Why is it illegitimate? Where will it lead to? What can be done to stop it?
Tuesday, 7th April 2015
Chairman (Dr Saeed Shehabi): We are going to discuss the current war in Yemen. Is it really a defensive war launched by the Saudi alliance or is it an offensive war? Why has the whole Arab world not supported it altogether? Yes they have support from the GCC countries and one or two other big countries but the rest of the Arab countries did not support it. It is a very controversial conflict and the ramifications of this conflict are likely to have long term consequences and it is one of the very, very controversial and difficult wars because the outcome will determine where the Saudis will be standing. There are predictions that the Saudis may not be able to bring the war to a decisive end. In this case the political argument that they have forwarded will fall apart.
So what we are witnessing today is a very difficult situation that is causing a lot of stress and difficulties to the people of Yemen. It is also causing unease among the Arab rulers and the rulers of the large Muslim countries like Pakistan, Turkey, Iran and even Egypt is finding itself in a difficult position because of what is going on and the pressures on it to get involved in a war not of its own choosing.
Tonight we are going to discuss the wide ranging issues linked to this conflict and I hope by the end of the night we will have formed an opinion about where we stand on this conflict.
Thanos Petouris: Yemen is all over the news these days and people are trying to make sense of what is happening in the country especially because we have not given enough attention to Yemen. Three hundred people attended the conference Yemen: challenges for the future held at SOAS in 2013 which showed that we need more meetings such as this one to try and make sense of what is happening in this forgotten part of the Arabian Peninsula.
I will start by giving a review of how we got here. I thought it would be good to look into four historical episodes in the history of the country since its unification in 1990 in order make sense of where these groups who are fighting each other are coming from and what their essential motives are in keeping Yemen in the situation of a failed state.
I would like to start with the 1990 civil war and remind people that this is when the former Peoples Democratic Yemen Republic decided that they had got a really bad agreement by going into unity with the north dominated by President Saleh. During that war Saleh used the so-called Afghan Arabs who had just returned from the theatres of war in Afghanistan supporting Bin Laden and the Americans against the Soviets. Ali Muhsin Al Ahmar the general in Saleh’s army was the main link between the regime and these groups.
At the same time the other allies of Saleh were the Al Islah party which has been broadly described as the Muslim Brotherhood in Yemen. But it is more than that. It is an umbrella political party bringing together the Muslim brothers but also more extreme strands of Islamists such as Salafis and Al Zindani.
So essentially the 1994 civil war divided the country into two very distinct camps. You had President Saleh, the Al Ahmar family, Al Islah and the Salafis on one side and the southern population on the other. A lot of atrocities took place, mosques were destroyed and burned in the south. The southerners felt that they were essentially under occupation by a force that came to impose its will and ever since 1994 the regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh did its best to alienate the population in the south. It did not try to make amends with the population and it did not try to promote any measures of unity that would enhance the political, social and cultural unity of the country. On the contrary it made things worse by stopping the development of the port of Aden and stopping international aid from reaching parts of the south.
After the civil war which found Saleh victorious and all powerful politically in the country he abandoned Islah as a partner of his regime. He decided to run the country on his own with his party the General People’s Congress. This is where you have the first potential split in the regime where Al Islah moves on to form an opposition organisation that joined parties like the socialists which Islah had fought in 1994. At the same time the Al Ahmar family that have been one of the political pillars of Al Islah never lost touch and contact with the Salah regime.
Moving on to the second episode the 2004 first round of the so-called Houthi. In 2004 you had the emergence of the Houthi movement. In 2003 the first episode of the long series of the sixth round of the Houthi wars took place in Sana when the Al Houthi family started to demonstrate against Saleh and his complicities (as they called it) in supporting the war on terror and the American war against Iraq.
The Houthis or Ansar Allah as they call themselves are essentially a revivalist movement. They started off as a movement in the northern highlands of the country trying to fend off the encroachment of the Saleh regime and of the state in their region. They belong to the Zaidi sect of Shia Islam but that does not really say much and it is a term that has been abused a lot recently and there are attempts to pin it as part of the broader Shia-Sunni conflict all over the Middle East.
The Zaidi sect is the one that is closest to Sunni Islam. Anyone who has lived and experienced Yemen would know that you can’t tell a Zaidi from a Shafi Sunni in the country. In the northern highlands where they are concentrated you have instances where people share mosques, they pray together. There hasn’t been a divisive line between the two communities. It is very important to stress that there haven’t been instances in historical memory of a sectarian war between the two madhabs of Islam in Yemen.
