Report - Issue 50 - Yemen Times

50 - Dec 11th thru Dec 17th 2000, Vol X

Kidnapping in Yemen:
Problem & Solution

Hasan Saeed
Al-Zaidi
Yemen Times
In last week’s issue No. 48 we discussed briefly the reasons for kidnapping and ways of remedying the problem. However, there are still many questions that need objective and convincing answers.
If we agree that kidnapping incidents are criminal acts, then the continuation of this phenomenon makes us look for its reasons, motives and eradication. When we come to the kidnappers’ usual demands, we find that they are related to the state providing public projects to their regions and assertion of their personal and tribal rights. Whether these demands are legitimate or they use them as pretexts does not matter. The crucial question is “How can this phenomenon brought to an end?”
If we consider the kidnappers’ demands for public services that constitute the core of the state’s responsibility, then the state must reconsider its general policies of distributing developmental projects fairly in all regions of the republic. If the resources of the state “are really limited”, then it would be fair to distribute them fairly to convince people “all people” that the government does its best. If we can not differentiate between security problems, the general policy of state, corruption in administrative and judicial departments, despite a plan for developmental projects, there would neither be an effective mechanism for carrying them out nor determination to fight and get rid of corruption.
To provide an appropriate atmosphere conducive for national, Arab and foreign investment, those in charge must start thinking of establishing a political and secure climate with no security problems. This may take time but a serious start would ensure the cooperation of all.

What has the state done to limit kidnapping?
A serious problem like kidnapping and its negative effects on the national economy and reputation of the country, needs urgent solutions, even if they are only temporary ones. The state has issued a law of execution on those who commit kidnapping crimes. It positions military units in regions vulnerable to kidnappings. Moreover, it has drawn a joint security plan between the Ministry of Tourism and security authorities to organize, escort and guard tours of foreign tourists in those regions at specific times. In case of kidnapping, military forces surround kidnappers, follow up citizens belonging to kidnappers’ tribe or region in cities, at homes and schools, put them in jails as hostages and, at the same time, send negotiators to free the kidnapped peacefully. However, those measures did not stop this phenomenon completely. The next question then is:

Who benefits from kidnapping?
Perhaps the negotiators benefit from kidnapping by having a chance to meet the president and ask him to solve problems that concern certain people whom they themselves can benefit from. The kidnappers themselves benefit by getting their demands answered. The losers are those hostages who have nothing to do with the whole thing. Yemen, too, loses its reputation and its economy gets weakened. The matter then requires other mechanisms and solutions beside the previous ones.

Applicable Solutions
Looking deep into the reasons of the phenomenon, measures taken by the state, economic losses, expenditures from the state budget, we can conclude that some other measures in association with the previous ones, would solve this problem. The state can involve the people of those regions, where kidnapping occurs or is likely to occur, in security forces and encourage them to invest in the tourism field. It can make them responsible for security in their regions instead of using military units. It is better to make people of the region recognize the immediate benefits of tourism for them and their big responsibility in protecting tourists rather than making tourists feel unsafe being escorted by soldiers.
In addition, the people’s knowledge of their regions, relations and customs would help them provide security and stability in those regions. Moreover, sheikhs of those regions must discuss the people’s problems and find fair solutions instead of ignoring them. Such ignorance may lead them to grow rebellious and encouraged to find solutions to problems such as kidnapping rather than resort to such extraneous ways to draw the attention of the state to their problems.

Furthermore, the authorities must draft immediate punitive measures against those responsible for kidnapping and guarantee rights to all, not only to sheikhs, their relatives or sons. Over and above, the authorities must quickly respond to all lawful demands so that tribesmen do not think their demands are ignored.

