The Yemen Option
Broadcast: 02/03/2004
Reporter: Mark Corcoran
LEAD STORY
SERIES 13
EPISODE 24
Synopsis
To the Romans, Yemen was Felix Arabia, a rugged unconquerable land on the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula. During Ottoman times, the Turkish occupation and rule of its fierce warrior tribesmen was at best, tenuous.
Today, Yemen finds itself firmly in the embrace of the great power of our age, Pax Americana. The country, cheek by jowl with Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan and Ethiopia, has become a clandestine battlefield critical to Washington’s success in its “war on terror”.
After the overthrow of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime in 2001 there were fears that Osama bin Laden would transform Yemen into his new base. Al Qaeda’s ranks were already full of Yemenis – this is also bin Laden ancestral homeland. More importantly, large sections of the country were outside the effective control of the government, ruled by heavily armed tribes sympathetic to Islamic extremists.
For more than 3 years a deadly yet largely unreported struggle has played out across the country, from assassinations and arrests on the ancient stone streets of the capital Sana’a, to a missile strike by a CIA Predator drone on a 4WD travelling a lonely stretch of desert.
But along with the killing there is also a unique compromise – the “Yemen Option”.
Yemen’s government has found a middle path between Washington’s demand to seek out and destroy Al Qaeda, and the views of many Yeminis who are sympathetic to their ideals.
In this report, Mark Corcoran meets a captured member of Al Qaeda, veteran of Bosnia, Chechnya and Afganistan, as he’s about to walk out the front door of the justice ministry and disappear into the labyrinthine lanes of the Old City. He admits his past crimes but says he’s now a reformed man. He’s a star recruit in the government’s controversial rehabilitation program to release Al Qaeda members who renounce the movement.
The government is also attempting to deny terrorists the tools of their deadly trade, spending $Aus44 million in just 8 months, buying back weapons on the black market, no questions asked. Corcoran and his crew inspect what was, until our visit, a secret a government warehouse crammed with tonnes of rockets, anti aircraft missiles and plastic explosives. Not surprisingly, the US Ambassador is worried that the government could be creating a new weapons market, with tribesmen encouraged to import more weapons into a country already awash with arms. And the Ambassador is uniquely qualified to comment, being the US State Department’s former Chief of Counter-Terrorism.
However despite American concerns, the Yemen Option appears to be working. More than a year has now passed since the last major attack by Al Qaeda in Yemen, an extraordinary turnaround.
Corcoran and the crew journeyed across this remarkable looking country, meeting tribesmen, sheiks, a poet turned official propagandist, an Australian doctor who survived an attack that killed three close colleagues, and a young Islamic student from Sydney who dreams of returning home as a Muslim missionary.
- Transcript
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