Activists and intellectuals had greeted the National Dialogue Conference with a combination of optimism and skepticism. By 2014, however, the Dialogue, and behind it the GCC initiative, were foundering. Talks persisted inside the Mövenpick Hotel in the upscale Haddah suburb of Sana‘a. However, elsewhere political, social, economic and environmental pressures were for the most part insufferable.
This chapter’s opening selection, Katherine Hennessey’s firsthand review of performances for a theatrical festival in Sana‘a in May, is striking for two reasons. First, readers unfamiliar with cultural invention in the poverty-stricken, purportedly backward periphery of the Peninsula might be surprised that such a festival takes place at all. Secondly, in light of subsequent events the plays Hennessey reviews seem almost eerily prophetic of the dangers that lay ahead.
The other entries convey how complicated matters have become by this time. Susanne Dahlgren and Anne-Linda Amira Augustin, respectively, reflect the mood in Aden and the southern governorates where irredentist sentiments ran high in 2013–14. Tobias Thiel offers a map of the proposed “federal” boundaries and the reasons they were rejected by the Houthis (among others).
That autumn, as the GCC initiative and the National Dialogue Conference unraveled, Stacey Philbrick Yadav and I struggled to make sense of events: Houthi rebels marched beyond their home turf in Sa‘dah, met resistance only in ‘Amran, rather easily occupied Sana‘a, and ventured into the Southern Uplands and the Tihama. Among the improbable twists was that after 10 years of warfare the Houthis joined forces with their old nemesis (the ostensibly deposed but still criminally proactive) ‘Ali ‘Abdallah Salih. The interim president Hadi (formerly Salih’s handpicked vice president) fled Sana‘a for Aden. The Houthi-Salih coalition followed him there, although it was abundantly clear that their fighters would face stiff, widespread popular resistance. Hadi left Yemen and sought refuge in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (setting the stage for events in the final chapter of this book, the Saudi-led, US-backed military intervention).
On October 9, 2014, a suicide bomber detonated himself in central Sana‘a, killing dozens of innocent people. Upon reading the news coverage of this terrible event my thoughts leapt back to a series of plays that I had seen performed in Sana‘a in the spring. Most of these performances took place under the aegis of the annual celebration of World Theater Day, known locally as the Festival of Yemeni Theater. Five months prior to the explosion in Sana‘a, a surprising number of the festival’s plays had made references to suicide bombing.
The festival’s opening production, Marzouq in the Role of the Terrorist, directed by ‘Umar ‘Abdallah Salih and performed on March 30, is a play within a play. It features an inept actor named Marzouq who is assigned a role as a suicide bomber but struggles to comprehend the motivations of his character. At one point during the performance, Marzouq entered “in character,” so far as he understands it: He is masked and carrying a rifle, which he points in the air, baffling his director. Marzouq explains that he is playing the kind of terrorist who attacks the power station and shoots at the power lines. The director responds furiously that Marzouq must follow the script: “The character wears a suicide belt. That’s so you can blow yourself up, and everyone around you!”
The subsequent night’s performance, Wa al-Hall? (What’s the Solution?), written and directed by Salih al-Salih, portrayed a neighborhood of ordinary Yemenis—a bookseller, an egg and potato vendor, an owner of a tea and sandwich shop—all trying to eke out a living in an atmosphere of deteriorating economic conditions and fragmenting social relations. Consumed by their own quotidian problems, they fail to recognize the danger in their midst, in the person of a long-bearded youth who accuses them, one by one, of having strayed from the true path of the faith. Though his verbal attacks escalate and his behavior becomes increasingly erratic, the others dismiss him as histrionic but harmless. In the last few moments of the play, to the horror of the other characters, he reappears wearing a suicide vest, at which the stage lights go dark.
Al-Tawhan, directed by Muhammad al-Rakhm, followed a remarkably similar plot, with a group of Yemeni characters going about their daily affairs, oblivious to the dangers of extremism until it is too late. A sinister, shadowy figure who lurks at the margins of the neighborhood eventually turns out to be a suicide bomber who has been biding his time so as to inflict the maximum possible damage with his lethal act.
Still another performance, Irhab ya Nas! (It’s Terrorism, People!), depicted a suicide bombing as one incident in a destructive chain of extremist violence that wreaks havoc on social relations. Here the central group of characters—once again, a set of “average” Yemenis, though this time predominantly young people—are gradually dehumanized by the fear and loss that mount inexorably with every explosion, every slaughter. In a stark departure from the social realism of the two aforementioned plays, this performance experimented with tableau scenes and stylized, symbolic action. At one point, the characters descended into animalistic fury, shrieking wordlessly at each other like monkeys, then snarling and snapping like a pack of stray dogs.
In May, as I watched the festival unfold on the stage of the Cultural Center night after night, the repeated focus on the issue of suicide bombing struck me as odd. Yemeni theater has not shied away from grappling with the issue of terrorism in the past. There are numerous Yemeni plays that show, for example, the aftermath of an explosion, or an act of mass violence, just as there is a subset of Yemeni plays that portray war and revolution. But contemporary theater in Yemen treats a remarkably diverse range of social issues. That four plays in a series of 13 at the Cultural Center would select the selfsame issue as a central theme was surprising, especially given the sadly broad range of threats and challenges facing Yemeni society.
More startling, though, was the repeated implication that suicide bombing was a serious threat facing the average Yemeni in Sana‘a. Certainly, the capital had seen its share of violence during the 2011 uprising, and had grown increasingly unstable in the subsequent years. Politicians and military figures ran the risk of assassination; the frequency of extrajudicial executions carried out by teams of two men on motorbikes, a driver and a gunman, even led to a ban on civilian motorbike traffic in the capital in September 2013. Indeed, as the festival ran its course this type of violence continued, most dramatically on May 5, when a French security guard was shot and killed in his car in broad daylight at a busy intersection in the heart of the capital. Yet this murderous violence, by and large, targeted particular individuals, and in that respect differed from a bomber detonating his belt in a crowded public square.
Residents of Sana‘a would of course have known about the gruesome violence of suicide bombing in other Yemeni cities, like the attack on South Korean tourists in Shibam in 2009. But this type of violence had rarely occurred in Sana‘a: One of the attackers killed in the 2008 attack on the US Embassy apparently wore an explosive vest; another in 2009 targeted the South Korean convoy that had come to repatriate the victims of the Shibam attacks, but that time the bomber killed only himself. In May 2012 the deadliest suicide attack in Yemen to date killed nearly 100 Yemeni soldiers as they rehearsed a parade for the annual celebration of Yemeni unification. Yet as frightening as that event was, many Yemenis continued to think of suicide bombing as being directed at particular targets—foreigners, the US Embassy, the military—rather than Yemeni society or the Yemeni everyman.
Clearly, Yemeni theater practitioners viewed the issue in a different light. Despite the fact that various other types of terrorist violence were making headlines and could conceivably have served as material for a play, all four of the plays described above focused on the issue of suicide bombing, as a clear and present danger to all citizens, about which residents of Sana‘a needed to be warned.