I was shocked to hear from those 16-year-old students, who came out of prison in the Criminal Investigation Department where they spent 17 days for interrogation in connection with the kidnapping of the Swedish expert. They were taken from their school Al-Nawares in Sana’a although they had nothing to do with it except that they were from the same region as the kidnappers. They expressed their indignation to this spurious incident and said that there was no value in the education for which they came from their regions. They said they were victims and they would discontinue their studies and take up their guns to kidnap and achieve what they dream of by force and not through education. Such wrong measures make the people of the region stand by the kidnappers’ side, not the state’s side.

Hurdles Before National Industry

Yasser M. Ahmad
Yemen Times
Researchers and industrialists represented by the Yemeni Industrialists Society think that development of national industry is hindered and blocked by a number of factors. Some of those factors are:
1- Unjust treatment of national products by customs authority.
2- Tax ambivalence and high cost of national production
Many factors help increase costs of national products against imported ones. Factors like imposing taxes on devices and systems used in production, high rate of electricity services, high taxes on imported raw materials, expensive transportation and high interest rates on loans of local banks- all lead to the price-rise of national products.
The tax ambivalence is represented by imposing taxes on imported raw material before they are manufactured and, then when products are manufactured, by disregarding the fact that these materials are subject to damage. Industrialists may have loans from banks at high interest rates for products that are not yet manufactured which makes them increase prices later. Researchers have established that taxes on clothes is between 5% and 15% in case of other kinds of imports while foreign products are subject to only 5% taxation.
3- Difficulty of exporting national products.
Industrialists complain about long procedures of clearance of raw materials, absence of specific tariffs for air shipments, lack of any agreements with other countries to exempt some of Yemeni products from custom fees, etc.
4- The cabinet decision to impose 5 rials for each package for improvement of cities. This means that factories have to pay taxation for about four times. In other words they have to pay taxes for raw materials, after production they pay taxes for products; taxes are added to electricity service charges and there is the taxation for factories themselves as a commercial institution.
Industrialists’ meetings have come out with a number of recommendations such as: classifying all raw materials as the same with the same tax structure (5%), Imposing new taxes on imported products that have similar national products to the extent of 40-50% as in many other countries, reconsidering laws of production and consumption taxes, improving transportation which is monopolized by transportation offices, and respect for all verdicts that ensure industrialists’ rights.

Reports to the Nation:
Report #6: Education for Change

Toward a New Education for a New Century
Dr. Abdulmageed Ghaleb Almikhlafi
Lecturer,
Sana’a University
Stasis and Education
No society can live without tradition but no society can survive without change. It depends on what kind of tradition and what kind of change and the way we understand them in time and place. There are three types of stasis in the Arab world: (a) completely passive, negative attitudes which may result in the disappearance or wakening of the resisting and transformative forces; (b) and active resistance to change on the part of ignorant traditionalist groups who hope to impose some, at least, of their ignorant values on the new social setting; and (c) different types of adjustment or adaptability to change which does not lead to the destruction of the status quo.
The western paradigms of orientalism, modernity, and development maintain that stasis in the Arab world is inherent in religion, tradition, and culture and that is the major root of historical and cultural retardation of the Arab nation. These incorrect notions that the masses wanted to hold on to tradition for the sake of tradition is often expressed by these paradigms which attribute the qualities of modernization and development to the dependent bourgeoisie. That is how these paradigms looked at revolutions, too. To these paradigms, the main reason behind the revolutions is the split of the national personality. They ignore the fact that these rebellions, sometimes, were led by men of religion, culture, and tradition against a segment of society who bought development with people’s money and kept it for themselves. The people are not bigots; they are not against change and development, because real development and change are conditions of emancipation, but they are against corruption. Had the governments used what they have to educate and satisfy the basic needs of the people, the people would have preferred development. Had the governments asked for a return to religion and remained affluent, the masses would have turned against religion. The real source of stasis, then, is the exploitation of the masses - whether it comes from home or from abroad. Even when the masses think of religion, they think in terms of a pure form of rule and not a native return to tradition. They think of it as a source of emancipatory values and as a protective structure against alienation.
Tradition is not something sacred, something that is always positive. Tradition has within it negative elements that impede development. The split of society into the educated and the illiterate, the exploiting bureaucracy and the deprived masses, and the emergence of new dependent classes who were concerned only with luxurious enjoyment in a chaotic atmosphere, and with ignorant and immoral imitation of the materialistic way of life, presents a dismal picture in which tradition serves as an ideological source for stasis. In accepting one’s tradition, one may or may not accept it in toto, one may select the emancipatory aspects from the retardational aspects; and if one did so, how does one draw the line between what is emancipatory and what is retardational in tradition? The real problem is an educational one. It is that of studying the tradition, on the one hand, and the grasping of a modern heritage on the other. For some Arabs (ignorant and educated), the two may appear contradictory, because both had been seen by them superficially. This superficiality is seen in other aspects of Arab life as well: reading the sciences in universities without following the scientific spirit in society, retaining theories in ivory towers without trying to practice them in society. Those who preach Islam or socialism know the theories very well, but they never got down to the basics and thus they ended up in fighting before they realized what they aimed for. Thus, the conflicts in the level of education, culture, tradition, and ethics are not the conflicts between the left and the right as they appeared to be. They are the conflicts between superficial open-mindedness and blind imitation, between naive universalism and encapsulating relativism. These are the constituting elements of stasis as a condition of retardation. If the role of education in Arab society is understood only as the reproduction of the skills of labor power, the submission to the ruling ideologies, the preservation of the status quo, then it is an education for stasis.

