Gregory Johnsen: When talking about Yemen, when thinking about Yemen, it’s really, really easy to become overwhelmed by just the totality of the crises that country faces. And so, I tend to view the country as having these three separate layers of crises if you will.

At the top there's this elite rivalry. There's this struggle for power. This is taking place behind closed doors, but it’s something that really, I think, effects all the other levels of and layers of crises within the country. President Ali Abdallah Saleh has been president since 1978. He saw the country through unification in 1990. He saw the country through the civil war that happened four years later when the south attempted to secede and he continues to really, I think, maintain this delicate balancing act. He likes to claim that ruling Yemen is like dancing on the heads of snakes, and this is something that he’s done very, very well, but it’s something that increasingly it seems as if he’s losing a little bit of his grip.

Now, whether this is just because he’s getting older or whether this is because he’s running out of money and is not longer sort of able to play different opposition groups off against one another is keeping them all perpetually dependent. I think that’s still a little bit of an open question. But, what we have now is all these - this next generation of leaders if you will. So, you have the president’s son, you have a quartet of nephews who are all sort of attempting to position themselves to seize power once the president eventually leaves.

In addition to that, you have another very powerful family. A tribal family, the Al-Akmar family, who’s also attempting to seize power or at least position themselves in a place where they could have a shot at taking power.

And so, this is all going on at the top. It’s something that people within Yemen talk about, speculate on, but it’s very much sort of palace politics. Something that there's much more rumor than fact.

Then below this we have, in this second layer if you will, we have a trio of security crises. We have the, of course, resurgent Al-Qaeda threat. We have the civil war up in the north, the Al-Houthi rebellion that I reference earlier, and then the cause for secession from the south. So, these - this trio of security challenges, I think, have really grabbed the majority of the headlines in 2008, 2009 and as we move forward, particularly the Al-Qaeda threat will grab most of the headlines in the future.

Then below this we have, I think, what could really be described as sort of a - almost the structurally challenges to the state. This is the fact that the state, which is heavily dependent upon oil revenue, is running out of oil. It’s losing water. The water table is dropping by, say, six to eight meters in some areas of the country, which for a country where the vast majority of the population still is dependent upon sustenance agriculture for their livelihood, this is a very significant thing.

There’s rampant corruption in the government. A very high birthrate correspondingly very rates of literacy within the country. Unemployment is very high; poverty is very high. So, you really, at this level, you have sort of a laundry list. And so, that’s sort of the snapshot of Yemen, at least as I see it at the moment.

Recorded on January 25, 2010
Interviewed by Austin Allen