“Terror of fire from the skies” ─ Survivor writes to U.S. and Yemen presidents

Yemenis protest
U. S. hostilities
drone attacks
breach of sovereignty
killing innocents

Neither “bothers to distinguish friend from foe” … innocents killed, potential allies lost

Excerpt, minor edit, formatting by 

Carolyn Bennett

Yemeni engineer Faisal bin Ali Jaber in August of last year lost his nephew and brother-in-law when a U.S. drone attacked Hadhramout Governorate in Yemen. This year before a meeting between U.S. and Yemeni presidents, Jaber wrote a letter addressed to U.S. President Barack Obama and Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi. The London-based legal charity Reprieve released Faisal bin Ali Jaber’s letter.

Yemen land
under
U.S. drone attack

U.S-backed entrenched regime

Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi is a Yemeni major general and politician who has been the President of Yemen since February 27, 2012, when he was formally inaugurated following the resignation of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh. In the 2012 presidential election process held on February 21, 2012, Hadi was the sole candidate, his candidacy having been backed by both the ruling party and the parliamentary opposition.

Before assuming this position, Hadi had been the country’s vice president (1994-2012); and while former president Ali Abdullah Saleh was undergoing medical treatment in Saudi Arabia (between June 4 and September 23, 2011) for an alleged injury sustained in an attack on the presidential palace during the Yemeni uprising, Hadi was acting president, a position he held a second time on November 23 after Saleh, ‘in return for immunity from prosecution,’ moved into a non-active role pending the presidential election.

Politician and soldier Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi is a career military officer with a rank of major general. In 1994, he had become Yemen’s vice president after Ali Salim Al-Beidh resigned and lost the 1994 civil war. President Ali Abdullah Saleh on October 3, 1994, appointed Hadi vice president.  Before this appointment Hadi had been Yemen’s minister of defense.

U.S. global hostility

Faisal bin Ali Jaber’s letter

Dear President Obama and 

President Hadi:

My name is Faisal bin Ali Jaber. I am a Yemeni engineer from Hadramout, employed by Yemen’s equivalent of the Environmental Protection Agency. I am writing today because I read in the news that you will be meeting in the White House on Thursday, August 1, to discuss the ‘counter-terrorism partnership’ between the U.S. and Yemen.

My family has personally experienced this partnership. A year ago this August, a drone strike in my ancestral village killed my brother-in-law, Salem bin Ali Jaber, and my twenty-one-year-old nephew, Waleed.

Yemen President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi
United States President Barack Hussein Obama

President Obama: you said in a recent speech that the United States is ‘at war with an organization that right now would kill as many Americans as they could if we did not stop them first.’  This war against al-Qa’ida, you added, ‘is a just war - a war waged proportionally, in last resort, and in self-defense.’

President Hadi: on a trip to the United States last September, you claimed that ‘every operation [in Yemen], before taking place, (had) permission from the President.’ You also asserted that ‘the drone technologically is more advanced than the human brain’.

Why then did you both send drones last August to attack my innocent brother-in-law and nephew? 

Members of Our family are not your enemy.

In fact, the people you killed had strongly and publicly opposed al-Qa’ida.

Salem [Jaber’s brother-in-law] was an Imam.  The Friday before his death, he gave a guest sermon in the Khashamir mosque denouncing al-Qa’ida’s hateful ideology. It was not the first of these sermons, but regrettably, it was his last.

In months of grieving, my family have received no acknowledgement or apology from the U.S. or Yemen.

We’ve struggled to square our tragedy with the words in your speeches.

A people under endless 

Attack by foreigners

How was this ‘self-defense’?

My family worried that militants would target Salem for his sermons. We never anticipated his death would come from above at the hands of the United States.

In his death you lost a potential ally ─ in fact, because word of the killing spread immediately through the region, I fear you have lost thousands [of potential allies].

How was this ‘in last resort’? 

Our town was no battlefield.  We had no warning ─ our local police were never asked to make any arrest. Before the strike cut short his life, my young cousin Waleed was a policeman.

How was this ‘proportionate’?

U.S. drones on Yemen

The strike devastated our community.  The day before the strike, Khashamir buzzed with celebrations for my eldest son’s wedding. Our wedding videos show Salem and young Waleed in a crowd of dancing revelers joining the celebration. Traditionally, this revelry would have gone on for days ─ but for the attack. Afterwards, it was days before I could persuade my eldest daughter to leave the house; such was her terror of fire from the skies.

