Answer: Tribal Lands

Now that it seems the president of Yemen has tribal connections, maybe the tribes will turn out to be decisive. Certainly they can outvote the middle classes, which makes democracy ill-advised for the latter. I’d like to know the form of land-ownership in the countryside – I’m guessing it’s comparatively primitive and that none of the farmers could ever be considered petit bourgeoisie.

The events in Yemen seemed to have passed me by. The outcome for the despot had already been pronounced, but desperate measures were taken that changed the equation. The revolution is stalled, unable to pass into that more advanced but still uncertain stage it reached for the Egyptians more than two months ago: constitution making.

In both Egypt and Yemen, the decisive event has been the military (part of it in Yemen’s case) taking the side of the revolution. It’s clear now that in Egypt the middle classes were strong enough to depose the despot so long as the army did not take the despot’s side. In Yemen, family loyalties kept part of the military on Saleh’s side. That was not nearly enough even to stalemate the revolution, but for reasons that do not apply in Egypt.

A numerically strong and well-armed tribal element not at all organized along modern economic or political lines has joined with students and urban professional classes in the call for Saleh’s ouster. This is what I was wanting to find out. Had the land passed into the hands of rentiers, petit bourgeois or corporate farmers, or a manorial aristocracy? Or did it remain tribal property administered by the elders and sheiks? In the former case, the urban middle class might find a natural and permanent ally in the countryside. In the latter, any alliance, in the absence of shared economic interests and forms of activity, could only be temporary.

If any facts were necessary to demonstrate this tendency, one by itself would probably be sufficient: that Yemen is the kind of impoverished and politically naïve nation where Al Qaida could hope to thrive. I wondered why Saleh, with his own tribal ties, didn’t remove himself to the countryside, consolidate his strengths there, manipulate divisions among the revolutionary classes in the capital, and await a moment favorable for his return. But it seems the larger tribes were already aligned against him very early on. He was actually safer in the capital.

The reason of it seems to be services: clean water, electricity, health care. Water makes the best example. The sheiks and elders have not hesitated to send parties of well-armed youths to gain or defend sources of water, any less than their Native American counterparts would have hesitated to fight over hunting grounds. Seeing an opportunity to end this zero-sum game, tribal leadership is seeking, not just resources from, but an expanded role in, government – one that the master manipulator Saleh, left to his own devices, would never have given them.

And so the right-opportunist tribes have entered into an alliance with, among others, the left-adventurist students.

The students have chosen a dangerous path, one also being tread by certain elements in the Egyptian revolution. It’s wrong to put vengeance against the individuals who made up the previous regime ahead of concrete steps to establish the new regime. It’s only slightly less wrong first to seek punishment for crimes committed during the revolution itself. And one thing that’s wrong with U.S policy towards these revolutions, that we will consider interfering only to prevent crimes against humanity, is that punishment is the logical next step when prevention has failed – and whom would we like to punish?

If revolution were against the persons who happen to administer a state, it might be considered a success merely to replace these persons without replacing the state. This is the false position, and real risk, reached by calls for vengeance. Again, students do not have a real, but only a potential, interest in the outcomes of revolutions, and that allows them to be led by passions that do not necessarily comport with the real interests of the other revolutionary parties. I am reminded that the Terror did not so much preserve the revolution in France, as make the nation ripe for the return of despotism – of the imperial kind.

So the students who rejected the deal with Saleh because it does not ensure he will be tried for whatever thieveries or murders he has committed, have put the actual reformation of the state, for the time being, on the back burner. And that I call “adventurism.”

At the same time, co-existence with a pre-capitalist economy and society poses some problems for the builders of the revolutionary state. How can the urban middle classes demand rights for women from elders who pass capital judgment on them in their absence and without a hearing? How will the secret ballot fare when the elders dictate their votes to the male members of the tribe? The “temporary alliance” is sure eventually to break down in a nation where the tension between city and country is amplified by the tension between modern and pre-modern societies.

But the prospects for state-building in Yemen I reserve for a future post (maybe after the problem Saleh poses has been resolved)….