By: Hizam al-Asad
It should be borne in mind that most of Yemen’s problems and crises are the product of accumulated political failure and of the flawed methods to which the political forces controlling power in the country have grown accustomed over the past five decades. The Yemeni people rose up against them in February 2011, in the context of the Arab Spring revolutions; those forces then reinstated themselves through the so-called Gulf Initiative, so that the Yemeni people, in all its components, made a new revolution to correct the course: the revolution of 21 September this year.
It should be borne in mind that most of Yemen’s problems and crises are the product of accumulated political failure and of the flawed methods to which the political forces controlling power in the country have grown accustomed over the past five decades. The Yemeni people rose up against them in February 2011, in the context of the Arab Spring revolutions; those forces then reinstated themselves through the so-called Gulf Initiative, so that the Yemeni people, in all its components, made a new revolution to correct the course: the revolution of 21 September this year.
“The forces of influence and foreign interference: a mutually reinforcing relationship of shared interests”
The forces of influence in Yemen have always sought to please certain regional and international states at the expense of the country’s stability and security, by perpetuating conflict and feeding hotbeds of tension. The Republic of Yemen has known no stability in recent decades, except for three years: the rule of the late president Ibrahim al-Hamdi.
Yemen has experienced devastating wars amounting to crimes against humanity: the targeting of the Hashemites and all who sympathised with them at the end of the 1960s; the wars in the central regions in the 1980s; the summer 1994 war against the people of the southern regions, which was called the war of apostasy and secession; and likewise the six unjust and devastating wars waged by the regime against the people of the far-northern governorates, known as the Saada or Houthi question. Those wars lasted six years, with regional and international states taking part directly, providing logistical support to the ruling regime and broad media cover to justify the war – sometimes on regional grounds, sometimes on sectarian grounds, and at other times on grounds of security and sovereignty. They ended with the authorities apologising for those crimes, calling them a mistake that would not be repeated and pledging to compensate all those harmed – a pledge that has still not been fulfilled!
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“Sectarianism is an artificial tone and an imported word in a country that does not know it; most of Yemen’s problems are political”
Many Yemeni citizens do not know what Sunni or Shia, Zaydi or Shafi‘i, Salafi or Sufi mean – terms constantly used by inciting media, most of which, regrettably, are funded by regional Arab regimes, indeed by Yemen’s sister and neighbouring states, which use these terms and labels to stoke an imaginary conflict between those who embody coexistence in the country. Yemenis know well that failed policies do not represent a school, a faction or a sect, but rather those who persist in that failure, cling to those policies and use their failure for other purposes. This is what led Yemenis, through the 2011 revolution, to take to the streets and demand, through a popular revolution, the departure of the centres of power and influence embodied by their two wings, Ali Saleh and Ali Mohsen. Those forces and that regime then changed their strategy towards the revolution, cooperating and coordinating with certain states to counter the revolutionaries’ demand that the pillars of the regime leave power. They circumvented the revolution and its goals – the aspiration of Yemenis to build a genuine civil, democratic state that believes in pluralism and establishes national partnership. The February 2011 revolution was indeed circumvented by the restoration of the regime, with both its wings, through the so-called Gulf Initiative and its implementation mechanism, which granted the head of the regime, its pillars and all who worked with them immunity from any criminal prosecution, while the two sides of the regime shared what they had shared before: wealth and power. With this initiative, which gave each side of the regime a free hand over the state institutions under its control (ministries and government departments), many employees of the public and mixed sectors were sidelined and turned into something like unemployed people, and all new hiring of qualified ordinary citizens was frozen for four years from the formation of the initiative’s government – while at the same time more than two hundred thousand recruits were enlisted for the faction and party of Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, namely the Islah party. All this came amid a major economic collapse and failure, currency inflation, increased tax and customs evasion, encouraged by so-called exemptions from customs and taxes for the organisers of the revolution! Add to this the great security failure, which reached the point of a security vacuum in many