Sanaa, Yemen
Thomas Friedman drove me to try qat. An evergreen plant, grown in the Yemeni highlands, with leaves that have mildly narcotic properties, qat can be both a relaxant and a stimulant. Almost all Yemeni men chew it after lunch, and almost all Western journalists try it when they visit.
Friedman had recently spent three days in Sanaa, and, when I arrived here, his columns about the trip had just come out. Opinions about them were as ubiquitous as qat, but varied: they were vital; they were superficial; they captured the true Yemen; they missed the point. (“Sanaa is not Kabul, and Yemen is not Afghanistan—not yet,” Friedman wrote, in one passage that I heard both sides cite as evidence.) Something of what you might call a Friedman paradigm had emerged: the compliments were more likely to come from optimistic, pro-government reformers, who saw promise in international aid and projects like “Friends of Yemen”; the complaints from cynical supporters of the opposition, unmoved by easy talk of solutions for Yemen’s many problems. Or, put differently, Friedman-loving hopeless dreamers on one side, realists on the other.
On my second afternoon in Sanaa, I took a taxi to meet a Yemeni journalist at his house on the outskirts of town. My driver had stuffed a baseball-sized wad of qat leaves in his cheek, and he kept slipping in more from a plastic bag on his lap. As we drove around Sixty-Meter Road, which sits on an elevated plateau and partially encircles Sanaa, I put him on the phone with the journalist to get directions. The journalist was also chewing qat, it turned out, and the ensuing production was a not-so-funny comedy of phone calls and wrong turns.
Foreigners who worry about Yemen often worry about qat. When the House Committee on Foreign Affairs met earlier this month, Congressman Gary Ackerman said of the Yemenis, “These people spend the afternoon getting away from reality, getting high,” and suggested that qat might be undermining the country’s ability to fight terrorism. Brian O’Neill, the author of the influential Yemen blog Waq al-Waq, replied:
There are Yemenis who think that qat undermines their civic society; but they also generally believe that not much can be done about it. Amel Ariqi, a Yemeni consultant to the World Bank, told me that she was recently asked to look into ways to end the culture of qat chewing. “It’s not that simple,” she said. “I can’t just ask people to stop. You’ll have to find something else to replace it with.” Qat cultivation is blamed in part for Yemen’s water shortage—it is a notoriously water-thirsty plant. The industry is also said to employ one in every seven Yemenis.
The debate over qat mirrors the one about Yemen’s security predicament: driven by outsiders, fuelled by misinformation, prone to oversimplification. The United States and other Western countries would like to see Yemen confront Al Qaeda, which is thought to have a couple hundred operatives in the country, and its alleged teams of underpants bombers. But the dysfunction in Yemen runs much deeper than qat and Al Qaeda. Yemen faces two ongoing wars: one between the government and the Houthi rebels in the North (which may be entering a new ceasefire phase), and an ever-stirring secessionist movement in the South. In the North, there is an immediate refugee crisis, and across the country there are slow-burning ones: a female illiteracy rate of seventy-five per cent; unemployment at thirty-five per cent (and projected to double in twenty-five years); half of the country living on less than two dollars per day. Meanwhile, seventy-five per cent of Yemen’s national revenue comes from oil, but output is declining and, without new discoveries, will, according to some estimates, cease entirely by 2017.
It can be hard to imagine how Yemen carries on, and yet it does. It is a beautiful place, in some respects unchanged for hundreds of years (many men still wear traditional robes with a jambiya, a ceremonial curved dagger, tucked into the front of their belt), and in others fully modernized (cell phone service is great). In Sanaa, there is the illusion of a remove from the problems of the North—checkpoints around the city help with this, as do tight restrictions on the travel of foreigners, and a ban, issued a few years ago, on private citizens carrying Kalashnikovs in town.
Eventually, my taxi arrived at the journalist’s house, and he offered me some qat. Friedman wrote that he had tried qat—he stopped chewing after fifteen minutes, he said—and I wasn’t going to let him out-Yemen me. Breaking off the small, soft leaves, I chewed on them, three or four at a time. No major revelations, although my notes got a little sloppy, then ceased altogether. Later I was told that it sometimes takes a few sessions before you really “get it.” I’ll have to give it another go.
(Photograph: A qat market in Sanaa. Joshua Hersh.)
