Obituary | Snake-in-chief

Obituary: Ali Abdullah Saleh was killed on December 4th

The first president of a united Yemen was 75

WHEN Houthi rebels broke into Ali Abdullah Saleh’s house in Sana’a on December 4th to ransack it, they found several bottles of vodka and premium Lebanese arak. The unIslamic hoard cast doubt on the president’s public shows of prayer and the great mosque, with six white minarets, looming beside his palace. It surprised no one who knew that, as a highlander from Yemen’s northern mountains, he probably liked a chaser after a pleasant chew of qat in the afternoons. Others would have remembered how, as a young army officer in charge of a checkpoint on the main road to Taiz from the Red Sea, he would wave through whisky smuggled up from Africa if enough rials crossed his palm. That blind eye won him useful allies among the merchants of Taiz.

He needed such ruses because he was a nobody. His clan, the Sanhan, was a lowly, overlooked group in a society seething with wild and larger tribes heavily armed with pride and Kalashnikovs. His family contained no sheikhs, and his village, flyblown Bayt-al Ahmar, had no one rich enough to subsidise him through officers’ training school. To that end he was helped by a southerner and this, too, proved politically useful. In his rugged and chronically ungovernable country the short, bull-necked soldier, with his sharp sing-song northern accent, his heavy silver tribal ring and his mesmerising stare, turned out to have contacts all over the place.

Hence, in part, his dizzying rise to power. From tank commander he became president, in 1978, of North Yemen, which united with the communist south in 1991 with him, naturally, in charge. He went on to rule the new country, with maximum guile and graft, for the next 21 years. He rose, too, because no one else cared to rule North Yemen, where the two previous incumbents had been dispatched within nine months of each other: one shot while cavorting with foreign prostitutes, the other minced by an exploding briefcase. Mr Saleh did not want courage. He had his own close shaves, the closest in 2011 when his mosque was blown up with him inside it. The Saleh Museum, opened in Sana’a two years later, displayed his scorched trousers and the shrapnel taken out of him.

By then he had stepped down, but only after an extraordinary spell in power, bolstered first by a wall of relatives around him. When he became president of the whole country they assumed key posts in ministries and the army, while his nephew Tarek headed the elite Republican Guard; his son Ahmed was groomed to succeed him. His Sanhan clan was now important, and the tribal confederation it belonged to, the Hashid, the most powerful in the land. Other members, especially the al-Ahmar tribe (some of them cousins, from his own village), prospered too, and non-blood tribes were kept in line with handouts from oil revenues, gifts of new cars and a vast web of patronage controlled by his party, the General People’s Congress.

In the oil-rich 1990s he piled up and paid off freely, stashing billions of dollars’ worth of gold and property under different names in hidey-holes abroad. His palace in Sana’a boasted marble halls, gold-inlaid furniture and shelves of shiny, unopened books. (He relaxed not by reading, but by playing billiards or tooling round the hills about Sana’a in his luxury Toyota pickup.) His home village acquired, among the dust and dogs, a compound of Saleh family villas clad in coloured marble, and a swarm of security guards in shades. Not a lot of money trickled down to desperately impoverished Yemenis, especially in the south. But that was not his problem.

His problem was how to stay in power. He compared it to dancing on the heads of snakes: these reptiles lurking in his own party and the Hashid confederation, as well as in rival tribes, though he was snake-in-chief. When his security detail once failed to catch a rare wild black camel by roping and dragging it, he used that metaphor too: Yemen could not be governed by force. He broke that rule in 1978, when he killed 30 army officers for conspiracy, and in 2011, when his troops shot at least 50 protesters hoping for an Arab spring in Yemen. But they were stooges of al-Qaeda, he brusquely told the Western press.

Plotting in the shadows

The West may not have noticed because his wiles were so subtle, and his shift of alliances so constant. When it suited him, he went soft on the jihadists and Salafists who increasingly infested the north. In 2005 he said he would retire, but in 2006 he changed his mind, because his people were urging him to stay. He said he would leave power “like kicking off my shoes”, but they proved tight-fitting. In 2012 he stepped down, but only in exchange for immunity from prosecution. He also never went away, plotting in the shadows, his portrait still on shop walls, for only he could hold his dissolving country together.

His half-secret marriage of convenience after 2014 with the Shia Houthi rebels, who had previously opposed him, was riven by mutual mistrust—over patronage in the north, and especially over his long off-on dalliance with Saudi Arabia, supposedly their common enemy, and with the United Arab Emirates, where his son Ahmed was under loose house arrest. The prospect of continuing the family’s rule through the good offices of the Sunni Gulf states was irresistible. That sealed his fate.

This article appeared in the Obituary section of the print edition under the headline "Snake-in-chief"

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