By Ahmed A S Hashim When the Roman Empire held sway over much of the Western world and dominated its near abroad, the Romans, quite fa...
By Ahmed A S
Hashim
When the Roman
Empire held sway over much of the Western world and dominated its near abroad,
the Romans, quite familiar with this remote region, used to refer to Yemen as
‘Arabia Felix,’ or Happy Arabia.
Image Attribute: San'a Houses
At Dusk Yemen Digital Art by Michael Robert Powell
It would be an
understatement to say that this moniker is hardly appropriate to Yemen in
contemporary times. Indeed, Yemen has not been a happy place for the longest of
times. Like most of its other Arab neighbors it lacks water, unlike most of
them it has hardly any oil. It is the poorest country in the Arab world and
currently as The Economist so felicitously put it recently: the Arab world’s
poorest country is being bombed by its richest, Saudi Arabia. It would not be
remiss to call it ‘Arabia Infelix,’ or unhappy Arabia.
Poverty is not
its only or even most pressing problem, seemingly endless civil wars and
violent politics are. The country has suffered from a multitude of conflicts
and civil wars as far as most people can remember. Its people fought the ruling
Ottoman Empire in an insurgency at the turn of the 20th century. This was a
vicious insurgency that few people know much about. In the 1960s when the
country was split into North and South Yemen, there was a civil war in the
north between Royalists and Republicans. Saudi Arabia and the West supported
the Royalists and the Egyptians and the Soviet bloc supported the Republicans.
The latter won and they set up a republic in the North. Meanwhile, down in
South Yemen, equally interesting things were afoot. South Yemen was a colony of
the British, and then called the Aden Protectorate. The British had seized the
southern part of the country because the city of Aden was one of the best
natural harbors in the world and it was a port of call for the Royal Navy and
merchant ships on the way to India, Britain’s prize possession. In the 1960s
the British faced an insurgency in South Yemen; this was one they did not win.
Following the British withdrawal in 1967 – essentially a defeat – a government
of radical secular nationalists took over. The country then became an avowedly
Marxist-Leninist state, the only one in the Arab world. It began helping
Marxist insurgents in Dhofar, the impoverished region of the Sultanate of Oman
bordering Yemen. The People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) as it called
itself also engaged in machinations against other Arab regimes, including the
republic in North Yemen, whose capital was Sana’a. The Saudis supported the
North Yemenis against South Yemen because Riyadh was terrified of Marxists on
its doorstep. In 1989 the Soviet bloc started to unravel and so did the PDRY.
In 1990 it joined with the north to create the Republic of Yemen. For the
longest time, Yemen developed some of the most democratic politics of any Arab
country and there was a budding civil society. However, it was a superficial
democracy as precious few, if any, strong state institutions were built.
Politics revolved around personalities and their respective constituents. Under
President Ali Abdallah al-Saleh, the elite power centers were represented by
the presidency itself in the person of Saleh, the army under the control of
General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar and his relatives, and the Islamist Islah Party
under Sheikh Abdallah al-Ahmar, which dispensed money and goods to the Sunni
Arab tribes of the north courtesy of the deep pockets of the northern neighbor,
Saudi Arabia, always seeking to ensure that the Yemeni state remained
perpetually weak. In 1994 a civil war broke out between the recently united
North and South Yemen. Southerners accused the northerners of political
discrimination in jobs at the center of power in Sana’a and also of economic
discrimination because of Sana’a’s failure to provide funds for economic
development and social services. Major air and ground battles erupted with air
force units from the south bombing the capital and the north retaliating by
bombing Aden, the regional capital of the south. Missiles were also used
against cities. The North won because it had a preponderance of military power
and because when the south seceded nobody in the international community
recognized it. Saudi Arabia supported the south not because of any ideological
sympathy but because of a desire to keep Sana’a weak. In 2011 Yemen also
underwent a revolutionary hiatus like several of its Arab counterparts. The
revolution succeeded in overthrowing the famously corrupt regime of Ali
Abdallah Saleh when he lost the support of the wobbly Yemeni military and
security forces. The conservative Arab countries, notably Saudi Arabia, were
concerned by the collapse of a ruler whose political antics kept Yemen weak and
quiet – just as the Saudis wanted – and the emergence of various political
forces ranging from those calling for democracy, southern Yemeni separatists
calling for a secular democratic republic in Aden, and Salafists calling for
Islamic government.
