Yemeni hospitality made it possible for me to visit the entire country. I even insisted on going to see the ruins of the ancient port of Moka, which had had its glory days in history. “What a strange idea,” said both Fahima, whom I had involved in this adventure, and our Yemeni guide, a professor. We descended from the superb mountains with a delightful climate to low-lying lands, humid and hot. We ultimately discovered that there was nothing left of the vestiges of Moka, just a small square surrounded by wires where archaeologists worked on an ungrateful soil in which they had discovered nothing. Fahima, an elegant Lebanese, had not at all appreciated this little excursion. I, being stubborn, did not regret it since I had seen the site of Moka all the same!
My visit to Yemen helped me to understand the country’s importance in Arab history. There were two questions that I always asked and to which I never found answers. Why do the Saudis fear the Yemenis so much? The former are rich whereas the latter are poor. Why do so many Arabs from Morocco to Egypt to Iraq claim that their ancestors came from Yemen? The answer, which several historians offered, but not completely convincingly, in my opinion, is simple. In the entire Arabian peninsula, Yemen is the only area organized as an actual society. Its healthy climate allows for better demographic growth, and every five hundred years or so in ancient times, Yemenis were forced to leave en masse, to emigrate as conquerors. They formed Ethiopia, which shares its language with the ancient Semitic languages of southern Arabia. They provided the largest Arab armies of Islam. The Saudis fear them. They fear their resolution, courage, and capacity for organization.
Upon returning to Sana’a, I was given the opportunity to discuss at length the country’s political prospects. Yemeni leaders were strongly critical of the Egyptian intervention, with good arguments. Unfortunately, the problem was not only the well-known arrogance of petite-bourgeois officers—contemptuous toward this “illiterate” people and busy making money by any means to furnish their Cairo apartment—but also, beyond that, the incoherence of Nasser’s strategy, not knowing which way to go in relations with the Saudis, the product of a mixture of authentic progressive intentions, useless and absurd expansionist aims, and poor-quality execution. Yemenis—at least those I met—certainly did not come to “anti-Egyptian” conclusions; on the contrary, they remained admirers of Egypt and Nasser, and supporters of Arab unity. But they thought they would not have done any worse acting alone. I believe they were right, knowing that what they did could only be a beginning of modernization, and hardly more. But were they aware of these limitations? It is difficult to say. The imitation of Muammar Gaddafi’s populist model through the General People’s Congress worried me. There were words, many words, quickly described as “socialist.” The progressives among these leaders and militants from the north counted a lot on the support that unity with the south would provide. Subsequent developments proved that the weaknesses of the south’s progressive political forces largely quashed these hopes.
Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan
I was only in Iraq once—in Baghdad, which I did not leave, to participate in a pan-Arab meeting. That was at the beginning of the Saddam dictatorship in 1980. We spoke freely about the problems on the meeting’s agenda, with some prudence as to the vocabulary used. At the back of the hall, four Iraqi participants, with bushy moustaches (I never, or almost never, saw Iraqi men without a moustache; the exceptions stood out) sweated and labored to take complete notes of everything that was said. “Quite figurative” characters, as my friend the Brazilian painter Tiberio would say. I asked to speak. “I see that our brothers, the Iraqi participants, are extremely serious and anxious to derive the maximum benefit from our discussions. Why not facilitate their task by installing a recording device and then we can offer them the tapes? They will then have the possibility of calmly reflecting on exactly everything that we have said.” Loud laughter. The proposal was adopted.
Beyond this good joke, the atmosphere was terrible and each day the newspapers reported arrests, sentences, etc. The country was being terrorized. I invented a rather grim nokta: every morning, the radio announces the hanging of twenty-five people: five communists, five errant Baathists, five bourgeois liberals, five Islamists, and five with no opinion whatsoever. This way no one will feel secure! My cousin, Mansour Fahmy, who had been a consul in Baghdad, and who had a good Egyptian sense of humor and knew how to imitate the local accent to perfection, told me (he made this up, of course) how a Baathist “culture festival” unfolded. There was a long table with fifteen identical mustachioed men. The first stands up and reads his cultural address. Very brief, one sentence in fact: In May, we killed 50,000. The second stood in turn: In July, we killed 100,000, etc. The last stood: in August, we killed everyone. That’s the end, no one can do better. The festival ended.
However, Iraq is full of intellectuals of the highest value and tens of thousands of militants with uncommon courage. Those whom I was able to see dared to speak, in a low voice, only away from their homes, outside and away from any building. What I heard from them testified quite simply to the sheer horror of the Iraqi Baathist political system. Is it then any wonder that most of these admirable intellectuals ended up choosing exile? Unfortunately, most unfortunately, a large number of these intellectuals subsequently believed that it is possible to return to the country in the train of the invader. The tragic sequel to the story is well known.
Lebanon is certainly a small country, but it is captivating and rich in the quantity and variety of its intellectual output. This is certainly a result of both its confessional diversity, which requires of everyone a sense of perspective, and its democratic life—as limited as it is—unequaled in any of the other Arab countries.
I visited Lebanon on several occasions during the civil war, which bathed the country in blood for ten years beginning in 1975, at the invitation of the bloc of democratic and national forces. Everyone knows today that this war was not the spontaneous result of a “visceral” hostility between communities, but rather a complex game played out, on the one hand, between militias—that assumed a monopoly of speech and action in the name of these communities they claimed to defend whereas, in fact, they placed them under their thumb—and, on the other hand, external forces, that is, Zionists, Western powers (the United States foremost, and behind them their Saudi vassal), Syria, Islamist Iran, Palestinians of the PLO) that played this or that card (and sometimes cynically changed partners). The cruelest moment of this period was certainly the Israeli invasion (1982) and the accompanying massacre of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila, organized by Israel and its acolytes among some Maronite groups. The objective was clearly to break Lebanon apart, fashion a micro-Maronite client state of Israel and the West, and open the south of the country to Israeli conquest and expansion. This plan was defeated, first, it must be said, by the Lebanese people themselves. Giving a big lesson to the Arab world and the Palestinians, the Lebanese civilians did not flee before the Israeli army and fought them by resisting in the occupied