problem.” It seemed it wasn’t just this group of reporters who needed to know the various ways the press could serve society, it was the entire society itself. Almost all of Yemen’s newspapers were blatantly partisan, and so anyone interviewed would of course assume a reporter had an agenda other than the truth.
I planned to assign them stories that they could publish in the paper, coaching them along the way. I wanted everything I taught them to contribute to the betterment of the Yemen Observer . There was much that needed bettering, starting with the English. For example: “The security source denied any dead incidents happened during the riots.” Or, from another reporter, “Nemah Yahia, an elderly lady, said that they went to a mill in Raid, have an hour takes them, to crash the cereal.” I suppose that “crash the cereal” isn’t all that inappropriate a phrase to describe what occurs at a mill. But still.
Then there was the utter lack of structure to the stories, the dearth of legitimate sources, the three-paragraph-long sentences, and the nonsensical headlines. One notorious headline in the Observer , before my time, accidentally referred to the Ministry of Tourism as the Ministry of Terrorism. The folks at the U.S. embassy were so entertained by this that they pinned the story to their bulletin board. It was hard to know where to begin, but I figured I couldn’t go wrong by starting with the country’s biggest news story.
“There’s a presidential election coming up in September,” I said. “What role do you think a newspaper can play in the months before the elections? What are its obligations to its readers? In other words, how does the press contribute to the creation of a true democracy?”
The mention of democracy immediately perked them all up. The Yemeni government is officially quite keen on democracy and forever issuing statements about the glorious progress of its march toward such a political system. Yet at the moment, true democracy is but a speck on the horizon. Yemen has existed as a unified country only since 1990. After the end of Turkish occupation in 1918, the North was ruled as a quasi-monarchy by a series of politico-religious leaders called imams. In 1962, a civil war in the North resulted in the overthrow of the imamate and the establishment of the Yemen Arab Republic.
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
I planned to assign them stories that they could publish in the paper, coaching them along the way. I wanted everything I taught them to contribute to the betterment of the Yemen Observer . There was much that needed bettering, starting with the English. For example: “The security source denied any dead incidents happened during the riots.” Or, from another reporter, “Nemah Yahia, an elderly lady, said that they went to a mill in Raid, have an hour takes them, to crash the cereal.” I suppose that “crash the cereal” isn’t all that inappropriate a phrase to describe what occurs at a mill. But still.
Then there was the utter lack of structure to the stories, the dearth of legitimate sources, the three-paragraph-long sentences, and the nonsensical headlines. One notorious headline in the Observer , before my time, accidentally referred to the Ministry of Tourism as the Ministry of Terrorism. The folks at the U.S. embassy were so entertained by this that they pinned the story to their bulletin board. It was hard to know where to begin, but I figured I couldn’t go wrong by starting with the country’s biggest news story.
“There’s a presidential election coming up in September,” I said. “What role do you think a newspaper can play in the months before the elections? What are its obligations to its readers? In other words, how does the press contribute to the creation of a true democracy?”
The mention of democracy immediately perked them all up. The Yemeni government is officially quite keen on democracy and forever issuing statements about the glorious progress of its march toward such a political system. Yet at the moment, true democracy is but a speck on the horizon. Yemen has existed as a unified country only since 1990. After the end of Turkish occupation in 1918, the North was ruled as a quasi-monarchy by a series of politico-religious leaders called imams. In 1962, a civil war in the North resulted in the overthrow of the imamate and the establishment of the Yemen Arab Republic.
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
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