AHMED ATEF AND MAJID MAHDI

5. A TEACHER AND STUDENTS’ TRANSFORMATION AT A TIME OF WAR

A Case from Yemen

INTRODUCTION

We should help ourselves first. Allah (God) will not help those who do not help themselves – Samar (16), one of Majid’s students. Wars destroy nations while education builds them. No doubt, wars impose challenges on education, but how can teachers and their students deal with the ramification of the first on the second? How can teachers help build bridges for their students to cross safely from the agony of war to the comfort of peace and stability? How teachers and students are transformed while they try to bring normalcy to their schools during and after the war? Majid was driven by these questions when he worked on this project. The authors of this chapter were born in Yemen, Majid in the north and Ahmed in the south. Both are concerned about the plight of Yemeni people and particularly children, because of the continued war and armed conflicts. The authors begin this chapter by reviewing the impact of armed conflicts and war on children, and then they discuss the context of education in the school and the region where this study was conducted. Ahmed is a US-Yemeni educator and a current Ph.D. student at George Mason University (GMU), Fairfax, Virginia. Majid, the second author, has worked as a teacher of English in a Yemeni high school in a province in north Yemen for over a decade. The authors have collaborated on this paper despite the distance that physically separated them. As such, this study can also be seen as an example of the viability of the cross-country collaboration among educators in an increasingly globalized world.

THE WAR IN YEMEN

Majid’s school is situated in a mountainous province in North Yemen near the Yemeni-Saudi Arabian borders. Since 2015, this part of Yemen, as with the rest of the country, has experienced a war between forces loyal to the current elected Yemeni President Abdrubo Mansoor Hadi, a southern, who belongs to Sunni Islam and is supported by a Saudi-led Arab coalition, on one hand, and the Houthi armed fighters,

S. Baily et al. (Eds.), Experiments in Agency, 57–76. © 2017 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. A. ATEF & M. MAHDI who are supported by forces loyal to Yemen’s former President Ali Abdulla Saleh’s (a northern who belongs to Zaydi-Shia form of Islam), on the other. The Houthi is the name of a tribe (or a large family) in Northern Yemen, and the Houthis are Zaydi- Shia followers. They are named after a city called Houth in Sada’a province to the north of the capital Sana’a. According to Peter Salisbury (2015, p. 2), “the Houthis have transformed themselves over the past decade into a formidable militia.” The former President Saleh ruled Yemen Arab Republic (Y.A.R, or North Yemen) from 1978 to 1990. When Y.A.R was united with the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (P.D.R.Y. or South Yemen) on May 22, 1990, Saleh continued to be the President of the new union while the then Southern President, Ali Salem Al-Beidh, was his deputy. On April 27, 1994, a war between the two armies of North and South Yemen erupted, but was quickly ended on July 7th of the same year when Saleh’s forces invaded Aden, the capital of the South and defeated Al-Beidh’s army. In 2007, a peaceful movement against the rule of Saleh took place in the South and continued to gain momentum. On February 11, 2011, the popular uprising against the rule of Saleh occupied the main squares in the capital Sana’a for months, demanding Saleh to leave power. Fearing the escalation of the uprising into a civil war, the regional powers headed by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries, members of the Gulf Cooperation Council [GCC], intervened and convinced Saleh to sign a transition agreement. According to this agreement, known as “The GCC Initiative,” the then Vice President Hadi was appointed as a transitional President. In February 2012, Hadi was elected as the new President of Yemen. A national dialogue among all Yemen’s political parties took place soon after to shape the transition to a new democratic government. However, on September 21, 2014, the Houthi forces supported by former President Saleh’s armed forces occupied Sana’a and placed President Hadi and his government under house arrest. Soon after, President Hadi managed to escape Sana’a and took a refuge in the Southern city, Aden. When the Houthi and Saleh’s forces approached Aden to capture him, President Hadi requested the military intervention of the Saudi government and other GCC countries to save his rule from the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels whom he labeled as “coup plotters” (Mukhashof & Fahmy, 2015). Hadi’s request was immediately accepted by the Saudis and other GCC and Arab countries who formed a coalition to support the return of Hadi’s elected government to power. The Saudi’s immediate response to Hadi’s request indicates the level of animosity and mistrust in the Saudi-Iranian relations, the two nations that have been in the form of détente for years (Salisbury, 2015). Since March 26, 2015, the war is still ongoing in Yemen to reinstate Hadi’s government. As the war continues, so are the sufferings of millions of Yemeni people, including children. In July 2015, the United Nations Children Funds’ (UNICEF) Humanitarian Action for Children issued a worldwide appeal to help Yemeni children. This appeal noted that 21.1 million people, including 9.9 million school- aged children, were affected by the war, and more than one million people were internally displaced (UNICEF, 2015). It is worth mentioning that the recent war in

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