parts of Yemen because of mismanagement, partisan staffing and the abuse of power: the police and army were turned into private fiefdoms guarding plundered land and facilities for military and party leaders, and the homes and motorcades of those figures, and were dragged into personal and partisan wars and disputes for the benefit of powerful figures, as happened in Hajjah, al-Jawf, Amran and Sanaa governorate. Meanwhile crime and assassinations increased, becoming almost daily, particularly in the capital, Sanaa, and some governorate capitals; unlicensed foreign fishing boats entered Yemeni territorial waters with the complicity of some powerful figures, draining and plundering Yemen’s marine wealth with modern methods that destroy marine resources; the so-called al-Qaeda organisation spread, with the coordination and cooperation of pillars of the regime, targeting military and security installations; and US drones intervened, giving the organisation greater sympathy by violating the country’s sovereignty and striking innocent civilians in more than one area. The authorities also persisted in marginalising the other components of Yemeni society, across their political, social and intellectual spectrum; the two parties to the initiative ignored the demands of the southerners and of those harmed by the six wars in the northern governorates; and repression of press, intellectual and political freedoms increased – the initiative period saw more human rights violations than the periods before it. All this made it imperative for Yemenis to press for a genuine dialogue representing all political, intellectual and social components and orientations. This is indeed what happened with the Comprehensive National Dialogue, which was a popular demand born of the conviction of most segments of Yemeni society – not because it was provided for in the Gulf Initiative, which represents only the two sides of the regime that signed it.
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“The new political components in Yemen and the National Dialogue”
The dialogue was an important milestone in the transition towards building the Yemeni state we aspire to, despite attempts by some forces to wreck this historic opportunity by targeting some of the new and principal components entering the political equation. The Ansar Allah component was targeted from the very first day of the dialogue, 18 March 2013: its revolutionary square was attacked and stormed, leaving dead and wounded. This only strengthened the component’s determination to pursue the path of peaceful dialogue. The target then shifted to its leaders taking part in the dialogue, through assassinations: first an attack on dialogue member Abdulwahid Abu Ras, in which several of his companions were killed or wounded. Ansar Allah (the Houthis) continued on that civilised path; then one of its leaders and a member of the dialogue, Dr Abdulkarim Jadban, was killed; and weeks later the academic, constitutional and international law scholar, dialogue member and Ansar Allah leader Dr Ahmed Sharafeddin was targeted on his way to the venue of the National Dialogue Conference – all this while the dialogue was in session. Each attack struck those leaders while they were unarmed, carrying nothing but papers, pens and ideas looking towards the coming light, the promising hope and a better tomorrow. These crimes were covered in a distorted way by the media of the centres of influence and of the forces harmed by the agreement among the people of this exhausted country, in the hope that the Ansar Allah component would leave the National Dialogue Conference – which did not happen. Those forces then launched, while the Dialogue Conference was in session, a ground war against the Ansar Allah component on several fronts – in Dammaj, Kitaf, Harad, Khaiwan, Dhanan Hashid, Arhab and al-Jawf – with military participation and support from some units recently recruited on a partisan basis, and with inciting media involvement from some neighbouring states. They sought to force the new political force represented by Ansar Allah to leave the National Dialogue Conference and return to the cycle of conflict that had always brought those forces money from abroad, as in the six previous wars: WikiLeaks documents revealed that the Yemeni regime in Sanaa was extorting money from the US administration and from Saudi Arabia to continue the war in Saada, presenting the war it was waging as a proxy war on behalf of the United States and Saudi Arabia against what it called Iranian interference and expansion, and colouring those wars and attacks with regional and sectarian hues, although such hues do not exist in reality. Ansar Allah (the Houthis), for example, is a political and social component present in many parts of Yemen, in most governorates and districts, and drawn from various schools and regions: Zaydi and Shafi‘i, Sufi and Salafi, northern and southern, from the Tihama coast, the desert and the mountains. This diversity was reflected in the diversity of its representatives at the National Dialogue Conference, who contributed actively to drafting the outcomes of the National Dialogue – outcomes that the authorities and those forces have once again evaded implementing.
