Ottawa Citizen, October 14, 2001 
and newspapers across the United States through the Associated Press wire service

Attack on ship shatters Yemen’s holy calm  

by Diane Stuemer

Aden, Yemen –

A full moon has risen over the craggy volcanic peaks of Aden. Christmas lights, put up in honour of the Independence Day long weekend, glitter festively on tall buildings and along the major boulevards. From loudspeakers, long drawn-out chants from the muezzin, calling the faithful to prayer, compete with each other from various tall slender minarets. The streets are full of Yemeni men, wearing tasselled skirts and Arab headdresses, laughing and clasping hands with each other. Some wear wickedly curved daggers thrust through wide belts.

It is Friday, the close of a holy day. One would never know that disaster has struck just a few hundred metres away.

Across the calm water of Aden harbour, the scene is anything but festive. Here, a stricken American warship lies, its floodlights drawing attention to a gaping blackened hole in its side. A large white tarpaulin flaps in the wind and does not succeed in hiding what looks like a mortal wound.

It appears as if the USS Cole is taking on water, both from the location of the hole right at to the waterline, and from the fact that a huge, unceasing stream of water, as if from an opened fire hydrant, is issuing forth from an aperture right beside the wound. This may be normal -- cooling water from a generator perhaps – but more likely it is not. Many men can be seen milling around on deck.

The ship, at least, has a chance to survive, but for the men who died when a terrorist bomb delivered this horrific blow yesterday morning, it is too late.

We, a Canadian family of five, are one of four sailing boats and dozens of huge cargo ships sharing this harbour with the stricken American warship. From the deck of Northern Magic, about 300 metres away, the raw wound in the side of that long grey ship is easily visible. We are among the very few spectators of this drama, because the legions of news reporters, the CNNs and the Associated Press reporters, have yet to arrive.

We weren’t on board Northern Magic when the suicide bomb went off. We were climbing a mountain a few kilometres away, to visit the 500-year-old ruins of a fort. We were at the top when a huge boom filled the air. It sounded very much like the sound of mortar fire, which we had once heard on a similar mountaintop far way in war-torn Sri Lanka.

“What’s that?” we had asked Salem, the genial taxi driver with whom we had spent the past four days.

“It’s nothing; smile, you’re in Yemen!” he answered, this being his stock answer in every possible situation. But his own ready smile was uncertain.

When we returned to the harbour two hours later, it was full of uniformed men. Several soldiers armed with machine guns were blocking our way. By then we had heard there had been some kind of explosion on a ship, but we still had no idea what. We stood there in confusion, with our three hungry, tired children and an armful of baguettes, saying, “We have to go to our boat,” over and over again to the nervous young soldiers who spoke no English but who were determined not to let us through.

Finally someone more senior came and let us pass, but no sooner had we climbed into our dinghy than two more soldiers confronted us and made it extremely clear, even without benefit of a common language, that we were not to proceed.

“That is my boat! I have to go back to my boat!” my husband Herbert, our captain, kept repeating. But we dared not leave without permission, not when our antagonists were carrying machine guns. Finally after five or ten minutes, the standoff ended and to our relief we were waved away.

A container ship was filling up with fuel in front of us, partly blocking our view of the stricken ship. Michael, our 14-year-old son, shinnied up the main mast, and from the spreaders reported that he could see a huge hole in its hull. We still didn’t know that terrorists were involved, not until some hours later when we received a surprising e-mail by satellite from my worried parents, asking if we were OK. We couldn’t imagine how they knew that there had been an explosion. It was only early the next morning that we learned about the terrible loss of life that had happened right on our doorstep.

As soon as we awoke this morning, Michael and I set out in our dinghy to get a better view from the side of the container ship. The hole was now covered by a white tarpaulin, but it could be seen to extend to the waterline and looked half as long as our 42 foot boat, and about 3 metres high.

We stopped at a nearby sailboat and spoke to her Swiss captain, who had been on deck the morning before and had a clear view of the huge billowing cloud of black smoke that had risen into the air right after the blast. Although he hadn’t seen the suicide bombers, he did watch in puzzlement as three large pieces of a red inflatable Zodiac dinghy floated by, no doubt the remains of the very boat used in the attack.

I decided to radio the ship and ask for permission to approach it to take photographs and possibly interview crew members. “I don’t think you’ll get permission anytime soon,” the radio officer answered. “But I’ll ask my Charlie Oscar.” Shortly after we watched as the head of the Yemeni navy paid the Cole a visit.

I called back later and asked again for permission to approach. It was denied, the officer said, because divers were at that moment working underwater to assess the damage. We spent the rest of the day listening to our VHF radio, as the Cole communicated with other arriving naval vessels. Another two warships, one American, the USS Donald Cook, and another either Australian or British, judging from its name and the accent of its radio officer, the HMS Marlborough, were circling in the harbour entrance. They weren’t coming in. 

