A skirmish at sea

By Maye Ostowani

Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef was quoted as saying that the Yemeni forces fired first, injuring a Saudi soldier, and forcing the Saudi forces to fire back "in self-defence." He also confirmed the death of the three Yemeni soldiers and the injury of nine others during the clash on Duwaima island off the Yemeni coast. An injured Yemeni officer was taken to Najran in Saudi Arabia. Nayef said the wounded officer and the dead bodies could be returned to Yemen "any time it wanted."

On Monday, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh accused Saudi Arabia of shelling the island. He said nine Saudi naval ships also fired rockets at border guards stationed there. A cease-fire was announced following the five-hour clash.

In a bid to ease the tension, Nayef said Riyadh considered the clashes "not an attack but a border skirmish. We hope this incident will be the last." Sanaa also confirmed that Yemeni Foreign Minister Abdul-Qader Bagammal was due to arrive in the Kingdom for talks with his Saudi counterpart.

The outbreak of violence is the latest round in a decades-long border dispute between the two neighbours. Fighting has occasionally erupted along their 2,000-kilometre frontier, but top officials have rarely spoken of the clashes publicly.

Yemen has threatened several times to take the border dispute to international arbitration, an option which Riyadh rejects outright. In his statements on Tuesday, Nayef reiterated the Saudi position. "We do not want arbitration because we want to resolve this between the two countries... We are optimistic that we will be able to solve this without resorting to arbitration."

Saleh earlier said Sanaa wanted to continue the dialogue with Riyadh but would seek arbitration if bilateral talks failed to solve the 60-year-old dispute. In arbitration, he said "Yemen will demand all its legal and historic rights." Yemeni officials claim the country has already given its share of concessions, relinquishing its claim to the southern Saudi regions of Najran, Jizan and Assir in 1934. Yemen warned that it will renew such claims if Saudi Arabia fails to show flexibility in bilateral talks.

After border clashes in late 1994 and early 1995, the two countries signed an agreement calling for the normalisation of relations and the demarcation of their common border. But a committee they set up to oversee the demarcation process failed to finalise an agreement despite conducting a series of high-level talks.

Before the latest clash, tension escalated between the two countries after Saudi Arabia handed a surprise memo to the Arab League and the United Nations on Friday stating that it did not recognise a border agreement reached between Yemen and Oman in 1992 because it allegedly involved land that belonged to Saudi Arabia. Sanaa accused Riyadh of "perpetual acts of aggression" and seizing its land, a charge denied by Riyadh.

The Saudi-Yemeni clash coincided with renewed violence inside Yemen as protests continued over the government's recent decision to increase prices of fuel by 40 per cent. The governor of Yemen's northern Al-Jawf province was shot and wounded Tuesday as tribesmen fired at a government convoy which was also carrying two ministers about 100 kilometres north of Sanaa. The attackers were allegedly members of the Shawlan tribe, which dominates the region.

Sporadic fighting between tribesmen and Yemeni security forces was reported in the oil-rich provinces of Mareb and Al-Jawf following the government's decision to increase prices on 19 June. Government reinforcements were sent to the two provinces last week after oil pipelines were blown up by tribesmen. Over the past few weeks more than 50 people have been killed and 200 injured when public protests turned into violent clashes with security forces.

But according to Abdel-Aziz Al-Saqqaf, editor-in-chief of the English-language weekly Yemen Times, the government's reform programme, launched in 1995 in agreement with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) to rebuild the economy, has had positive results. "The reforms currently being implemented by the government are quite necessary for the future of the country... [and] have resulted in reducing interest rates, stabilising the [Yemeni] riyal exchange rate and reducing the budget deficit," Al-Saqqaf told Al-Ahram Weekly.

However, he insisted that the government must provide more job opportunities, especially since the population is growing at a rate of 3.7 per cent annually. He added that the government should manage its resources better and attract more foreign investment. "High unemployment rates -- reaching 40 per cent in some sectors -- the rise in the cost of living and other economic difficulties make it quite urgent to introduce remedial measures," Al-Saqqaf said.

He attributed the increase in protests to public dissatisfaction, especially among the poor and underprivileged, with senior government officials not affected by the economic crunch caused by reforms. "If [government] officials are forced to relinquish some of their over-the-top privileges and generous hand-outs, the public will not feel it is being victimised by the side-effects of the economic reform programme," Al-Saqqaf said.

Government officials, however, insist that total calm prevails in Yemen and that its people are satisfied with government efforts to improve their political and economic lot.

Minister of Labour and Vocational Training Mohamed Al-Tayyeb, who is close to President Saleh, told the Weekly from Sanaa that the unrest was provoked for purely political gains. Al-Tayyeb accused "foreign powers" of taking advantage of the government's price hikes to stir up trouble. "They want to undermine the government's achievements, tarnish Yemen's image at home and abroad and show the world that it is an unsafe and unstable country," Al-Tayyeb said.