Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [19]
South Yemen was under British rule from 1839 to 1967, when the last British forces withdrew from Aden and the country became the People’s Republic of South Yemen (renamed the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen in 1970), the only Arab Marxist state in history. After the Soviet Union began to dissolve in 1989, North and South Yemen began talking seriously about unification. They unified formally on May 22, 1990, though a bloody civil war erupted in 1994 between the (still unmerged) northern and southern armed forces.
Yemen has had the same president for more than thirty years. Well, technically President Ali Abdullah Saleh has only been president of all of Yemen since unification. But before that he ruled North Yemen for twelve years. While grumbling about President Saleh’s leadership is a popular national pastime, the Yemeni people have not experienced a peaceful transfer of power in their lifetime and thus struggle to imagine such a thing.
Still, this year, for the first time, Yemen has a real opposition candidate. In 1999, when the country held its first direct presidential election, Saleh handily defeated a candidate from his own party with a majority of 96 percent. Now, opposition candidate Faisal bin Shamlan is providing the press with the thrilling opportunity to write about someone other than Saleh and about a political party other than the ruling party, the General People’s Congress. My reporters were bursting with pride about their country’s democratic efforts. They seemed to feel that this transition could finally earn Yemen the respect it deserved. Even so, no one really doubted that Saleh would win reelection.
“But the press has an obligation to report impartially about both candidates,” I told my class. “And to give voters as much information as they can, so that they can make informed choices.” No easy task when it’s against the law to directly criticize the president in the paper. And when the owner of the paper actually works for that president. Theo had explained to me that the Yemen Observer was just one of Faris’s many enterprises. His main job was working as the president’s media adviser. He also owned a security franchise, campaigned against corruption, helped organize investment conferences, and had his industrious fingers in many other ventures. While I found it clearly unethical for the owner of a newspaper to work for the president, it seemed best to keep my thoughts to myself. I was there for only three weeks. I would just have to try to get my reporters to report as fairly as possible and hope Faris wouldn’t meddle too much.
The concept of even-handed reporting seemed to be going over remarkably well with my students, who said they wanted their stories to read like those in the New York Times. It remained to be seen how well they could execute this. They gave me several different ideas for kinds of election stories they could write: candidate profiles, issue-specific stories (on the eradication of weapons, say, or fighting corruption), and news stories about the direction of the candidates’ campaigns. Farouq, the paper’s main political reporter, was already working on a story about the opposition party’s threatened boycott of the election.
I ended class by giving them each an assignment related to their beat, due at six P.M. This would help me learn more about Yemen as well as more about what my reporters considered news.
Arwa, for example, wanted to do a story about an all-women sports club, but I had trouble getting her to tell me what was new about it.
“We need a reason that we are writing about it today,” I told her. “Tell me what is new. Did it just open? Is it the first club for women?”
“No …”
“Did it just introduce some new kind of sport? Or is it part of a growing trend? Are more