The Zaidis today make up about one-third of the country according to estimates. In the former northern Yemen they made up the majority but with unity with the totally Shafi south the number has dropped to about 30 – 35 %.
It is also important to say that the reason that pushed the Zaidi communities in the north to react to the southern regime had mainly to do firstly with the support by the Salah regime for Salafi groups to go to their ancestral lands and establish schools and seminaries and on top of that to use a particularly militant language against the religious practices of the Zaidi locals. They were always branded as rafida. They were always targeted by these groups which were supported by the Saleh regime. You must have heard of the Damaj school which started to attract Salafi students from all over the world, not just Yemen.
On top of that, which is equally important, the government in Sana imposed an educational curriculum in the state-run schools in the country which promoted a uniform kind of Islam and did not look into the sensitivities and particularities of the Zeidi community.
One ought to remember that the thousand year old immante that existed and ran north Yemen from Saada down to Taiz was run by the Imam of the Zeidi sect. So we are talking about a community and a population which up until 1962 when the republican revolution took place in Yemen existed in a state that was run according to their own religious and political expectations.
At the same time as the Houthi wars were taking place in the north, you had the formation of Al Hirak southern movement in large parts of the southern part of the country. This was in response to the deteriorating economic situation in the south. It was made up mostly of teachers, civil servants and former army officers of the south who were dismissed from their posts following the 1990 civil war because Saleh distrusted them and did not want a repetition of what happened in 1994.
But these people were left jobless, idle embarrassed because they could tell me when I lived there that they were not able to perform their main social duties to care for their families and have a job which they were able to perform until 1994.
The southern movement was particularly attacked by the Saleh regime. Every time there was a demonstration in Aden there would be dead people in the streets. The security services responded particularly harshly to the southerners.
Moving on to the outh uprising of 2011, part of the broader youth uprisings in the Arab world, the so-called Arab spring. Of course you had a very thin sector of the Yemini population which actively connected with the youth uprisings that were taking place in other parts of the Arab world. We are talking about the well-educated middle class students and young people who occupied the university in Sana and started to create free spaces for themselves in the major cities of the country in Sana, Taiz and Aden. They were called the chain squares.
This coincided with a looming crisis of succession of the Saleh regime. A lot of us thought that the regime was going to go through a crisis in 2013 when Saleh was due to finish his second term as president and he would probably have to hand over to his son. But the youth uprisings essentially split open the regime in Sana. They exposed the already existing fissures between Saleh, the Al Ahmar clan and General Ali Mohsin Al Ahmar who were waiting for him to eventually step down after 34 years of rule in order to promote their own kin into that position.
Not to be unfair to the Yemeni youth and uprising that took place, it was a truly unprecedented event for Yemen and for Yemini political history and perhaps the longest running one in the Arab world when Egypt, Tunisia and Syria went the way they did you still had in Sana an active part of the youth demonstrating in the squares and demanding social justice, and a secular civil state to be established.
This experience offered an unprecedented for Yemen exchange of ideas and communication between different segments of society that did not come close to each other in the past and exchange ideas. The tents that accommodated the activists in the chain squares would accommodate Houthis, southerners, women educated young people and tribes people who would be coming to Sana to inform themselves of what was going on in the country. That had never happened before.
There was a lot of potential and a lot of optimism among a lot of us that a lot of good would come out of this opportunity, of this meeting for the Yeminis to discuss their own problems and their own future and to manage their own affairs. And this, when with a lot of different crisis were taking place in a lot of parts of the Middle East the West and the GCC countries came together and put together the GCC agreement a plan whose main aim was essentially to appease the Yemini political elites and find a way accommodating their needs and almost exclusively ignore the demands of the activists, the youth groups and the southern movements.
The GCC plan allowed Saleh to step down. And the biggest mistake in this document was that it gave him immunity from prosecution and allowed him to stay in the country as president of the GPC party and placed in the president’s seat his vice president, Mansour Hadi who was until then a non-entity. He had been in that position for a good decade or more but he never expected to take the position of president and run the country. His ability to mobilise especially people from the north was limited because of his southern connections.
The second mistake of the GCC plan was that it provided for a national dialogue process. It said let us put together delegates from all different political parties and as many people from the social movement as possible in one room to discuss and decide the future of the country. But the problem in my opinion was that the people that were put together to discuss had no clear mandate from the Yemini population to do so. They were appointed to those positions by their own political parties and they brought their own political agendas to the table which did not necessarily correspond to what the Yemini people were expecting.
