Yemen's troubled transition
<
http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/aaron-edwards> Aaron Edwards
08 March 2014
In Yemen a transition towards a new political dispensation is threatened by
Islamist violence, drone strikes, southern secessionism and tribal
militancy. But concentrating on the first alone and failing to understand
the wider context will not secure it.
Luke Somers. All rights reserved.On December 5th 2013, 52 people were killed
in an Al Qaeda attack on the hospital inside the Ministry of Defence complex
in Sana'a. In the deadliest episode in the capital since May 2012, a suicide
bomber rammed the gates in a truck laden with explosives. Over the city's
ancient skyline the cloud of smoke and debris could be seen for miles. The
bomber's accomplices, disguised as soldiers, fired on terrified civilians,
brazenly disregarding international humanitarian law-doctors, nurses and
patients were callously cut down by a determined, emotionless gunman. Seven
foreigners were also murdered in the incident, which drew condemnation
around the world.
As often before, there was disagreement at first over whether the
perpetrator was Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP)-arguably the
organisation's most deadly franchise-or other militants with an altogether
different set of grievances. Suspicion fell briefly on the Houthi (Believing
Youth) movement concentrated in northern Yemen. The Houthis belong to the
Zaydi branch of Shia Islam and have been fighting for independence from
Sana'a ever since the Yemeni government killed their leader, Husayn
al-Houthi, in 2004.
A few weeks later, AQAP's military leader, Qasim al-Raymi, emerged to admit
responsibility for the incident-and to issue a rare apology: he claimed the
attack had not been sanctioned. But AQAP alleged that the hospital had
housed the nerve centre of the government's drone programme.
We know comparatively little about a drone strike on a wedding party a week
later, in which 12-15 people were killed. This incident also brought an
international outcry. Human Rights Watch called on the Yemeni and US
authorities to investigate-a plea which fell on deaf ears but nevertheless
prompted Yemen's parliament to agree a moratorium on drone strikes on its
soil.
Questionable though drones may be in tackling the root causes of AQAP
violence, there is a lot more going on in Yemen beyond the unending cycle of
atrocities and attempted assassinations targeting Islamists, which
contribute to countless deaths of Yemeni citizens. The kaleidoscope includes
southern secessionist protests, tribal infighting in the vast eastern
province of Hadhramaut and the Houthi rebellion.
Instability
Yemen is one of the world's most unstable states. Ranked 160th of 186 on the
United Nations Human Development Index, it is scarred by illiteracy, gender
inequality, unemployment and poverty. In the absence of a viable economic
base, it depends on aid for survival. In 2011, when the "Arab spring"
exploded across the Middle East and North Africa, in Sana'a the regime of
the then president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, wobbled under the weight of protests
that spread quickly across the country. Women and youth, backed by key
segments of Yemeni civil society, took to the streets to bring attention to
unemployment, corruption, health, education and economic volatility.
The protests created an opportunity for violence. After a rocket attack on
the presidential compound, in which Saleh was temporarily incapacitated, his
deputy, Abdrabuh Mansour Hadi, took over as Acting President-an appointment
confirmed by an election, in which he was however the only candidate, in
February 2012.
In November 2011 the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) brokered an agreement on
political transition. This established a National Dialogue Committee (NDC)
embracing political, social, tribal and ethnic interest groups, to create
the conditions for democratic elections in March 2014. To ensure effective
stewardship, the UN appointed the veteran Moroccan diplomat Jamal Benomar as
its Special Representative, signalling the international community's backing
for the NDC process.
The United States, United Kingdom and Russian Federation have all spoken of
the need to allow the political transition to run its course, while calling
on the Yemeni government to reform the security sector and better combat the
threat from AQAP. But the roots of the challenges that still threaten to
unravel Yemen's transition have been insufficiently addressed.
A divided history
Yemen's failure to consolidate its state structures can be traced back half
a century to the second "Arab awakening" (the first being in the 19th
century). Anti-colonial forces turned to violence to try to overthrow the
traditional rulers in the two separate states of North and South Yemen.