The main
concern of the Saudis as well as the international community was the seeming
re-emergence of the al-Qaeda affiliate, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
(AQAP), which naturally took advantage of the chaos to enlarge areas under its
control. Though it met with a bloody nose on some occasions, it did manage to
render vast areas ‘no-go’ zones for the Yemeni state. The other group, the one
that worried the Saudis even more was the Houthi movement, formidable Zaidi
Shia guerrillas from the most northern part of Yemen – thus bordering Saudi
Arabia. The Houthis are members of a rebel group, also known as Ansar Allah
(Partisans of God), who adhere to a branch of Shia Islam known as Zaidism.
Zaidis make up one-third of the population and ruled North Yemen under a system
known as the imamate for almost 1,000 years until 1962. The Houthis take their
name from Hussein Badr al-Din al-Houthi. He led the group’s first uprising in
2004 in an effort to win greater autonomy for their heartland of Saada
province, and also to protect Zaidi religious and cultural traditions from
perceived encroachment by Sunni Islamists, who were being provided with greater
leeway in politics by the Sana’a government. After Houthi was killed by the
Yemeni military in late 2004, his sons took led another five rebellions before
a ceasefire was signed with the government in 2010.
In 2011, the
Houthis joined the protests against then President Saleh and took advantage of
the power vacuum to expand their territorial control in Saada and neighboring
Amran province. Saleh fell from power in a coup orchestrated by outside powers
and was replaced by Abdel Rabo Mansur Hadi, a southerner with no constituency
or power bloc in the north. The Houthis subsequently participated in a National
Dialogue Conference (NDC), which led to President Hadi announcing plans in
February 2014 for Yemen to become a federation of six regions. The Houthis
however opposed the plan, which they said would leave them weakened and without
resources for their province or sufficient access to power at the center. They
rose up again.
The current
round of perpetual war in Yemen pits the Houthis on one side against the
remnants of the Yemeni state, Sunni tribes in the north who adhere to Salafist
ideas and are suspicious of the Houthis, and of course AQAP, which is
concurrently fighting what remains of the Yemeni state. AQAP detests the Shia,
but not on the level of the Islamic State, some of whose warriors have
allegedly infiltrated into Yemen to fight the Shia Houthi movement. As if this
not convoluted enough, it seems that the southern separatist movement is also
involved in the fighting, but on whose side nobody really knows. Ali Abdallah
Saleh, the former president and ever the opportunist told his supporters to
take the Houthi side.
From the above
it becomes quite clear that whatever happens in Yemen does not stay in Yemen.
Others get involved because Yemen is strategically located and because its
weaknesses attract all sorts of ‘miscreants’ such as the infamous and deadly
al-Qaeda affiliate known as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) who scare
the regional powers and international community. Currently though, it
Is the
multi-level civil war dominated largely by the struggle between the Houthis and
the ineffectual Hadi that has caught the attention of regional powers and the
international community. After Houthi forces closed in on the president’s
southern stronghold of Aden in late March 2015, a coalition led by Saudi Arabia
responded to a request by Hadi to intervene and launched air strikes on Houthi
targets. The coalition comprises five Gulf Arab states and Jordan, Egypt,
Morocco and Sudan. The conflict between the Houthis and the elected government
is a proxy war between Saudi Arabia, a conservative Sunni Arab state, and
non-Arab Shia Iran. Relations between the two powers have deteriorated sharply
in recent years due to many factors, most of which have nothing to do with
Yemen. The crisis in Yemen has, of course, been a further aggravating factor.
Gulf Arab states have accused Iran of backing the Houthis financially and
militarily, though Iran has denied this, and they are themselves backers of
Hadi. Yemen is strategically important because it sits on the Bab al-Mandab
strait, a narrow waterway linking the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden, through
which much of the world’s oil shipments pass. Egypt and Saudi Arabia fear that
if the Houthis consolidate control over all of Yemen, they would most likely
ally themselves unofficially with the Islamic Republic of Iran. If the IRI is
present in Yemen that is a threat to the soft underbelly of Saudi Arabia and
Egypt. The conflict is likely to go on indefinitely because regional and
international attention is focused primarily on the events in Syria and Iraq.
About The
Author:
Ahmed A S
Hashim, Associate Professor, Nanyang Technological University. He can be
reached by an email : isashashim@ntu.edu.sg
___________________________________________
Publication
Details
Citation:
Hashim AAS (2015) Yemen Arabia Infelix. J Def Manag 5:127. doi:
10.4172/2167-0374.1000127
© 2015 Hashim
AAS. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License