The national dialogue took a year to conclude and then it came up with hundreds of recommendations for the future of the country. At the same time the government of Yemen was unable to take decisive steps to establish its authority over the country. One major issue was (and today we find it in front of us) the restructuring of the military. After 34 years of rule Saleh was able to establish his hold over the military by placing half brothers, cousins, and nephews at the head of the different sections of the army and it ought to have been the first step towards a different Yemen. To dismantle this extensive network that paid allegiance to Ali Abdullay Saleh and by removing a couple of figure heads – sending his son as ambassador to the UAE and moving around a few individuals. Hadi was not able to this. He has been unable to mobilise any important part of the Yemini army.
Reaching a conclusion to this kind of introduction to the crisis what in my opinion was a turning point in this whole situation was a decision to turn Yemen into a federal entity which is not a bad idea in itself. It would reflect a lot of the realities on the ground: the southern grievances and the Zaidis desire to run their own affairs in the north. The federal plan that was proposed divided vertically the Houthis strongholds of Saada, Amran, Al Jaff and Hega into three different federal entities and was perceived as a direct attack on their interests and on any potential they might have had in uniting their area and running their own affairs in the way they wanted.
And this is what precipitated the Houthi advance onto Sana to make sure that this federal plan does not take place in order to establish realities on the ground. The ease with which the Houthis descended onto Sana can be explained both by forging alliances with local tribes and the fact that President Saleh had decided by now that it was time to derail the whole national dialogue and transitional process in the country and his allies did not harass the Houthis as they were coming down to the capital.
Today we have a situation whereby both the West and Arab countries failed to admit that their original plan has failed, they failed to make amends with the Houthis. They did not attempt in any way to hold discussions with them when they eventually came to Sana. They did not want to take into account that the political balance in Sana had changed completely after the Houthis descent and they also did not do anything in order to back Hadi as the legitimate up until then president of Yemen in his attempts to secure the army and alleviate what has become a major humanitarian crisis in the country.
I would like to finish by saying that all the alliances we are seeing today are opportunistic. I think that this war is going to continue for a long period of time. I don’t think that the Saudis have really thought of a way out of this situation. They have opted for the easy way for the aerial bombardment but as we have seen this has done nothing to deter Saleh or the Houthis from advancing to the south and attempting to take Aden and the Saudi and the Arab coalition of the willing do not seem to have a comprehensive plan of what to do after the bombardment. We can’t go on bombing the country into accepting any decision that was made outside of Yemen. I don’t think that the Yeminis either from the north or the south will submit to external positions.
My real fear for the current situation is that it really drives a wedge between north and south. We have seen how the northerners, irrespective of affiliation, have condemned the Saudi bombardments and this external imposition and we hear more and more southerners calling for ground troops and for external intervention into the country to protect them from the advancing Saleh and partly Houthi forces.
All this is happening with the humanitarian situation in the background worsening by the day. The Red Cross and other humanitarian organisations have been prevented from going into the country and providing assistance. And also in the background there is a jihadi movement which we call Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula which is reorganising itself and taking advantage of the empty, ungoverned spaces that have been left in the country especially in the eastern governorates in Hadramaut and Shabwa. But there is a lot more to that. People have spoken of a looming ISIS versus Al Qaeda conflict over Yemen about who can take over and manage these areas. I leave it there and I hope to discuss more during Q & A.
Chairman: Thank you very much Thanos Petouris for this illuminating, comprehensive background. It gave us a good insight into what has been going on in Yemen before the war that has was launched two weeks ago. He has not spoken much about the war but he said that the Saudis may have entered the war without a clear plan for the exit and that they cannot keep on bombarding the country from the air forever especially as the humanitarian situation becomes more desperate.
Ahmad Al Mo’ayyad: It is my pleasure to be here with you to discuss our problem in Yemen. My name is Ahmad I am from Saada Province in Yemen. This place called Yemen has suffered so much from the Saudi regime for more than 40 years. Today we are talking about the third Saudi war in Yemen. I think that it will be good to talk about the relationship between Saudi Arabia and Yemen during the past 40 years.
The first revolution in Yemen started in 1962 after the Zaidi Immamate. It was a revolution to make a new republic. Saudi Arabia was supporting the Zaidi Immamate in Yemen. Egypt with its leader Jamal Abdel Nasser supported the new republic. This war lasted until 1970 when a new republic war born.
