Breakdown of Transnational Repression
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something. If those people over there are facing the army with guns and everything, the
least I can do is support them with my voice.
For Haidar of Birmingham, the massacre also affected him personally. He said,
Initially, Yemenis in the UK were not involved in the revolution heavily, until what
happened in March 2011 in [Change] Square, Jumaat al-Karamah. I remember that day,
it was – a black day – when we saw the blood of our friends, our colleagues. Some of my
best friends were injured in this massacre. Since this day, we started to move.
figure 4.3. Yemeni community members shout slogans against Yemen’s embattled
president Ali Abdullah Saleh during a demonstration in front of the White House in
Washington, DC, on March 26, 2011. The large banner reads “Ruling Yemen is not a
family business.”
(Photo credit: Jewel Samad/AFP via Getty Images)
Mahmoud of Sheffield described the effect of the massacre as “shocking” in
its scale. Referring to another well-known community figure and longtime
regime opponent named Abdallah al-Hakimi, he said,
It [became] not only about me or Abdallah calling people and saying, let’s go out. It was
amazing how people were calling us to say, look guys, you have to do something, we need
to mobilize. I think we had one or two demonstrations beforehand, but they were not as
big as after Jumaat al-Karamah. The response of people was very enormous to that.
Morooj also attested that the massacre inspired activists across different US
cities to begin working together to launch national days of protest in
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press
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