*Finian Cunningham (journalist)
** Dr Madawi Al Rasheed (academic, author)
*** Dr Helen Lackner (analyst, author)
The past four decades have witnessed reckless military adventures that have scarcely achieved noble goals, starting with the Iraq-Iran war, the two wars led by the US in Kuwait (1991) and Iraq (2003), the Saudi-Emirati incursion into Bahrain at the peak of the Arab Spring (2011) and the war on Yemen started in 2015 by a military alliance led by the Saudis and Emiratis. These two countries have in recent years become more flagrant in stretching their military muscles with the aim of redrawing of the political and military lines in the shifting Arabian sands. Crushing the Bahraini Revolution ten years ago may have given impetus to the Saudi-Emirati alliance but the debacle in Yemen after six years of war has initiated new dynamics that may eventually tame the ambitions of MBS and MBZ. But will the big powers, namely the US and UK heed the calls to stop their support to these military adventures?
Tuesday 16th March 2021
Finian Cunningham: I just want to give my reflections on events in Bahrain at that momentous time. I was really there by circumstance. I was working previously to the uprising as an editor on a business magazine. The Gulf economies were going into a slump at that time around 2010. For a lot of people like myself the contracts expired and I was just hanging around looking for a job in the Gulf. Then this huge maelstrom whipped up in Tunisia and then in Egypt. It was just coming across the whole Middle East. There was a feeling of inevitability that it was going to reach Bahrain.
Up to that point I was quite oblivious about the history of Bahrain and the society. It was only through witnessing the revolution that I realised the huge deep grievances of the Bahraini people. The majority of the people had no affiliation with the rulers. The rulers were seen as imposters who lorded over the Bahraini people for generations. It was a privilege to witness the indignation of the people and the expression of their historic rights.
From what I could tell from being involved with the crowds when the regime reacted very violently and killed several protesters in cold blood. In the next four weeks there was a massive encampment at the Pearl Roundabout under the landmark sculpture which the regime then tore down in a fit of rage to erase any kind of memory of the momentous uprising.
But during those four weeks it really was quite amazing people power. I had never seen so many Bahraini people in Bahrain. I was used to seeing a lot of expatriate people from Asia and Europe and all of a sudden Bahrain seemed to come alive with its own indigenous people – 300,000 to 400,000 people all at a given time at rallies almost every day. The feeling was one of tremendous potential to retrieve their historic rights. I had the sense that the regime was on the back foot and had lost control of the island kingdom.
It was a very peaceful and imaginative uprising. The people organised a mass drive through the island when all the cars went at 5mph and it brought the whole island to a standstill. There was no violence involved and they were really using people power in a very powerful, imaginative and strong forceful way to bring attention to their grievances.
Tragically about four weeks after this 14 February uprising, the Valentines Day of 2011, Saudi and Emirati troops came pouring over the causeway a 25km bridge from Saudi’s eastern province to Bahrain. The Saudi and Emirati forces launched a really fiendish repression when they were just killing people in cold blood, shooting protesters in the eye. I witnessed some horrific murders by the Saudi and Emirate troops in collusion with the Khalifa forces of Bahrain.
I want to emphasise just to jog memories that a few days before the bloody ruthless incursion, the massacre of peaceful unarmed protesters the British government and the American government sent very senior delegates to visit King Hamad Al Khalifa. On March 9 Sir Peter Ricketts the senior security adviser to the prime minster, David Cameron at the time arrived in Bahrain along with General Sir David Richard the UK Chief of Defense Staff. This was only five days before the Saudi Emirati invasion. On March 11, this was reported by the Bahraini media, Robert Gates the American Secretary of Defence in the Obama administration was in Bahrain. These two senior delegates reassured the monarchy in their press statements that the Bahrain minority had the full support of the British and the Americans. Britain was a colonial power in Bahrain which has recently become an important military base for the Americans.