Yemeni actors and directors often describe themselves as educators. In Yemen, theater imparts essential information to a populace that still struggles with basic literacy; it strives to fill in some of the massive gaps left by a failed educational system. Theater is also both a means of and a forum for free and creative expression and for public debate about the myriad challenges facing the nation. To attend a theatrical performance in Yemen is, almost invariably, to witness a particular issue or perspective held up to public scrutiny on stage, embodied with careful consideration and in rich detail, with the aim of provoking social change—political reform, for example, or greater rights for women, or improvements to health care and education.
To attend the annual Festival of Yemeni Theater, then, with 10 or 12 plays staged in the course of a fortnight, is akin to peering at a cross-section of the social problems that Yemenis judge so pressing as to warrant the time and intellectual energy required to write, rehearse and stage a play. Suicide bombing was strikingly prominent as a theme, but the 2014 theater festival also provided audiences with a further assortment of thought-provoking topics running the gamut from human trafficking to preventive medicine.
Yet where in previous years the festival brought an exhilarating range of comedy, tragedy, farce, satire and melodrama to the stage, the 2014 festival instead struck a series of darkly pessimistic notes. Rather than enthusiastic calls to action, the 2014 performances repeatedly staged corruption and stagnation, violence and destruction. And where in the past the Yemeni stage tended toward utopian, wish-fulfilling conclusions in which the honest but downtrodden hero or heroine eventually triumphs and the evildoer is unmasked and punished, the 2014 plays predominantly portrayed villains who escape justice and suffering protagonists powerless to change their fate.
One of the festival’s first performances, Al-Tifl (The Child) directed by Ha’il al-Salwi, reads very clearly as a parable about the imminent dangers that violence poses to the innocent. The performance culminates in a chilling scene in which a frantic father grabs a rifle and shoots at the ruffian who has been ordered to spirit away his only son—but the bullet strikes and kills the infant instead of the thug. I had attended several rehearsals of the play in the weeks before the festival, but found myself unprepared for the disconcerting experience of watching the portrayal of the shooting death of an infant in a theater filled with Yemeni families and small children (parents may well have assumed from the title that the play was meant for children).
Al-Tifl was not the only festival play that startled its audience with its subject matter. Barakash wa al-Kash (Barakash and the Cash), written and directed by Luna Yafa‘i, took up the issue of human trafficking in Sa‘dah, a northwestern province on the Saudi Arabian border, as perpetrated by the greedy and utterly unscrupulous Barakash, who at one point in the play promises a prospective client “whatever you want, a Somali, an Ethiopian, a Djibouti.” Barakash targets the isolated and marginalized, kidnapping a young Yemeni woman, orphaned and with no adult male relatives, as she travels without a chaperone to take up a job to support her brood of small siblings. Barakash and his assistant repeatedly comment on the young woman’s beauty, implying that the captive is not merely a commodity for sale but also a potential sex slave.
Even more controversial was Yafa‘i’s decision to portray Barakash and his cronies as members of the Yemeni armed forces stationed in Sa‘dah. The portrayal of the army is somewhat redeemed by the play’s ending, in which an officer shocked by Barakash’s excesses blows the whistle, and a crack commando unit—whose captain is female—storms in and arrests Barakash’s henchmen. But the title character himself gleefully escapes, dressed Saudi-style in a thawb, a red-and-white kaffiyya and sunglasses, and carrying a briefcase stuffed with the profits of his trade. This conclusion seemed to sit poorly with certain members of the audience, particularly the armed, camouflage-uniformed guards who entered the theater during the final act to break up a scuffle between two rowdy groups of teenagers in the audience, and who remained stationed in the aisles, stone-faced, until the play’s conclusion. Yafa‘i has since complained that the administration of the Cultural Center refuses to provide her with a copy of its video footage of the production, which they allege insults the armed forces.
Yafa‘i was one of three female directors slated to produce their work at the 2014 festival. Unfortunately, one of the other female directors, Nargis ‘Abbad, withdrew Dab‘ al-Maydan (The Hyena in the Square), her creative adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, after eleventh-hour cuts to the budgets that the Ministry of Culture had offered the directors threw the festival into turmoil. It was a real loss for the audience: ‘Abbad had a grand, ambitious vision for her production, which meditated on the history of South Yemen and its fragile union with the north.
The festival’s other female director, Insaf ‘Alawi, struggled with her production, Al-‘Ushaq Yamutun Kull Yawm (The Passionate Die Every Day). ‘Alawi intended the performance of this classic Yemeni play as a tribute to its author, the well-loved and recently deceased poet and playwright Muhammad al-Sharafi, and it began well: The opening scene shows the audience the head of a morgue, who must decide whether the bodies of those killed in a recent conflict deserve the honor of interment in the Martyrs’ Cemetery, after their souls appear before him to plead their cases. Yemeni actor Muhammad al-Daybani gave a particularly powerful performance as a paraplegic in a wheelchair who recounts a tale of unjust suffering, including having his hand cut off as punishment for a theft that he did not commit. He cackles eerily at the end of his monologue that he should not be interred in any cemetery, since he is “the living dead.”
After this promising start, however, the production careened downhill. ‘Alawi inexplicably elected to replace the remainder of al-Sharafi’s script with an acrobatic performance followed by a video montage that included a filmed scene of various characters rising from their graves to perform a musical number and a series of images of world landmarks, and finally, a patriotic salute to a photo of al-Sharafi projected onto the back wall of the stage. All were perplexing choices, and most were executed in such deplorably amateurish fashion that one of the actors took to the stage afterwards to apologize for the faults in the production. The general consensus from stunned audience members was that the performance was a travesty of al-Sharafi’s script.
From teetering on the edge of disaster, the festival came storming back the following night with Man Anta? (Who Are You?), written and directed by ‘Abdallah Yahya Ibrahim. Its opening featured a laser light show set to thunderous techno music, and an actor in a monster mask skillfully breakdancing through a mist of dry ice, against a backdrop of black cloth, with irregular holes backlit in green, blue and purple, all of which was carried out with an unexpected degree of technical precision. It riveted the children and enthralled the teenagers in the audience—a crucial achievement, since the play revolves around a mystery and must hold viewers’ attention, no easy feat in the chaotic atmosphere of a Yemeni playhouse.
The plot features a monster that terrorizes a Yemeni neighborhood, kidnapping victims and dragging them off to his lair. An old man who escapes recounts that the monster’s hideout is filled with piteous crowds of captives—men and women, children and the elderly, Yemenis of every social status and description. The frightening scenes are interspersed with slapstick hilarity: Two chain-smoking, card-playing neighborhood youths keep up a rapid-fire series of jokes at the other characters’ expense, and the monster deftly inserts himself into two very funny dance numbers. The characters repeatedly but fruitlessly speculate about the monster’s identity, and eventually a courageous father vows to kill the monster and free his son from the dungeon.
