “state for all,” then it was ready, and if they did not want that, then in the end they would remain in their places and would not lose anything.

Source: Al Majalla Magazine