Internal political fighting fed by external powers like Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Iran has heavily damaged Yemen’s educational system, and the lives of those in academia.
Najat Sayim Khalil, a retired Yemeni professor of the Sanaa University, believes art and culture deserves better coverage, and is tired of politics always taking precedence over it.

“People don’t like politics because it brings death and misery,” Khalil says without directly mentioning Yemen, where political turbulence has created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, according to the UN. 

Despite her disregard for it, politics has dictated the direction of Khalil’s life from the very beginning. It was her grandfather’s role as a public servant in the Ottoman Empire which saw him deployed to Yemen during World War I. But just as politics altered her family’s life’s course a century ago, it has also turned academia - as she has always known it - into a nightmare.

“When the Ottoman rule ended after World War I, Yemeni authorities demanded from the new Turkish Republic, [replacing the empire] to leave some of its public servants in Yemen to help the country run its state institutions. My grandfather was one of them, doing engineering work for the governor’s palace in Sanaa,” Khalil tells TRT World. 

As a result, Khalil’s grandfather stayed in Yemen, establishing his family there. Najat Khalil was born and grew up along with her three sisters and one brother in Yemen for mainly political reasons. “I am originally Turkish,” she reminds me.  

Almost exactly a century after her grandfather’s deployment to Yemen, another political incident, a civil war, triggered by the uprisings across the Arab world, forced her to leave her beloved university for Turkey. The ‘Arab Spring’ protests began first at her university. She recalls how the institution was divided during the 2011 protests into two camps - one supporting the ‘Arab Spring’, with the other opposing.

In March 2015, when the war in Yemen escalated between Iran-backed Houthis, a political coalition of northern Shia tribes, and the Saudi-backed Yemen government, Khalil, a social psychologist, was in Turkey as one of the co-organisers of a conference titled, “Yemen under the Ottoman Rule”. 

Following the four day-long conference, she could not return to Yemen. Tensions escalated in the capital Sanaa, which was under severe Saudi bombardment, closing down its airport to civilian flights. Since then, the airport has remained closed to civilian flights. On March 26, her airplane was rerouted to Turkey. She has been living in Turkey ever since.