After a thrilling fight scene the father stabs the monster with his jambiya, the curved dagger worn by many Yemeni men. The monster slumps to the ground—only to rise again, horror-movie fashion, startling the other characters (and some members of the audience). At this point a fearful character calls out, “Who are you?” The monster picks up a placard from a table on the set and brandishes it at the audience. On it is written a single word: al-saratan, Arabic for cancer.
The point of this production, as it turned out, was to educate Yemeni audiences about the disease and about the benefits of screening and early detection. At the conclusion of the play the actors addressed the audience from the stage, explaining that like the monster, cancer is a disease that can afflict Yemenis of all ages and classes. Volunteers passed out pamphlets including lists of risk factors and symptoms, as well as contact information for local clinics equipped to screen patients for various forms of cancer. In addition to its utility as a public service announcement, Man Anta? was technically sophisticated, visually appealing and cleverly written; it was an excellent piece of theater, the best in the 2014 festival. Moreover, despite the sobering material it was one of the few festival plays to pinpoint both a problem and a potential solution—a “call to action” in the typical tradition of Yemeni theater.
In contrast, Al-Hafila (The Bus), which depicts the struggles, fears and petty quarrels of a group of passengers who are stranded in a wasteland when their bus breaks down, seemed like its characters lack direction and purpose. Written and directed by Yahya Suhayl, it provided some colorful moments—the opening scene, for example, featured a wedding procession with both male and female characters in full regalia, accompanied by a group of musicians playing at earsplitting volume, no doubt titillating spectators accustomed to gender-segregated celebrations—but offered little of deeper significance.
Hikayat Amal (Amal’s Tale), written by ‘Adil al-‘Amri and directed by Nabhan al-Shami, achieved a more sophisticated level of character development than Suhayl’s play, then squandered it on a pat ending. The play dramatizes a piece of Yemeni folklore about the wahsh al-jabal, the mountain monster, whose lascivious attempts to prey on a young woman are thwarted when her friends and her teacher (all female) and their bus driver (male) band together to save her. They encircle the monster, accusing him of embodying all the social ills that they have endured in their lives (“You are corruption! Fear! Unemployment! Backwardness!”), then beat and execute him. A salutary message of strength in unity, certainly—if only “kill the monster” were a viable step toward a more stable and prosperous Yemen.
Mukafahat Nihayat Khidma (End-of-Service Payment), a one-woman show written by Munir Talal and capably acted by Amani al-Dhamari, searchingly explored the struggles of single women in Yemeni society—the pressure to accede to early or arranged marriages, the difficulties of pursuing higher education, the oft-frustrated desire to participate in society beyond the protective walls of the domestic sphere. The protagonist harbors hidden artistic talent, which she expresses by sculpting with her fingers a series of images in a thin layer of sand, constantly rearranging the grains on her makeshift canvas to create new forms out of the previous ones—each as beautiful, fragile and ephemeral as her hopes for happiness.
The festival’s final play, Al-Masir al-Ghamid (Destination Unknown), written and directed by Adam Sayf, was widely expected to be a rollicking musical comedy, the genre for which Sayf is best known. Yet rather than for the dances and the elaborate jokes, audiences will remember this performance for the moment that Sayf, in the midst of dialogue with another actor, turned to the minister of culture in his front-row VIP seat, and proceeded to mock the Ministry for the funding debacle that had thrown the festival into chaos.
The jokes were arch rather than devastating, and delivered with the sort of teasing tone one might take when ribbing a long-time friend. Nevertheless, it was clearly a moment in which a Yemeni artist had chosen to take his government to task—and the audience joined in, gleefully applauding Sayf’s every line. The lighting technicians even brought up the house lights, allowing the crowd to see plainly that the minister had been caught completely off guard at becoming a part of the play. While amusing, this interlude was also rather disquieting for those concerned about Yemeni government officials’ ability to respond adroitly to the unexpected.
Thus, even in its most bracing and memorable moments, the festival presented a grave, sobering assessment of the state of Yemeni society, and precious little hope for its future. Some of this pessimism no doubt stemmed from the shambolic administration of the festival. Disenchantment with the transitional government and the National Dialogue may have also contributed to the atmosphere of sardonic depression. Yet in hindsight, and in the wake of the Houthi takeover of Sana‘a in September and the suicide bombing in the capital in October, the performances also seem strangely prescient, as though, rather than portrayals of the current state of Yemeni society, they were in fact portents of its impending disintegration.
For the first time, a Million-Person Rally or milyuniyya will be held in Yemen’s oil-rich eastern province of Hadramawt. It is being called milyuniyyat al-huwiya al-junubiyya or the Million-Strong Rally for Southern Identity.
The mass demonstration aims to unify all of the southern Yemeni protests against the Sana‘a regime. For two years now, milyuniyya rallies have been held in Aden, the hub of southern Yemeni revolution, gathering large crowds of men from all over the southern provinces and women from less far-flung areas to give voice to the concerns of southerners before the world. The object of the April 27 rally is to commemorate the 1994 “war against the south” that led to the downfall of the southern army and the solidification of ‘Ali ‘Abdallah Salih’s rule, understood by many southerners as a northern occupation. The choice of Mukalla, Hadramawt’s main port, as the site for the demonstration is significant: only months earlier tribes gathered to form the Hadramawt Tribes Confederacy in order to resist what is considered a systematic looting of the fruits of the land by the regime, which is distributing business deals to its cronies while marginalizing locals. The tipping point was the murder of a notable tribal sheikh at an army post, which sparked a full-blown popular uprising.
The uprising has halted oil production in this province where about 80 percent of Yemen’s oil reserves are located. The Council of Peaceful Revolution for Freedom and Independence in Hadramawt has declared each Thursday a day of civil disobedience in a manner copied from other southern provinces and attracting an astonishing unanimity of popular participation. Hadramawt’s involvement in the all-southern uprising was further strengthened by the agreement declared in February from Beirut between the former southern leaders ‘Ali Salim al-Bayd and Hasan Ba‘um, two rival leaders of the uprising. The slogans for Mukalla are strongly worded, to say the least: One reads, “I am a Southerner, oh nation! No Yemenization after today.”
Still, many people in Aden are hesitant to make the 310-mile trip to Mukalla for fear of an army crackdown after the entry of forces into the area earlier this week. For those who are not willing to make the dangerous trip, another million-strong rally is planned for downtown Aden. Still, for others, like the young activist and poet Huda al-‘Attas, the question remains: Will such gatherings solve the problem of world indifference to southerners’ rightful demands?
The Yemeni regime in Sana‘a could take this opportunity to show that the transition process agreed upon under the patronage of the GCC countries, the United States and European states, and the National Dialogue Conference it set in motion, are indeed peaceful and inclusive. The entry of tanks into downtown Mukalla, violence against activists in Lahij and Aden and the crackdown on the revolutionary square in Mansoura, where two activists remain “disappeared,” all suggest otherwise.