From that day Saudi Arabia opened a new page in Yemen because she had to keep all the game plans in her hand. So she started to give salaries to more than 300,000 sheikhs in Yemen who took a salary from Saudi Arabia since 1970. So you can imagine what that means. The lowest salary was 4000 riyals ($1100) and the highest was up to one million dollars a month for the biggest sheikh, Ahmed Ahmar.
Ahmed Ahmar had control over the whole of Yemen. In 1978 Ali Abdullah Saleh came to Yemen to be the president. Saleh was in front and Ahmar was behind him. So Saudi Arabia made an investment in Yemen. That investment was with persons not with the people. So after 1990 Yemeni unity between the north and south was achieved. I believe that Saudi Arabia was not happy with this unity but the people wanted to unite.
In 1994 there was a war between the north and south and Saudi Arabia supported the south to split this unity. This is a summary of how the Saudis deal with the situation in Yemen. After that in 2000 Ali Abdullah Saleh signed a very important agreement with Saudi Arabia. This agreement was about the borders as there was a cold conflict between Yemen and Saudi Arabia about the provinces of Najran, Asir and Jezzan. Now it is in the south of Saudi Arabia but it is Yemeni land. Since 1934 there was a conflict between Yemen and Saudi Arabia and they took this temporarily under the Taif Agreement.
In 2000 Ali Abdullah Saleh became a very important person in Yemen because he signed an agreement for this area to belong to Saudi Arabia. All the Yemeni people accepted this because he is was a very important person.
In 2003 the war started between America and Iraq. At that time the Houthi movement started due to pressure in Yemen. More people started to hate Ali Abdullah Saleh. They did not want this dictatorship. There was corruption was at the top at a very high level. So all the people were looking for real freedom. They needed their dignity to be preserved.
So Ali Abdullah Saleh found a good opportunity to destroy the small neck. It was related to the Zaidi movement as they were at the head of the regime in 1962.. Now unity was is in danger. We have to fight against those who are getting their support from outside. We have to protect our republic.
Every year for the past six years there has been a war against the Houthi movement and Saada. Thousands of families were killed and their houses were destroyed. So it was a very bad situation during the time of Saleh and nobody knows about this. For six years the government banned all media from Saada and they could not hear from the people about what was happening there. All the news had to be taken from official Yemeni sources.
Al Islah, the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Houthis and other parties in Yemen took part in the revolution of 2011. This is a very important moment in the history of Yemen because Ali Abdullah Saleh was gone but Saudi Arabia returned him to Yemen, gave him immunity and brought him back as a main player in politics in Yemen. So what happened? We got nothing. So what was the benefit of our revolution? Ali Abdullah Saleh came again. The Islah Party (the Muslim Brotherhood) accepted that because they were looking for places in the government. They took the half the seats in government and Ali Abdullah Saleh’s party got half of the seats. So three years after this unfair division Yemen has suffered from a very bad situation.
On 21st September 2014 a new revolution was launched. The Al Houthi movement, other parties and independent people were behind it. It was a very big revolution with large support. So from this date Saudi Arabia became alarmed and said we have to do something now or we will lose Yemen. So why is Saudi Arabia now launching a war against Yemen? Why does it want to change everything in Yemen and return it to the state Saudi wants? This new revolution has cut Saudi domination in Yemen. Now Saudi Arabia has lost everything in Yemen because they supported a number of people who are in Saudi Arabia now. They are not in Yemen because they do not belong to Yemen. They take their money, their salary, their benefits from Saudi Arabia. They did not do anything for the Yemini people.
Now Saudi Arabia has one thing in Yemen. They want it and they are trying to save it. What is this thing? It is Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda has very good relations with Saudi Arabia because Saudi is the main source of these extremist ideas and the funds come from there. Do you think that Al Qaeda work or get salaries. No, they get easy money just to destroy and kill other people who do not accept their ideas. So Saudi Arabia now has intervened in Yemen quickly to save Al Qaeda. Consider how many wars the whole world has launched against Al Qaeda: the USA in Afghanistan what was the result? Nothing. Al Qaeda is larger now than in 2000. It has Dash, it has ISIS, it has many branches. It is the same in Syria.
But in Yemen there were ten wars in Saada, in Hut, in Amran, in Sana and many other places. Al Qaeda was a main player in these areas: they had their system and their people, they controlled everything and they applied Shaira as they described it. But the Houthis and other Yemeni people removed Al Qaeda from these ten places. After ten wars the Yemeni people were victorious and Al Qaeda was removed from all these places. Now they are in Hadramaut and Shabwa. For ten years they were in Ghada. Now they are not in Ghada and Baida.