The Donald Cook and the Marlborough began assisting the Cole, sending boatloads of crew carrying huge awnings to cover the Cole’s open foredeck. Perhaps they needed using the deck for temporary quarters, or other purposes we could only guess at. But we could see lots of activity and what looked like many bundles lying on the huge aft deck of the ship.

We also overheard the Cole trying to coordinate the sending of e-mails to the families of its crew. Most of its computers had been destroyed or rendered non-functional by the blast, so they were scrambling to collect e-mails and e-mail addresses with the few remaining computers they had. The Marlborough offered to send the e-mails off the next morning. At least two times, grey military planes flew from the direction of the harbour mouth over the Cole, one of them circling low before heading inland.

At the end of the afternoon, with still no permission from the Cole to approach, and overhearing their evident concern about a pilot boat that had ventured too near without permission, I returned with our 12-year old son, Jonathan, to the spot safely distant from which Michael and I had taken photographs and videos earlier in the day. The big container ship that had partially obscured the view from our own boat was now gone, and the tarpaulin had blown aside, revealing the extent of the damage clearly. We wanted to get a bit closer, to get a better view.

We had scrambled up on a huge mooring buoy, and I had snapped but a single shot when we were approached by a fast-moving pilot boat. “No photos,” they said, “Not allowed. The police are coming. Go away fast!”

Jon and I nervously scrambled back into the dinghy and returned to Northern Magic.

A motorboat driven by a single Yemeni naval officer in a sparkling white uniform passed us, and I waved gaily to him for lack of anything better to do. Fortunately he just waved back and didn’t confiscate my camera, put me under arrest, or worse.

So we didn’t venture forth to take any more photos. Herbert was now looking particularly grey and stressed, because the same pilot boat that had warned us had passed by and told him I was crazy for trying to take pictures, because it could end me up in jail.

We had intended to go tonight to a dancing demonstration, but news that the British Embassy in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, had also been bombed, and that threats had been made against all westerners in Yemen, made us change those plans. Leaving the kids on the boat, we instead went to an internet café to send messages to family and friends.

Our driver, Salem, told us that glass in his house, and many others, had broken from the concussion of the blast. Yemenis are nervous, he told us, very afraid because even during the civil war six years ago, they had never heard a blast like that one. The government had told the people the explosion had come from a malfunction inside the ship. But he had heard otherwise on CNN.

“Life is going to get very difficult here again,” he told us with a voice of regret. “It was just recovering from the war, and now this. This is crazy.”

We had liked Yemen, with its smiling, roguish-looking men and its silent, black-robed women, the very modern ones daring to show their faces underneath black head coverings and head-to-toe black robes, most of them revealing nothing but dark eyes peering through a narrow slit. The very modest ones show not an inch of skin, even in 40 degree heat, with semi-transparent veils over their eyes, black gloves covering their hands, and opaque black stockings covering their feet. I didn’t go so far as to cover my face, Yemeni-style, but I did make a point of wearing long skirts and full length sleeves whenever I left the boat.

We hadn’t felt the least bit threatened during our six days in Yemen, even when we passed through a noisy all-male pro-Palestinian demonstration two days before, that somehow had looked like a cross between a fight and a party.

In fact everywhere we went, we had felt quite welcome. As we had walked around the streets of old Arab Town, admiring the camels pulling rough wooden carts, we had even attracted a small crowd of smiling admirers. For our part, we tried not to stare at the Yemeni men whose cheeks were all puffed out like a squirrel’s with the mild narcotic plant leaf called qat, the national addiction.

No, we had felt very well here indeed, and even the filth, the garbage-strewn streets, the flocks of Somali refugees begging and the many piles of concrete rubble that are everywhere – whether from demolition or the remnants of the civil war, we were never quite certain – hadn’t obscured the curious charm we had felt about this undeniably exotic place.

But tonight, with that benevolent full moon rising and those falsely festive Christmas lights winking, to learn that kidnappings and further terrorist action against westerners like us had been promised, Aden no longer seemed like the welcoming place it had just the day before. Which of these faces that scrutinized us was the enemy? Which of these might be offended that my western woman’s face was so brazenly exposed? Which of these people may have rejoiced at the news of this massacre? Which ones may have helped in it, giving support to the actual bombers, who may have passed right beside our own little vessel with their cargo of death?

So we’re speeding up our plans to prepare Northern Magic to carry us to Eritrea, our next stop as we head up the Red Sea towards home. As soon as we have purchased our last provisions and reclaimed our passports from the government officials who are holding them, we will leave, and happily, for the next leg of our circumnavigation.

As for the USS Cole, she is going nowhere soon, and our hearts grieve for the men for whom, unlike us, Aden was their final stop.