...but possibly not the kind you're thinking of
Tom Friedman has dropped in on the troubled country for his latest column.
Here's a flavor:
Al Qaeda is like a virus. When it appears en masse, it indicates something is wrong with a country's immune system. And something is wrong with Yemen's. A weak central government in Sana rules over a patchwork of rural tribes, using an ad hoc system of patronage, co-optation, corruption and force. Vast areas of the countryside remain outside government control, particularly in the south and east, where 300 to 500 Qaeda fighters have found sanctuary.
Now read the rest at the New York Times
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This "Yemeni Way" has managed to hold the country together and glacially nudge it forward, despite separatist movements in the North and the South. But that old way and pace of doing things can no longer keep pace with the negative trends.Consider a few numbers: Yemen's population growth rate is close to 3.5 percent, one of the highest in the world, with 50 percent of Yemen's 23 million people under the age of 15 and 75 percent under 29. Unemployment is 35 to 40 percent, in part because Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states booted out a million Yemeni workers after Yemen backed Saddam Hussein in the 1990 gulf war.
Thanks to bad planning and population growth, Yemen could be the first country to run out of water in 10 to 15 years. Already many Yemenis experience interrupted water service, like electricity blackouts, which they also have constantly. In the countryside today, women sometimes walk up to four hours a day to find a working well. The water table has fallen so low in Sana that you need oil-drilling equipment to find it. This isn't helped by the Yemeni tradition of chewing qat, a mild hallucinogenic leaf drug, the cultivation of which consumes 40 percent of Yemen's water supply each year.
Roughly 65 percent of Yemeni schoolteachers have only high school degrees. Most people live on less than $2 a day -- except those who don't. A Rolls Royce was recently sold in Sana for the first time. More than 70 percent of government income comes from dwindling oil exports, while 70 percent of Yemenis are illiterate and 15 percent of kids are not in school.
Yet, at the same time, this country has some of the most interesting journalists, social activists and politicians I have met in the Arab world. I spent a morning at the Media Women Forum, an N.G.O. that trains Yemeni female journalists and promotes press freedom -- part of the "young guard" of idealistic Yemeni reformers who want to serve their people but, so far, have not really been empowered by the old leadership. Founded by a Yemeni press-freedom sparkplug, Rahma Hugaira, the office was bustling with girls, whose hunger to speak their minds filtered right through the black robes that covered all but their eyes.
It's not a secret how to fix this country, argued Mohammed al-Asaadi, a media consultant who sat in with us: "We need a revolution against the status quo. We need to build capacity, institutionalize the rule of law and build a culture of ownership and responsibility." Added Murad Hashim, the Al Jazeera bureau chief here: "We need more education, but we have not used our educated people." Indeed, Yemen has the resources to save itself, but they need to be mobilized by better governance. Without that, the trend lines will eventually overwhelm everything and the Qaeda virus, still controllable, will spread.