The strike left a stark lesson in its wake ─ not just in my village; but across Hadramout and wider Yemen.

The lesson, I am afraid, is that neither the current U.S. nor Yemeni administration bothers to distinguish friend from foe.  In speech after speech after the attack, community leaders stood and said: if Salem was not safe, none of us are.

Unrepentant cavalier killing of innocents

Careless loss of potential allies

Your silence in the face of these injustices only makes matters worse. If the strike was a mistake, the family ─ like all wrongly bereaved families of this secret air war ─ deserve a formal apology.

To this day I wish no vengeance against the United States or Yemeni governments. But not everyone in Yemen feels the same.

Every dead innocent swells the ranks of those you are fighting.

Yemenis protest
U.S. drone attacks

All Yemen has begun to take notice of drones ─ and they object. Only this month, Yemen’s National Dialogue Conference, a quasi-Constitutional Convention which I understand

the U.S. underwrites, almost unanimously voted to prohibit the unregulated use of drones in our country.

With respect, you cannot continue to behave as if innocent deaths like those in my family are irrelevant.  If the Yemeni and American Presidents refuse to engage with overwhelming popular sentiment in Yemen, you will defeat your own counter-terrorism aims.

Thank you for your consideration.  I would appreciate the courtesy of a reply.

Yours Sincerely,

Faisal bin Ali Jaber

Sana’a, Yemen

END OF

Faisal bin Ali Jaber’s

LETTER

Sources and notes

“LETTER FORM YEMEN: Must-Read: Letter From Yemen” (50855.jpeg) “This letter was written to President Obama and the President of Yemen by a man who lost innocent family members in a U.S. drone strike aimed at Al-Qaeda militants. The day the letter was released there was another strike on Hadhramout, with its wadis, crops of wheat, millet, coffee, date palm and coconut groves and herds of sheep and goats.

“The letter was released to coincide with the meeting between President Obama and President Hadi at the White House at which the U.S. president spoke of the visit reinforcing: ‘the strong partnership and cooperation that’s developed between the United States and the government of Yemen’ and thanking President Hadi and his government for the strong cooperation that they’ve offered when it comes to ‘counterterrorism.’

[Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey Pravda Ru translation note: ‘give license for the U.S. to execute, without Judge or jury, people like Mr. Jaber’s relatives, on Obama’s signature’.]

http://www.reprieve.org.uk

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/08/01/remarks-president-obama-and-president-hadi-yemen-after-bilateral-meeting

http://www.globalresearch.ca/why-are-we-at-war-in-yemen/5345692

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

Copyright © 1999-2013, «PRAVDA.Ru». When reproducing our materials in whole or in part, hyperlink to PRAVDA.Ru should be made. The opinions and views of the authors do not always coincide with the point of view of PRAVDA.Ru's editors.

August 16, 2013, http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/16-08-2013/125405-letter_yemen-0/

[Wadi (Arabic: وادي‎ wādī; also: Vadi) is the Arabic term traditionally referring to a valley. In some cases, it may refer to a dry (ephemeral) riverbed that contains water only during times of heavy rain or simply an intermittent stream.

[wa·di (wah-dee): noun, plural wa·dis. (in Arabia, Syria, northern Africa, etc.): (a) the channel of a watercourse that is dry except during periods of rainfall; (b) such a stream or watercourse itself; (c) a valley.]

Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi bio, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abd_Rabbuh_Mansur_al-Hadi 

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy

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Uprising against “oppression, corruption, nepotism, bribery” —

Protests in Yemen

Yemeni revolution envisions restructuring from “ruins of repressive, militarized, corrupt rule”

Excerpt, minor editing by Carolyn Bennett from Democracy Now transcript

Yemeni Activist Tawakkol Karman accepting the Nobel Peace Prize

U.S.-allied with Saleh regime in Yemen
Across Red Sea
U.S. bombs
Horn of Africa (Somalia)

“… I stand before you in … one of the most important moments of human history — coming from the land of the Arab Orient, coming from the land of Yemen, the Yemen of wisdom and ancient civilizations, the Yemen of more than 5,000 years of long history, the great Kingdom of Sheba, the Yemen of the two queens, Bilqis and Arwa, the Yemen that is experiencing the greatest and the most powerful and the largest eruption of Arab Spring revolution, the revolution of millions throughout the homeland which is still raging and escalating today.…

Tawakkol Karman
Human rights activist
Journalist
Nobel laureate

“… [W]hen I heard the news that I had received the Nobel Peace Prize, I was in my tent in the Tahrir Square in Sana’a. I was one of millions of revolutionary youth. There, we were not even able to secure our safety from the repression and oppression of the regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh.