North Yemen had been under the control of an ancient pre-Islamic imamate,
dislodged from power on 26 September 1962. The imam, Muhammad al-Badr, was
overthrown by a military coup and for eight years fought a bloody civil war.
This saw 70,000 Egyptian troops intervene in support of the fledgling
republican regime, while a covert mercenary unit of British and French
special forces provided technical advice to the ousted royalists.
In South Yemen, the British (who called it South Arabia) were maintaining a
foothold in Aden, their only port colony in the Middle East. Indirect rule
over its hinterland was achieved by wooing powerful tribal confederations
with guns and cash, bluffing them into thinking they were in control of
their destiny and, on occasion, bombing them. This policy worked until Arab
nationalism took root in the fertile revolutionary soil of North Yemen and
spread like wildfire across the porous border into the south.
Yemen is one of the world's most unstable states.
Facing economic crisis at home and the resilience of Nasserite nationalism
in the region, in 1967 the British reached a deal with the National
Liberation Front (NLF), which had been consolidating its hold over South
Yemen in the previous four years. After their departure, the NLF's ideology
gravitated from Arab nationalism on the right to a form of
"Marxism-Leninism" along Soviet lines. By the time the Peoples' Democratic
Republic of South Yemen was born, the civil war in the north had ended in
stalemate.
After the assassination in 1978 of the north's president, Ahmad al-Ghashmi,
his close friend Major Ali Abdullah Saleh, an artillery officer based in
Taiz'z, assumed power. The distribution of patronage-"dancing on the heads
of snakes", he called it-among the tribal confederations, secular socialists
and Islamist groupings stymied challenges to his authority for 30 years and
allowed him to amass a strong political following in the guise of the
General People's Congress (GPC).
Manipulation of Yemen's turbulent political economy allowed Saleh
progressively to concentrate the state's wealth in his own hands.
Unification of what became the Republic of Yemen in 1990 accrued further
problems, with the uneven development of capitalism north and south
exacerbated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, inherited debt and tight
control of distribution networks by a business cabal.
Grievances over perceived colonisation of the south by the north triggered
the 1994 civil war but the southern forces were crushed within weeks by
General Mansour Hadi, promptly rewarded with the vice-presidency. Many
southerners still see the civil war as unfinished business.
Nor could the military eradicate resort to tribalism. There has been a
tendency, notably in the excellent work of the late Professor Fred Halliday,
to discount the allure of its "mystic exoticism". But pre-Islamic tribal
identities in the Arabian Peninsula have at times exerted a powerful hold
and attempts to supplant them by the official ideology in South Yemen in the
1970s and 80s failed.
Tribalism has been one of the main sources of instability during the NDC
process, from which the Southern Hirak Movement recurrently withdrew. Thanks
mainly to social media, we can follow the growing secessionist
demonstrations, which reflect a groundswell in the urban centres of the
south in support of a return to a time when Aden served as their capital.
The protests encompass a range of grievances, which coalesce around a return
to political, social and economic rights purportedly usurped by northerners.
The demand for an end to central-government control has also been reflected
in the violence of the powerful tribal confederation in Hadhramaut, one of
the largest and poorest parts of southern Yemen.
Uncertain future
The conclusion of the NDC process has seen President Hadi's government
endorse a plan to divide Yemen into six regional units: four northern (Azal,
Saba, Janad and Tehama) and two southern (Aden and Hadhramaut). But this has
been perceived by leaders of Hirak and the Yemen Socialist Party as stymying
their designs for southern independence. The GPC's attempts to buy off
secessionism with limited autonomy do not bode well for the success of the
political transition.
The threat posed by AQAP-which continues to preoccupy Western security
planners-compounds the difficulty. But focusing on AQAP, without placing
Yemen's other problems in their proper context, does injustice to the
complexity of Yemen and the security needs of its people.
Received on Fri Mar 07 2014 - 19:03:58 EST