My point is that this slaughter of innocents, this massive repression has continued over the last ten years totally sanctioned and given the green light by the British and American governments. There is no other way to conclude from the sequence of events. So I just want to emphasise that London and Washington bear total responsibility and complicity for the subsequent repression of the genuine pro democracy movement in Bahrain that took place on 14th February 2011 and in subsequent years was repressed, detained and kicked off the street. Whole villages were saturated with tear gas to lethal levels. This was all with American and British complicity in my view. This is the context in which one should look at the revolution and why it seemed to failed. That is my point anyway.
Dr Madawi Al Rasheed: It is pleasure to be back at the Gulf Cultural Centre and I look forward to meeting you in person. I would like to look at how this militarism unfolded in Saudi Arabia with the war on Yemen. Let me go over briefly over what happened as King Salman came to power in 2015. Anybody who studied the history of Saudi-Yemeni relations would not be surprised that the 2015 war on Yemen took place. There had been a series of wars throughout the last 100 years and even earlier than that but we do not want to go into the 18th and 19th century. Let us focus on the last episode of Saudi intervention in Yemen.
The main issue in this sort of regional conflict in the Arabian peninsula is that we have a country at the southern edge of the Arabian peninsula, the most populated country surrounded by very rich oil producing states that lack the population of Yemen. In an ideal world Yemen would have complimented Arabian peninsula’s shortage of manpower and labour but unfortunately this did not happen.
Throughout the 20th century Yemen was regarded as the hotspot for trouble simply because Yemen had a strong society and a very weak state that failed to spread its influence everywhere. Also Yemen was a hotbed for ideologies, for ways of thinking particularly that the Saudis deemed subversive. Yemen was also regarded as basically a security threat and from the beginning throughout the last decade the Saudi regime struggled to assert one important fact that Yemen should remain weak politically in order not to pose any serious challenge to Saudi Arabia from the southern part of the peninsula.
Let me just go over the 2015 episode which is the most recent episode of Saudi intervention in Yemen. The Saudis have always intervened in Yemeni politics sometimes diplomatically, sometimes by creating patronage networks with Yemeni rulers, tribes and civil society and many others. Saudi Arabia also intervened religiously in Yemen trying to unsettle real coexistence between different religious groups that belonged to different sects: the Sunnis, the Zaidis and others. Saudi Arabia tried to infiltrate that sort of microcosm of a religiously diverse society by trying to push for a kind of Salifisation of Yemen, establishing schools, universities and educational centres that preach a different message than the one that is predominant in Yemen.
In 2015 when Salman came to power there was an issue that was troubling Saudi Arabia and maybe that is the Obama administration signing the nuclear agreement with Iran behind Saudi Arabia’s back. That was an important moment when Saudi Arabia felt threatened by such rapprochement between Iran and West. Therefor there was a heightened sense of propaganda in Saudi Arabia as they were going to introduce what was called Salman’s doctrine and many writers who are promoters of the regime started writing about this Salman doctrine.
In a nutshell Salman and later his son said that since the Arab uprising during the rule of King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia looked weak, hesitant and its foreign and regional policy was stagnating. Obviously the shock of 2011 not only in Bahrain but also in other Arab countries – in Egypt, in Tunisia, and Libya left Saudi Arabia extremely vulnerable. The people of Saudi Arabia responded to this challenge of 2011, people were going into the streets calling for justice and freedom.
So from 2011 – 2016 the Saudis implemented one of the most repressive regimes to contain the spread of this wave of democratisation in the region. So Salman’s doctrine wanted to reverse that kind of stagnation. They thought that throwing money at the population like the $130 billion that were distributed immediately after 2011 was enough. So there was a regime of repression that targeted all Saudis of all political persuasions and also Salman’s doctrine involved a regional dimension that they have to be assertive in order to contain and make Iran retreat from some countries in which it did not have previous influence such as Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.
And therefore Salman’s doctrine was translated into an aggressive stance against Iran and its rising influence in the region. So this assertive policy unfortunately was put into practise in the poorest Arab country Yemen. Saudi Arabia propagated the idea that a Hezboallah like organisation was emerging on its southern borders thus referring to the Houthis. They are controlling Sanaa and spreading and the stated objective of this war on Yemen is to make Saudi Arabia safe, especially on its southern borders.
