Arab Media & Society

Restricting access to information can be as serious a threat to journalism as overt censorship or government persecution.  The ongoing insurgency in Yemen’s northern governorate of Sa‘ada is one example of how a state’s attempt to enforce an information blackout has helped hide and sustain a conflict that has festered over four years, killing thousands and leaving a city destroyed, and continuing to stoke fears of a return to violence.

The Sa‘ada governorate, located in Yemen’s mountainous northern region on the border with Saudi Arabia and home to around 750 thousand people, has witnessed stop and go wars since 2004.[1]  Precise numbers of the dead and wounded are unknown because no organization, national or international, has been allowed full access to the area to make an independent account of the violence, although most estimates put the death toll well into the thousands.

Yemen is a Muslim country; the majority follow the Shafi‘i branch of Sunni Islam while the remainder are Zaidi Shi‘a concentrated in the country’s mountainous north.[2]  Zaidi Imams ruled parts of Yemen for hundreds of years prior to the 1962 revolution, yet nationalist politics and state education efforts had muted their influence to a large extent by the 1990s.

Amid growing Sunni-Shi‘a tensions after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and concerns over Iranian influence in the Arab world, a Zaidi revivalist movement led by a group known as the Huthis emerged in Yemen’s Sa‘ada governorate in 2004, named after their charismatic leader Hussein Badreddin Al Huthi.[3]  The group, who also referred to themselves as al-Shabab al-Mu’amin (The Believing Youth), resisted government attempts to dismantle Zaidi schools and infrastructure, which triggered the first outbreak of violence in June 2004.

No comprehensive account of the ensuing rounds of fighting has been made, yet Human Rights Watch estimates that 130 thousand have been displaced and sixty thousand have taken refuge in safe areas of the town of Sa‘ada where they receive limited assistance in camps and private homes.  Seventy thousand others in remote areas and towns remain outside the reach of aid agencies.  Several towns including al-Assaify, home to two thousand residents, have been completely destroyed by land and areal bombardment.  Yemen’s president, Ali Abdallah Saleh, declared the war over in July 2008, yet reports of ongoing violence continue to emerge.[4]

While the conflict is at core a local power struggle between the central government and the breakaway Zaidi group, there are a number of wider factors at play.  There have long been charges of growing Salafi sympathies within key members of the Yemeni government and armed forces, for example Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, the president’s powerful half-brother and commander of the armed forces.[5]  While the level of Salafi influence is difficult to gauge accurately, these allegations are explosive given charges that Iran is supporting its Shi‘a coreligionists in Yemen by funding the Huthi rebellion.  Even without conclusive proof that Sunni Salifi antipathy toward Shi‘a communities helps drive the fighting, these claims over sectarian-driven funding of the conflict demonstrate how many see the Sa‘ada insurgency through the prism of the regional Sunni versus Shi‘a narrative.

Controversy over the U.S. role in Yemen also animates the conflict to some extent. Shortly after the September 11 attacks, Yemen’s President, Ali Abdullah Saleh, visited Washington to initiate closer counterterrorism cooperation with America.  In 2003, the Huthi rebels challenged this relationship by raising anti-American slogans at Friday prayers, seemingly in hopes of drawing attention to their cause and putting pressure on the government to respond forcefully.  Some argue that Yemen’s pro-American stance has also resulted in less pressure to comply with humanitarian law in the Sa‘ada conflict.

In addition, competition within the Yemeni army between Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar and Ahmed Ali Saleh, the president's son, both seen as possible candidates to replace the aging president, could be intensifying the conflict as they vie to outdo each other with battlefield successes.

Media blackout and journalist persecution

Sa‘ada is a remote mountainous part of Yemen with limited access by road, which has made it relatively easy for the government to restrict access to foreign and domestic media and other observers.  "The blackout of media on Sa‘ada which was imposed by the Yemeni government is the strongest in the world," said Gerry Simpson a spokesman for the Human Rights Watch refugee program.

Print and television media in Yemen have been prohibited from running photographs or news items about the war.  "As soon as the war started, the state prevented any journalists from entering Sa‘ada, and halted the [mobile phone] connection coverage.  Only during the fourth round of fighting did they allow one mobile network to operate, so that they could better monitor the calls," said journalist Mageed al-Garafi.  When the Yemeni newspapers al-Shoura and al-Shar‘a disregarded the censorship and ran stories on the conflict, their papers were shut down and editors arrested.

Human Rights Watch reported that the government had instituted the unusual requirement for their team to get permission from the Interior Ministry to enter the Sa‘ada governorate; the permission never came.[6]  A team from Doctors Without Borders has also withdrawn from Yemen because it was not allowed to deploy sufficient aid to meet the needs of the injured.

While these restrictions kept the international aid and human rights organizations at bay, local journalists had better luck getting into Sa‘ada.  Journalist Mageed al-Garafi used credentials from his second job as a schoolteacher to get past security checkpoints and into the warzone.  He recounted impressions from his March 2008 visit:

"The people welcomed us happily despite the difficult conditions; beside every house there is a white tent where children and women are living a miserable life….  Most of them had lost their houses and incomes because their farms were destroyed.  The wounded were being treated in clinics that lack even the simplest medical capabilities."

"When we met the Secretary General of the Yemeni Red Crescent, he cried from his inability to help the displaced people, he said that there are people dying from hunger, we don't have any supplies, all we have are tents," al-Garafi continued.