“Our revolution is the South Arabian revolution,” shouted five or six men at a march in Crater, a district of Aden, on March 20, 2014. The mass of demonstrators answered in unison: “Get out, get out, oh colonial power!” The call-and-response pattern continued: “Our revolution is the South Arabian revolution.” “Against the power of the tyrants.” The stanza concluded with the chant leaders prompting, “No unity, no federalism,” and the crowd again thundering, “Get out, get out, oh colonial power!”
It was a protest mounted by the Southern Movement, or the Hirak, whose activists hail from the full spectrum of southern Yemeni society. In 2007, former soldiers, students, state employees and unemployed youth took to the streets of Aden and other towns to demand an end to the marginalization of the south at the hands of the central government in Sana‘a since unification of the north and south in 1990. The “southern cause” (al-qadiya al-janubiyya), as southerners call their collective grievances, came to be felt keenly after the war between north and south in 1994, when southern factories were looted, land was stolen and southerners were forcibly retired from the civil service and the army. After the government’s security forces beat back the first protests, the Hirak began to sharpen and harden its objectives. It now calls for the complete independence of the territory of the former People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) from Sana‘a. The “southern cause” has become the “South Arabian revolution.”
Slogans are mirrors of a movement’s values and claims. In the Southern Movement’s rhetoric, the territory of the former PDRY is “occupied” by (northern) Yemenis. The term “colonial power” (isti‘mar) refers to southerners’ perception of northern domination, prompts a comparison of Sana‘a’s control to British rule and evokes the independence struggle of the 1960s.
Moreover, the denunciations of colonial power reflect southerners’ rejection of the shape of the political transition in Yemen that began at the close of 2011. Facing popular uprisings and armed rebellions, former long-term president ‘Ali ‘Abdallah Salih was compelled to resign from office as a result of an initiative by the Gulf Cooperation Council, made up of Saudi Arabia and the other monarchies in the Arabian Peninsula. One key outcome of the National Dialogue Conference that followed Salih’s resignation was the decision to reorganize Yemen into six federal regions, two of which are to divide the south. The Hiraki leadership refused to participate in the Conference because the Sana‘a elites and their international partners did not recognize the right to self-determination for the south.
On the afternoon of May 21, two months after the rally in Crater, the Adeni quarter of Mu‘alla was the scene of a mass demonstration (milyuniyya) whose discourse was also revealing of the Hirak’s determination to achieve independence. Mass demonstrations in the south normally take place on two consecutive days and bring together groups from inside and outside Aden. The occasion this time was the twentieth anniversary of the announcement of southern disengagement from the north before the 1994 war by ‘Ali Salim al-Bayd, the Socialist Party head under the PDRY who briefly served as vice president of unified Yemen. An intrinsic part of every rally is the fa‘aliyya, a celebration during which everyone in attendance has the opportunity to perform a song, recite a poem or deliver a speech from the stage. Demonstrators fill the short breaks between the different acts with chants.
Journalist Radfan al-Dabis of the Aden Live satellite channel headlined the May 21 event. “We swore by God,” he incanted into his microphone, “we swore.” The crowd of thousands of southerners gathered in Madram Street roared in response, “Sana‘a cannot govern us!” The slogan makes explicit that the Hirak considers Aden, the former capital of the PDRY, to be the center of legitimate power.
Next came a song whose refrain the protesters repeated over and over: “My country, my country is South Arabia / And the capital of the republic is Aden.” It was an old Yemeni anthem composed by Ayyoub Tarish but with a Hiraki twist. The original chorus goes: “My country, my country is Yemen / I greet you, my homeland, in the course of time.” The rephrasing ties today’s movement to the southern Yemeni past. Before 1967, the year the PDRY gained its independence, the territory was governed as the Federation of South Arabia (Aden and its hinterland) and the Protectorate of South Arabia (eastern part of southern Yemen) by the British and local sultans and sheikhs, respectively. The revised refrain refers simply to “the south” (al-janub), the popular abbreviation for al-janub al-‘arabi, or South Arabia. Any reference to Yemen is pointedly omitted.
After a woman gave a speech, the May 21 protesters launched into another set of rhyming slogans: “State of South Arabia / Free it, oh struggler / I want our territory / And nothing nugatory (dawlat al-janub / harrarha ya munadil / bafani ardna / ma bafani shay’ batil).” “Territory” or “land” is a central theme in the Southern Movement’s rhetoric and in local newspapers. After unification in 1990, the command economy of the avowedly Marxist PDRY was liberalized. An investment law opened the country to foreign capital, and the September Directive of 1991 enabled the sale of land that had been nationalized in the PDRY’s early days. In the ensuing decade, there was a rush on the former state land. Functionaries in the state bureaucracy and army officers took immense kickbacks from the sales and expropriated some of the estates themselves. Southern feelings about the land grab are still raw.
The protesters on May 21 went on to applaud a pro-independence pop song, and then a brass band in PDRY marine uniform provided the soundtrack for a march of women up and down Madram Street. Again, the women sang, “My country, my country is South Arabia / And the capital of the republic is Aden.” After several repetitions, the crowd chanted in rhythm, “Get out (irhal), get out, get out of Aden, get out of Aden.” The target of their ire was clear—northern Yemenis who work in trade or study at the university. Many southerners see it as an affront that they have to compete with northerners for places at the institution of higher education or in the civil service—a competition in which they often lose out.
To the accompaniment of the brass band, young men cried out, “With spirit and blood, we devote ourselves to you, oh South Arabia.” It was another resonance with the past—or, more precisely, today’s reinterpretation of the past. In the days of the PDRY, southern children chanted this classic Arab political slogan in school, but to dedicate themselves to Yemen, not the south. The refashioned slogan draws a clear distinction between southerners and northern Yemenis. The “South Arabian identity” is constructed from remembered experiences of life under the PDRY. In the memories of the older generations, and the nostalgia they pass down to the young, southern identity stands for modernity and cosmopolitanism, whereas “Yemeni identity” is seen as backward, tribal and corrupt. Many southerners think of the PDRY as a secure, well-functioning civil state that supplied jobs, education and health care to all. They believe that northerners, by contrast, are unable to build a civil state—hence the failure of the National Dialogue.
At first, the women who had been marching urged on the male youths: “Advance, oh men, advance, advance, advance.” After a while, though, the women joined in the men’s devotion of themselves “to you, oh South Arabia.”
The next chant on the agenda again rebuked the government in Sana‘a. “O South Arabian, raise your voice! Independence or death!” The protesters here expressed the depth of southern distaste for northern rule. They also played on a saying of ‘Ali ‘Abdallah Salih, “Unity or death,” which he had inserted in speeches and emblazoned on placards in Aden’s streets to convey to southerners that any attempt at independence would fail. As this chant resounded, the marching women returned to their seats.
The May 21 milyuniyya finished with another sequence of call and response. “Raise your head,” television anchor al-Dabis exhorted the throngs of southerners, who answered him, “You are a free South Arabian.” This Hiraki adaptation of an iconic holler from the Egyptian uprising of 2011—“Raise your head, you are Egyptian”—can also be found scrawled on walls all over Aden.
