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Hard questions over Yemeni liberal's
death
By Sheila Carapico, Lisa Wedeen
and Anna Wuerth
Jarallah Omar, deputy secretary
general of the Yemeni Socialist Party, was assassinated
December 28, 2002, minutes after delivering a
conciliatory speech to the Yemeni Congregation for
Reform, known as al-Tajammu al-Yemeni lil-Islah or
simply Islah.
Initially, some Yemenis speculated
that Omar's murder could portend violence in advance of
parliamentary elections scheduled for April 2003, while
others assumed the shooting of a well-known secular
politician was connected to a string of al-Qaeda
terrorist attacks in Yemen. Not surprisingly, Yemeni
government sources say that the man arrested for the
killings of the three Americans, Abed Abd al-Razzaq
Kamel, plotted his attack in tandem with Jarallah Omar's
assassination.
Public crime, public
confession
Omar, a prominent progressive
intellectual and nationalist opposition leader, was shot
in the heart just before noon on December 28, after
addressing an audience of several thousand at a closed
convention at the Islah party headquarters in Sanaa,
Yemen's capital. Omar had helped to create an opposition
coalition of the socialist left and the conservative
Islamist-leaning Islah against the ruling party of
President Ali Abdallah Salih in the upcoming elections,
and for peaceful resolution of the nation's troubles.
The opposition hoped to win seats in the 301-member
parliament with a platform calling for fair, free,
rule-bound contested elections; policies to alleviate
Yemen's acute problems with public security, increasing
poverty, dire water shortages and inadequate services;
and a rule of law plank calling for the eradication of
corruption, the protection of human rights and rights of
free expression.
The accused gunman, Ali Ahmad
Muhammad Jarallah, approached Omar at close range and
fired several shots. Two bullets fatally wounded Omar,
who died en route to hospital. Bystander Said Shamsan,
of Islah, was also injured. The assailant, Ali Ahmad
Jarallah, was apprehended on the spot and taken to the
nearby home of Sheikh Abdallah al-Ahmar, the speaker of
parliament and an Islah party leader. There, in the
presence of security officers, and on videotape, he was
interrogated by 16 representatives of Yemen's various
political parties. In the afternoon, the assailant was
transferred to the Criminal Investigation Department,
and by the evening was finally handed over to public
prosecutors. By permitting this irregular procedure, the
government apparently intended to make his uncoerced
confession a matter of public record.
Circumstantial evidence linked the suspect to
both the radical fringe of the Islamist movement and the
government. Now in his late 20s, Ali Jarallah was
reportedly registered in the mid-1990s at the private,
ultra-conservative al-Iman University, recently accused
by the government of links to al-Qaeda.
He was
currently serving in the Yemeni military and told
interviewers that he had fought on the Salih
government's side against the socialist leadership of
the former South Yemen during the 1994 civil war, in
accordance with a fatwa (religious-legal ruling)
issued at the time by Islah ideologue Abd al-Wahhab
al-Dailami that justified the killing of Southern
secessionists. The southern People's Democratic Republic
of Yemen (PDRY) and North Yemen unified their systems in
1990, but negotiations over the details of unity broke
down in 1994. Supported by Islah, troops under Salih's
command defeated the remnants of the PDRY army and its
socialist leadership in 1994.
Uncertain
affiliations
Although the accused killer publicly
denied any partisan affiliation, the Ministry of
Interior told the Yemeni news agency Saba that he was an
Islahi activist who was detained for anti-government
agitation through a popular mosque in 2001 by Political
Security and released last year after party supporters
interceded on his behalf. Other reports claimed the
assailant belonged to the General People's Congress,
headed by President Salih. Journalist Ahmad al-Sufi, who
was interviewed on Al-Jazeera after witnessing the
interrogation, suggested that the killer had not been
operating alone, and may have had connections to
government agencies.
The prosecution also
interrogated Muhammad Abdallah al-Yadumi, secretary
general of the Islah party, who, according to Al-Jazeera
television, had refused a Ministry of Interior offer of
police protection for the annual Islah party conference
on the grounds that the party could provide its own
security. Yemeni reporters questioned how the assassin
entered the conference, armed, without an invitation,
and seated himself in the second row usually reserved
for dignitaries. Denying any complicity with the
assassin, Islah issued a statement threatening to sue
the government for slander. The party also issued a
statement calling Jarallah Omar "a martyr for
democracy".
According to excerpts from the
videotape of the preliminary interrogation published in
al-Ayyam, the accused assassin admitted planning to kill
other prominent secular opposition figures, including
some present at the Islah convention, in particular the
leader of the Nasserist Union Party, Abd al-Malik
al-Mikhlafi, and the Baathist leader Qasim Salam. He
also said he aimed to "teach a lesson to Islah",
presumably about the mainstream religious party's
cooperation with the socialist enemy. He declined to
implicate any associates.
A group calling itself
"Kata'ib Abu Ali al-Harithi - The Military Wing", known
to be associated with Osama bin Laden, issued a
statement on December 29 to commemorate the killing of
Qa'id Sinan al-Harithi and four others by a CIA Predator
drone in early November. The statement accused the
"infidel" Yemeni regime of allying itself with the
United States and Zionism against the Islamic world
under the pretext of an anti-terror campaign. In
defiance of fatwas issued by Yemeni ulama
(religious scholars), the statement continued, Salih had
sold out to the US. Moreover, his regime had detained
and persecuted "hundreds of young men, lingering in the
prisons of Political Security, some of them for years."
The group swore revenge for al-Harithi and others
assassinated by the government, like Samir al-Hada and
Mujalli al-Arhabi, the latter, as they claimed, being a
chief negotiator between the government and the
Islamists. The statement warned: "We can, as you know,
get at you any time, and as we have children and
relatives, so you do too."