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“The outcomes of the National Dialogue: a year of procrastination and delay”
Almost a year after the end of the National Dialogue Conference, citizens have seen no seriousness on the part of the authorities in implementing what was agreed in its outcomes. On the contrary, they have continued their methods of corruption, exclusion and squandering of public money and of the country’s resources, bringing the country to a failure that almost paralysed it entirely. The authorities even went so far as to take a decision that weighed heavily on Yemeni citizens: a price increase, described as deadly, that raises poverty and unemployment, increases the number of schoolchildren living on the streets and of unemployed young people slipping across the border to seek a livelihood in neighbouring countries, where they endure the worst forms of misery, contempt and humiliation at the hands of those countries’ authorities. This increase also raises crime, security failure and social and family breakdown. The authorities raised the prices of petroleum products by almost 100%, on top of the previous price increase introduced with the formation of the initiative government in 2011, which was close to the same percentage as the latest one. This doubled the suffering of citizens and led the Yemeni people, in all its political, social and intellectual components, to rise up in a peaceful revolution to stop these wrongful practices and restore the right course of the February 2011 revolution.
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“The 21 September revolution and Yemenis’ aspirations to change a bitter reality”
The Yemeni people rose up in a peaceful popular revolution, led by new forces and components such as Ansar Allah, demanding economic reforms – the cancellation of the price increase and an end to financial and administrative corruption – and political and social demands: the formation of a government of national competences and the implementation of the agreed decisions of the National Dialogue. The revolution remained peaceful in the face of bullets, killings and the storming of sit-in squares, even though weapons are widely available in Yemen – most Yemeni citizens own one. The revolutionaries maintained the peaceful character of their revolution with legendary steadfastness, witnessed by observers around the world through the media coverage of those painful scenes, when recruits belonging to one of the regime’s pillars targeted the peaceful sit-in squares and killed dozens in cold blood in front of the prime minister’s office and in the camps on Airport Street, without any response from the revolutionaries and the revolutionary committees. But patience has its limits: on 19, 20 and 21 September, armed clashes broke out between recruits and militias belonging to the faction of Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, who had attacked a number of revolutionaries in the Hamdan area west of the capital. The clashes spread to the outskirts of Sanaa, and the battle was settled when Ali Mohsen fled to Saudi Arabia. The revolution of the Yemeni people triumphed, and popular committees were formed to protect state institutions and public and private property in the capital, Sanaa, and in some parts of the country that experienced a security vacuum, as the deposed leaders gambled on playing the security card. This led the army and security forces and the popular committees to form joint, coordinated units to confront these serious security challenges, posed by elements of the so-called al-Qaeda, which targeted innocent citizens in several parts of Yemen and stepped up its attacks and suicide bombings among civilians and soldiers in recent times – that is, after Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar left the country. Positive results have been achieved in this respect, with broad community cooperation.
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“The political and security situation after the signing of the Peace and Partnership Agreement”
As for the political situation, the Peace and National Partnership Agreement was signed on 27 September 2014. Everyone regards it as the best solution to Yemen’s accumulated problems, for it represents a national consensus to establish a genuine national partnership among all the political components and actors in Yemen, away from the quotas of the Gulf Initiative and the sharing out of power. The agreement is also regarded as the main gateway to implementing the outcomes of the National Dialogue Conference, since it is based on them. It provided for the formation of a government of national competences, through consultation between the President of the Republic and his advisers, according to criteria of competence, integrity and experience; it approved a partial cancellation of the price increase; and it provided for an economic committee to study economic and service problems and solutions, and for preparations for future elections and milestones once the drafting of the constitution is complete, by involving everyone in the Supreme Elections Committee. Although the recently formed government included some figures from the former regime implicated in corruption cases, the revolutionary committees – which were also excluded from the government line-up – responded positively and removed the sit-in camps from the capital, Sanaa, and its surroundings, as the agreement provided, as a sign of good faith, to establish a sound era of understanding and rapprochement, and in the hope of a promising and prosperous future within a genuine state that guarantees everyone the right to live together.
As for the extensive cooperation between the popular committees, the security forces, the army and society in confronting elements of the so-called al-Qaeda in some areas, this cooperation has brought security and stability to many areas that had served as bases and launching points for the organisation’s suicide attacks on citizens and on members of the army and security forces.
Hizam al-Asad
17/11/2014