The rallies of the Hirak have the dual function of displaying the breadth of dissent to the regime in Sana‘a and informing the outside world about the “southern cause.” The anti-northern stance is obvious. But the protests also have a large impact internal to the Southern Movement, particularly via the PDRY slogans that have been reinterpreted for the exigencies of today. The slogans contribute to the formation of identity and collective memory among Hirak activists—and can even constitute instruments of collective power.
The protesters in Aden’s streets are mostly underprivileged—aging southerners who lost their jobs after 1994 or youths who have never been able to find a job at all. Many of the activists lead individual lives of quiet frustration, even desperation, but chanting and marching to music they turn their airing of grievances into a loud, whooping celebration. Together, they can be heard from afar.
“This is no longer a movement,” said the young man whose Facebook name is Khaled Aden. “This is a revolution.”
Khaled, whose real name is Khalid al-Junaydi, is a leading activist in the Hirak, or Southern Movement, which aims to restore independence to southern Yemen. I met him on a Saturday morning in April 2013 at a street corner in Crater, the old part of Aden, located inside an ancient volcano. Here the liberation front fought some of their fiercest battles against the British colonial forces in the mid-1960s, and here the Hirak often confronts the security forces of the government in Sana‘a. The parallels between the two struggles are so striking that Aden Live, a Hiraki satellite channel based in Beirut, regularly airs a clip splicing images from the 1960s together with footage from today’s confrontations.
[…]
Khaled Aden, as he likes to be called, lives in the same area that I did and is one of the few wealthy enough to have a car. He is an engineer and runs his own small business, the only way for graduates here to get a job, as public-sector positions are distributed from Sana‘a. While driving through the narrow streets of colonial-era neighborhoods, Khaled told me that the gas I inhaled is meant for exterminating animals and not for crowd control. It causes rashes and severe breathing problems. But the gas was not the only reason why he was there every Saturday and Wednesday morning. Demonstrators were being hit by live ammunition every week, and his car was needed to take the injured to the clinic.
When we arrived at the clinic, the owner was himself receiving medical attention—he had been attacked by government troops in a nearby street. Clinics and hospitals in southern Yemen were once functioning parts of the World Health Organization system, but no longer. This private clinic is one of many in town that provides decent care—to those who can afford it. The owner is a supporter of the Hirak; the activists said he has guaranteed free treatment to demonstrators who have been hurt.
On one occasion, the activists brought an injured plainclothes member of the security forces to the clinic. People in the street had set upon the security man with fists and handbags after he was identified as the killer of an unarmed activist, based on a video clip. Young boys call him the Blue Ghost, for his blue eyes, a rarity in Yemen. He has a reputation for utter mercilessness, and Khaled told of being criticized by comrades for staging the rescue. Government troops recovered the Blue Ghost from the clinic, and the authorities never investigated the allegations against him.
The following Wednesday morning, the situation was even more serious near my house. There were more gunshots as troops ran into Crater. They had come to trash one of the squares where the Hirak holds its gatherings. Older men shouted at the troops as one of their number was struck by a soldier’s rifle butt. The troops returned later to finish the job. Two middle-aged women yelled at them, but the confused soldiers left them alone. After the troops left Crater, I heard that two teenaged boys had been shot, one of them fatally. In the square, the photos of previous martyrs were torn down and the modest platform that activists had built totally destroyed.
The next day some 60 residents gathered in the square, men and women, of all ages, mostly very poor. Overnight someone had printed photos of the dead boy, Ahmad Darwish, 17, on posters and distributed them. Ahmad’s mother and grandmother were there to vent their anger amid their grief. The grandmother, dressed in a worn-out overcoat, asked the emotionally charged questions on everyone’s lips: “Where is the United Nations? Where are our human rights?”
On the Saturday following these dramatic events, older people came into the streets to protect the young boys. Troops arrived in tanks and fired tear gas. But this time there were no casualties—perhaps because of the presence of women in the streets. While women have lost their lives, too, their challenges to “the occupying forces,” as government troops are called here, are somewhat protected by the culture of men showing respect for women.
For all the similarities to the mid-1960s, there is one clear difference—today’s “anti-colonial” movement insists on unarmed resistance. In the birthplace of the struggle against the British, the Lahij governorate, the fighting has been bloody for years. But in Aden, once the cosmopolitan hub of the Arabian Peninsula, resistance means civil disobedience, strikes, meetings to educate the younger generation in history and the strong presence of women.
The more well-to-do activists say they aim to restore a civil state—one free of domination by the tribal, religious and military elites who rule in Sana‘a. They want a multiparty system and a strong focus on services for the poor. For the less well-off, though, the Hirak is a revolution for a decent life. Women’s rights is also a key political goal. As a young woman explained, women want to reemerge from the shadows where they have been since the 1990 unification. At the various gatherings, however crowded, the only seats available are reserved for women and there is no harassment. Men lament the increased prominence of the niqab, the full-face veil. There is a general will to restore women to their place “alongside men in building society,” as per the rhetoric of the Yemeni Socialist Party that governed the People’s Democratic Republic from 1967 to 1990. Intellectuals and schoolteachers complain about the distortion of southern history by the regime in Sana‘a. According to the regime narrative, before unification the south was barely developed and Aden was merely a village. Southerners are now more or less unanimous that they will not regain their dignity as long as they are together with the north. Still, while men in the street use harsh words about northerners, the Hirak leadership tries to downplay the idea that the movement is against northerners as people. Such an idea would be racist, one Hirak leader told me.
[…]
Though the entirety of southern society supports the cause, it is the poor who confront the troops sent by Sana‘a. The revolutionaries who brave the bullets are primarily young boys with no shoes. In many squares, meanwhile, it is poor women of all ages who play the most vocal part with their demands for a normal, decent life. It is the poor who organize the demonstrations and attend the lectures in the squares. These places of street-level organizing can be found in almost every district of Aden. The uneducated learn about the city’s history, and the young learn about life before unification, when there were no water and power cuts and every graduate got a job. Occasionally, a preacher is invited, and numerous men of religion have joined the movement, but overall the movement is clear that southerners will not be subordinated with appeals to faith. One of the key demands of the Hirak is an apology for the fatwas that reactionary northern clerics have issued against “unbelievers” in the south.
On October 14, the Hirak convened in Aden to commemorate the fifty-first anniversary of the uprising against the British. At the march the movement issued a hasty plan: The Yemeni administration and army is to withdraw from the entirety of southern territory by November 30, the date of southern independence in 1967. While the streets are ready for independence, Adeni intellectuals fear that the movement is not. The intellectuals fear a repeat of 1967 when the sudden British exit left behind a new country with almost no resources. Amid the frenzy the Houthi take-over of Sana‘a has created in the south, an Adeni activist commented wisely on his Facebook wall: Southerners did not realize it until weeks later, but the date of separation of north and south was actually September 21, the day the Houthis rolled into the Yemeni capital.
