A Struggle for Peace in a Place Where Fighting Never Ends

"These are very complicated matters," Rabea said, trying to explain how a Shawlan could marry a Hamdan, but they are really not complicated at all. They met during a truce, and during a truce, anything feels possible. Peace will be permanent. Aid will be coming. Development will be right behind. Modernization is inevitable.

From time to time, Rabea has tried to share this vision with the men around him whose love is for fighting and who seem so utterly filled with despair. "If this were not going on, you could go out and see things," he told them. "You would know things."

"You have money," he said they answer. "You can travel. You have options. We have nothing."

"You would have opportunities," he said.

And sometimes they might listen, he said, and sometimes they might say to him that what they need is money, not fantasies, and unless he gives them some they will fire their guns at Hamdan and ruin the truce.

Blackmail? Desperation?

What's the difference? Rabea asked. He is continually peeling bills off the bankroll he keeps on the front seat of his car for just such occasions, because what else is there to do?

"In America, any problem has a solution," he said of what he has gleaned from reading newspaper articles, seeing images of the United States on satellite TV, and most recently meeting with Robin Madrid. "You have courts. You have law. You have democracy. You have accountability."

Here, he said, there is only fighting. "I hate it," he said at the end of this day. "I hate killing. I wish I didn't have enough money to buy even a pack of cigarettes in exchange for no fighting."

A sheik's wish: that Al Jawf could be like other places in the world. Like the United States? "It's impossible," he said. Maybe like the United Arab Emirates, where he visited once and didn't have to carry a gun.

Sleep this night was as it always is for Rabea: on a pillow under which is his Kalashnikov. Six hours later, he awakened to news that there had been shootings in one of the villages he'd been in two days before.

Soon after sunrise, he went to the village to find out what happened because a sheik in Al Jawf is the court, the law, the democracy, the accountability and the solution. It turned out that four people had been shot by a man who suspected three of them of taking one of his guns. He went looking for them, found them hanging onto the side of a pickup truck they had flagged down for a ride, and opened fire. All three men were hit and injured, and the driver, whose only role in this was to stop and give three people a ride, was killed.

"Where is he?" Rabea asked and was directed to a house in another village about a mile away.

So he went to that village and was escorted into a room lined with 20 tense men, including one at the far end, who abruptly stood up, grabbed his assault rifle and said he didn't do anything wrong.

The killer. Who was baby-faced, biting his lip, and might be all of 18.

He brushed past Rabea and went outside, and Rabea stayed where he was. There was no point in following him because what would he do with him? In the United States he might be arrested, tried and imprisoned, but here, where there are no functioning jails, courts or police, justice has nothing to do with the individual, only the tribe. Better, then, for Rabea to stay where he was and to settle the matter quickly, before there could be time for a revenge killing, which could spiral into more.

The deal he proposed: The family of the dead man would be given four assault rifles, and the killer would be told to go away.

Agreed.

A potential war averted. Justice has been done.

"Very, very sad," Rabea said back in the car, on his way to one last stop, to see the injured men. He wound his way back to the small private hospital in Mymerra, where the three men were inside. One was shot in the thumb. He would be fine. One was shot in the chest and elbow. He would recover. The third was the most serious. The bullet passed through him near his spine. He was in surgery for four hours, and now he was wrapped in iodine-soaked bandages and mumbling incoherently as another man sat next to him holding his hand, a third man stood guard with his gun, and dozens more pressed in on a doctor in the corridor who said to Rabea, "We're worried about keeping him here. We're worried he's in danger."

There was nowhere else for the man to go, though, no facility except this one, where the only reason he had been admitted was that the people who brought him promised to pay. How? they were asked. They motioned to the pickup truck they had arrived in. It was the truck of the dead driver who had stopped to give the three men a ride.

This is Al Jawf, the place that Robin Madrid hopes to rescue.

"The most difficult days ever," Rabea said of these past weeks, heading home now and worrying about something new. The truce settlement called for Hamdan to surrender 44 of its Kalashnikovs to Shawlan, but so far it had surrendered only two.

What would he do if the rest weren't turned over? That's what he was worried about. He would have no choice, he said sadly. In his wishes, Robin Madrid's program would succeed, but until then, there was only one answer.

"We will attack them," he said.

