In recent weeks, Yemeni protesters calling
for an immediate end to the 32-year reign of
United States-backed President Ali Abdullah Saleh
have been met with increasing violence at the
hands of state security forces. A recent pledge by
Saleh to step down, one of many that has not met
demonstrators' demands, has yet to halt the
protests or violence by the troops backing his
regime.
During a demonstration this month
in the city of Taiz, protesters marching down a
central street were confronted by security forces
and Saleh supporters, while government helicopters
flew overhead. "The thugs and the security forces
fired on us with live gunfire," Mahmud al-Shaobi,
one of the protesters told the New York Times.
"Many people were shot."
In the days
since, more demonstrators have been attacked by
government forces - with the
death toll now estimated to exceed 130. Witnesses
have also been reporting the increased use of
military helicopters in the crackdown. Some of
those aircraft may be recent additions to Saleh's
arsenal, provided courtesy of the Barack Obama
administration as part of an US$83 million
military aviation aid package.
Since the
beginning of 2011, under a program run by the US
Department of Defense, the US has overseen the
delivery of several new Bell UH-1Hs, or Huey II
helicopters, current models of the iconic Huey
that served as America's primary gunship and troop
transport during the Vietnam War. Although these
helicopters are only the latest additions to a
sizeable arsenal that the Pentagon has provided to
Yemen in recent years, they call attention to how
US weapons and assistance support regimes actively
suppressing democratic uprisings across the Middle
East.
How to arm a dictator Last December, 26-year-old Tunisian
fruit-seller Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire
in front of a local municipal office, touching off
popular protests that continue to sweep across the
Middle East and North Africa. By the end of
January 2011, the country's US-backed dictator
Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had fled and
demonstrations, which would eventually also topple
corrupt autocrat and long-time US ally Hosni
Mubarak, had broken out in Egypt.
In
Yemen, as is the case elsewhere in the region,
anger at government corruption, rampant poverty
(40% of all Yemenis live on less than $2 a day),
high unemployment (also running at 40%), and
decades of harsh rule by an authoritarian
strongman brought tens of thousands into the
streets.
In January, as freedom struggles
were spreading across the region, President Barack
Obama publicly avowed support for "certain core
values that we believe in as Americans[,] that we
believe are universal: freedom of speech, freedom
of expression, people being able to use social
networking or any other mechanisms to communicate
with each other and express their concerns." Just
days earlier, however, his government had
transferred military equipment to the security
forces of Yemen's so-called president for life.
Under the terms of a $27 million contract
between the Pentagon and Bell Helicopter, Yemen
received four Huey IIs. Prior to this, 12 Yemeni
Air Force pilots and 20 maintenance personnel were
trained to fly and service the aircraft at Bell's
flight instruction facility in Alliance, Texas.
"The swift execution of the Yemen Huey II
program demonstrates that the military departments
- in this case the US Army - can quickly deliver
defense articles and services to US partners with
the cooperation of US industry," said Brandon
Denecke of the Defense Security Cooperation
Agency, the branch of the Pentagon that
coordinates sales and transfers of military
equipment to allies.
The recent helicopter
deal is just the latest example of Pentagon
support for the forces of the Yemeni dictator
through its so-called "1206 program", a
congressionally-authorized arrangement that
"allows the executive branch to rapidly provide
foreign partners with military equipment and
training ..." Named for section 1206 of the 2006
National Defense Authorization Act, the program
allows the Pentagon to enhance the capabilities of
foreign military forces for "counter-terrorism and
stability operations".
Since 2006, more
than $1.3 billion worth of equipment has been
allocated under the 1206 program and Yemen has
been the largest recipient worldwide, benefiting
from about one-fifth of the funding or
approximately $253 million through 2010. This
assistance, according to a recent report by the
Congressional Research Service, has provided
Yemeni security forces with light airplanes,
helicopters, small arms, ammunition, light
tactical vehicles, trucks, radios, surveillance
cameras, computers, body armor, patrol boats, and
helicopter parts, among other materiel.
Since 2000, the Pentagon has also
transferred weapons and equipment directly from US
stockpiles to Yemen's security forces. These items
include armored personnel carriers, M-60 machine
guns, 2.5-ton military trucks, radios, and
motorboats, according to an analysis of Defense
Department documents by TomDispatch. The Defense
Security Cooperation Agency did not respond to
repeated requests for further information.
All told, over the past five years, the US
has provided more than $300 million in aid to
Yemen's security forces, with the dollars
escalating precipitously under the Obama
administration. In 2008, under president George W
Bush, Yemen received $17.2 million in baseline
military assistance (which does not include
counter-terrorism or humanitarian funding).
In 2010, that number had risen to $72.3
million while, overall, Yemen received $155.3
million in US aid that year, including a "$34.5
million special operations force counter-terrorism
enhancement package". These funds have provided
Yemen's security forces with helicopters, Humvees,
weapons, ammunition, radio systems and
night-vision goggles.
Additionally, US
special operations troops (along with British and
Saudi military personnel) have been supporting,
advising and conducting training missions with
some of Yemen's elite forces - including the
Republican Guard, Special Operations Forces and
the National Security Bureau - which are commanded
and staffed by Saleh's sons and other close
relatives.
As his part of the bargain,
Saleh allowed the US to launch missile strikes
against suspected al-Qaeda camps in Yemen while
instructing his government to take credit for the
attacks (for fear that if their American origins
were made clear, there might be an anti-American
backlash in Yemen and the larger Arab world),
according to classified State Department documents
released last year by the whistleblower group
WikiLeaks. "We'll continue saying the bombs are
ours, not yours," Saleh told then-Central Command
commander General David Petraeus following strikes
in December 2009.
