In Sana’a the opposition was outfoxed by President Saleh — but protests in provincial cities show the public’s anger has not abated. Iona Craig reports
As Cairo’s Tahrir Square and surrounding area spiraled into chaos,the central square of the same name (Liberation) in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, was inhabited by pro-Saleh supporters in oversized tents.
Despite two opposing demonstrations taking place in the capital — pro- and anti-government — the feared violence on Yemen’s “day of rage” failed to materialise on Thursday, at least in Sana’a.
To the east of the country, in the coastal city of Mukkalla, the main city of Hadramaut province, at least one person was reportedly shot when government security forces opened fire on demonstrators. Other major protests took place in Taiz, Ibb and the southern city of Aden, where 22 people were arrested, according to local press.
Unfortunately there is no western media coverage of the provincial cities and as far as the world’s press was concerned, Yemen’s “day of rage” rather fizzled out. Tahrir Square in Sana’a couldn’t have offered a scene of greater contrast to that of Cairo’s. In Yemen’s capital, the day turned into a massive chewing session of the mildly narcotic leaf, qat, by pro-government supporters as they settled in to large wedding-style tents.
President Ali Abdullah Saleh has been extremely clever in his management of events here. After 32 years in power, he has become something of an expert at keeping his job.
Since the knock-on effect of Tunisia’s uprising began to be felt and protests in Yemen mounted, the president has announced a string of welfare reforms to appease the people and on the eve of Thursday’s protests, he declared that he would not stand for re-election at the end of his term in 2013. He made the same declaration in 2005 before standing as president in 2006. Saleh also reached out to opposition parties on Wednesday by conceding on a four-member electoral committee, stating that it would now include two opposition members. The coalition of opposition parties, the JMP, has so far boycotted the election process, due in April.
The president’s PR machine has been so slick that his supporters were ready and waiting to cheer him on — and call on him not to stand down in 2013 — before he had even made the announcement in an emergency parliament meeting on Wednesday. The takeover of the capital’s main square meant that planned anti-government demonstrators were forced to switch location at the last minute to Sana’a University.
Despite a distinct build up in security — soldiers occupied every major junction and street corner in the capital on Thursday — the two sets of demonstrations passed off peacefully without ever meeting. In the rest of the country where the international press does not tread, events were less passive.
On Friday in Sana’a there were no spontaneous follow-ups to yesterday’s demonstrations, organised by the opposition. Yemenis are so far reluctant to pick up the baton from the Egyptians. What’s happening in the rest of Yemen is less clear and may be more crucial than events in the capital.
Iona Craig is a freelance journalist and editor at the Yemen Times, Sana’a.
The Egyptian government has cut mobile telephone and internet services, Index on Censorship’s Egypt regional editor Ashraf Khalil reports on how the information vacuum affected yesterday’s “day of rage”
The cell phones started working this morning again, although I’m not sure they’ll stay that way. The internet (as of 7pm local time) was still blocked. The fact that one but not the other has been restored perhaps indicates that the government views the internet as a larger threat than phone calls and text messages.
Whatever the logic, it’s worth noting that all these government attempts to restrict communications did very little to hinder the protesters yesterday and today.
The #Jan25 Day of Rage that kicked off the current waves of civil unrest rocking President Hosni Mubarak’s government DID employ Facebook, Twitter and text messaging as crucial tools. Last minute notifications on where to gather went out electronically at first. And all through the day on 25 January, protesters used Twitter to coordinate, offer each other encouragement and get news about protests happening elsewhere. When clashes happened in Suez or Alexandria, the protesters in Tahrir instantly knew and took heart from it. If there was thousands fighting to reach the square, they knew that too.
But if protests on 25 January took place in the context of a veritable flood of information, yesterday’s massive demonstrations happened in a literal vacuum. Suddenly dragged back to the landline communications era, the protesters didn’t know about Alexandria or Suez; they didn’t even know what was happening across the river.
It didn’t matter. Protest organisers basically bypassed the idea of coordination altogether and just told people “Protest everywhere.”
