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ROTTERDAM
Yemen studies end as violence flares
Area native cuts his trip short after battle near hotel
BY MARK ROBARGE Gazette Reporter

   Paul Notar hoped to expand his education when he was chosen for a prestigious U.S. State Department program to study Arabic in the Middle Eastern country of Yemen.
   What he didn’t bargain for was getting a frightening lesson in the volatility of the region, a lesson that cut his stay short.
   Notar, 21, son of Paul and Donna Notar of Rotterdam, said he decided to come home after the hunt for an Egyptian accused of being the al-Qaida member who masterminded the suicide bombing of a group of Spanish tourists ended violently near the hotel where he was staying.
   “Once the violence had come into San‘a, I really got scared,” he said.
   Notar graduated magna cum laude in May from Siena College with a bachelor’s degree in political science and economics and an additional concentration in Arabic. He was named the top economics student in the class of 2007 and studied in Morocco and England, interning in London as a Middle East markets analyst for Grant Thornton International, one of the world’s largest accounting and consulting fi rms.
   It was there, he said, that his boss told him that being able to communicate in Arabic would be a great career move.
   “He said that Arabic skills would be very helpful for my career,” Notar recalled. “If I knew Arabic, I would be able to get a job in the Middle East in corporate fi - nance, basically doing whatever I want to do.”
   He had studied Arabic during his semester in Morocco, but sought out an opportunity to further improve his skills. A Google search found the State Department’s Critical Language Scholarship program at the American Institute for Yemeni Studies in San‘a. He applied for the program and found out two months later that he was among only four percent of more than 3,300 applicants to be accepted.
   Notar said he did think about the possible danger of living in the Middle East, but dismissed his concern rather quickly.
   “When I applied, really the problems were confined to Iraq, some in Beirut, Lebanon, and that was about it. There really hadn’t been anything that happened in Yemen for a while. There was a lull in violence in Yemen, and I took the chance. I thought that I’d be safe.”
   And for the first couple weeks, he was. He attended class four hours a day with about 80 other students, had three or four hours of homework each night and spent the rest of his time interacting with the Yemeni people, something suggested by his instructors to further immerse him in the language. He and his fellow students stayed on the same floor of a high-end hotel.
   But on July 2, eight Spaniards and two Yemenis were killed outside a temple linked to the ancient Queen of Sheba in the remote town of Marib, about 100 miles east of San‘a. The U.S. Embassy responded by banning its employees from leaving San‘a, canceling its scheduled July 4 celebration and urging Americans in Yemen to keep a low profile, but State Department officials reassured Notar that more violence was unlikely.
   “I went along with it,” he said. “I thought that everything was going to be OK. I felt fine after a few days, after speaking with my parents, speaking with State Department officials.”
   Four days after the bombing, though, soldiers stormed the home of Ahmed Bassiouni Dewidar, the suspected ringleader in the attack and a man believed to be the leader of al-Qaida in Yemen. Dewidar responded with machine gun fire and grenades, and five more people died, along with Dewidar.
   Notar said the sounds of gunfi re are not uncommon in the streets of San‘a, where gunbattles are frequent and shots also celebrate weddings and other festive occasions.
   “Usually there’s gunfire at night, but this was different. Grenades sound a lot different,” he recalled. “This all happened less than 400 yards from my apartment, on a street that runs perpendicular.”
   In the wake of that night, Notar said he had second thoughts about staying and left the country as soon as he could.
   “My line of thinking was, they’re targeting tourists, I go to the most well known and largest American school in Yemen, so if they really wanted to hurt Americans, they’d target us,” he said.
   Extremism like that attributed to al-Qaida is not an unfamiliar topic for Notar. While studying in Morocco, he wrote a paper examining unemployment in a country where job growth was moving from the public sector to private enterprise. In presenting that study, he said, he discussed how unemployment plays a role in the rise of extremism as people grow increasingly frustrated with government. Thus, he argues, creating jobs can be a tool in the war on extremists.
   “Economic development is often used as a weapon,” he said. “If people have jobs and they’re working 40 hours a week, they have more important things to worry about — their families, their jobs, their careers.”
   Notar said he hopes he will be able to aid in that fight in the future. While he is moving to Chicago in August to seek a job in the banking industry, his long-term goals are to earn a master’s degree in business administration from “hopefully one of the top schools” and build a career in international finance, specifically in emerging markets such as eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
   “I think there are going to be a lot of exciting things going on,” he said. “There’s a lot of interesting things going on. I think there’s a lot of money being thrown around in the area.”
   And while he hopes his career will have him traveling around the world, there’s one country that won’t be on that list in the near future.
   “I don’t foresee Yemen being a country that I’ll visit very soon,” he said. “It’s a little unstable right now.”  

  
  
  

The Notar's are a good family, doing business in town, unless they have officially moved to Princetown. They used to be right in the house (now a barber shop) right across the side street from Curry Freeze.

Maybe Mr. Notar would consider, as a small business owner, trying to run for a town office.

I don't blame him for getting out. I'd never go over there in the first place.

I would have never gone or allowed my kids to go either.

I don't know about Mr. Notar...he tried selling that pacel to a retired cop to open a 'juice bar' (aka: strip club) a few years back. There were many many discrepencies that came from both Mr. Notar AND the retired cop.