A blow to international coverage of Yemen

A group of young men lie in a line on the asphalt, heads in the gutter at the feet of soldiers. Two of the men lying in the road clasp hands as they smile at each other. Another appears to be sleeping, eyes bound with a strip of the Yemeni tricolor flag. A photograph captures a moment: demonstrators in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, on Oct. 16, 2012, demanding justice for the families of protesters gunned down by government security forces.

Photojournalist Luke Somers’ images documented Yemen’s 2011 revolution and the ongoing humanitarian crisis that has affected more than half its population of 24 million. For almost three years, he captured the country’s reality, including its imminent political and economic collapse. From the horrific aftermath of suicide bombings to the peaceful protests to the inauguration of President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, Somers was one of the only foreign photographers to witness and faithfully record it all.

Somers was kidnapped in 2013 and held hostage by the Al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen. His death on Dec. 6, the tragic result of two failed rescue attempts by U.S. special forces, is doubly heartbreaking because it means that his valuable work — which challenged the stereotype of Yemen regularly portrayed in the Western media by disseminating an alternative and more holistic view of it — has met its end, right when it is needed most.

Unsurprisingly, Western press coverage after the Dec. 4 release of a video statement by his captors that threatened his life and after his death only reinforced the Yemen-pit-of-terrorism image so regularly peddled by the American media. It strengthened Washington’s depiction of Yemen and what it represents to the United States: a threat to the homeland and a haven for militants. This narrative is repeatedly used to justify the United States’ opaque targeted-killing program in Yemen carried out over the past decade.

An Oct. 9 suicide bombing that killed dozens of civilians in Sanaa, for instance, was billed by CNN a “new terror threat to the U.S.” rather than the consequence of momentous political turmoil affecting Yemenis. United Nations figures for 2014 put the number of people in need of humanitarian aid in the Middle East at 28.8 million; more than half of them — 14.7 million — are in Yemen. Yet in May 2012, when the World Food Program made a plea for more than 10 million hungry Yemenis (44 percent of the population) and Somers’ photos depicted the suffering of severely malnourished Yemeni children, international headlines focused once again on the apparent Al-Qaeda threat in the wake of leaked reports of an alleged bomb plot emanating from Yemen. With Somers’ death, we have lost a rare voice that broadcast issues that affected Yemenis daily.

We are already seeing some of the consequences of the recent rescue attempts: Five days after the second operation, half a dozen rockets were fired into Al-Anad air base in the south of the country. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attack. Yemeni troops were the casualties. Further retaliatory attacks will continue to be felt most immediately by the poorly trained, underequipped and underpaid Yemeni troops (who earn $150 to $200 a month), scattered throughout checkpoints and military installations across the country. Reprisals against Western interests and foreign nationals are also anticipated.

But the consequences of the botched rescues will be felt in the media context too. There are currently fewer foreign journalists writing for the English-language press from Yemen than at any other time in more than four years. The lack of interest, deteriorating security situation and surge in kidnappings has discouraged some of the existing handful of Western freelancers from staying.

The Yemeni government has done its part to narrow the trickle of visiting reporters. It has not issued a single visa to a U.S. journalist since an American freelancer, Adam Baron, was deported without explanation in May. The deaths of Somers and Pierre Korkie, a South African teacher and fellow hostage, will undoubtedly further dissuade journalists from contemplating a move to one of the most underreported countries in the region.

A knock-on effect of reduced on-the-ground reporting in Yemen will be the erosion of already limited accountability and awareness of U.S. actions in the country. It will thus become ever easier for the prevalent narrative — which Somers fought so hard through his work to counter — to prevail, and his death deals both a symbolic and a very real blow to international coverage of Yemen.

Despite the valiant efforts of the few Yemeni journalists reporting for the English-language press, the impact of Washington’s counterterrorism policy and covert drone strikes is likely to be buried deeper than before. The White House official line will become more dominant and even less scrutinized than it currently is. Americans will be less aware of what their government is doing in Yemen in their name.

The actions of the Yemeni government will be increasingly hidden from the international community, which spends millions of dollars supporting it and maintaining Hadi’s increasingly precarious position. Meanwhile, the reporting of those who sought, as Somers did, to give a voice to Yemenis is at risk of disappearing.

As airtime and column inches in the days before and after Somers’ death concentrated on the intricate, often fanciful, details of the special-forces missions — a level of scrutiny rarely afforded to the covert airstrikes the U.S. has regularly carried out in Yemen — few questions were raised over the longer-term impact of the hostage deaths.

The coverage reminded me of a moment I had with Somers in April 2011, at the height of the Yemeni revolution. Over a cigarette, sitting on the sidewalk of Change Square in Sanaa, we mulled over the contrast between the on-the-ground reality of Yemen and the perception of it from afar. We were surrounded by hundreds of tents in the protest encampment, which stretched for two miles through the streets. 

“I wish Americans could be where we are now, just to spend a day in the square. Then they’d understand,” he said, pulling on a Rothmans cigarette. “If we can’t make them understand, then we’re doing something wrong, don’t you think?” In light of the past weeks’ coverage of Yemen, we have failed.