The Politics of Qat

How one plant explains Yemen's dysfunction.

BY PEER GATTER | FEBRUARY 18, 2013

In Yemen, qat is a strategic commodity, used to buy allegiances and quiet a potentially restless populace. Qat was freely distributed by President Ali Abdullah Saleh's regime in return for votes at election time, and during the 2011 Arab Spring, the so-called "qat weapon" was deployed one last time, with millions of dollars of qat distributed to tribesman and others on the margins of Yemeni society to encourage them to come out to demonstrate in favor of Saleh. Here, in Sanaa's Tahrir Square, partisans chew late into the night in a pro-Saleh "tent city."

Peer Gatter/The Politics of Qat

 

Peer Gatter is a political scientist and Middle Eastern and Islamic studies scholar who served as an advisor to Yemen's Ministry of Planning and Water during the 2000s for the U.N. Development Program and the World Bank. In 2002, he organized Yemen's "First National Conference on Qat." He is the author of Politics of Qat -- The Role of a Drug in Ruling Yemen.