In a week’s time it will be the sixth anniversary of this treacherous war that led to a loss of livehood and the humanitarian crisis in Yemen. What helped Saudi Arabia to launch that war was that the Obama administration gave it the green light to do what it wanted to do as a trade off. Saudi Arabia felt threatened by the Iran nuclear agreement that Obama orchestrated the Americans kept a blind eye to what Saudi Arabia was doing on its southern borders. That lasted for a year and we get into Trump administration with the election of Trump and Saudi Arabia had four years of never being restrained by President Trump.
At the same time we find that this Salman’s doctrine was translated into branching out into other areas of the Arab world where they imagined there is a real Iranian influence. And here we begin to see how that kind of intervention led to the derailing of many of the Arab uprisings in the way that they become militarised because multiple countries began pouring arms and money to support certain factions.
It is clear that in Saudi Arabia they felt that if the Al Khalifa fell that would be the first monarchy to fall in the Arabian peninsula and the domino effect would actually roll down the coastal states and then reach Saudi Arabia. So they actually wanted to make a very big effort to preserve the monarchy in Bahrain as a genre of political governors that has to be preserved in order to save themselves.
I remember on February 14 in Pearl Square the peaceful protests and images we were shown. I have never been to Bahrain because I was not allowed. It would be security issue for me to go to Bahrain and even my books are banned in Bahrain which was not the case previously but with the increasing alliance with the Saudi rulers it became very difficult for somebody like myself to go there.
I do remember the shock I had when the camera moved to certain neighbourhoods in Bahrain where people lived in a supposedly wealthy state: the kind of urban decay and squalor while we had this image of the downtown area completely renovated, part of global liberal economy. This was shocking. I had read many books on Bahrain and had already familarised myself with the history of the country. It was very shocking to see the disparity between certain neighbourhoods and the glamour of this banking centre which was promoted.
Saudi Arabia with Salman’s doctrine worked in two directions. It worked as a counter revolution in some countries but also as a revolutionary force in other countries. To give you can example. In Egypt, Bahrain, and Tunisia all of those places Saudi Arabia supported the status quo and tried to derail the uprising either diplomatically or militarily and also by pouring funds into the groups that would maintain the status quo and suppress any democratic impulse.
So Bahrain, unfortunately was a victim of the counter revolution of Saudi Arabia. But in Yemen Saudi Arabia knew that in Yemen politics is too complicated and its civil society is very strong so they brokered a peace agreement that allowed Ali Abdullah Saleh to come back to Yemen and stay there. But then the whole agreement erupted and it didn’t work until we get to 2015 when different factions started fighting and were supported by outside funds and encouragement.
In Yemen the Saudis were allowed to experiment with newly acquired arms that had been accumulating for decades. And it is interesting that the war in Yemen had two aspects. One of the aspects was targeting the domestic audience meaning the Saudis themselves. As you know between 2015 – 2018 Saudi Arabia was undergoing a serious re shuffle of its princes and main actors. So Prince Salman suppressed all the other princes and promoted his own son Mohammed Bin Salman who was young and made him minister of defence. He knew that his son didn’t and still doesn’t have legitimacy and acceptance across the board and among members of the royal family.
So historically Prince Sultan used to deal with the Yemen file and then some members of King Abdullah’s family tried to deal with Yemen. But from now on we have a new Minister of Defence Hamid Bin Salman who wanted to assert that he is the new face of Saudi Arabia and a military adventure in Yemen was expected to provide the right moment for him to score a victory and then possibly pave the way for him becoming king after his father passes away.
This kind of behaviour was targeting domestic audiences. The Saudis needed to see a new desert warrior. If you remember in the 1990s – 1991 when Khalid bin Sultan the desert warrior according to the Saudi narrative was able to push the army of Saddam Hussein outside Kuwait. Nobody mentions that there were 500,000 US and international troops who arrived in the kingdom to defend it against a possible invasion by Saddam Hussein.
