If you want to be inspired, read about Tawakkol Karman (“a thirty-two-year-old [Yemeni] woman who runs an organization dedicated to protecting journalists”) on page four, page five, and page six of Dexter Filkins’s opus on Yemen in The New Yorker. Things are so very complicated in our little world. Ms. Karman is one of the true leaders of the Yemeni Revolution, and for all our fears about anarchy or a takeover by Islamists sympathetic to al-Qaeda, she doesn’t fit that bill.
A few days later, I visited Karman’s house, in central Sanaa. On the mantel in the sitting room were framed photographs of four people: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Hillary Clinton. Karman had met Clinton in January, just before the uprising began. Her organization, Women Journalists Without Chains, receives funding from the U.S. government. The meeting with Clinton was arranged by the U.S. Embassy, she said. Looking at the picture of Clinton, she added, “I don’t want to be foreign minister, but she is my role model.”
Is she naive? Quite possibly. Is she idealistic? Most definitely. But the New York Times reports that our government has concluded that she is right about the most important thing.
The United States, which long supported Yemen’s president, even in the face of recent widespread protests, has now quietly shifted positions and has concluded that he is unlikely to bring about the required reforms and must be eased out of office, according to American and Yemeni officials.
The Obama administration had maintained its support of President Ali Abdullah Saleh in private and refrained from directly criticizing him in public, even as his supporters fired on peaceful demonstrators, because he was considered a critical ally in fighting the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda.
But that doesn’t mean Ms. Karman is pleased. She may see Hillary Clinton as a role model but she’s not afraid to criticize her boss.
“We are really very, very angry because America until now didn’t help us similar to what Mr. Obama said that Mubarak has to leave now,” said Tawakul Karman, a leader of the antigovernment youth movement. “Obama says he appreciated the courage and dignity of Tunisian people. He didn’t say that for Yemeni people.”
“We feel that we have been betrayed,” she said.
That betrayal may be coming to an end, but it’s not like Ms. Karman necessarily is any wiser about what lies in store for her country than our best intelligence officers.
As Dexter Filkins reports, Abdul Majeed al-Zindani, a man the U.S. Government considers a terrorist, recently made a speech before the group of protesters that Ms. Karman has been leading. He called for a caliphate.
A few minutes later, I spotted Karman, and we ducked inside a tent next to the stage. She was furious. “We had a big argument about Zindani—about whether to allow him,” she said. “I was opposed. This is a youth movement, not a religious one.”
The demonstrators who had gathered outside Sanaa University faced a dilemma: on their own, they did not represent the aspirations of Yemen’s twenty-three million people, but, the more the movement grew, the more Islamist it threatened to become. Seventy per cent of Yemenis live in rural areas, and most are deeply religious.
In other words, there are a bunch of intellectuals who are revolting against tyranny and corruption, but any true democratically representative government in Yemen would be anti-intellectual in the extreme. And that doesn’t even touch on the fact that every sheikh in Yemen is getting two checks every month (one from the Yemeni government and one from the Saudis) to keep the peace. The corruption in Yemen may be the most pervasive of any place on Earth, and there are precious few institutions independent of the regime.
Despite these concerns, the U.S. has evidently decided that the regime cannot be salvaged and some kind of orderly transition must be attempted.
…negotiations now center on a proposal for Mr. Saleh to hand over power to a provisional government led by his vice president until new elections are held. That principle “is not in dispute,” the Yemeni official said, only the timing and mechanism for how he would depart.
This proposal is supported by Yemen’s “official” opposition (known collectively as the Joint Meetings Parties) and by the Gulf Cooperation Council, but has so far been rejected by the protesters.
Whoever takes over will have to deal with the fact that Yemen is completely broke and figure out a way to govern that isn’t reliant on paying bribes to every sheikh in the country. As for Ms. Karman, I hope she isn’t disappointed. Maybe she’ll become a leader in the new government. Maybe she can figure out a way forward.
