I continue to get blown away by the quality of material coming from Middle Eastern media network Al Jazeera.
I’ve just watched the latest Listening Post podcast and have learned more about Yemen in a few minutes than from a lifetime of watching, reading and listening to Australian media.
And fascinatingly, this is how Listening Post presenter Richard Gizbert explained how you can take part in the program.
We are now closing in on four thousand viewers following us on Facebook and Twitter. They check in to find out what stories we’re working on and in case they want to weigh in as one of our Global Village Voices. If you’d like to do the same, just go to either of those sites and search us out. Or you can get in touch with us the old-fashioned way on email. We’re at listeningpost@aljazeera.net.
Yes, that’s right. Email is now “old-fashioned”. Love your work, guys.
Great find from al-Jazeera, Stil. I spent a month in Yemen at the start of 2009 and found it a fascinating place to be. Interestingly, (and in accordance with the Listening Post report) while 30 suspected al-Qaeda trainees had been arrested only a week before I arrived, it wasn’t treated as a big deal at all in the local media, and certainly not at the macro-level. Issues like the demographic problems are much more concerning: while I was over there someone told me that the average Yemeni woman gives birth to 7 children! (This goes part-way to explaining why the median age is so low)
Another problem is their wholesale addiction to khat (think Arabic chewing tobacco), and the fact that many many farmers are turning to it as a cash crop rather than growing more useful things. Combine that with the dwindling oil reserves and water supply, and you’ve got big challenges ahead.
I did encounter some quite strong anti-American sentiment while there (I had to explain quite vehemently to one local in a market that I was Aussie, not a Yank). Whether Yemen becomes a full-blown terrorism hotbed (which I don’t think it is at all now) will probably depend on where the blame for the country’s problems gets levelled: at the Yemeni Government or at the West.
Given that the current President has been in power for 33 years, The last thing the US wants to be doing right now is providing more propaganda for the real terrorists to use.
@andrewdotnich: The range of your knowledge and experience continues to amaze me.
Apart from the male dominance in what I assume is a relatively “traditional” culture, the number of children born indicates that Yemen is still in a pre-industrialised phase — and I’m using the term loosely here. Usually, when the wave of industrial development moves through a society, prosperity and thus healthcare increases first, bringing with is an improvement in lifespan and a decrease in child mortality. Only a generation or three later does the birth rate drop to match — the result being a population surge.
That graph is from the RAND report Global Shifts in Population.