So had Mohammed bin Salman been able to score that victory then he would have been crowded as the new desert warrior. But unfortunately for him Yemen was too complex to be pacified, conquered and shaped in a way that suits Saudi Arabia and its own national interest. So Mohammed bin Salman is now in this war for the sixth year and I can see how the logic of protecting Saudi Arabia and its southern border has actually turned against him because inside Saudi Arabia its oil and economic installations have become targets. Since February we see more and more attacks by drones sent from different parts of the Arabian peninsula. There is no clear path of actually finding out where these drones are coming from but they are the drones of the Houthis that target Saudi vital installations.
There are no independent journalists who could go to the border and assess what is going on there. There is a military zone on the border with Yemen but nobody can go there. Quite a lot of the population have been moved further north.
I was interviewing for my last book somebody who is from that region and he describes in great detail what is happening there. It got to the stage where the local population is actually scared of not the Houthis bombing them but the number of foreign troops from Pakistan from and other countries who have been settling there building barracks and living among the local population. They are worried about their daughters going out because the whole zone has become militarised.
But there are no independent journalists who could tell us what is happening on the border with Yemen and who is firing missiles. The Houthis are also probably now also exhausted by this war which has killed thousands of people. It has made Yemen a state with almost no institutions, no vital services, no hospitals no education and all of this is caused by the six-year war which allowed the Saudi prince to launch it with complete disregard for the consequences.
The other point is that Saudi Arabia has been building its arsenal of arms for almost four decades in ways that had made it not capable of launching wars but feeling that it can. Obviously the spending on armaments is increasing and it increased during the Obama era and eventually sky rocketed during the Trump administration because the relationship with Trump was transactional based on profit not on statesmanship or the national interest of the people in the region.
The Saudi military capabilities wanted to test their efficiency in Yemen unfortunately. We find that it can’t do it on its own and here we come back to the statement that Finnian made about the responsibility of the international community and countries that arm Saudi Arabia. The European parliament on several occasions recommended banning the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia that are used in Yemen. In Britain the Campaign Against the Arms Trade launched a legal battle with the British government in order to stop the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia and they went through an appeal as the judge decided the first time it is lawful and Britain has no responsibility when Saudi Arabia is using the arms.
But we also know how Saudi planes fly from their bases in Saudi Arabia and bomb Yemen with guidance and training by US and British military personnel. So the crisis in Yemen was regional and then it became international as many international actors were involved in supporting the Saudi aggression and making it even worse for the people of Yemen.
I just want to conclude by saying that the Saudi regime felt it was capable of launching a war although it does not have the ability to win the war. The initial goal was to secure the southern borders of Saudi Arabia and push back any Iranian influence on its southern border. However the war has dragged on for six years and the silence of the international community especially the partners of Saudi Arabia who arm it has been deafening.
There is a glimpse of hope as Biden during his election campaign made it clear that he would push for peace and he would like to see an end to this war. So far he has been in office for a couple of months but we do not see a serious effort to contain this conflict and pledging help to accept and make the actors that destroyed Yemen start building it and pay for the damage they have done throughout the last six years.
Saudi Arabia started a war that is impossible to win and the silence of the international community is deafening. I hope over the coming months we will see an international effort to put an end to this war that has not solved any issues in Saudi Arabia or between Saudi Arabia and its regional rivals. It has only resulted in the destruction of yet another Arab country.
Helen Lackner: Thank you very much for asking me to speak. Welcome to everybody and thank you very much to everybody for spending time and listening to this. Thank you to Professor Madawi who has covered an enormous amount of the territory and I will cover a little bit more leaving an enormous amount that will not be covered unless some questions arise.
I thought that the timing of this meeting is particularly appropriate because this month has two anniversaries of Yemen. First is the anniversary of March 18th which was the Friday of dignity in 2011 and I will speak briefly about this because what happened then is very much at the root of what his happening today. And secondly it will soon be the sixth anniversary of this operation known as Decisive Storm. Somebody recently made a comment how it was recently turned into Restoring Hope and it was more like restoring despair but I won’t go into that.
I will talk briefly about what happened in 2011 and about the transition. I will not talk in great detail about the war. I will also focus on why the Houthis are being as successful as they are and I will finalise on what is the major topic of this discussion: militarism and adventurism and briefly the role of the Emirates.