And Khaled Aden, the engineer who ferries the wounded in clashes with government troops to the clinic? According to Amnesty International, he was arrested and held without charge in Aden’s al-Sulban prison, twice in 2011 and again in November 2013. He was kept in a small cell without ventilation, lights or a toilet. On August 31, 2014, Khaled Aden disappeared again. He was held incommunicado for nearly three months. Upon his November 14 release, he received a hero’s welcome in Aden’s protest square.
Map 5: Proposed Federal Boundaries. (2014)
Produced by the Spatial Analysis Lab, University of Richmond
With the war in Yemen well past its hundredth day, confusion persists as to the underlying causes of the conflict. Far from a sectarian proxy war between Shafi‘is under the patronage of Saudi Arabia and Zaydis backed by Iran, as the mainstream media would have it, the hostilities are rooted in local quarrels over power sharing, resources and subnational identities. These wrangles, in turn, are part of a broader negotiation process among domestic forces over a new social contract after the 2011 removal of the long-time president, ‘Ali ‘Abdallah Salih. At the core of this struggle lies a dispute about the future state structure, which provided the catalyst for the breakdown of the post-Salih transition road map sponsored by the Gulf Cooperation Council and the ensuing escalation to full-blown interstate war.
The continuing failure to bring the adversaries to the table recalls the civil war in North Yemen in the 1960s, when rivalries for regional hegemony between Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Britain prevented a local settlement between Yemeni royalists and republicans. Much to the same effect, today’s international support for President ‘Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi fuels the adamant insistence of his locally untenable government-in-exile on the implementation of the lopsided UN Security Council Resolution 2216, which calls for the unilateral withdrawal of Houthi fighters from captured territory and the resuscitation of the GCC initiative as preconditions for, rather than objectives of, talks. In order to break the deadlock, it is crucial to reopen a dialogue about the six-region federal division, which was rammed through, over the objections of the Houthis and others, at the National Dialogue Conference (NDC) that was intended to be the showpiece of the post-Salih transition.
Though hailed as a forum for averting Syrian-style civil war in Yemen, the NDC did not live up to expectations. As a Yemeni friend of mine sarcastically remarked after its conclusion in early 2014, “the NDC resolved all of Yemen’s problems—except for the secessionist strife in the south, the Sa‘da conflict in the north, national reconciliation, transitional justice and state building.” In other words, it failed to overcome every major stumbling block on its agenda.
The lack of genuine consensus on a new state structure proved the most salient shortcoming. As the NDC approached its original closing date in September 2013 with no agreement in sight, a subcommittee with eight representatives from each side, north and south—known as the 8+8 Committee—was charged with finding a solution to the southern question. In its Agreement on a Just Solution, the working group, which included one Houthi delegate, unanimously affirmed that the Republic of Yemen—a unitary state with 21 governorates—should become a federal entity. This agreement was never revisited or approved by the NDC’s 565-member plenary, but simply accepted as a fait accompli.
Though united behind the principle of federalism, the 8+8 Committee failed to settle on the number of new federal regions (two, five or six) or their boundaries. Instead, the committee outsourced these decisions to another fairly unrepresentative committee, handpicked and chaired by President Hadi, which was to study the parameters of a federal order. Established shortly after the release of the NDC’s final communiqué, this 22-member Committee of Regions took less than two weeks to delineate six new federal regions—Azal, Saba’, al-Janad, Tihama, Aden and Hadramawt. The process violated NDC rules, lacked broad consultation and was too short for the detailed studies that should have been commissioned. Nevertheless, its conclusions were referred to the Constitution Drafting Committee.
Even though all but the Houthi representative had signed off on the new map, most major political movements, including the Yemeni Socialist Party, the salafi Rashad Union and the southern Hirak, as well as the Houthis, publicly rejected or expressed reservations about the six-region federal division. The Houthis argued that the plan distributed natural wealth unevenly. It deprived the Azal region, in which the Houthis’ historical homeland of Sa‘dah is situated, of significant resources and access to the sea. Here the Houthis were referring, respectively, to the hydrocarbon-rich governorate of al-Jawf and the Red Sea province of Hajjah, both of which the movement has traditionally considered within its sphere of influence.
Riding a wave of popular discontent with the transition, the Houthis radically altered the political landscape when they took control of the capital Sana‘a in September 2014. The conquest fell just short of a coup, as the Houthis signed the Peace and National Partnership Agreement (PNPA) with President Hadi and others to relieve tensions. Articles 8, 9 and 10 of this agreement called on Hadi to reconstitute the National Body for the Implementation of NDC Outcomes, which was to revisit the state structure to align it with the agreements made by the NDC rather than those by the Regions Committee.
UN Special Mediator Jamal Benomar paving Yemen’s road off a cliff. (December 2, 2013)
By Samer Mohammed al-Shameeri
Even before the draft constitution was released in January 2015, the Houthis reiterated their rejection of the six-region federal structure contained in the document. When Hadi nevertheless attempted to move forward the constitutional process by circumventing the PNPA, tempers flared. On January 17, the president sent his office director Ahmad bin Mubarak to deliver the draft document to the National Body, which had not been reconstituted. Enraged by this political intrigue, the Houthis flat-out kidnapped Mubarak to thwart the six-region federal order. The move set in motion a chain of provocations that culminated in the overthrow of the Hadi government, his escape into exile and the Saudi-led bombing campaign.
A crucial, albeit frequently overlooked fact is that the Houthis have repeatedly stated their acquiescence to a federal system—be it jointly with the Hirak, in the form of a two-region federation, or in the form of a six-region division based on a sound political process. Rather than a rejection of federalism per se, the Houthis’ refusal of the six-region division is as much grounded in the lack of a genuinely inclusive decision-making process as in the specific parameters that undermine their interests. While none of this background serves to justify the Houthis’ recourse to arms, it does highlight the need for a new transition process based on equitable power sharing and sincere ownership across Yemen’s diverse political and geographic landscape as the only way out of the crisis.
On September 21, 2014, fighters of Ansar Allah, the military wing of the Houthi movement, conquered Yemen’s capital. Soon some militants occupied the home of 2011 Nobel Peace Prize winner Tawakkul Karman, a leader of the 2011 uprising against the regime of President ‘Ali ‘Abdallah Salih and a member of the Islamist party Islah. When the young men tweeted photos of themselves sprawling on her flowery bedspread with automatic weapons and bags of qat littered around them, the Houthi fighters conveyed a triumphal logic of coercive power, here sexualized for maximum impact. They later apologized, saying that the intent was to “guard” the Nobel laureate’s home. But the takeover of Karman’s house fell into a pattern of attacks on the homes of Islahi leaders, including the villa of the infamous Gen. ‘Ali Muhsin, commander in Salih’s wars against Ansar Allah. Many outside observers reported the advance of a ragtag militia into Sana‘a and beyond as a struggle between the “Shi’i” Houthis and assorted “Sunnis,” among them Islah. More than sectarian animus, though, the autumn turn of events demonstrated the political appeal of some Houthi positions, including critique of the excesses of Yemen’s established elite and rejection of the transitional mechanism advanced by the Gulf Cooperation Council and Western enthusiasts. It was, as journalist and youth activist Farea al-Muslimi observed, “a breakdown of the Saudi-backed order.”