“At that moment, I contemplated the distinction between the meanings of peace celebrated by the Nobel Prize and the tragedy of the aggression waged by Ali Abdullah Saleh against the forces of peaceful change. However, our joy of being on the right side of history made it easier for us to bear the devastating irony.

“Millions of Yemeni women and men, children, young and old, took to the streets in 18 provinces demanding their right to freedom, justice and dignity, using nonviolent but effective means to achieve their demands. We were able to efficiently and effectively maintain a peaceful revolution in spite of the fact that this great nation has more than 70 million firearms of various types.

Yemeni Protests

Southwest Central Asia (Arabia)
East/Horn of Africa

“Here lies the philosophy of the revolution, which persuaded millions of people to leave their weapons at home and join the peaceful march against the state’s machine of murder and violence just with flowers and bare breasts, and filled with dreams, love and peace. We were very happy because we realized, at that time, that the Nobel Prize did not come only as a personal prize for Tawakkul Abdel-Salam Karman, but as a declaration and recognition of the whole world for the triumph of the peaceful revolution of Yemen and as an appreciation of the sacrifices of its great, peaceful people.

'Day of Rage" - Yemen

“… This revolution will soon complete its first year since the moment it was launched as a peaceful and popular revolution of the youth, with one demand: peaceful change and the pursuit of free and dignified life in a democratic and civil state governed by the rule of law. This state will be built on the ruins of the rule of a repressive, militarized, corrupt and backward family police rule, which has consistently brought Yemen to the edge of failure and collapse during the last 33 years.

…“… [T]he Arab Spring revolutions have emerged with the purpose of meeting the needs of the people of the region for a state of citizenship and the rule of law. They have emerged as an expression of people’s dissatisfaction with the state of corruption, nepotism and bribery.

Yemeni protesters

“These revolutions were ignited by young men and women who are yearning for freedom and dignity. They know that their revolutions pass through four stages, which can’t be bypassed:

TOPPLING the dictator and his family,

TOPPLING his security and military services and his nepotism networks,

ESTABLISHING the institutions of the transitional state, and

MOVING TOWARD constitutional legitimacy and establishing the modern civil and democratic state.

“…Many nations, including the Arab peoples, have suffered, although they were not at war, but were not at peace either. The peace in which they lived is a false ‘peace of graves’ — the peace of submission to tyranny and corruption that impoverishes people and kills their hope for a better future.

United Nations
192 member nations

“… [A]ll of the human community should stand up with our people in their peaceful struggle for freedom, dignity and democracy, now that our people have decided to break out of silence and strive to live and realize the meaning of the immortal phrase of Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab — ‘Since when have you enslaved people, when their mothers gave birth to them free?’…

Tawakkol Karman shares this year’s Nobel Peace Prize with three other women “for non-violent struggle, for the safety of women, and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.”

Sources and notes

TAWAKKOL KARMAN BRIEF

Tawakkol Karman shares the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize with: Leymah Gbowee (Residence at time of award Liberia); and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (at the time of the resident and President of Liberia).

She is the first Arab woman, the youngest Nobel Peace Laureate to date, and the second Muslim woman to receive a Nobel Prize

Tawakel Karman (Arabic: توكل كرمان ‎ Tawak[k]ul Karmān; Anglicized: Tawakul, Tawakkol, Tawakkul or Tawakel Abdel-Salam Karman) (32, b. February 7, 1979, became the international public face of the 2011 Yemeni uprising that is part of the Arab Spring uprisings.

2011 protests include protest on the ‘Day of Rage’ that Karman had called for in Sana’a, Yemen, from February 3, 2011. During the ongoing 2011 Yemeni protests, Tawakel Karman organized student rallies in Sana’a in protest against the long-standing rule of Saleh’s government. [Wikipedia note, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tawakel_Karman&printable=yes]

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2011/karman.html

“‘The Arab People Have Woken Up’: Yemeni Activist Tawakkol Karman Accepts Nobel Peace Prize” [Speech given Saturday December 10, re-broadcast with transcript on Democracy Now, December 13, 2011, http://www.democracynow.org/2011/12/13/the_arab_people_have_woken_up

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy
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