So I’ve noticed a few things in the two protests that I’ve attended at the UN, calling for an end to the Ali Abdullah Saleh regime. The first protest took place on February 25th 2011, a few hours after the killing of over 20 peaceful protesters in Aden. This protest at the UN was last minute and the majority of the protesters were of southern Yemeni descent. I can tell because I understood their dialect of (southern Yemeni) Arabic and the fact that I knew a lot of the people there on a more personal basis.
The second protest was held on Friday March 18th 2011, a few hours after the morning massacre in Sanaa in which the army killed over 56 peaceful protesters and injured well over 300. During this protest, which was also sort of last minute-ish, had an overwhelming majority of northern Yemenis. I would say all of them but I saw some friends and family of mine from the South there.
When I asked a southerner friend of mine as to why he didn’t join us in protest in March 18th he emphatically replied, “When we protested, they pointed at us and scoffed, calling us ‘seccionists’ and the ‘conspirators against the unity of Yemen.’ Let’s see how they like it when their children and friends are shot and killed in peaceful protest. How do they feel when they go protest and no southerner goes with them? It’s a small taste of the pain that we’ve been through during the past four years. We will protest with them, in due time. But they first have to taste the bitter taste of betrayal. They have to feel the same pain that we’ve felt.”
Everybody is dying; Northerners and Southerners. The problem is that people haven’t awakened to realize that the animosity that was stirred between the two sides arose from Ali Saleh’s tricky ways to have us hate each other. And out of that hate for each other, he distracted us from the real enemy, himself. It may not be easy to put aside years of carefully grown and planned out hatred, but I’m sure it can be done. It’s easy to forge an alliance with this person that you’ve called an “enemy” when the real threat arises, especially if that threat is the one that pit you against each other.