The main thing is that events and the uprising in 2011 were very much seen as a threat in the peninsula. What happened in Bahrain was a foretaste of what would happen later. Particularly Yemen is and has been for the last 50 years, a republic. It is the only non monarchy in the region. And even through its republican movement was not the best possible democracy you can imagine it certainly was not a simple, straight forward farcical operation as you had in places like Tunisia. You had elections that were going on which was very real and that was felt very much as threat and another reason why the regimes in the rest of the peninsula would not allow Yemen into the GCC which would have been a very positive thing to do and also set up the Gulf Co-operation Council initiative and later an agreement in 2011 which was designed to calm down the movement that had risen in Yemen against the Saleh regime.
You need to note that the involvement of the international community at large (the US the UK and everybody else – the ones I call the gang of ambassadors which had been set up a year earlier as the friends of Yemen) all were involved in this GCC initiative. It is also very interesting to see that the whole international community was very happy to have it named the GCC initiative. Also the GCC were happy to adopt it as an initiative when the actual original text that was agreed in November was actually a Yemeni document prepared by Yemenis with very little international involvement.
To come back to the 18th March. It was very important because the revolutionary movement in Yemen prior to the 18thMarch had been led by young and less young people who wanted a fundamental change of regime and were not just interested in replacing one elite with another elite or one group so crooks with another.
The important thing that happened on March 18th was that on that day Saleh’s snippers killed over 50 demonstrators. This was quite unprecedented and upset the people and led to a split in the regime. You not only had one particularly strong military character Ali Mohsen but also a number of politicians and ambassadors and others who changed sides and basically stopped being with Saleh and claimed that henceforth they were going to be with the revolution.
And then the opposition, at least the formal opposition which was led by the Islah party which is a combination of northern tribesmen and Islamists changed sides. The main thing is this was a turning point. After March 18th you had a conflict in Yemen that became increasingly militarised and which focused on the two major factions debating or fighting each other leaving the more independent or those who were seeking a political fundamental change basically side lined.
That does not mean we have to have illusions about the wonderful independence movement. They were great guys and women, they still are great guys and women but there were some very fundamental problems with this movement mainly the lack of an alternative economic programme. They did not in any sense change the neo liberal policies that had been implemented for a long time. There was an absence of organisation and of leadership.
I know formal leaderships have a nasty tendency of becoming quite unrepresentative and undesirable. However without any formal leadership and formal organisation there was no mechanism for them to mobilize people. The result of this situation was in November you had the introduction of this transitional regime where Saleh gave up the position of president and
that deal which was known as the GCC initiative basically was there to make peace between the rival groups of elites which had effectively been fighting it out for many months.
There was an idea on the part of the international community or the UN that somehow as a side line of this there would be some improvement for the population at large. But it wasn’t the primary objective and the idea was basically to keep Yemen quiet. The Salafis wanted Yemen to be weak enough not to cause a problem. At the moment the situation is not what many of them would have liked.
The result is that the transitional regime which was supposed to be there for two years was blighted by a number of factors. First there were considerable weaknesses and divisions within the transitional government. They had not made peace between themselves. The rivalry and the competition between them continued throughout that period and there were many who said the transitional regime was by far the most corrupt that ever existed in Yemen. I am not sure if that is true but it certainly was pretty corrupt. You had a continual struggle between these elements.
The second thing that went wrong with the transitional regime was that there was no improvement in the living conditions of the population at large. The development financing that had been promised in September 2012 never materialised. That was quite a lot of money. We are talking about almost $8billion. The meant that when the crunch came in 2014 the people had no inclination to go and support the transitional regime because they saw no improvement.
During that period another thing that happened was that both the Houthis became stronger and the southern separatists and the transitional regime continued arguing among themselves. Both had been excluded from the transitional government. The Houthis wanted to participate in it but they were excluded.
So the outcome was by 2014 you had an alliance between the Houthis and Salah and that alliance had started a year or so earlier. It had become public by 2014 but it was there because they shared objectives. They had been fighting six wars against each other since 2004 and between 2004 and 2010. So it is not exactly as if they were friends but they had a shared objective. The two objectives that they had was that they opposed the decentralisation which was very much a theme of what the international community was trying to push on Yemen. The Houthis wanted to gain power and Salah did not want to lose power so they were both very much concerned with retaining power.