In anything, the information vacuum may have ended up sharpening the wills of the demonstrators. With no idea of the situation anywhere else in Egypt, protesters had no choice by to fight like hell for whatever public patch of ground they were standing on—and then fight their way through to the next patch of ground.
All through the day Friday and deep into the night, Cairo seemed to have reverted to a word-of-mouth storyteller society. If you were walking in the street and you saw protesters coming from the other direction, you asked them where they were coming from and what the situation was like there.
The shutdown also didn’t manage to stop the world’s media from effectively conveying the story to the world. Correspondents generally found a way to get online or, in many cases, reverted to the old-school practice of dictating their stories and notes to the newsroom over a landline.
Perhaps the largest impact was that many photographers and videographers have amazing images and footage trapped on their cameras with no way to get them out. I personally know several people in this situation.
When the government does finally lift the country-wide internet blockade, look for an absolute flood of imagery to instantly start flowing.
Inspired by unrest in Egypt and Tunisia, the opposition has staged massive protests demanding President Saleh’s resignation but so far there is no sign of a grass-roots move for change. Iona Craig reports
I’m in the Red Sea resort of Sharm El Shiekh covering the 2nd Arab Economic Summit — a chance for Arab ministers and business magnates to gather and discuss the economic future of the region. But the elephant in the room this week is Tunisia, where a failure to create economic opportunities for the people has resulted in a shocking outbreak of civil unrest that drove a heavily entrenched Arab dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, into exile in just one month.
For Arab governments, Tunisia serves as a chilling example that economics IS politics. The protests that swept Bin Ali from power weren’t sparked by a desire for greater political freedom; that certainly became the main issue, but it all started when a humble 26-year-old street vendor publicly set himself on fire in mid-December to protest his inability to earn a living wage despite holding a university degree.
The delegates here aren’t going out of their way to mention Tunisia, but they can hardly help talking about it since every journalist they meet makes a point of asking. I managed to get two minutes with Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa, and immediately asked him what the lessons were from the Tunisian example. His response was surprisingly direct for a career Arab diplomat. “It’s an obvious lesson. The people will no longer accept to be marginalised and pressurised like this.”
Egyptian Minister of Trade Rachid Mohamed Rachid, speaking at the summit’s opening, said the Tunisian example serves as a warning that Arab governments need to accelerate economic reforms and that those reforms needed to be matched by simultaneous political reforms.
Already the Tunisian uprising has sparked a macabre series of copycat self-immolations that Arab governments must be closely watching. On Monday, less than an hour before Rachid and Moussa held a joint press conference, an Egyptian man set himself on fire in front of the country’s parliament. While the press conference was happening, I received an email that a man in Mauritania had done the same thing.
The situation is particularly nervous in Egypt, where President Hosni Mubarak has ruled for longer than Bin Ali, and where the economic situation for many is dire and public frustration levels run high. Despite macroeconomic policy changes that have made Egypt the one of the models of international economic reform, nearly 20 per cent of Egypt’s 80m citizens live on less than USD 2 per day, the standard poverty line set by the UN.
Many Egyptian activists, inspired by the Tunisian revolution, are openly calling for a repetition of the scenario that ended Bin Ali’s reign. At an anti-government protest over the weekend in Cairo, demonstrators chanted “Congratulations to the Tunisians, we hope we join you soon” and “O Bin Ali tell Mubarak, ‘Your plane is waiting for you!’ ”
Egypt’s economic architects are mindful of the widespread public frustration, and say they are working to control spiraling costs of living while ensuring that more Egyptians feel the benefits of the country’s economic growth.
But Rachid, the trade minister, also stated that he didn’t believe Egypt was in danger of the same sort of widespread civil unrest, due to a comprehensive public subsidies package that ensures affordable fuel and basic food staples.
“Egypt is a different case than Tunisia. It’s not likely that a crisis like what’s happening in Tunisia will happen in Egypt,” he said. “Tunisia like many other Arab countries stopped subsidising food and petroleum items many years ago…It became very volatile to any changes in world prices, that’s why consumers were directly hit and consequently frustration escalated.”
In Sana’a the opposition was outfoxed by President Saleh — but protests in provincial cities show the public’s anger has not abated. Iona Craig reports