Abyan - context of conflict

1. Happy Arabia, according to the newest and most exact observations. 300 years ago.

2. Some things haven’t changed enough.. But we’re interested in this bit

3. where things have changed quite a bit.. But not the rainfall..

4. This is a major watershed, It runs from Yarim to the coast. The catchment area of WadiBana is 7,200km2, Wadi Hassan is 3,300km2, Under nominal annual precipitation, the basin input is 2,590mm3 for WadiBana and 660mm3 for Wadi Hassan. Plenty of water – pretty unusual for Yemen..

5. WadiBana Wadi Hassan It all comes out here, in the Abyan Delta, in those two wadis.. This area, just 30 km from north to south, comprises a very significant area of good alluvial soils. With water!

6. Thus there always was irrigation here, and the Yafa’e and Fadhli people made excellent farmers. However, in 1938, the British colonial office took it upon themselves to begin construction of a seriously large project. They started building weirs and canals, and leveling out areas of land for a major spate irrigation project that they thought would cover 10,000 Ha.

7. Why did they do that? By 1967, the total extent of canals looked like this, and it remained like this until the mid 1980s Those weirs, offtakes and canals provide a potential irrigable area of 39,460Ha. Catastrophic flood damage 1981 / 1982 changed the pattern of canals slightly, and construction of dams far upstream in the catchment regulated the flow a little.

8. The yellow green is bananas In fact, only 10,000ha is ever irrigated by spate flood (and spate plus borehole), borehole irrigation adds 1,400 ha - mostly in the southern end of the delta. Back in 1949, the British did the sums and got it right. But somewhere in between, people got exited and inflated their expectations. Unrealised dreams are a bad thing.

9. The 400 Ha farmed in 1938 has grown to 10,000 Ha, and the population is now six times the 1940 level. A lot of people moved into the Delta to take advantage of the farming and the labour it supported. But whose land was it?

10. Up here This lot in here… In 1906, it was all mapped out quite well in terms of tribes.. The Fadhlisultanante, mere newcomers from 1703, occupied the southern half.. making a living from farming, fishing and trading. The Yafa’e, held seriously old tenure over the upper half of the delta.

11. Bateys Al Haroor Maqazin The 1906 border line (in red) follows the pattern of today’sborder. The current FadhliYafa’e border runs down from Haroor to Maqazin to just East of Bateys. In the last 109 years, the tribal borders haven’t changed much.

12. Bateys Yafa’e land… Fadhli land… 68% of the irrigable land ..but downstream from the main control structure The big offtake at Bateys for the main canal, supplies waterto an area of 9,182ha, 32% of all the potentially irrigable land, - and its controlled by the Yafa’e. The downstream offtakesfeed smaller areas, Diyyu3,840 ha, Makhazan 3,470 ha, Haiga/ Hayja 3,430 ha, Gharaib/Gharair 3,390 ha, Massani 350 ha. Wadi Hassan - on the Eastern side - irrigates up to 5,300ha but the flow is much less regular.

13. here Bateys Zingibar To create a unifying system British ran the original main canal from Bateys down to Zingibar up on top of Jebel Khanfar, in Jaar. and placed the all-controlling Abyan Board, right in the middle, Jaar was only a small village until after 1945; it grew because of the Abyan board and the canal. By the 1960s, the Abyan Board was managed by a thirteen-member council: six Yafa’e appointees, six Fadhli appointees, and one Brit - just in case they couldn’t agree. It worked so well they sometimes turned a profit.

14. ..because the feeder canals and weirs silted up. The drought started down at the bottom end.. … So the communists kept it going right through to 1989. After the 1991 unification and the 1994 civil war, things went badly awry. The AbyanBoard failed to raise water charges from the farmers and the courts in Jaar and Zingibar failed to enforce the law, so with no internal revenue, the system itself rapidly fell into decay.

15. Up there.. Over here.. In here.. After 1995, the farmers downstream sank lots of boreholes and grew bananas with highly subsidised diesel while the Yafa’e farmers up in Bateys, continued to irrigate their bananas with (free) floodwater. Since 2002 the people up near Bateys have been using a wellfield- that was drilled and developed to supply Aden with potable water - to further irrigate their bananasand get two crops a year. Farmers resist placing a proper value on water: they know that flood irrigation losses are 60%. i.ethey can save at least 40% of the volume of water, but they seldom apply best practice.

16. for all.. In fact, the old Abyan Board was so mindful of the need to achieve an equitable distribution of water resources and extend a balanced pattern of employment it controlled everything. Crop selection, planting dates, irrigation rates, water levies, harvest dates and marketingwere all optimised to create equity in employment and maximise productivity over the widest possible area. - thatwas the original aim. Spread the benefits and keep the peace

17. Without an effective enforcement mechanism to regulate them, the people at the head of the system acted with impunity. But by 2000, what was visible was hydrological Darwinism: survival of the highest. Due to all that frantic pumping, the ground water table in the delta was dropping by up to 3m a year With the demise of the Abyan Board, farmers and leaders negotiated several agreements over water abstraction and water rights, but the agreements were never implemented. For the Fadhli, the inevitable debacle was only held in check by diesel subsidies.

