The limits of the 'sectarian' framing in Yemen
By Stacey Philbrick Yadav
September 25 at 2:17 PM
It was 2005 when my Yemeni friends first started talking seriously about
their fears that the Houthis would march on the capital of Sanaa. The
Houthis were never closer than the nearby province of Amran back then. There
was a media blackout, and most of our information came from journalist
friends who were in and around the city of Saada, then the center of the
conflict, distributing news via SMS. Information was not the only thing the
regime of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh sought (and failed) to
control: Humanitarian agencies had no way to reach the civilians who were
bearing the brunt of the conflict between government forces and Houthi
militants. In a harbinger of things to come, a UNICEF employee told me that
the only way he could get supplies to Saada was by partnering with the Islah
Charitable Society (ICS), a local aid agency tied to Yemen's largest
Islamist party. He complained that ICS was padding the books and inflating
the numbers of people who had been displaced to gain resources for its wider
evangelical work, but he noted that it was the only non-governmental agency
that he knew of that was granted a permit to work amid the stranded
civilians. It was in ways like this that the Saleh regime manipulated the
"sectarian" politics of Northern Yemen, seeking to ensure that the two
groups were too distracted by each other to turn their attention elsewhere.
That, of course, was not a wholly successful strategy. Over the past decade,
there have been at least half a dozen military campaigns with the Houthis, a
secessionist movement in the South, the relocation of al-Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) from Saudi Arabia to Yemen, a popular uprising that
lasted 11 months, a fracturing of the armed forces, an externally-brokered
transitional agreement, a dramatic escalation in U.S. drone attacks in
different parts of the country, and a National Dialogue Conference
theoretically designed to put all the pieces back together. So, why think of
this as sectarian war? The Houthi's march on Sanaa in September cannot be
easily glossed as "sectarian" just because they are Zaydi Shiites, and most
(though not all) Islahis are Sunnis. The existence of nominal difference is
not by itself a compelling causal story.
The fact that the Houthis are Zaydis does not mean that their movement is
aimed exclusively or even primarily at establishing a Zaydi political order,
reinstituting the kind of imamate that ruled Northern Yemen for hundreds of
years (though some critics will tell you so). Similarly, the fact that
Islah's membership is predominantly Sunni doesn't mean it is working to
reestablish the caliphate, or even that it is willing to cooperate with
those transnational movements that would, though its detractors may allege
this. Instead, the conflict that pits the Houthis against Islah is one
several decades in the making, and rests as much in the structure of the
Yemeni North, the hierarchies of power and privilege among Zaydis
themselves, and a state apparatus that sought to manipulate them.
Charles Schmitz recently contributed an
<
http://www.mei.edu/content/at/huthi-ascent-power> excellent overview of the
development of the Houthi movement as a political force. Additionally, the
work of anthropologists like Gabrielle von Bruck and Shelagh Weir on the
cultural politics of Zaydi/Islahi tension in the North is useful. While
their field research mainly predates the Houthi movement as such, it
outlines the dislocating impact of republican ideology in the North from the
1970s, and two interrelated developments that form a subtext to the current
conflict. In "Islam, Memory, and Morality in Yemen: Ruling Families in
Transition," Von Bruck maps the ways in which Hashemites (descendants of the
Prophet, from whom Zaydi leaders have historically been chosen) were
maligned as "feudal" by new republican leaders and the ways in which Sanaani
Hashemite families consequently worked to refashion central Zaydi religious
precepts as supportive of constitutional rule and accountable governance,
fitting religious concepts into the discourse of the developing state.
Weir's book, "A Tribal Order: Politics and Law in the Mountains of Yemen,"
documents the efforts of Sunni evangelists (who would ultimately align with
Islah) to make use of this republican critique of hierarchy to recruit or
"convert" low-status Zaydis in the far North, biting in to the core Zaydi
demographic base. As constitutional checks on presidential authority and
more general political accountability were undermined by Saleh in Sanaa and
his regime supported the expansion of Islah-oriented schools to advance
Sunni recruitment in the North, these new Hashemite discourses of
accountability became more evidently oppositional. The residue of this
ideological refashioning is evident in the Houthi project.
