Yemen Chronicle by Steven C. Caton

Author:Steven C. Caton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-12-25T16:00:00+00:00

6

WAR

At the end of April, Sheikh Hussein Ali al-Gadhi left the sanctuary in disgust. I assumed he was peeved by the Bani Dhubyan’s refusal to settle, but Muhammad the Maswari shed a different light on his departure. [It] is supposed to be a “deep secret” that the Bani Siham have been fighting the Bani Dhubyan over tribal boundaries for the past five months. About forty people of the Siham tribe have been killed, and al-Gadhi is their sheikh. Now it stands to reason that the Bani Dhubyan would doubt al-Gadhi’s impartiality … Another point worth mentioning is that the Bani Suhman are allies of the Bani Siham in the tribal boundary dispute, and the Bani Dhubyan may fear that the sheikh is trying to forge an alliance against them. In his stead, the al-Giri sheikhs and the houses of Wadi Maswar (my friend Muhammad’s clan) became more prominent in the negotiations. For my fieldwork, this had the result that I could see more of Muhammad, which allowed me to work with him on the poetry of the dispute.

That I would see mainly the mediator’s and sanctuary’s sides in the dispute should come as no surprise. I did not learn until much later the Bani Dhubyan’s view, and it went something like this: Ostensibly mobilizing its forces to defend the sanctuary, Khawlan was in actuality threatening the capital, trying to pressure the North Yemeni government into retreating from its policy of unification with South Yemen. The accusation cut even deeper, implying that Khawlan was working in concert with a foreign power—unnamed but probably Saudi Arabia. This thesis sounded fantastic, but it gained plausibility by the following occurrence. Sometime in April a truck filled with Saudi riyals was found abandoned by the side of the road in Khawlan. This much even I knew at the time. The inference drawn by the Bani Dhubyan was that the anti-unification party in Khawlan was being paid by agents of Saudi Arabia to oppose the government’s policy. Of course, this meant that the North Yemeni state might have been covertly supporting the Bani Dhubyan so that it would have allies in case of an offensive against Sana’a launched by the Saudis or, more likely, their proxies.

It might help to understand the conflict, as it grew and changed course from January until April, by borrowing a term from physics. Resonance is a word used to describe vibration that passes from one body to another in such a way that the two vibrate synchronically and sometimes synergistically. A local tremor, for example, produces vibration along adjacent fault lines, which in turn can magnify the energy of the initial seismic event, possibly causing an earthquake. When one prong of a steel tuning fork is struck, it sounds a particular note, and almost immediately the other prong vibrates at the same energy to emit the same note, the two prongs now vibrating together to amplify the sound. As with resonating bodies, so with the initial event and the successive waves of tensions it produced.

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