Opinion: An Inside Job
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Abdulrahman Al-Rashed
on : Wednesday, 24 Sep, 2014
Yemen’s capital Sana’a has been both attacked from the outside and stabbed
in the back by insiders. The prime minister and the interior minister staged
a coup against the state in favor of the assailants, while Houthis shelled
the city from all sides. Sana’a suffered a sad and difficult night, opening
a new era in which the whole country is now placed in danger. As to why and
how such a situation arose, there are many factors that led to the siege and
the collapse of state authority.
First of all, let’s keep in mind that the overthrow of Yemen’s longtime
president Ali Abdullah Saleh was not going to be quick and easy. Two years
on, he has succeeded in disrupting the country’s domestic situation
indirectly. Among his allies are the Houthis and the Houthi Ansar Allah
organization, which share some traits with Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and which rejected reconciliation
and declared its leader a caliph.
The objective of former president Saleh’s supporters is to sabotage any
alternative to their rule in the hope that they will return to power. The
Houthis’ plan is to control the northern strip of Yemen with Iranian
support. They have therefore triggered the crisis by attacking cities and
staging protests and confrontations to obstruct government services in the
capital.
Although evil powers have left their mark everywhere, we must note that in
Yemen there are rivals—Northern, Southern and tribal factions and political
parties—who cannot come together in one government with ease. It seems that
Saleh and the Houthis—the new Yemeni regime’s biggest enemies—succeeded in
taking over most of the capital on Sunday, and they may succeed in taking
control of the rest of Yemen. However, their success will only be temporary,
as the parties that accepted the outcome of the reconciliation process will
later reject any Saleh–Houthi–ISIS domination.
Saleh was removed from power due to massive popular protests and amid
something approaching a consensus among most political parties and tribes in
the country that he had to go. Ever since his removal, he has not stopped
trying to sabotage the Gulf Initiative, the agreement that united Yemen’s
different factions around a plan for a reconciliation process and a
political transition. This may not have been a perfect solution, but it was
only intended to be temporary, until such time as the transition is
completed and crises are overcome.
During the current crisis, United Nations Special Envoy to Yemen Jamal
Benomar has sought to broker a political agreement to end the current
disputes, and managed to attain many concessions to satisfy the Houthis and
those who stand behind them. He can now see that their aim was not to so
much to find a solution as it was to pave the way to their taking power by
force. This raises questions for the UN, which sponsored the transition and
reconciliation process. The UN reassured Yemen’s pro-secessionists in the
south, prevented the division of the country, and urged Yemen’s neighbors as
well as global powers to help protect the state from collapsing in order to
prevent a political and humanitarian crisis. The question is: what will
Benomar do now, now that the Houthis and their supporters have betrayed him?
Keeping silent over the Houthis’ takeover of Sana’a is similar to accepting
the ISIS takeover of Iraq’s Mosul. The Ansar Allah group is composed of
religious extremists who want to impose their beliefs on other Yemenis.
Their presence in Yemen will inevitably mean that disturbances will last for
many years. This is the aim of Iran, the Houthis’ foremost funder. The same
goes for Saleh’s supporters, who spread chaos and benefit from the naïveté
of the Gulf Initiative which left the door open for him to leave with all
his money and men, even though he was well-known as the fox who slyly ruled
Yemen for three decades and kept state funds stored outside the country.
One of the Gulf Initiative’s mistakes was that it accepted one of Saleh’s
men as his successor—Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, a man with no character, skills
or political knowledge that could qualify him to manage a country with
problems as serious as Yemen’s.
Received on Wed Sep 24 2014 - 10:00:59 EDT