So between this was the weakness of the transitional regime and the ambiguous position of all the external participants. You had the collapse of the transition by 2015. And just two more points about the transitional regime. One it had a number of other elements. The major one was the security sector reform. That was never implemented nor was it even effectively supported by the international community or indeed by anyone else.
The second one was the national dialogue conference which is usually equated with the transitional period even though there are a lot of other elements to the transitional period. That had the representation of what were known as the new revolutionary forces and they were supposed to be women, youth and civil society and maybe later we can spend a bit of time discussing why they are particularly new.
When this system collapsed you had the war start in 2015. It is important, particularly in the context of this discussion to realise that you cannot blame it exclusively on external intervention. You have a Yemen civil war between a number of factions with different objectives. These will remain relevant even if international intervention pushes for some kind of peace agreement in the coming months or maybe in a year.
There are a number of reasons why this war is continuing. One of them of course is the war economy. This is playing a major role. You have some of the old kleptocrats and you have some new kleptocrats all of whom are benefitting enormously from the war economy and the presence of these war profiteers cannot be ignored. They are there and they have a vested interest in the war continuing.
You also have a number of serious internal regional elements. You have the re emergence of southern separatism and I think it is important not to just mention the southern separatists but to also remember that there are a whole variety of southern separatists and that in the south there are also people who are not separatists. And in the rest of the country you also have a significant number of social and economic and increasing social visions and fragmentation. I had used the word sectarian just to be clear as was pointed out earlier sectarianism is not a traditional feature in Yemen. The Zaidis and the Sunnis lived quite happily but it is an element which the Houthis are currently promoting very heavily and which could become a serious relevant factor to the struggle is things continue.
So we now have had six years of war. I won’t go into details about this. If people want to ask about this we can talk about it later. Basically we are in a situation where the Houthis are in charge of about a third of the land and definitely about two-thirds of the population. They control not just the Zaidi highlands but a whole host of areas around them ranging from the Tihama to areas like Ibb and Taiz and Al Baida and increasingly now areas in the north-east.
The bombing by the coalition has had a considerable impact in destruction. But I think it is always important to remember that the naval blockade has caused more deaths and suffering in Yemen than the bombing. That is very important because people tend to concentrate on the bombing when they talk about the situation.
So I just what to say why I think the Houthis are so successful. They are not exactly a bunch of agreeable democrats that any of us would vote for. Basically there are a number of factors that have allowed them to achieve what they have achieved. The first one is the argument that they have that they are opposing external aggression. I think it is very clear that the Yemenis have had an ambiguous relationship to the rest of the Gulf and particularly to Saudi Arabia and therefore the claim of resistance to aggression is something that creates solidarity in the areas that they control.
They second thing is that they are running an incredibly authoritarian and repressive regime. Showing any sign of dissent with the Houthis is not a healthy thing to be doing. The third one is that they are in alliance with the northern tribes who are hostile the Hadi government even though you had a lot of complex splits there. They have more support among the Sadaa, the people others call the Hashmites the descendants of the prophet whom they basically promote. Again this is something we can go into if people want. In the medium to long term they are being very effective in a very intensive indoctrination system through education and other media. And finally what is making their life much easier is the complete disarray and chaos of the anti-Houthi movement of which again we can talk about later. There is such a multiplicity we can go on at length about this.
So now I would like to say a few things about the role of the UAE. You talk about the Saudi led coalition, they talk about the Saudi led coalition. It is always the Saudi this the Saudi that. The Emriaties are not just simple followers unlike the Sudanese and others who are just simple bodies there just to fight. The UAE is playing an active military and political role in the struggle and I will go into this a little bit.
The Emiraties have been very successful in avoiding much of the negative international publicity which the Saudis have suffered from and deservedly so. But what is equally clear is that the Emriaties have not been angels. So yes their strategy has been focused on the coasts. That is part of their long term strategy of maritime control. If you look at all the ports they are controlling along the peninsula and the Horn of Africa, along the Red Sea the only one they do not have control over is Djibouti because they got thrown out. This is part of their strategy.
