In 2011, a month after protests broke out in Yemen against President Ali Abdullah Saleh, an activist sent me a video that had begun to circulate widely online. Filmed from the balcony of an apartment building in the capital, Sanaa, the footage shows a throng of unarmed protesters taking shelter behind a ten-foot wall in the street below. Black smoke is rising from a pile of burning tires on the other side of the wall, where pro-Saleh thugs are crouched, firing rifles at the protesters. During a lull in the shooting, one of the protesters—a young man with a green shawl wrapped around his head—pulls himself up onto the wall. Pumping his fists in the air, the man turns to face the gunmen, then leaps off the other side. Moments later, the crowd surges forward, tears down the wall, and chases the gunmen down the street.
The symbolism was not lost on Yemenis. I asked one of the protesters, Ahmed, a forty-two-year-old grocer and father of three, why he followed the young man over the wall. He brushed the question aside. “I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t even think about it,” he said. “The wall was the regime. We had to tear it down or the revolution would have failed.” Other protesters described the experience in more personal terms. “It changed me. When I went over the wall, I felt as if I’d left a part of me behind,” Yasir, a law student who was shot in the foot that day, said. “My life was out of my hands. I wasn’t scared. I felt powerful.”
The toppling of the wall marked the end of the bloodiest crackdown in Yemen’s history, and the beginning of the revolution that would eventually unseat Saleh after thirty-three years in power. On that day, Friday, March 18, 2011, now known in Yemen as Jumaa al-Karama, or the Friday of Dignity, protesters had gathered for noonday prayers in the place they named Change Square when snipers opened fire, killing fifty-three and wounding hundreds more. The massacre prompted a wave of resignations: ministers, officials, ambassadors, and even the country’s most powerful military general defected. The protests against Saleh, which had been scattered and sporadic, swelled as thousands poured into the square in solidarity.
I was in Change Square that day, reporting for the Guardian as a freelance journalist. When the shooting started, I ran to a nearby mosque for cover. In its dusty prayer room, I stood and watched as the dead were carried in. One by one, their pale, mangled frames were wrapped in white shrouds and lowered to the floor. Prayers were uttered. Miniature copies of the Koran were placed on chests, as blood soaked into the carpet. After the gunfire died down, a woman burst through the door. She was looking for her son. When she saw his body in the corner, she wailed and ran to him, stumbling over the arms and legs of other corpses as if they were tree roots in a forest.
There was death and despair that day, but also grit and bravery. For every protester I saw shouting or hurling rocks over the wall, another was standing still, often in plain view of the snipers, filming the events on a camera or mobile phone. Among them were sixteen-year-old Nasr al-Namir and his friend Khaled. They worked for an opposition TV channel and were considered by many to be the cameramen of the revolution. Both were nearly killed. Their footage, shaky and raw, is the foundation of “Karama Has No Walls,” a thirty-minute account of the massacre and a nominee for this year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary Short.
The film, which splices together Khaled and Nasr’s footage and interviews with bereaved relatives, is both an elegy to the dead and an exploration of loss and protracted trauma. Above all, “Karama Has No Walls” is a paean to the strength of nonviolent resistance. It is the men in hardhats flashing V-for-victory signs and baring their chests, not the regime’s gunmen, who prevail.
To a Western audience, the violence of the Arab Spring can seem difficult to understand. The imagery of “Karama Has No Walls” cuts through our confusion. We stare into the empty eyes of Ghaleb al-Hamazi, a gravelly voiced street vender whose eleven-year-old son, Saleem, was blinded by a sniper. “I came home and asked Saleem’s mother where he was,” he recalls. “She said, ‘He went to buy eggs for breakfast and didn’t come home.’ ”
Sara Ishaq, the film’s twenty-nine-year-old director, was born in Sanaa, to a Yemeni father and Scottish mother, but has spent most of her adult life in Edinburgh—studying film, mountain-biking, and teaching yoga. In early 2011, as unrest spread across the Middle East, Ishaq returned to Yemen to make a documentary about her family and found herself in the middle of a revolution. Like many Yemenis her age, she was drawn to Change Square, the two-mile-long shantytown by Sanaa University where protesters camped for months. In the square, Ishaq met Afro and Ameen, two other budding filmmakers. Together, they gathered footage of the attack and tracked down relatives of the victims.
“The more people we spoke to, the more we realized how much that day had changed them,” Ishaq told me. “It was like an awakening, not just for those who were there. The whole country suddenly woke up. That was when we knew this was something that needed documenting.” It changed Ishaq, too, rekindling her attachment to a country whose deeply conservative culture had felt alienating after living for so long in the West.
Today, as the bloodshed continues in Syria and as Egyptian military rule digs in, the Arab uprisings are being described by some as failed revolutions. But political transformation should not be the only yardstick; cultural and social shifts have been set in motion. In “Karama,” we see women in the square, young and old, delivering speeches, strumming guitars, and beating drums—images of Muslim women rarely seen in the West. A post-revolutionary struggle is currently underway to secure rights for women, such as a ban on child marriage and a law that would reserve thirty per cent of all elected offices for women. And in a nation where the right to bear arms is more deeply ingrained than it is in the American heartland, we see unarmed tribesmen flashing peace signs and shouting “We’re peaceful” as they are fired upon.
In some ways, Ishaq is fortunate. Her film, shot in the heady days of the revolution, does not have to grapple with the internal schisms that would later hamper the Yemen uprising. It is a snapshot of a protest movement at its most powerful, when differences (male, female, Southern, Northern, Sunni, Shia, old, young, secularist, Islamist) were put aside in the name of battling the shared injustices of poverty, unemployment, and corruption. Three years have passed, and that thread has unravelled. Saleh, a master of political intrigue, is still at large; his deputy clings to power. Bakeries are empty. U.S. drones regularly strike the countryside. And in Change Square, now a terminus for motorbike taxis, a few crumpled tents remain, coated in dust.
Last summer, I returned to the street where the wall had been torn down. Outside a café, two students were playing chess. A bullet-pocked lamppost and a melted tire were the only signs of March 18th, 2011. I asked one of them if he knew where the wall had been. He shook his head, his eyes not leaving the game. The other man apologized. “He’s depressed,” he said. “He thinks the revolution failed.” I asked him if he thought the same. “No I don’t,” he muttered. “But I miss the square.”