Most English-speaking journalists and policy analysts have advanced one of two main speculations about the Houthi advance. The first dominant trope emphasizes the Zaydi roots of the Houthi movement, ahistorically framed as an “Iranian-backed Shi’i militia.” In assuming an all-purpose Shi’i vs. Sunni simplification, transposed from Iraq and Lebanon onto Yemen, this storyline deductively misidentifies all of the Houthis’ adversaries—from the government to the tribes surrounding Sana‘a—as “Sunni.”
This notion is flat-out wrong. Zaydism is related to the dominant Twelver form of Shi’i Islam institutionalized in Iran in the same way that, say, Greek Orthodoxy is an offshoot of Catholicism—the statement makes sense, maybe, in schismatic terms, but in terms of doctrine, practice, politics and even religious holidays Zaydism and Twelver Shi’ism are quite distinct. Moreover, historically, the city of Sana‘a and all points north were the Zaydi heartland. Resistance to the Houthi advance did not come from “Sunni tribesmen,” as so many reporters suggest, but from sons of Zaydi tribesmen who, when they joined the neo-conservative Islah, adopted or converted to a “Sunni” identity inspired by Saudi Wahhabism and/or the Egyptian Society of Muslim Brothers. The al-Ahmar clan, paramount sheikhs of the historically Zaydi Hashid tribal confederation clustered between Sa‘dah and Sana‘a, and who detest the Houthis, are Zaydi by parentage and Sunni by denominational conversion via partisan affiliation with Islah. On the other side, the majority denomination in the coastal and southern midlands provinces are the Shafi‘is, who are Sunni (in the same way that Lutherans or Methodists are Protestant) but rarely identify themselves as such—even if historically they distinguished themselves from the Zaydi regimes in Sana‘a. Instead, to the limited extent that this conflict is “sectarian,” it is also institutional: It began with a rivalry between Houthi summer camps and the Saudi-financed Salafi institute in the small, historically Zaydi town of Dammaj, which is a story rather more precise and interlaced with contemporary state power than the implied frame of an “age-old” dispute between the two main branches of Islam allows.
[…]
The second prevalent narrative places great faith in the will and capacity of foreign donors and consultants to broker a gradual, peaceful transition from authoritarianism. It goes something like this: Yemen is yet again “on the brink” of self-destruction, but the GCC monarchies and Western advisers can save it from itself.
These two angles have converged in a cockeyed view of the impact of regional and international forces. Iran is often said to be the bugaboo behind the Houthi militia, seen as a wannabe counterpart to Hizballah in Lebanon. Yet Saudi patronage of salafi elements within Islah and long-standing Saudi backing of the Salih regime have been bracketed off from explanations of what are purported to be purely domestic machinations. Furthermore, journalistic and think-tank reporting has tended to overlook the deleterious effects of US counter-terror airstrikes against al-Qaeda targets on state sovereignty and regime legitimacy.
Houthi forces march into the South Yemeni quicksands. (March 2015)
By Samer Mohammed al-Shameeri
In focusing on sectarian divisions and/or the Yemeni state’s (in)capacity to monopolize the legitimate use of force, the mainstream accounts distract attention from fundamental renegotiations of the nature of the state and the regime. The dominant narratives also misstate the threats to Yemeni sovereignty, which abound, but are neither denominational nor purely endogenous.
The Houthi militia’s advance from their base near the Saudi Arabian frontier through Zaydi strongholds in ‘Amran (seat of the Hashid confederation) into Sana‘a—and onward into Shafi‘i-majority provinces like Hudayda (on the Red Sea coast) and Ibb (in the mountainous midlands)—must be read as positioning, an intent to renegotiate Yemen’s political regime. A regime is an intermediate stratum between the government (which makes day-to-day decisions and is easy to alter) and the state (which is a complex bureaucracy tasked with a range of coercive functions). As such, a regime is understood by political scientists as a system of rules and norms by which power is distributed across and through state institutions. Yemen’s political regime is in the process of being rewritten. By engaging in armed conflict and political maneuvering around the composition of the new government and revolutionary populist appeals, the Houthis have attempted to influence Yemen’s future regime on several fronts.
On another level, Yemen’s convulsions can never be comprehended as separate from the power structures of the Arabian Peninsula, dominated by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the other filthy rich petro-kingdoms of the GCC, which in turn are protected by the US military. With average per capita incomes not much higher than the poverty level in Saudi Arabia, Yemen absorbs both migrant laborers expelled from the Gulf and desperate refugees fleeing East Africa. Millions subsist on less than $2 per day. And things are getting worse.
In some ways the Houthis represented subaltern objections to the agreement initiated by the self-consciously Sunni petro-monarchies of the GCC, formalized by the United Nations and facilitated by international experts, that culminated in the National Dialogue Conference of March 2013–January 2014. The Houthis and other dissidents maintained that the GCC initiative sought to demobilize the mass 2011 revolutionary uprising by sanctifying an elite pact between members of the Salih regime and its formal, multiparty, cross-ideological “loyal” parliamentary opposition, the Joint Meeting Parties. The JMP, in turn, was dominated by a conservative northern alliance of Islah, the Sana‘a old guard and the Hashid confederation. Given the GCC monarchies’ interest in stability in the most restive quarter of the Arabian Peninsula, the agreement contained a number of provisions to undermine populist demands for a democratic transition.
These measures included legal immunity for former president Salih and his family; the uncontested election of his long-standing vice president, ‘Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, as chief executive for the transitional period; exclusion of both the Houthis and the southern Hirak from the transitional governing coalition; and the division of cabinet portfolios equally between Salih’s GPC and the JMP (mainly Islah). The Houthis’ posture as “outsiders” let them present themselves as revolutionary challengers to the insufferable status quo ante. So the Houthis walked into Sana‘a largely unopposed, mainly because people were fed up with the GCC’s repackaging of the ancien régime, and secondarily for primordial reasons (because Sana‘a remains a largely Zaydi city where historically prominent local families are, like the Houthis’ leaders, sayyids, or direct descendants of the Prophet). Rather than a sectarian appeal, the speech given by the movement’s leader, ‘Abd al-Malik al-Houthi, to mark Ansar Allah’s occupation of the capital was full of stirring populist, nationalist rhetoric and widespread complaints about corruption intended to appeal to southerners, other Shafi‘is and most Yemenis.