Do you think that Saudi Arabia will wait for you as the Yemeni people and the Yemini army to take Al Qaeda out. Their investment over the past 40 years is zero now so they do not accept the situation. They are now talking about Iran. This is not true. They want Yemen to remain in its current position or worse. So we the Yemini people are fighting against Al Qaeda and against the domination of Saudi in Yemen. How long will it take? I don’t know. But we are fighting for that inside Yemen because it is our country and we must make the decisions about our lives and our future. We only need Saudi Arabia to remove its hand from Yemen, that is what we want.
Chairman: Thank you very Ahmad Mo’yyad. This has complimented Thanos Petorius’ presentation about the history of Yemen. Ahmad Mo’yyad provided a new perspective even for me who has been following events in Yemen. What he said about the continued struggle against Al Qaeda in Yemen is new to me. We know Yemen is one of the main bases of Al Qaeda. All the wars against terror launched for the past 12 years against Al Qaeda have led to nowhere.
According to his own analysis the Houthi movement, which has been joined by others, moved on two places which were Al Qaeda strongholds and they have removed them. Al Qaeda has been moved to the eastern province of Yemen: Hadramout and Shabwa right to the east. This is what angered the Saudis. They did not want this to happen.
Now I just want to say a few words about the war because we have not discussed the war. There is a clear indication that this war appears to be heading no where. It has no final aim. What is the final aim? What is it going to achieve after two weeks of continued bombardment. In the first ten days 860 people were killed. That is 86 people killed every day. One hundred and sixty two children were among them. Now compare that to the Israeli’s two or three attacks on Gaza and you will see that the numbers in Yemen are greater.
But the images and reporting from Gaza on the Israeli aggression was much greater. I do not think anybody has seen news from Yemen taking the first headline from the BBC. Today I was watching the BBC and thinking about how it was reporting. Wherever they report on ISIS the BBC and Reuters always say the Islamic state, nothing else. When they talk about Yemen they do not talk about Ansar Allah the official name of the movement in Yemen. The Houthis are just the leadership but they only talk about the Houthis and never mention Ansar Allah movement.
If you ask them why do you use Islamic state they will say this is the official name. Of course here the official name is not Houthis. The official leader of the Houthis, Abdul Malik Al Houthi, would not refer to Houthis. He would say Ansar Allah. This is the official name but the BBC does not use.
The BBC always looks at events in the Middle East in Sunni-Shia terms. It is always Shias and Sunnis nothing else. It is always sectarian but the conflicts in the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East are not sectarian. They are political conflicts. It is not a matter of Shias versus Sunnis. Which prominent religious leader has come forward and said: ’I am a Shia and I want to kill all the Sunis.’ They would be used to legalise the war but the reality is not like this. This discourse and terminology of hatred and sectarianism is not the real issue. The real issue is domination.
Just to conclude I would like to say that the 2011 Arab spring was going to come and lead to a different situation in the Middle. If it was left alone the situation of the Middle East, which has been dominated by despotism and tyranny and dictatorship would have ended. But all of the revolutions have failed, even in Tunisia where the old regime has been brought back. This is also the situation in Egypt. In Syria and Libya you see the destruction.
Who has done this? It could not have just happened. Who has turned this tide of change into destruction? I think the Saudis, the GCC, what we call the forces of the counter revolution joined together and did everything. Sectarianism and terrorism were the two main arms against the movement of change in the Middle East.
Of course they will talk about Iran and the Shias and Sunnis. Without this they would not have managed to change the course of history in the way in which it has been changed.
* Thanos Petouris is researching the nationalist, anti-colonial movement in Aden and South Arabia and the subsequent decolonisation process from British rule in the years 1937-67. He has been visiting Yemen regularly since 2005, having worked in the past as an English teacher, and NGO volunteer in Aden which enabled him to travel to almost every part of the country. He is a committee member of the British-Yemeni Society. Thanos is a regular contributor to Chatham House Yemen Forum events as well as providing advice to the FCO and DfID on Yemen. He has spoken at the Universities of London, Harvard, Athens, and Exeter, and was the convenor of the “Yemen: Challenges for the Future” conference at SOAS in 2013.
**Ahmad Al Mo’ayyad is a political activist from Yemen, a writer, commentator and journalist. He is setting up a London office for Al Maseera Channel, which is against the ongoing war. He is from Sa’da, the birthplace of the Ansaru Allah Movement, commonly linked to the Houthis.