Two weeks later, as the two-thirds mark of her six-month program closed in, Robin Madrid was summoned to a meeting with Thomas C. Krajeski, the U.S. ambassador to Yemen.

She had been working increasingly long hours, trying to launch the research part of the program that was a condition of her $300,000 grant from the U.S. government. With the help of a University of California researcher, she had developed a 15-page questionnaire whose answers would lead to a definitive list of every tribal conflict in Al Jawf and two other governorates, a list on which future programs about ending tribal conflicts could be based. She had hired a team of Yemeni researchers who would spend a total of six weeks in the governorates administering the questionnaire to 450 people from every tribe and sub-tribe, and she had worked out arrangements with some sheiks from each of the governorates to help the researchers with access and oversee their safety.

None of this had gone easily. It is no simple thing, for instance, to find researchers in Yemen conversant enough in the language of Western-style questionnaires to follow instructions such as "Insert into the questionnaire one copy of Sections Three and Four for each conflict discussed."

More difficult were some of the discussions with the sheiks, who astonished the woman they affectionately call Dr. Robin by asking for $200 a day to help the researchers.

"There is not a chance," she told them, because her organization's per diem for Yemen is $17.25. "Not. A. Chance."

"Exasperated, she said that there are two types of organizations in the United States -- those that hand out the money they get, and those, like hers, that use the money to go to a place and do work. NDI is "a huge building in Washington" with "an accounting department of 25 people," she explained. "The reason I'm telling you this is because you heard the president say we got $300,000 for the program, and you think, 'Wow.' " But the truth is that "very little of it gets to Yemen."

That's one truth; another is that every day has come with similar difficulties. All, though, have been resolved except for one -- an increasing lack of cooperation from the Yemeni government.

At first, officials all the way up to the president had seemed supportive. But then came signs that they were starting to worry about a program that would unite two dozen sheiks whose historic inability to get along with one another is one of the reasons the president has remained in power for 27 years. And now the U.S. ambassador had summoned Madrid to tell her about a meeting he had the day before with Yemen's foreign minister -- a meeting in which the minister was almost certainly speaking on behalf of the president.

The minister's message: " 'We want the program stopped. Immediately,' " Madrid told her staff after returning from the embassy.

The ambassador told her that he tried to negotiate, she said, going over their conversation. "He clearly thinks this is an important program," she said, "but he's also aware, increasingly aware, of how nervous it makes people in the government. He said, 'Look, it's your decision if you want to shut the whole thing down.' He doesn't want to shut it down. But what he does want to do" -- to let things settle -- "is delay the start of the research."

For how long?

Give it a month, he'd said, maybe more. He mentioned that Yemen's president was scheduled to visit Washington in early November to meet with President Bush and suggested delaying the project until after his return.

So that's what she will be doing, she told her staff, slowing the project down -- and now, two days later, she was breaking the news of this to the sheik who had initially approached NDI in March 2004 asking for help and had been waiting expectantly since.

When she was done, all that the sheik, whose name is M'Fareh Mohammed Buhaibeh, could think to say was, "If you become weaker, they will turn against us."

"Do you have some recommendations?" she asked. "Some ideas?"

"Our work should continue the same," he said. "Because we are not doing anything wrong."

"When they tell me I have to delay the research, I don't have much choice," she said of the pressure.

"You dare to work with the tribes, and the tribes dare to work with you. So the pressure is both ways," he said.

"Do you have any ideas?" she asked again.

"Yes," he said. "You should ask for a meeting with the president, and ask him to let this proceed."

The president, of course, was the one who once referred to her dismissively as old and worthless, an ajooz . And whose newspaper just the day before had accused her of spying under a headline that said, "American Democratic Institute -- Hidden Objectives!" That's what she was thinking, but what she said was, "There's a possibility that there will be a meeting with him in the United States."

"You should do it here," M'Fareh said.

"We've tried," she said.

"Then you'll just have to do it in Washington," he said, and that's how the fourth month of a six-month project came to an end, with Rabea in Al Jawf, worried about 42 Kalashnikovs, and Madrid in her office, worried about a president in whose hands her project to help Rabea and everyone like him now rested.

"He is ajooz ," a frustrated staff member said of the president.

"No," Madrid said, knowing better than that. "I am."