18. Source: Water Watch, (now eLeaf), Netherlands. Image analysis to show changes in land usebetween 2006 and 2010 shows where the impacts were.. The people at the top of the system maintained or increased production.. The people at the bottom of the system maintained production, but the people in the middle lost out altogether - and these were a mixture of Fadli and Yafae people. Examining this image with the command areas and exact tribal boundaries (within Fadhli) is instructive in gaining an insight into the roots of conflict.

19. So it got mixed up. That didn’t matter under strong legal institutions, but… The British had also created an open market for land in the delta, partly to encourage investment from the mercantile classes. This was made possible by a complete land survey in 1964. Absentee landowner merchants bought land in the system, as well as ordinary people. Despite this veneer of order, three systems of land law apply to the delta: tribal law/customary law, Islamic law, and formal law. The use of each is based on the ability to pay.

20. All because of a lack of law? By the mid-2000s the court in Jaar was clogged with contested land claims, and the arbiters of the court were notoriously corrupt. The incidence of murder and revenge killings rose rapidly. Moreover, back in 1998, the remnants of the Al QuaedaaffilliatedAden Abyan Islamic Army were caught, tried and sent to jail in Jaar. … where their families turned the old cinema into a renegade mosque and AQAP was spawned.

21. So that’s all history now? No. UNOCHA and the donor community are now looking at finding ninety million dollars for ‘stabilisation’ and ‘early recovery’. The package that has been deveoped is predominantly humanitarian, Its dominated by healthcare, childcare, potable water supply, schools rehabilitation, clinic redevelopment and training the trainers to train the trainer.. All the stuff that INGOs doand donors feel safe with. The whole of Abyan has around 450,000 people spread over eleven districts. The AbyanDelta goes into just two: Khanfar and Zingibar. Between them they hold around 135,000 people. As elsewhere in Yemen, these people fall into different social and economic classes, but over 75% of them are farmers of one sort or another.

22. Farmers in the delta can be classified as: Absentee landlords: landowners who live in Aden, Sana’a, or overseas; Landlord / farmers: significant landowners who live locally; Formal tenant farmers: tenant farmers working the land under formal agreements; Sharecropper farmers: farmers working under informal (unwritten) terms, but often with significant rights of access/rights of use; and Landless labourers: day rated labour who usually work for the tenant farmers and landowners farmers on a semi-permanent basis. In numerical terms, only the bottom two brackets are significant. For these people, the one event of the last decade that seriously affected their lives were the food price hikes in the last two months of 2007 and the first half of 2008. Household food security, community food security, is their primary concern. Given this concern, the social ‘safety status’ of the landless labourers is very different between Bateys and Zingibar. The farm labourers of the Yafa’e are tribal people and an integral part of the Yafa’e tribe. While they are not kinsmen (there is no intermarriage), they are ‘protected’ by their history. The social status of the day-labourers in the south is much more precarious. They are an historical assemblage of migrant poor from other parts of Abyan. They are tribal, but not large coherent communities with a strong mutual allegiance to the landowning class. They are much more vulnerable.

23. In 2011, the revolution crashed the economy and diesel prices rose. Landowners reacted differently, - and with different results. Up near Bateys, the landowners were somewhat insulated, They could continue to irrigate their bananas and fields with water that arrived by gravity alone. In Zingibar, the richer farmers simply cut the use of diesel and laid off much of their day rate labour. At a time when the food prices were rocketing (basic foodstuffs doubled in price inside three months), this was a dangerous pattern. It is no coincidence that after a decade of simmering Islamist discontent, Ansar al Sharia emerged insideAbyan and within the Yemeni revolution. Ansar sought to end corruptionand deliver employmentand justice. Ansar were predominantly led by ‘middle class’ members of a Fadhli sub tribe. The core membership in Jaar and Zingibar were the poor and unemployed youth who couldn’t leave. One of the first things that Ansar did as a political entity in their own right, was to address the issue of land and land tenure.

24. Ansar developed a mediation service within the courts that successfully cleared land claim cases in weeks, if not days. Cases that had sat in the courts for over a decade and cost the litigants a fortune in fees and bribes were resolved by the application of careful negotiation to mutually acceptable and legally documented ends. In popular understanding, this is Ansar’s most positive legacy. Ansar knew that land is, quite literally, the foundation of nations. It is what people fight and die for. A tribe is synonymous with its land, its place of origin, and land is nothing without water. Rural Yemenis may have different reasons to fight, but given their hunger and risk aversion, the two main reasons to risk your life are to protect your assets (land or water) or to earn money. Of these motives, men protecting their land will fight the hardest of all because they know their land well - and they have more to lose - since their land is synonymous with their identity and culture. All the historical and cultural precedents and current anecdotal evidence suggests that Yemeni men require significant payment to engage in sustained warfare: thus while ideology is important, it is a moral cover rather than a core driver of organised violence.

25. Now the refugees are going back home to Abyan. The poor, who never left, are largely excluded from the ‘reintegration packages’. The land dispute issues remain, and may be worse. The irrigation water issues are certainly worse. The humanitarian focus of the current ninety million dollar early recovery plan ensures that donors will address healthcare, education, housing and household food security, however, the critical development context of land conflicts, land rights and irrigation water are barely addressed or even mentioned. Despite this, it stands to reason that a sustainable reduction in armed violence in Abyan can only be achieved by looking at the politics of ownership and access to land and water – from the bottom up. ©Henry Thompson. August 2012. oxania@gmail.com