Change and Education
There were many changes that have so rapidly taken place in the twentieth century such as the destruction caused by the two world wars and the miseries engendered by the economic crisis; the unprecedented advance of science and technology, and man’s journey beyond the confines of this planet; the emergence of socialist states on three continents, and the triumph of national liberation movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. These changes have influenced politics, culture, and education all over the world. In the Arab nation, all these changes revealed a great deal of complexity in the relations between educational thought, political thought, culture, and power. These involved several issues. First, is the question of the effectiveness of educational and political thought as a vehicle of challenge in Arab society. Second, is that of the relation of educational and political thought to the existing culture of Arab society. Third, is that of the implantation into Arab culture of categories and frameworks of educational and political thought produced in other, - i.e. foreign-cultural contexts. Fourth, is that of the specific ways in which frameworks of educational and political thought conceived in the context of the dominant foreign cultures are received and transformed in the subordinate Arab culture. Finally, there is the question of changing relations of power within Arab society under neo-colonial domination.
Thus, to understand the process of social change, it is necessary to look closely at transformative emancipatory projects, in both their contents and directions, and to look at the new and old social forces struggling against all forms of domination and retardation. New projects of emancipational change must necessarily involve the building of a new independent-transformative Arab culture for the masses and the redistribution of educational power and resources. These will contribute to the creation of an effective political democratic process and the remodeling of social relations. The mode of inserting the Arab nation in the world economy needs to be reformulated to avoid hegemonic tendencies. Also needed is the development of a new emancipatory rationality, which would take into consideration the changing and growing complexity of the Arab social network along with that of the Arab state.
The role of education in the shattering of stasis is very important. Education has to play a role in the elimination of ignorant traditionalism. It is so crucial to attack existing retardational dominance and to create an alternative emancipational dominance and to create an alternative emancipational source for it within present Arab society. Education must contribute to the creation of a new emancipatory political thought that would be a vehicle for change. Arab education must enable the generations to develop their capabilities of predicting change and reducing its uncertainties. Education should reassure the Arab youth and adults that they are not helplessly thrown into an objective world which is impervious to conscious intervention by their human minds and rational wills. On the contrary, the objectivity of the world becomes meaningful only because of the presence of them as human beings, and their capacity to transform and change their world for the sake of their becoming fully emancipated humans. Education has to reassure the masses that through individual initiative and collective action, they can learn to change and transform their givenness as products of nature and history, to become aware of their knowledge-gaining capacities, and thus to act with consciousness and will