The Yemeni government
also came up with a cover story for, and even
excused, the deaths of civilians in those strikes.
Rashad al-Alimi, a deputy prime minister, claimed
that the Yemeni citizens killed in an attack were
"acting in collusion with the terrorists and
benefiting financially" when, in reality, they
were likely Bedouin families involved in little
more than peddling food.
Not so tough
talk As Yemen's security forces have
escalated their violence against demonstrators
this spring, the Obama administration has offered
mixed signals regarding Saleh, but has yet to
issue an outright condemnation of the dictator, no
less sever ties with a leader seen as crucial to
the fight against al-Qaeda.
"We have had a
good working relationship with President Saleh.
He's been an important ally in the
counter-terrorism arena," said US Secretary of
Defense Robert Gates on March 23. "But clearly,
there's a lot of unhappiness inside Yemen. And I
think we will basically just continue to watch the
situation. We haven't done any post-Saleh
planning, if you will."
On April 5, White
House press secretary Jay Carney came out more
forcefully. "The United States strongly condemns
the use of violence by Yemeni government forces
against demonstrators in Sana'a, Taiz and Hodeida
in the past several days," he said. "The Yemeni
people have a right to demonstrate peacefully, and
we remind President Ali Abdullah Saleh of his
responsibility to ensure the safety and security
of Yemenis who are exercising their universal
right to engage in political expression."
That same day, however, Pentagon spokesman
Geoff Morrell was more equivocal, justifying
enduring US support for Yemen's strongman as a
"prudent course of action", while including the
protesters as the equals of the security forces in
his condemnation of the use of force: "The
protests, the demonstrations need to be
non-violent. Obviously, the government needs to
respond to them in a non-violent manner. So we are
- we condemn the violence all around."
Morrell also sought to distance the
Pentagon's aid for the country's security forces
from the violence being meted out in Yemen's
streets. He told reporters, "To suggest that the
aid to Yemen has somehow been used against
protesters I think is a leap of faith for which
there is no evidence to support." Recent reports,
however, suggest that Yemen's elite US-trained
counter-terrorism troops have now been deployed in
the capital, Sanaa, to deal with the massive
ongoing protests.
Late last year, the
Pentagon floated a new proposal to pump up to $1.2
billion more into Yemen's security forces over the
next five years. However, with protesters in the
streets week after week in vast numbers and
significant elements of the military defecting
from the regime, the Obama administration failed
to write Saleh a check and began quietly urging
him, through back-channel communications, to hand
over power - assumedly to a successor likely to
favor US interests.
Finally, on April 23,
after Saleh seemingly agreed to an arrangement
brokered by Arab mediators that would grant
immunity from prosecution to his family and him,
and eventually shift power to his deputy for an
interim period, the Obama administration threw its
support behind the plan. A spokesman characterized
it as "responsive to the aspirations of the Yemeni
people". Not only have many opposition protesters
rejected the deal, while Saleh's troops continue
to attack them, but the dictator has slowly backed
away from it as well.
And yet, despite
weeks of violence that have left hundreds dead or
wounded, Obama has yet to publicly and
unequivocally call for Saleh to step down as he
did, albeit belatedly, with former Egyptian
president Hosni Mubarak and, more recently, Libyan
leader Muammar Gaddafi.
Sending a
message This month, Tawakul Karman, a
Yemeni human-rights activist and anti-government
protest leader, told the New York Times of her
anger at Obama for his failure to issue such a
call. ''We feel that we have been betrayed,'' she
said. Hamza Alkamaly, another prominent youth
leader, echoed the same sentiments: ''We students
lost our trust in the United States.''
After watching two allied autocrats fall
in Tunisia and Egypt, the United States has
focused on its periodic enemy, Gaddafi in Libya,
and has done little of substance to advocate for,
let alone facilitate, demands for democracy and
social change by protesters in allied states that
are more integral to its military plans in the
region, including Yemen, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan and
Saudi Arabia.
Instead, Washington has
continued to support repressive governments to
which it has provided training, weapons and other
military equipment that has already been used or
could be used to suppress grassroots democratic
movements.
In the case of Bahrain, the US
has provided millions of rounds of live
ammunition, helicopters and tanks. For Saudi
Arabia, it was a weapons deal worth tens of
billions of dollars that will have Saudi pilots
training in the US. In Iraq, the US is aiding the
very units of the security forces implicated in
crackdowns on the free press. And these are only a
few examples of recent US efforts in the Middle
East.
A survey of Yemeni adults conducted
in January and February by the US-based polling
firm Glevum Associates found exceptional hostility
to the United States. Ninety-nine percent of those
surveyed viewed the US government's relations with
the Islamic world unfavorably, 82% considered US
military influence in the world "somewhat bad" or
"bad", 66% believed that the US hardly ever or
never took into account the interests of countries
like Yemen, and just 4% "somewhat" or "strongly
approved" of Saleh's cooperation with the United
States.
The numbers could hardly get more
dismal, but anger and resentment can deepen and
become even more entrenched. When protesters look
to the skies over Sana'a in the days and weeks
ahead, they may notice new American-made, US
taxpayer-financed helicopters hovering above them.
Unless the Hueys are seen ferrying the dictator
away in a scene reminiscent of Saigon in 1975,
Yemenis - more than two-thirds under the age of 24
- are likely to remember for a very long time
which side the United States took in their freedom
struggle.
Nick Turse is a
historian, essayist, investigative journalist, the
associate editor of TomDispatch.com, and currently
a fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe
Institute. His latest book is The
Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso
Books). You can follow him on Twitter @NickTurse,
on Tumblr,
and on Facebook.
His website is NickTurse.com.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