Surely control of state institutions is crucial. There was credible speculation that President Hadi decided against resisting the Houthi advance into the capital; although counter-intuitive given his past wars against them, it also became clear that Salih was encouraging Ansar Allah in order to disrupt the transition. As vice president, Hadi had witnessed firsthand the perpetual triangulation that helped to sustain his predecessor’s power. In the 1990s, the GPC and Islah, both based in what had been North Yemen, ganged up against the Yemeni Socialist Party. After vanquishing the south and diminishing the Socialists in 1994, Salih turned on his right-wing challengers and erstwhile allies in Islah. In response, Socialists joined centrist elements in Islah and several smaller parties in the JMP to forge a unified counterweight to one-man military-based rule. Throughout the 2000s, Salih worked to neuter this parliamentary alliance by chipping away at Islah’s salafi edge and pitting it against the moderate opposition center. Never fully successful, this strategy strained the alliance and preoccupied its leadership at the expense of its grassroots. Salih’s triangulation helps to explain why, on the eve of the 2011 uprising, and during “youth” encampments spanning over a year, the loyal opposition enjoyed so little credibility. Its formal condemnation of human rights abuses had fallen by the wayside.
Meanwhile the Houthis had a history of conflict with Islahis and associated salafis in far northern Sa‘dah. When the GPC needed Islah, Salih’s party protected its religious schools, which were recruiting converts in the Zaydi heartland. When the Houthis protested—and eventually took up arms—some Islahi leaders supported Gen. ‘Ali Muhsin’s scorched-earth campaigns.
In 2011, centrist Islahis like Karman seemed to find common ground with Houthi partisans while camped out in protest squares for months on end to bring down Salih. As the GCC agreement became a reality, however, conservatives in Islah, burnishing a “Sunni” philosophy favored by the Gulf monarchies, were rewarded by the transitional terms.
Once in power, Hadi returned to Salih’s playbook to cut Islah down to size. As the largest and most influential member of the Opposition Coalition, and as a party willing to buy into the GCC initiative, Islah benefited disproportionately from the deal. It was the best organized of the member parties, with the largest popular base and share of parliamentary seats (however moribund the parliament, elected in 2003, may have been) and the strongest backing from nearby petro-monarchies. Fighting broke out between militias affiliated with Ansar Allah and tribal forces identified with Islah and/or backed by neighboring “Sunni” monarchies, first in al-Jawf and eventually during the siege of the salafi school in the village of Dammaj near the frontier with Saudi Arabia, in the autumn of 2012.
Islah’s reaction to the fall 2014 crisis showed its political experience relative to the Houthis, but also revealed its weaknesses. While condemning the Houthi aggression against its infrastructure and leaders, Islah nonetheless did not engage the Houthis militarily in Sana‘a. Rather, leaders challenged the state to restore order. When instead Hadi allowed Houthi militants to overtake security and infrastructural institutions, he signaled his own desire to clip Islah’s wings. Unable (or perhaps unwilling) to generate popular counter-mobilization, Islah quibbled over seats in the new government of Prime Minister Khaled Bahah on the basis of an outmoded parliamentary portfolio assembled in 2003.
The National Peace and Partnership Agreement signed by President Hadi, representatives of the Houthis and other political parties on September 21 called for a new, broadly inclusive and/or non-partisan technocratic government. To Islah’s dismay, space was made for the Houthis and the southern Hirak, including some Socialists.
Debates over government portfolio allocations masked more serious issues related to the nature of the regime. While the privileging of Islah by transitional institutions fomented conflicts in Dammaj and al-Jawf and inflected the conflict with a neo-sectarian tenor, the Houthis’ move into the capital coincided with mounting anxiety over the ongoing constitutional drafting process. The six new federal districts recommended by the National Dialogue Conference—two in the former south and four in the north—were avowedly designed to devolve some power to subnational units and also to stem the possibility of southern secession. In the abstract, or to outsiders, the federal proposal sounded appealing. Yet it was not anchored in local realities and reflected the advice of international consultants more than local constituencies. It seemed oblivious to the enormous technical, administrative and political difficulties to be faced in dismantling 22 existing provincial structures and creating new seats of authority. Pressure mounted on the Constitution Drafting Committee to reconcile the demands of the Houthis, the Hirak, entrenched political parties and external patrons.
Houthi speaking “in the name of the people.” (February 8, 2015)
By Samer Mohammed al-Shameeri
As the Houthi military campaign pressed well beyond Sana‘a, their fighters amassed heavy weapons in al-Bayda, north of the former inter-Yemeni border, site of numerous US drone strikes against al-Qaeda targets. There, Ansar Allah faced off against Ansar al-Shari’a, known in English as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP. Residents of al-Bayda and southern provinces sided variously with the Houthis, Ansar al-Shari’a or the Hirak based mainly on very local allegiances and grievances.
When youths in Sana‘a, Aden, Hudayda, Ibb, Ta‘iz, al-Bayda and other parts of the country took to the streets in 2011 demanding “the downfall of the regime,” they meant the status quo ante dominated by Salih, his family, the GPC, the Hashid tribal confederation, Islahi conservatives, the northern security apparatus and the entrenched corrupt bureaucracy—all rooted in the northern Zaydi heartland and all (nonetheless) backed by the Saudi kingdom, other GCC monarchies and, by extension, the United States. The GCC-brokered transition agreement kept this regime intact while politely inviting Salih to transfer the reins of power to Hadi (a native southerner and GPC member). American airstrikes against what recently seemed the main threat to both the Gulf monarchies and American hegemony in the Peninsula, the Sunni-identified Ansar al-Shari’a, continued or accelerated.
Ansar Allah’s astounding military successes in, and then beyond, the northern Zaydi highlands confused matters—all the more so against the backdrop of the formidable sweep of the nihilist, radically anti-Shi’i neo-Sunni group in Syria and Iraq known variously as “the Islamic State,” ISIS, ISIL or Da’ish, the Arabic acronym for ISIL. Within Yemen, Ansar Allah and Ansar al-Shari’a, both declared by the Saudi kingdom to be “terrorist” (read: anti-systemic) entities, have been presented as locked in mortal, antithetical, “sectarian” conflict. At about the same time, Washington called for sanctions against Salih and two Houthi leaders on the grounds that they were spoiling the GCC-sponsored transition plan. US policy in Yemen is, as ever, reactively aiming at a moving target, and strongly shaped by the US-Saudi alliance.
Like the strange selfies of Houthi home invaders luxuriating on Tawakkul Karman’s bedspread, these events are nearly inscrutable to outsiders—or, indeed, to Yemenis, who are hardly of one mind amid the dizzying twists and turns. One commentator, Haykal Bafana, described the “jarring bipolarity” between de facto US support for the Houthis via drone attacks on rival AQAP targets in al-Bayda even as other organs of the Obama administration appealed to the UN for sanctions against Houthi militia leaders, considering this juxtaposition an “elegant summation” of dysfunctional and probably ineffectual American policy. Farea al-Muslimi noted with irony that the Houthis have given al-Qaeda even “more legitimacy than [US] drones did in the past.” The Ansar al-Shari’a present themselves as a bulwark “against this new gorilla called the Houthis,” he ventured, opposition to which “now sells” among the general public. Despite its origins in institutional conflicts and regime machinations, the “sectarian issue,” al-Muslimi observed, now has provided “more political capital than AQAP ever dreamed of.”