Jarallah Omar,
rebel and politician
Once a guerrilla fighter,
Jarallah Omar became a prominent pro-democracy activist
and an early advocate of Yemeni unity who had the
potential to lead a national opposition coalition. His
life dramatized some of the classic fault lines in
Yemeni politics and spoke to key events in contemporary
Yemeni history. He was a Northerner but also a
Southerner, a student of religion and of revolution.
Born in the village of Kuhal in the Northern province of
Ibb in 1942, he studied Islamic jurisprudence in Dhamar
as an adolescent. Like many upwardly mobile male youths
of his generation, he then trained as an officer in
Sanaa.
During the North Yemeni civil war of
1962-1968, Omar became radicalized. Imprisoned in 1968
for leftist politics and educated there by fellow
inmates and by authors such as Karl Marx and Antonio
Gramsci, Omar left prison in 1971 to become an adversary
of conventional politics. He led the commando forces of
the National Defense Forces in the North, a conglomerate
of five separate groups dedicated to overthrowing the
military government in Sanaa. This campaign continued
after Ali Abdallah Salih came to power in 1979 following
the assassination of two predecessors in 1977 and 1978.
Defeated by Salih in the 1980s, Jarallah Omar escaped
with many other Northern socialists to South Yemen,
where Marxists were in power.
Subsequently, as a
member of the politburo intimately involved in the
bloody battles for control of the Socialist Party in the
South in 1986, Omar sided with the victorious faction
around Abd al-Fattah Ismail and Ali Salim al-Bid. He
later argued that the intense regional and ideological
struggle for control of the party turned so deadly
because of party norms and constraints that made the
airing of grievances in public prohibitive. His
assessment of the devastating effects of undemocratic
practices within the party led him to call for increased
"pluralism" as well as North-South reconciliation.
"January 1986 was a turning point," Omar later recalled.
"Why combat the North, when reforms were needed in the
party itself?"
Credited as a force for Yemeni
unification in 1990, Jarallah Omar served briefly as
minister of culture in one of the post-unification
governments, but resigned as partisan differences
threatened the unity accords. Opposing both war and
secession, he was forced to flee Yemen during the brief
civil war of 1994 only to return a year later. Since
then he has continued to play a vibrantly contentious
role in Yemeni political life, speaking out against
injustice and hosting debate sessions in his home. He
became widely known as a liberal democrat devoted to the
electoral process and respect for human rights.
Omar became assistant secretary general of the
Yemeni Socialist Party in 2001, and pushed for reform
within the party even as it prepared for parliamentary
elections. He was a key broker of 2002 alliance between
the YSP and Islah, Yemen's main Islamist party. A
popular politician prominent in a strengthened
opposition, he was challenging hardliners in his own
party as well as Islah's radical right wing, while
making the ruling General People's Congress uneasy, too.
Unsolved murder
It may never be known
with certainty whether Ali Ahmad Muhammad Jarallah acted
alone in killing Jarallah Omar or, if he acted on behalf
of co-conspirators, who they were. Few Arab leaders
today would tolerate a former rebel commander
spearheading electoral opposition, and some Yemenis
believe the regime, the ruling party or the security
forces encouraged the assassination in order to thwart
the formation of an effective opposition coalition. The
other popular and plausible theory is that jihadi
or salafi elements outside the political
mainstream - possibly with links to al-Qaeda - have
begun to target secular and liberal intellectuals along
with foreign interests and Yemeni security forces.
Ordinary Yemenis are mourning the death of a man who
embodied a great deal of the nation's past and its hopes
for the future.
The tragic deaths of two
well-respected American doctors who had spent their
adult lives at the Baptist mission hospital in Jibla and
a colleague, two days after the assassination of
Jarallah Omar and one day after threats issued by
friends of al-Qaeda, seem to point in the direction of a
terror campaign directed against Yemenis and Americans
alike by a rather small but quite expert reactionary
underground, presumably trained in Afghanistan.
Considering that the dead are an opposition politician
and three American civilians living in Yemen for many
years, it could be a bloody, indiscriminate campaign
along the lines of those waged in the 1990s in Egypt and
Algeria. The coincidence of two unprecedented and
senseless crimes - a public assassination and the murder
of unarmed foreigners - has left the nation in shock.
The Salih administration has contended all along
that attacks on the USS Cole and the French ship the
Limburg, as well as shootings and bombings in Sanaa, are
aimed at destabilizing the Yemeni government and
disrupting its relations with the US. Since the attack
on the Cole in October 2000, US-Yemeni relations,
virtually severed after Yemen failed to join the US-led
war on Iraq in 1991, have steadily improved. The Yemeni
government cooperated with US intelligence agencies
investigating the Cole incident and with the Predator
attack on a vehicle in the Yemeni desert in November
2002.
Acknowledging that al-Qaeda elements found
sanctuary in isolated communities along the Yemeni-Saudi
frontier, Sanaa has been pleading with Washington for
massive American assistance to beef up its maritime,
border and domestic security. The Bush administration
has begun to comply with these requests, dangling
prospects of hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of
training and equipment annually if Yemen prosecutes the
war on terror. After Spanish and American forces
intercepted North Korean Scud missiles bound for Yemen
earlier in December, Sanaa told US officials that it
would be happy to accept American weapons instead. Today
the Salih government is saying, we are in this war
together.
Sheila Carapico teaches
political science at the University of Richmond; Lisa
Wedeen teaches political science at the University
of Chicago; Anna Wuerth is currently a visiting
professor at the University of Richmond. This article
first appeared in the Middle East Report Online of
the Middle East Research and Information Project.
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