So when I say that this conflict can't be glossed as sectarian, I don't mean
to suggest that religious conviction is irrelevant to the Houthi movement or
its relationship to Islah or to the Yemeni government. Instead, it is
important to investigate the meaning of "sectarian" concepts of good
governance and opposition to corruption, and question whether these are (or,
more to the point, are not) consistent with existing institutions and
governing practices by Yemen's transitional government.
It took a decade for the Houthis to march on Sanaa, but before they did so,
they also sat in its square, participating in a broad-based social movement
that called itself the "Change Revolution." Easily forgotten is that they
did so alongside many members of Islah. Over the 11 months of Yemen's
popular uprising, Houthis and Islahis managed to cooperate on a number of
issues, particularly outside of top leadership circles. In the year that
followed, Houthis and Islahis were co-participants in workshops for Yemeni
youth, where they disagreed on principled grounds, but also carved out
spaces of agreement on core issues. To be clear, this was not an easy
relationship, but it was also not one characterized by implacable sectarian
animus.
The transitional agreement brokered by the Gulf Cooperation Council and
endorsed by the United Nations as the blueprint for a new Yemen included
provisions that overrepresented Islah and excluded the Houthis from the
transitional "national unity" government. It did little to address key
anti-corruption demands central to Houthi and non-Houthi protesters alike.
It also deferred essential transitional justice mechanisms that might have
brought redress for the brutality of past military campaigns against the
Houthis and civilians in the North. It moved instead to a direct (and
uncontested) presidential election of someone close to ousted president
Saleh and to a National Dialogue Conference that further overrepresented
Islah, even while cementing the importanceof the Houthi conflict as one of
the key questions facing the country.
So when the Houthis marched on the capital - a march that was not entirely
military, but also included large-scale, nonviolent mobilization of
protesters in the weeks that preceded it - there was no reason to interpret
this as a march on Sunnis, sectarian rhetoric notwithstanding. Instead, it
appears to be a campaign to target Islahis as major contenders for
institutional power, designed as a renegotiation of the transitional
framework. Islahi media outlets like Suhail TV have been taken off the air
(though it appears that the main Houthi Web site may have been hacked by
Suhail viewers). The homes of prominent Islahis have been seized or
destroyed, as has the home of General Ali Muhsin, who oversaw the bulk of
the military campaigns against the Houthis over the past decade, and later
defected to the opposition during the 2011 uprising. It appears that his
troops bore the brunt of the conflict with the Houthis in September, while
President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi ordered troops from other commands to
stand down.
The ceasefire agreement, rich in detail and very quickly agreed, focuses
primarily on renegotiating powersharing to increase the representation of
Houthis (and the Southern Movement, also a thorn in Islah's side), and to
outline concrete benchmarks for anti-corruption and economic reforms. It
calls for the quick establishment of a technocratic committee of economic
advisers whose recommendations will be binding on the new government. It is
not focused on the kind of "culture war" issues that might characterize a
sectarian conflict, but rather seeks to achieve several genuinely popular
reforms sidelined by the transitional government. That it was accomplished
at the point of a gun speaks as much to the failures of the transitional
framework as to Houthi ideology. Widespread dissatisfaction with slow
progress of the transitional process may help to explain why so many foreign
actors have been quick to support its renegotiation by backing the ceasefire
terms.
Worrisome for the medium term stability of Sanaa, however, is the question
of Hadi's relationship to the Houthis. The earliest ceasefire benchmark for
a new government has already passed, suggesting that all may not proceed
smoothly. While the Houthis may have helped to conveniently clip the wings
of Yemen's largest Islamist party in ways that help Hadi consolidate his own
position, now that the deed is done, how long before he decides that the
Houthis are more trouble than they are worth? After all, as vice president,
Hadi was at former president Saleh's knee when he first used Islah to hem in
the Yemeni Socialist Party, and then turned on Islah itself in the late
1990s and early 2000s. The Houthis will need to quickly cultivate allies
from other corners of the political field if they are to avoid a repetition
of that storied past. Their window for credibly doing so becomes narrower as
each benchmark is delayed.
Stacey Philbrick Yadav is the author of "Islamists and the State: Legitimacy
and Institutions in Yemen and Lebanon," and a member of the executive
committee of the American Institute of Yemeni Studies. She is an associate
professor of political science at Hobart & William Smith Colleges in Geneva,
N.Y.
Received on Thu Sep 25 2014 - 18:10:00 EDT