Yemenis Wear Out Their Welcome in Saudi Arabia

In the ancient port city of Jidda, which for centuries has served as a gateway to the Muslim holy city of Mecca, there is a quarter of brightly lighted shops and run-down auto repair garages, a place where the staid white robes of traditional Saudi dress disappear among the colorful draped skirts and rakish grins of the Yemenis.

It is a place, in a country known for good manners and temperate behavior, to which foreigners are advised not to go. It is called Yemen Town, and it is slowly emptying, another casualty of the Persian Gulf crisis.

Thousands of Yemenis have left Saudi Arabia since Sept. 18, when Saudi officials, irked with the Yemeni government’s support of Iraq, canceled all entry, residence and work privileges for the 1 million or more Yemenis in Saudi Arabia. The order also applied to some Palestinians working here as well.

Buses crammed with departing workers pull out of Yemen Town every afternoon, and the Yemeni Consulate in Jidda is flooded daily with hundreds of workers seeking help in finding Saudi sponsors in order to remain. The consulate closed for three days after the Saudi announcement to get ready for the impending crisis.

“They were afraid of being stormed,” said one Western diplomat whose offices are nearby.

In Yemen Town, a merchant shakes his head when asked which shopkeepers are leaving, and gestures in every direction.

“I have been here from the old king until this, for 42 years,” said Ahmed Salam Ahmed, who dispenses packets of fragrant cardamom, cloves, saffron and incense from his spice shop in the heart of Yemen Town. “For me to leave, it’s like getting a whale outside the sea. But it’s something by the hand of God.”

Yemenis, with close tribal links to much of Saudi Arabia, had until now enjoyed a special status that allowed them to work in the kingdom without entry visas, to work without sponsorship of a Saudi citizen, to own their own businesses.

But all that was canceled last month by Saudi officials irritated by massive demonstrations in Yemen against Saudi Arabia’s decision to call in U.S. troops, and by the Yemeni government’s abstention on several U.N. and Arab League resolutions endorsing the deployment of foreign troops to defend Saudi Arabia.

The decision is likely to be devastating for Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the Middle East--a country heavily dependent on the wages Yemeni workers sent home from Saudi Arabia, estimated at more than $1 billion a year. Yemen also supports a thriving black market in Saudi currency and consumer goods smuggled in by employees.

Yemen reacted angrily to the Saudi move, announcing that Yemenis who did not leave Saudi Arabia immediately would be considered traitors. President Ali Abdullah Saleh accused the Saudis of adopting a “he who is not with us is against us” policy.

In Jidda, political demonstrations erupted soon after the crisis began but were quickly broken up by the authorities. Yemeni workers convened tense meetings at Yemeni markets in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, and in the southern city of Nejran, 12 miles north of the Yemeni border, where about 10,000 Yemenis work.

In an interview this week, a Nejran farmer, Mubarak Mutlaqa, said 43 of his 60 Yemeni employees have left and that more may be leaving soon. Many, he said, have adopted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s slogans condemning the presence of foreign troops near the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and calling for a redistribution of the gulf states’ oil riches to poor Arabs elsewhere in the Middle East.

“They refuse everything,” Mutlaqa said. “They refuse to work, and they prefer to go home. The majority of them say the government of Yemen is right and, because they consider themselves Arab, the petrol must be shared with other Arabs.”

Saudi officials say the new regulations, by removing special privileges for Yemenis, simply put them in the same category as other foreign workers. But many admit privately that they would like to see the Yemenis replaced by workers from Egypt, which has joined with Saudi Arabia in condemning the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and has sent thousands of troops to join the multinational force in the Saudi desert.

Diplomats said there have been some private discussions in recent days between Yemeni and Saudi officials about easing the new restrictions, and Yemen did vote to support the recent U.N. resolution calling for an air embargo against Iraq.

But Saudi officials say they are not convinced that Yemen has joined the fold. Privately, they say Saudi Arabia is prepared to exercise its considerable political influence over Yemen’s northern tribesmen if their government does not join in.

“Half the tribes in Yemen have pledged allegiance to the (Saudi) king,” a diplomatic source said. “In theory, the Saudis could wreak havoc on Yemen’s political system.”

Western diplomats say they fear the dispute could rekindle old troubles along Saudi Arabia’s historically trouble-ridden border with Yemen.

“The long-term effects of this for the relations between Yemen and Saudi Arabia are not good,” one said. “They’d better tighten up those borders, they’d better put some more military down there, because these guys are wild and crazy--and right now, they’re mad.”

In Jidda, fruit juice vendors and bakers have set up carts to serve the hundreds of Yemenis swarming in the street outside the consulate, and merchants in Yemen Town say they are resigned to leaving.

“The people who have to stay will stay,” said Mounir Abdel Qadir, who has applied for Saudi sponsorship but not yet received it. “If I have to leave, I will. This is the opinion of the Yemeni government, and I have no opinion.”

Yahia Ibrahim Hakim, owner of a fabric store, shrugged and said: “They have the right to secure their country. And the Yemen government, they made a mistake. Anybody (who) agrees with what happened in Kuwait is not Muslim. This is a free country. We would like to stay. It is full of money, it is full of good things. But if they don’t like us, we go.”

Ahmed, the spice shop owner, was equally resigned. He was in Jidda, he said, at the time of King Abdulaziz, the Bedouin warrior who united Saudi Arabia into a single kingdom in the early part of the century.

“I came here, all this area was nothing,” he said. “There was no water, no electricity, nothing. Before they opened the Yemeni Embassy, I was here. This is my own store, my telephone, everything. I’m paying the electrical. . . . I carry the Yemeni passport, that is all.

“I don’t agree with the Yemeni government. This is big mistake. We came here, we eat here, we marry here, our children are born here, and we owe much to this country. They made very big mistake against us. I will try to stay if I can stay.

“Otherwise,” he said, sighing, “I will go back to Yemen. I hope to God in the end it will be a good thing for us.”

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