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An Anniversary of Broken Promises in Yemen PDF
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Two years have now gone by, and the President remains in power.  Yet in the end of 2007, the number of male and female beggars in the Republic of Yemen had reached almost 10% of the total population.  As of 2004, over 40% of the population lived below the poverty line, and the number has only grown since then.  All they have received are more promises, like the promise to add ten million families to social security coverage which has not yet come to fruition.  The levels of unemployment and poverty, however, have not decreased.  In spite of this fact, the past two days, the President has stressed that he has been able to implement and fulfill between 70-80% of his electoral platform.  

How the international community must envy the people governed by such an effective president!  Apparently, he has managed to eliminate unemployment, and resolve the water problems that plague the people of Yemen.  He has enriched the values of democracy, enhanced the educational system, rooted out corruption and supported the peaceful rotation of power!  Unfortunately, all these great benefits do not seem to have reached the citizens on the ground.  Below, we present the stories of some Yemenis who still wait for the promises the President made to be fulfilled.

Muhammad Abdul Basit lives in a room that is three meters long and four meters wide, close to the University of Sana’a.  He shares this room with ten people from the region he grew up in.  “I was not able to continue my education,” he admits, a hint of tears in his eyes.  “The difficulty conditions of life forced me to travel to Sana’a in order to make a living.  Life is very difficult and cruel sometimes.”  Although he came to Sana’a looking for work, he has not found steady employment.  Like some of his roommates, he works as a vendor, selling goods on tables along the street.  His less fortunate roommates can only sit on the sidewalks, waiting in the hopes of someone coming by looking for a laborer for the day.  On occasion, they are lucky, but most of the time, they are not.  “Do you consider this table that I am selling things on a job?” he asks forlornly.  “It brings nothing but more trouble and worries.”  He suffers under the shame and boredom of being unemployed, living in a city where the cost of living is high.
 
Ali Abdu Fara’a sits on the sidewalk nearby, watching the shoes of those passing by.  He is dreaming of someone who could repair his own shoes, which are barely wearable anymore.  “It is true that they promised to find us a job in the factories after the elections, but in fact there is nothing to that.”  Ali gathers his limbs close to his body, trying to keep warm.  He tells us that he did not complete his education.  “Each one of us should run after his living,” he asserts, dismissing the value of education.  He cannot believe that education is considered a key to a good livelihood in other countries; he sees no sign of it here.  “The President’s people told us that, after elections, they will give us a job and educate us, but no one came after that with a concrete offer for us,” he concludes mournfully, his eyes once again on the shoes passing by.

Fare’e Al Wisabi holds out little hope for the future.  “I studied until the sixth grade and I left school, because I have a family to take care of,” he tells us.  He does not expect to get a job or any help from the state.  “We are always sitting out here in the open, and no one has ever talked to us or offered us anything.”  As I speak with Fare’e, a young man passing by asks me what the interviews are for.  I tell him that I am conducting interviews with the unemployed.  He laughs, and advises me to stay away from such bad people.  Fare’e turns to me, arguing that such a statement is not fair.  There are college graduates who end up selling goods on tables in the streets; not everyone who is unemployed is unwilling to take even the most menial agricultural job.

Mohammed al-Khameri agrees with Fare’e.  Mohammad jokes that he is not from the famous and rich al-Khameri family.  If he were, he points out, he would not be forced to divide his life between working selling socks on the streets and studying economics.  “I graduated from high school in 2005,” he tells us, “then I went to Sana’a to look for a job … Some of the people working with me [as street vendors] are university graduates!”

The President assured his people that prices would not rise.  He promised an end to poverty and unemployment.  Well, two years have passed since those promises were made and those lines were drawn in the sand.  Every month, the prices of wheat, rice and sugar go higher.  References to the global economy only serve to confuse the Yemeni citizen more.  How is that the market causes the prices of everything the Yemeni needs to go up, but the prices of everything that Yemen produces to decline when exported abroad … and yet those same goods produced in Yemen are still expensive when sold in a local market?

We are trapped in a cycle, in which war and elections feed into each other without cease.  Elections are a necessity because we are on the eve of war, and war is necessary to preserve elections.  Meanwhile, the unemployed move north by the thousands.  Some join the army, where they are sent out into battles about which they know nothing.  Many never come back; those who do return are as unemployed as they were before, only now they have the added burden of the trauma of their experiences in war.  They suffer from disabilities, both mental and physical, and some will never recover.

Yet the army has become the way out of the trouble of the so-called presidential pledge.  Young people waiting for their promised jobs find no employment outside of the army.  Those who do not join the military are too often funneled into the qhat markets, becoming gangs that loot and steal, or becoming terrorists.  Too many end up in prison, often on charges that they never quite understood to begin with.

The decline over these past two years has not only affected the impoverished masses waiting for their jobs and for prices to go down.  Investors, who were carrying the burden on behalf of the state, are now faltering as well.  Ahmad Kamil Ashur, an Iraqi investor who had begun a project to manufacture mobile houses, found himself abducted by the same security officials who job it was to end kidnappings.  He found himself in jail and his children were forced to drop out of their schools to earn enough money to survive.  His factory now appears to be in the hands of a complete stranger, who had the money to take control of it.
 
Nor is Ashur alone in his terrible situation.  More than two hundred medium-sized economic sites and projects have been stopped during the last two years.  A hundred and fifty investors and entrepreneurs have been imprisoned, twenty of whom are foreigners.  Some languish in jail, without knowing the charges against them.  Sixty-three of these imprisoned businessmen have asked for the intervention of human rights organizations to protect them from their horrible circumstances; the rest either turn to tribal custom for support or remain in prison, trying to be patient as they wait for their freedom.

It is not only new projects which have suffered in the past two years.  Even projects which have continued in production for thirty years are now falling victim to the state and the current economic downturn.  An industrial complex, established in 1979, was recently closed by the state under accusations of a bad reputation.  However, the Federation of Craft and Professional Associations has complained that the land owned by that industrial complex had become desirable to people with power, and attempts were made to gain that land before the complex was ultimately shut down.

And so as the economy worsens and unemployment rises, more and more private employers are being shut down, making the situation ever more dire.  Some lucky few are able to weather the storm with help from friends, family or the occasional influential connection.  Others, like former professor Faisal Musre’e Emad, discover that criticizing men in power only leads to unemployment.  And still others suffer a fate not unlike Ashur’s.  Samir Abdullah, who graduated from the University of Sana’a, was unable to parlay his degree into a job.  He finally found work at a car wash.  Somehow, he caught the attention of a group of men in military clothing.  They beat him and dragged him to a prison for a period of time, on unknown charges, then just as mysteriously released him.  Now he is back to cleaning cars.

Rising unemployment presents a real danger to the stability of Yemen.  Inexplicably intertwined with poverty, unemployment leaves families struggling to afford food and shelter.  Young men without any means of supporting themselves will look for other ways to burn their energy.  They will find their identity in gangs, in secret or public political organizations, and in demonstrations and armed confrontations.  Some will turn to terrorism.  The President’s promise to eradicate poverty and unemployment in two years was perhaps unrealistic, but more steps in that direction must be taken if Yemen is to have anything close to the future the President promised us during his campaign.
 
 

Some of the names of our contributors have been changed to protect their identity.  The names of people interviewed have also been changed. The opinions expressed in our regional pieces reflect the beliefs of their writers, and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or opinions of the Tharwa Foundation and its members.

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