Battle lines | 19 March 2011

It’s tribal and religious divisions that really shape the Middle East – and that account for the Saudi intervention in Bahrain

I once got lost in Asir, the mountainous region on Saudi Arabia’s southwestern border with Yemen. This was the home of many of the terrorists on September 11, from the million-strong al-Ghamdi tribe. But the strangest thing, to me as a westerner, was that I seemed to be the only person who cared which country I was in. I met an elderly man with a garland of flowers in his hair, and asked if I was in Yemen. ‘It’s all the same to us down here,’ he mumbled.

The idea of border police — or, indeed, central government — becomes more blurry the further away from the region’s capitals you head. In Saada, a town on the northern Yemeni border, one can find open-air arms markets where machine guns, hand grenades and even surface-to-air missiles are laid out like fruit and vegetables. Armed tribesmen block the road with boulders, and safe passage has to be secured with bribes. When there is political unrest, it is natural for the West to think about an integral political unit called ‘Libya’ or ‘Iraq’. But to the actors in this drama, very different factors dominate. Much of the Arab world divides itself by tribes.

When civil war broke out in Libya last month, the country quickly split along tribal lines. Even some major oilfields have fallen into the hands of local tribesmen armed to the teeth, and if the country is again to be unified it will only be possible under the leadership of a tribal council. Yemen, the most tribal country in the region — indeed, it has spent only 20 years as a nominal country — is on the brink of revolution, and could well be torn apart again.