Brigadier General Al-Habili Talks

On the 30th Nov, Yemeni people celebrated the thirty third anniversary of independence of the southern part of Yemen from Britain.
On this occasion, we have hosted on of the most important political and military characters who’s been refusing to talk about himself and his role during the revolution for independence. We tried hard to persuade him to write about one of the most important stages of the 14th Oct. revolution. He finally agreed and started writing about the time before independence.
Brigadier General, Al.sharif Haider Bin Saleh Al. Habili , was born in Mareb in 1940, married and has four children, finished high school at Jabal Hadid college in Aden then joined the Jordanian military academy in 1956. Did many courses in Jordan and Britain in 1962 and 1963 then he got masters in military science in 1965 from Britain. For a while, he worked for the British army working in Western Germany.
The following are some of the posts he’s had in the south before independence.
- commander of the eastern region, 1960,
- commander of the western region, 1963,
- commander of the union guard, 1965
- chief of staff, 1967,
- leader of ‘peace forces’, 1981- 1994.

These were forces opposing the regime in the south of Yemen and were situated in Saudi Arabia.
After he returned to Yemen in 1994, he was assigned for the post of consultant of the president in 1995, then a member of the consultative council in 1997.
At the beginning, I would like to thank the reporter of the Yemen Times for giving me the chance to talk about this great occasion, which is the 33rd anniversary of independence, that took place on November 30, 1967. As we start the holy month of Ramadan, we celebrate the 33rd anniversary of independence of the southern part of our country on Nov 30 1967 from the British rule. Independence crowned a long march of struggle against British occupation for the southern part of Yemen. Undoubtedly, struggle against British occupation started on the first day Aden was occupied, 18-19 January 1839, a battle took place in which 139 Yemeni were killed while the losses of the British troops were 15 people, some killed and the other injured. Clearly, the revolution on the 14th October in the southern part was an extension of the revolution on the 26th September in the northern part and greatly affected by the revolution led by Jamal Abdul.Nasser in Egypt in 1952. The main goal of both revolutions, the 14th Oct. and 26th Sep. has been the unity of the two parts which indeed what happened

Reasons forced the British to leave the southern part
The reasons behind that were the increasing rejection to British occupation and the balance that has to be maintained between eastern and western camps. The withdrawing party should prepare the ground for the coming one and indeed that what happened, Britain left Aden and went to the Gulf countries under the excuse of fighting communism in the Gulf leaving the southern part of Yemen to be ruled by the communists.
There were three parties in the south competing with each other to receive power from the British, union of the Arabic south, liberation front and national front. Britain had to decide which of those parties to be given the power without harming its future interests in the region then it chose to pass power to the national front and rejected both of the rest because the union wasn’t prepared to have power and Britain wanted to get away with the commitments it made of paying an annual amount of money to cover some expenses of the union and keeping a sea force to defend Aden against any external aggression. The liberation front was supported by Egypt and had strong ties with it, that what made Britain work very hard to keep it away from power and even fight it. For all those reasons, power was passed to the national front. Measures taken by the front after receiving power were to make the whole country pro-Communist and implement Marxism in a Moslem country. On its way to do that, the front brutally killed many, filled jails with many others and showed severe aggression to Islam. All that made many people leave the country. What happened on the 3rd Jan 1986 was the start of the end of that regime until the actual came on the 7th Jul 1994.
Revolutions on the 26th Sep and 14th Oct have had many accomplishments that are not easy to list down, the most important of which are having the British leave Aden and the unity accomplished on 22nd May 1990. During the last 38 years, the country has witnessed development in all fields and as the president Ali Abdullah Saleh said that the revolution has moved Yemeni people from the dark centuries into the third millennium and created new values and foundation to move into the twenty first century.
Now, we are at a stage where we have to forget our conflicts and start serious and sincere work according to certain priorities to build a democratic state of law and order that respects human rights.