A turn towards the shia arc of influence-Yemen's new player
The sudden fall of Sanaa to the avowedly Shia Houthi rebellion in September
has changed the balance of forces in Yemen, transforming the political
equilibrium that emerged after the uprising begun in 2011.
by Laurent Bonnefoy
17.11.2014
When the fourth phase of the bloody Saada conflict (
<
http://mondediplo.com/2014/11/10yemen#nb1> 1) began in 2007, with President
Ali Abdullah Saleh confronting members of the Zaydi Shia minority (
<
http://mondediplo.com/2014/11/10yemen#nb2> 2), few would have guessed the
rebel leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi would go on to become the leading force
in Yemeni politics. Back then, he was simply the new head of the armed
Houthi movement, which bears his family's name and was then active in
Yemen's northwestern Saada region. Al-Houthi was born in the early 1980s and
succeeded his elder brother (who was killed in action in 2004) and their
ailing father.
The Houthis' assertion of their Zaydi identity seemed of marginal importance
in a country where the opposition of Zaydi Shia (around a third of the
population) and the Shafi Sunni majority did not seem fundamental. Through a
gradual convergence of religious affiliations, the majority of Yemen's
elites (including President Saleh) and a large proportion of the population
- despite their Zaydi origins - had dropped this affiliation in favour of a
more global Muslim identity.
Since 2004 the Houthis have placed themselves ever more explicitly in a Shia
symbolic context. They have close ties with Iran and Hizbullah, support the
Assad regime in Syria, and chant anti-American and anti-Israeli slogans
reminiscent of Tehran in 1979. They have also reclaimed specifically Shia
festivals such as Ashura ( <
http://mondediplo.com/2014/11/10yemen#nb3> 3).
After Yemen's peaceful uprising in 2011, the departure of Saleh seemed to
leave the field to the main opposition group, the Islah Party, an alliance
between the Muslim Brotherhood and conservative tribal elites. At the height
of the uprising, the human and logistical support and the experience of this
alliance undoubtedly gave the revolutionary movement the critical mass it
needed.
The national unity government formed in November 2011 to oversee the
political transition after Saleh's resignation had many Islah members.
Segments of the security apparatus progressively came under the control of
party insiders, and party leaders appeared to be the main allies of the
interim president, Abdu Rabu Mansur Hadi, and played along with the
transition process, while at the same time laying claim to revolutionary
legitimacy. Thereafter, Islah's progress to power seemed more than likely,
until the series of reversals suffered by the Muslim Brothers in the wider
region. The taking of Sanaa by Islah's Houthi enemies was quickly
interpreted in the light of those reversals.
Keeping a low profile
Having learned the lesson of the military's removal of Egypt's Muslim
Brotherhood president, Mohammed Morsi, in July 2013, barely a year after his
election, Islah's leaders were careful to stay away from the front line and
avoid giving the impression they had taken control of the revolutionary
process. But their tribal and military allies, who had historically played a
determining role in their integration in Yemeni society, brought about their
downfall. Yemen's Muslim Brothers are now having to re-examine their
ambitions and organisation.
The main target of the Houthis' Sanaa assault was Ali Mohsen. A close
relative of Saleh, he led the First Armoured Division in the earlier war
against the Houthis. His defection in March 2011 contributed to Saleh's
fall. The capture of Mohsen's base and his escape to Saudi Arabia on 21
September this year are indicative of the Houthis' desire for revenge. It
has also been widely noted that the former president may have quietly
supported the rebels by instructing Saleh loyalists in the military not to
fight. Though he said little on the day Sanaa was taken, he did post a
grinning photograph of himself on his Facebook page.
The ten sons of the late Abdullah al-Ahmar, the major tribal figure who
founded the Islah Party, have also come under pressure from the Houthis
installed in the capital. In its fight against the Houthi rebellion, the
Al-Ahmar clan has progressively lost the support of tribes in the region
north of the capital, proof of a major reconfiguration of the tribal
landscape. The new masters in Sanaa also quickly closed the religious
Al-Iman University, whose president was Abdul Majid al-Zindani, a
controversial Islah figure and former associate of Osama bin Laden. The
Houthis also vandalised the homes of Tawakkol Karman, the young Yemeni woman
who became a liberal activist in the Islamist party, winning the Nobel prize
for peace in 2011, and Muhammad Qahtan, an Islah leader who played a key
role in a rapprochement with the Socialists (
<
http://mondediplo.com/2014/11/10yemen#nb4> 4) and some Zaydi parties in the
early 2000s. These actions gave the Houthis' campaign the appearance of a
punitive anti-Brotherhood exercise and risked fuelling sectarian tensions
between supporters of the Zaydi Shia resurgence and Sunni Islamists.
