Ever since the conflict began in January 2011, anti-government protesters have occupied the area in front of the main gate of Sana’a University. Traditionally, the Liberation Square (Maidan Al Tahrir) has been THE place to gather and protest but it was occupied by government supporters, so protesters, mostly university students in the beginning, settled on occupying the ring road in front of the university. They named the place Change Square, but it really is a big intersection surrounded by businesses and residential buildings.

A friend of mine took me to Change Square this morning to check it out and to see her painting being displayed at the “Revolution Gallery”. Since the previous president has been kicked out and the new president has been elected and sworn in, I was expecting people to have gone home by now. To my surprise Change Square is still full of people and most of them were asleep in tents when we got there at 9 this morning. We walked around, took some pictures and talked to people. Not much was going on so we went home after two hours. We will probably come again sometime in the afternoon when there is more excitement.

What I liked:

1. Other than a few security guards, no one was armed, not even the uniformed soldiers. The area has a very friendly and relaxed atmosphere. We walked around freely and I had to fend off many friendly folks wanting to have their pictures taken. I can never say no to children though since they are just too cute.
2. The place might look like a refugee camp at first glance, but it’s actually pretty clean and organized inside. No piles of trash or smell of urine. There are twenty or thirty port-a-potties set up outside the hospital and a long row of water taps for washing and cleaning. Considering the large number of people living here, this is one of the best run camps I’ve ever seen, certainly better than some of the Occupy movement camps in my neighborhood.
3. Large scale street protests and violent endings of dictators elsewhere instilled some fear in the corrupt officials. It is not to say that corruption can be eliminated overnight, but the criminals are at least thinking twice before they embezzle millions.

What I didn’t like:

1. At 9am, people already started to chew qat. Nothing really changes at Change Square. Qat is a much bigger problem than who the president is or who runs the parliament. Yemen will not get out of poverty as long as most of the population is addicted to qat. It is much easier to demand change in the government than to change oneself
2. The movement is fragmented and lack of direction. The students are idealistic and passionate, but they don’t have the power or resources to make things happen. The movers and shakers, namely the Islah party and Al Ahmar family, provide the protesters with food, qat, medical supplies, electricity, TVs, and satellite dishes, but they join the movement with very different goals from the students’. It is the general understanding that a lot of the funding for the movement came from Qatar under the table. When I asked the students why they are still here, no one gave me a clear answer. Some said they would remain until the government eradicates corruption, some demanded higher living wages. As of now Change Square is a pretty cool dig for the students as wells as the homeless and jobless. Free lodging and food plus enough spending money for the daily qat supply, heck I wouldn’t want to leave either!
3. Both sides grossly exaggerate and distort the truth. The government supporters described the Change Square protesters as a bunch of immoral and violent trouble makers who caused all the misery in the past year and turned the clock back 30 years in terms of infrastructure and economic development. The protesters view government supporters as corrupt and old-fashioned tribesmen who want to hold Yemen back for another 30 years of stagnation. Media outlets grossly misreport number of protesters, sometimes off by 10 or 100-fold. Medical staff purposely misreported death toll numbers to serve their political agenda. One dead turned into 10, two turned into 16, etc. When journalists asked to see the bodies, they couldn’t produce enough, so they started to pull out natural deaths from the morgue. Al Jazeera Arabic has morphed itself from a news channel to an unrelenting propaganda machine with a clear political agenda. It has gone as far as reporting violent confrontations before they occurred aiming to incite more people to join the fight, and airing old footage of Iraqi police beating prisoners with the subtitle of “Yemeni police beating the arrested protesters”, except that the uniform and dialects were so different that it turned out to be an embarrassing episode for Al Jazeera Arabic. To their credit, after airing the wrong footage repeatedly all day, they did pull it off the air and issued a 30-second apology.
   

   Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. – 1984 by George Orwell

   Many broadcasters quit Al Jazeera Arabic over the past year citing the channel’s lack of objectivity and journalistic ethics. Ghassan Ben Jeddou, one of the most prominent hosts who quit Al Jazeera in 2011, has become a vocal critic of Al Jazeera’s handling of the whole movement. If you read Arabic, see his latest article titled Take your Arab Spring and go away خذوا ربيعكم (العربـــي).. وارحلوا .

4. The Arab Spring, more suitably called the “Qatari Spring” is backed by Qatar which threw in billions in running the propaganda machine, supporting the protests, and arming the rebels. But when dictators are gone and chaos ensues, Qatar is nowhere to be seen. People’s lives are turned upside down: the middle class became the poor and the poor became destitute. Where was the Qatar when Sanaa streets were empty of cars because petrol supplies were cut off? Where was Qatar when the entire capital sat 23.75 hours without electricity? Where is Qatar when people are paying 50% more for food on the same meager salary? And where is Qatar when Yemen, the poorest Arab nation, is paying the highest prices for gasoline and cooking gas despite the fact that it is surrounded by the richest oil-producing nations in the world? It’s easy for those sitting on billions and trillions of oil wealth to wield their magic wand and instigate chaos and destruction in the name of democracy. Even with the purist intentions, they are usually so far detached from reality that they are pushing for solutions totally unsuitable for countries with very different economic and social situations. This is like expecting Mit Romney to understand the daily struggles of the American working class. Not surprisingly, the aftermath of the “Qatari Spring” ranges from mediocre to disastrous. Thousands have died for their cause and millions are suffering the consequences, and yet, we haven’t seen true democracy or tangible economic development anywhere in the Arab world. When the dust settles, the biggest winners are Muslim brothers and Salafis, and the biggest losers are ordinary Arabs.
5. In case of Yemen, the new government is shared equally between the incumbent party and the opposition coalition, while the youth, who bore the brunt of the violence and sustained the heaviest human toll, got nothing.
6. Tawakkol Karman, the poster child of the movement and the Nobel peace prize recipient is not surprisingly a hated figure to the government supporters. What surprises me is that she is despised by most protesters at Change Square. The best reaction I got was indifferent. She had a good cause in the beginning, but as the movement gained momentum, she has become a force of division and violent confrontation instead of reconciliation and peace. Her stance of not holding talks with the government and pushing for more violent street battles is the opposite of what the Nobel peace prize stands for. Personally I don’t know who nominated her and how she won the Nobel prize. Now that she has been granted Qatari citizenship, she spends most of her time traveling outside Yemen and milking her new-found fame.

Yemen has multitude of problems that cannot be solved by simply replacing the president or the parliament. What Yemen needs most right now is peace and stability, and to achieve that it needs, ironically, a strong central government. For long term development, the government needs to concentrate on education, family planning, and reducing qat use. Currently Sana’a is calm, but to the north, Huthis are fighting in Saada, Al Jawf, and Hajjah, to the south, the separatists are calling northerners occupiers and large swath of Abyan province is in the hands of Al Qaeda, to the west, the tribes in Marib are attacking oil and electricity facilities on a weekly basis. As I’m writing this, there is no electricity or internet. The battery level of my laptop shows 30% so I’d better wrap it up.

If you’ve read this far, you probably think I’ve given up on Yemen. Actually it’s the opposite. When I was watching the events unfold from thousands of miles away, my biggest fear was an all-out civil war on the streets of Sana’a since Yemenis are armed to the teeth. The fact that it didn’t happen gave me hope and optimism. Despite the mounting problems and seemly impossible exit from the crisis, I’m confident that Yemen will come out better and stronger eventually.

•