ME VS. WE:

A Tale of Two Colonies: Our correspondent travels to Yemen and Eritrea, and finds that the war on terrorism is forcing U.S. involvement with the one country's tribal turbulence and the other's obsessive fear of chaos (Robert D. Kaplan, April 2003, The Atlantic Monthly)

Yemen

[...] Ma'rib's ratty streets smell of urine and petrol. The city swarms with young men, often in their early teens and with bad teeth and skin discolorations, riding around in pickup trucks, armed with knives and AK-47s. The knives are jambiyahs. Blunt and difficult to remove from their sheaths, they are rather impractical as ready weapons, and instead symbolize the stabilizing influence of tribal custom in Yemen-the social glue that keeps the rate of random crime low. The AK-47 is another matter. "Once you have a gun, why bother to learn to read and write?" a Yemeni soldier said to me, after I had asked a particularly hostile knot of young men if they attended school. They did not.

Estimates of the number of fire-arms within Yemen's borders go as high as 80 million-four for every Yemeni. Their availability, along with perhaps the largest al Qaeda presence anywhere outside the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, threatens to transform the small-scale tribal fighting that has plagued Yemen for centuries into a debilitating anarchy. Indeed, the high walls, the concertina wire, and the proliferation of armed guards in Sana'a indicate the level of apprehension felt by both the Yemeni government and the foreign community here.

Keep in mind that terrorism is an entrepreneurial activity, dominated by enterprising self-starters. An American military expert told me, "In Yemen you've got nearly twenty million aggressive, commercial-minded, and well-armed people, all extremely hard-working compared with the Saudis next door. It's the future, and it terrifies the hell out of the government in Riyadh." [...]

President Ali Abdullah Saleh, a former army lieutenant colonel, has ruled first North Yemen and then unified Yemen since 1978. By most accounts, his government controls the main roads, oil fields, and pipelines; but significant patches of the countryside, especially the desert regions near the Saudi border, such as Ma'rib, al-Jawf, and Sa'da, stand largely ungovernable. Traveling around Yemen, one can see why this situation obtains. I sat at many crowded local road stalls where every man or boy not only had an AK-47 but didn't put it down even while eating. Nevertheless, President Saleh may be doing better than the Turks or the British before him in extending control over this country. [...]

Al Qaeda's attacks on the USS Cole, in Aden Harbor in 2000, and on the French tanker Limburg, off the Yemeni coast in 2002, may have perplexed some Western observers. After all, the bombings should have served to bring the United States and France, two bickering allies in the anti-terror coalition, closer together. But al Qaeda knew exactly what it was doing. Without Saleh, Yemen would be a conveniently chaotic, culturally sympathetic base for al Qaeda, much more useful than non-Arab, geographically peripheral Afghanistan. Saleh's regime is not necessarily weak: its security and party apparatus provide an institutional basis for power rare in twentieth-century Yemen. But a substantial reduction in government revenues, which are Saleh's main tool to placate hostile sheikhs, could still destabilize his regime. Some informal estimates suggest that the attacks have reduced the amount of cargo arriving in Aden by 75 percent, and that $25 million a month is being lost in the container trade. And war-risk-insurance premiums for ships calling at Yemeni ports are already six times the worldwide average. [...]

Eritria

Whereas Yemen's streets and shops are plastered with photos of President Saleh (whose cult of personality is mild compared with those of other Arab and African leaders), one never sees such photos of the Eritrean President, Isaias Afewerki, the veritable founder of this country. For decades Afewerki led a low-intensity guerrilla movement that finally wrested independence from Ethiopia in 1991. "Photos of me would create an air of mystery and distance from the people," he told me in December. "It's the lack of photos that liberates you. I hate high walls and armed guards." While other leaders in the region live inside forbidding military compounds, Afewerki lives in a modest suburban-style house and greets people in his secretary's office, which sits at the end of an undistinguished corridor. He moves around the capital in the passenger seat of a four-wheel-drive vehicle, with only one escort car, stopping at red lights. Western diplomats here say they have seen him disappear into large crowds of Eritreans without any security detail at all. "It's easy to put a bullet in him, and he knows it," one foreign diplomat said to me.

Security, which consumes the Western diplomatic and aid communities in Sana'a (and everywhere else in the Middle East), is barely an issue in Asmara, Eritrea's capital. Despite its tattered storefronts, Asmara not only is one of the cleanest capital cities in Africa but also may be the only capital south of the Sahara where one can leave the car doors unlocked or prowl the back streets at all hours without fear of being robbed, even though the police are barely in evidence. American, Israeli, and other resident diplomats and aid administrators in Eritrea move freely around the country without guards or other escorts, as if they were at home.

Desperately poor and drought-stricken, with almost three quarters of its 3.5 million inhabitants illiterate, Eritrea nonetheless has a surprisingly functional social order. Women run shops, restaurants, and hotels; handicapped people have shiny new crutches and wheelchairs; people drive slowly and even attend driving school; scrap-metal junkyards are restricted to the urban outskirts; receipts are given for every transaction; there are few electricity blackouts from sloppy maintenance or badly managed energy resources. Foreign diplomats in Asmara praise the country's lack of corruption and its effective implementation of aid projects. Whereas rural health clinics in much of Africa have empty shelves and unexplained shortages of supplies, clinic managers in Eritrea keep ledgers documenting where all the medicine is going.

An immense fish farm near the port of Massawa testifies to Eritrea's ability to utilize foreign aid and know-how. The 1,500-acre complex channels salt water from the Red Sea, purifies it, and then uses it to raise shrimp in scores of circular cement tanks. The nutrient-rich excess of that process is used for breeding tilapia, a freshwater fish. The remaining waste water is pumped into asparagus and mangrove fields and artificially created wetlands. Though the operation was initially overseen by a firm from Phoenix, Arizona, and for a time employed an Israeli consultant, the consultant is now only rarely used. The Eritreans themselves run the operation in every respect.

Such initiative and communal discipline are the result of an almost Maoist degree of mobilization and an almost Albanian degree of xenophobia-but without the epic scale of repression and ideological indoctrination that once characterized China and Albania. The Eritrean xenophobia and aptitude for organization are, as Eritreans never cease to explain, products of culture and historical experience more than they are of policy choices. Eritrea never had feudal structures, sheikhs, or warlords. Villages were commonly owned and were governed by councils, or baitos, of elders. "It was not a society deferential to individual authority," I was told by Yemane Ghebre Meskel, the director of President Afewerki's office, "so we didn't need Marxist ideology to achieve a high stage of communalism." Wolde-Ab Yisak, the president of the University of Asmara, observed, "Communal self-reliance is our dogma, which in turn comes from the knowledge that we Eritreans are different from our neighbors."

Here's the Kaplan piece we referenced last week, when he was on Fresh Air. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 20, 2003 2:12 PM