Khat Time

According to legend, Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, is the oldest inhabited city on earth, established by one of the sons of Noah. Arriving at the airport, the walk down the steps from a smart Emirates jumbo jet takes me fifty years into the past, to an airport from the film Casablanca. Drive ten miles further to the cracked, 15-foot thick mud walls of the Old City of Sana’a, and the clock leaps back several centuries. Buildings cascade in two shades of brown clay, around the spice shops. In the suq, every bearded man tucks a vicious curved knife, a jambiya, into the front of his belt as he strolls the narrow lanes between stalls piled with cheap Chinese wares.

Each day starts slowly in Sana’a, and mutters along until lunchtime. Then life steps down a gear. The euphemistic European visitor calls it a siesta, but it is really khat time, and for most it is the end of the working day. Khat is a green plant that looks like a short eucalyptus leaf, the crop made juicy by sucking up forty percent of the country’s scarce water supply. Four out of five Yemenis, from the taxi driver to the college professor, pack a cud into their cheeks and enjoy its hallucinogenic effect.

Many spend one Yemeni rial on khat for every six they earn, and they hardly have money to spare.

I was in Sana’a for a meeting Reprieve had organized for the parents and brothers of Yemeni men held in secret American prisons around the world, timed to coincide with the sixth anniversary – January 11th -- of the opening of Guantánamo Bay. One former prisoner told the audience how he had been swept up by the CIA in Jordan, and tortured for six days before beginning a circuitous tour from Bagram Airforce Base in Afghanistan, to a torture chamber in Romania. A year and a half later someone finally worked out that he was telling the truth, and really was no terrorist, and dumped him unceremoniously back in Yemen. Now he relived his ordeal in front of our microphone, crumpling into shameful tears as he reached his finale. How, he asked, could he get compensation for the 18 months stolen from him, and the lifetime of flashbacks that lay ahead?

How, indeed? Even as he spoke, his path to justice was being impeded by the latest American court ruling – a panel of three appellate judges ruled the same day that a ‘foreigner’ such as him (and most New Statesman readers, to boot) should not be considered a ‘person’ under U.S. law.

Another man said his son had been held for many months in Bagram, and was one of an estimated 680 prisoners there, none of whom has ever seen a lawyer. We had to go to the U.S. Supreme Court to get access to Guantánamo, and his son will never see a lawyer without suing all the way to the high court again.

And then there were four dozen at the conference with sons and brothers in Guantánamo, where more than a third of the remaining 275 prisoners are from Yemen. Almost all their rich Saudi neighbours have gone home – 123 out of 136 – but very few of the Yemenis, and one of them returned to his family in a casket after committing suicide at the Cuban prison. What could these families hope to do to reunite their loved ones with their legal rights?

On average, a Yemeni earns £450 per year, less than £9 a week. If a prisoner’s father chose to give up his home and not eat for a year, he could hire an American attorney for an hour and a half. Fortunately there are lawyers willing to do some of these cases for free - half a dozen corporate lawyers from America attended our meeting.

Human rights are a commodity still far out of the reach of the average Yemeni. “It is sad,” said one Imam, “but we cannot afford human rights for ourselves. We must rely on you, from Europe and America, to give them to us.”

The critics of khat are probably right when they accuse the green leaf of contributing more to Yemeni poverty than the stultifying heat of the Arabian desert. Yet, in the end, perhaps it is only khat that keeps the Yemenis sane.

This article also appeared in the New Statesman.