Al-Houthi and his spokesman Ali al-Bukhaiti have emphasised a more
overarching aspect of their offensive - protecting the 2011 revolution - and
it was the announcement this July of the end of state subsidies for oil
products that triggered their advance on Sanaa: the Houthis protested at the
doubling of fuel prices and declining purchasing power, and demanded the
dismissal of a government they regarded as corrupt. They also demanded the
implementation of the far-reaching conclusions of the conference for
national dialogue - which they had not supported when they were announced in
January - concerning the fight against corruption, popular democratic
participation and power-sharing.
These demands won the Houthis social and political support that went beyond
the Zaydi community, and go some way to explaining the weakness of the
resistance to their advance on Sanaa where, because of internal migration, a
significant proportion of the population is not of Zaydi origin. The
non-intervention of the former president's supporters, and the relative
passivity of both Hadi's supporters and the international community, are as
indicative of hostility to the Muslim Brothers as of a desire for
conciliation and the avoidance of national fragmentation and escalating
violence. In this regard, the involvement of the UN and its special
representative, Morocco's Jamal Benomar, was critical to the signing of an
agreement between the Houthis and the Yemeni authorities on 21 September.
A degree of normalisation
After the failure of a first candidate, the laborious appointment of a
technocratic government under Khaled Bahah enabled the Houthis to be
politically integrated and re-established a degree of normality. Although
their armed militias are still occupying public buildings, they no longer
simply represent a rebellion from the social and geographic margins, but a
central element of power.
In order to genuinely transcend the sectarian dimension, the Houthis will
have to prove themselves. That is a major task, and tensions with Sunni
forces are especially strong. A few days after Sanaa was taken, militants
from Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) made threats, and then took
action. A jihadist blew himself up in central Sanaa on 9 October, killing 47
people, and a second attack in the south of the country killed 20 more.
Simultaneously, Yahya al-Hajuri, the former director of the Salafist
institute in Dammaj (northwest Yemen), was organising conferences in Aden
and Taiz - exclusively Sunni regions - calling for a mobilisation against
the Shia, whom he referred to pejoratively as rawafidh (unbelievers).
Analysing the Sanaa population's political, social and strategic motives for
supporting the Houthis allows for a more nuanced interpretation than simple
sectarianism. But such an analysis, while valuable, does not entirely
invalidate the sectarian logic of the conflicts. This also turns out to be a
direct inheritance of the Saleh regime, which, since the outbreak of the
Saada conflict in 2004, continually forced the Houthis back to their Zaydi
roots and their (initially imaginary) links with Iran, while at the same
time making use of the Sunni Islamists.
The regional power, Saudi Arabia, whose interference has left its mark on
Yemen's history, is playing a more complex role than it may appear. The
prevailing interpretation in the Arab world views Saudi's wait-and-see
policy towards the Houthi offensive as the result of hostility to the Muslim
Brothers and of a strategic rapprochement with Iran. This explanation is
incomplete. The criminalisation of the Muslim Brotherhood, which the Saudi
regime classes as a terrorist organisation, does indeed stem from Saudi
Arabia's domestic policy, its rivalry with Qatar, and its support for Abdel
Fattah Sissi's regime in Egypt. But Saudi diplomats have repeatedly stated
that this policy does not apply to the Muslim Brotherhood in Yemen.
Rather than a Saudi manipulation - a rear alliance with the Houthis against
the Brotherhood (which would go very much against the grain) - Riyadh's
laissez-faire attitude may in fact come from a structural weakness. Saudi
diplomacy in Yemen is characterised by an inability to act, or to formulate
a policy and objectives. This inability is not unique to the Saudis: the US
and EU, which with the countries of the Gulf are supporting the political
transition and President Hadi, have also been stopped in their tracks by the
depth of the crises afflicting Yemen. They are all patently having trouble
working out a policy framework between the massive use of drones against
AQAP, support for the central state, and restrictions on immigration.
The fact is that the crisis of Saudi Arabia's traditional proxies (notably
the Al-Ahmar clan), AQAP's growing power and the secessionist movement in
the south, have greatly reduced Saudi Arabia's ability to read the situation
and take effective action. Moreover, a great range of people involved in
Saudi diplomacy - ministers, princes, religious figures, semi-public bodies
- often competing with each other and hampering the policies undertaken.
Such a diversity makes the prospect of a rapprochement with Iran more or
less illusory, since the various players in Saudi diplomacy have for years
built up the notion of a Shia threat and stigmatised it in both religious
and strategic terms.
Received on Mon Nov 17 2014 - 15:18:08 EST