132 Coming Out and Coming Together [our] principles are no politics. When the revolution came about, politics reared its head within the community. And there were elements within the community that felt, for example, that, yes, we should be very pro-revolution and go out there and demonstrate. It was hard because it started fragmentation in the community. But alhamdulillah [thank God], [we were able to] enforce our decision. And of course, we should not be putting in barriers to stop them to do that. But we won’t open up the center to facilitate that kind of activity because it puts the objectives of the organization at risk. The YCAs of Birmingham and Sheffield reported adopting the same strategy in order to prevent their facilities from being used as a “political tool, either proor anti-revolution,” as Nageeb of Birmingham stated. Mohammad al-Sahimi of Sheffield echoed this view, stating, “If [the association is] going to say that we support the revolution, we’re also going to have to say that we support the Hiraak (the southern secessionist movement). Let’s leave the Yemen Community Association as a voluntary organization, not involved in politics.” Awssan’s nascent organization, the Yemen Forum Foundation, was also left unconverted to the revolution because of the rules stipulated in its bylaws. This foundation became dormant as he and his colleagues went on to form a new group to support Yemen’s uprising. That said, the Yemeni Community Association in Liverpool, which was perceived by revolution supporters as dysfunctional, corrupt, and an arm of the regime (see Chapter 3), became itself the target of anti-regime diaspora mobilization. As members of the community held meetings to debate how to respond to the uprising in early 2011, some of the independent youth decided to take action to force a change to the YCA’s leadership. As Kamal recalled, their youth movement “all wanted to do something locally. The idea was, let’s oust the old regime from the community association – they’re all supporters of Ali Abdullah Saleh anyway.” His brother Omar attested, “The YCA is important to us because it has a distinct status in the sense that it’s approved by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Yemen; it’s approved by the embassy.” Omar explained that their aim was to “change the direction of the organization democratically.” To do so, organizers set out to register new members of the YCA in the hopes of voting out the incumbent leadership in an upcoming election. Another participant in this campaign named Bashir recalled that they recruited between seventy and eighty people in the community by having them fill out a YCA membership application and pay a three-pound fee. Their expectation was that with a surge of new members, the community would vote out longtime incumbents who had left the organization in “tatters,” according to Abdul Basit, who had served as the YCA’s secretary in 1997. Despite their enthusiasm, however, their campaign was ultimately unsuccessful. Neshwan recalled that the YCA was only open one or two afternoons a week – an accusation that Abdul Alkanshali, head of the YCA in Liverpool, denied to me in a separate interview – which made it difficult to deliver the applications. Once election-drive volunteers found the YCA to be open and rushed to deliver the applications, Omar reported that trying to convince the https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press