I think there are a number of issues that arise from this. Their maritime strategy could in the medium to long term lead to either greater co-operation with China or an element of rivalry there. This strategy explains their focus on Hodeidah in 2018. They are flexible. Their military skills and their strategic skills should not be neglected. They have been withdrawing from the Asaad Base in Eritrea but they are currently building, or somebody is building for them, something that looks like a serious military base on Mailoun Island.
They claim to have left Yemen militarily but this is not actually true. They have maintained a number of very strategic positions that they want to maintain. There is also the situation in Socotra which is now almost totally under their control. If a Socotrti decides to tell the Emiraties that they can’t do something the guy who gets fired is the Socotri no one else.
There is still some influence from the outside world and the fact that the journalist Adel Al Hassani was released in the last few days shows the influence of the international community which is pleasant surprise given how the Emiraties have behaved in other cases.
When we talk about the Southern Transitional Council (STC) as being proxies of the Emiraties it is marginally more accurate than saying that the Houthis are proxies of Iran. The Houthis can continue without the Iranians. I am not sure how long the STC would manage without the Emraties and certainly they do a lot less independently than the Houthis do.
Their strategy ignores the reality of politics in the south or beyond. The other important element that one has seen in Yemen and in a few other places in an increasing divergence between the Emiraties and the Saudis. It started a few years ago and focused particularly on the STC on what happened prior to the Riyadh Agreement and the so-called implementation of the Riyadh Agreement. At first it started with the Emiraties who basically left Yemen in 2019 leaving it the Saudis to deal with.
It has even exploded into military clashes once or twice. It is now continuing. You are having a competition on other levels in things like headquarters. The Saudis want all the companies to install their headquarters in Riyadh which means they should move away from Dubai. Dubai is not likely to be very keen on this. This tension is an element that needs to be followed and is going to continue.
Very briefly I would like to talk about the prospects of peace. I think they are very limited regardless of Mr Biden hopes and intentions. They are constrained by the nature of UNSC 2166. I am glad to notice that more and people are saying it needs to be replaced. Some of us have been saying this for about five years. The UN has a special envoy who if he had any credibility to start with has not got much left.
Basically we need to remember that ending the foreign intervention in Yemen is not going to end the Yemeni conflict and I think that is something that is important. We have not talked about the humanitarian situation and about many other things. I would like to remind everybody that the current leaderships on all sides have no concern or sympathy or humanity or proper respect for the people of Yemen.
*Finian Cunningham is an award-winning journalist. He is a freelance writer and commentator for international news media, including the Strategic Culture Foundation (Moscow), Global Times (Beijing), Press TV (Tehran), RT and Sputnik (Moscow). He is twice-recipient of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromising Integrity in Journalism (2019, 2020). In 2011, he was in Bahrain covering the events of the revolution, including the military incursion by the Saudi and Emirati forces in mid-March 2011, and subsequent repression against the protest movement, until the Khalifa regime deported him in June 2011 over his critical reporting.
**Professor Madawi al-Rasheed is a Saudi Arabian professor of social anthropology. She has held a position at the department of Theology and Religious Studies in King’s College London and as a Visiting Professor at the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She gives occasional lectures in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. She is the granddaughter of Mohammed bin Talal al-Rasheed, the last prince of the Emirate of Ha’il. She has written several books and articles in academic journals on the Arabian Peninsula, Arab migration, globalisation, gender, and religious transnationalism. As of 2016, she is a Visiting Research Professor at the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore.
***Helen Lackner spent four decades working in rural development, including 15 in the three Yemeni states which existed since the 1970s. She is now a researcher mostly known for her work on the Middle East and Yemen in particular, a visiting fellow at ECFR and Research Associate at the Middle East Institute SOAS. She was Editor of the Journal of the British-Yemeni Society 2013-2020. She is the author of ‘Yemen in Crisis, the road to war’ (Verso, 2019) and has edited numerous books on Yemen, including ‘Why Yemen matters” (Saqi, London, 2014). She is now completing ‘Yemen: poverty and conflict’ to be published by Routledge next year.
