The Yemen Catastrophe: Beset by Contradictions of Will and Intellect
Published on
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
by
Global Justice in the 21st Century
The Yemen Catastrophe: Beset by Contradictions of Will and Intellect
by
Richard Falk
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A boy and his sisters watch graffiti artists spray on a wall, commemorating
the victims who were killed in Saudi-led coalition airstrikes in Sanaa,
Yemen on May 18, 2015. (Photo: Reuters)
Any attempt to provide a coherent account of the political strife afflicting
Yemen is bound to fail. The country is crucible of contradictions that defy
normal categories of rational analysis. If we look beyond the political fog
that envelops the conflict the tragic circumstances of acute suffering
imposed on the civilian population do emerge with stark clarity. Long before
the outbreak of civil warfare, Yemen was known to be the poorest country in
the region, faced with looming food and water scarcities. The UN estimates
80% of the population is in urgent need of humanitarian assistance, 40% live
on less than $2 per day. Further there are high risks of mass famine and
epidemic outbreaks of disease will occur, while continuing chaos is a near
certainty, with the prospect of yet another wave of desperate migrants swept
ashore in Europe.
Against this background, the UN Security Council seems shockingly supportive
of a major Saudi military intervention via sustained air attacks that
started in March 2015, severely aggravating the overall situation by
unanimously adopting a one-sided anti-Houthi Resolution 2216. This Saudi use
of force is contrary to international law, violates the core principle of
the UN Charter, and magnifies the violent disruption of Yemeni society. The
success of the Houthi insurgency from the north that swept the Yemeni
leadership from power, taking over the capital city of Sanaa, was perversely
treated by the Security Council as a military coup somehow justifying the
intervention by a Saudi led coalition of Gulf countries pledged to restore
the 'legitimate' government to power. To grasp the geopolitics at play it is
clarifying to recall that the 2013 blatant military coup in Egypt, with much
bloodier reprisals against the displaced elected rulers, aroused not a
murmur of protest in the halls of the UN. Once more the primacy of
geopolitics is showcased in the Middle East. It's not what you do, but who
does it, that matters when it comes to a UN response.
What makes it even more difficult to make sense of developments in Yemen is
the geopolitical tendency, as abetted by the media, to reduce incredibly
complex national histories and the interplay of multiple contending forces
to a simplistic story of Sunni versus Shia rivalry for the control of the
country. Such a prism of interpretation, above all, allows Saudi Arabia to
portray once again the strife in Yemen as another theater of the wider
region proxy war pitting Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies against Iran,
which is a guaranteed way of securing U.S. and Israeli backing. The same
rationale has served the Kingdom well (and the world badly) in explaining
why it supports anti-Assad forces in Syria during the last several years. It
also was the pretext for intervening in Bahrain in 2011 to crush a popular
pro-democracy uprising. If considered more objectively we begin to
understand that this sectarian optic obscures more than it reveals, and not
accidentally.
For instance, when it came to Egypt, however, the sectarian template was
completely discarded, and the Saudis immediately used their financial muscle
to help the anti-Muslim Brotherhood coup in 2012 led by General Sisi to
consolidate its control over the country. Even when Israel attacked Gaza a
year ago, seeking to destroy Hamas, a Sunni Islamic version of the
Brotherhood, Saudi Arabia made no secret of the startling fact that it gave
Tel Aviv a green light. What emerges, then, is not a regional politics based
on sectarian priorities, but rather a pathological preoccupation with regime
stability in the Saudi monarchy, with anxieties arising whenever political
tendencies emerge in the region that elude its control, and are perceived as
threatening. Part of the truer explanation of Saudi pattern of behavior also
has to do with the Faustian Bargain struck with the powerful Wahabi
establishment, which has allowed the Saud royal clan to flourish at home
while spending billions to spread the most repressive version of Islam far
and wide to madrassas throughout Asia. The fact that the application of
Wahabism at home, including more than 100 beheadings already this year and
confinement of women to an extent that makes the Islamic Republic of Iran
appear liberal by comparison, is a further sign that international clamor of
human rights is selective to put it mildly.
The people of Yemen are paying a huge price for this brand of Saudi violent
security politics. Whether it is paranoia at work or a healthy respect for
the mass unpopularity of its policies, or some mixture, is difficult to
assess. Yet what seems clear is that much of the world is lulled to sleep,
not taking the trouble to peer below this sectarian cover story. Only scant
account taken of the fact that the real threats to regional order in Yemen
do not come from a reasonable Houthi insistence on power-sharing political
arrangements, but mainly arise from the presence in Yemen of Al Qaeda of the
Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and ISIS that have been long targeted by American
drones as part of the war of the terror ever since 2007. So while the West
supports the Saudi fight against the Shia Houthis at the same time it does
its best to weaken their most formidable domestic opposition, and in the
process further alienates the Yemeni civilian population by its military
tactics, which recruits more extremists committed to fighting against this
second form of external intervention that finds no basis in international
law and enjoys the tacit support of the UN Security Council.
If this was not enough to make the Yemeni crystal ball opaque, there is the
internal alignment of forces. On the one side, the 2012 successor regime to
the corrupt dictatorial rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh that is headed by its
equally corrupt former vice president, Abd Rabbaah Mansour Hadi, now
apparently 'governing' from exile, although rumored to be seeking a return
to Aden. On the anti-regime side, in addition to the Houthis, are the main
military and police forces that still respond to the authority of the ousted
leader, Saleh, who has returned to the Yemen struggle to oppose the Saudi
intervention and have helped turn the tide of battle on the ground against
the Hadi-led government. Despite this adverse battlefield reality, the Saudi
ambassador to the U.S., Adel al-Jubeir, was quoted as saying "We will do
whatever it takes to protect the legitimate government of Yemen from
falling." Tragically, what this seems to mean, is reducing the country to a
shambles that brings starvation and disease to the population, and possibly
escalating at some future point of frustration by the launch of a ground
offensive. There are confirmed reports of a massing of Saudi troops close to
the Yemen border.
At this point, it is difficult to know what would bring some kind of peace
and stability to Yemen. What we do know is that both the sectarian optic,
Saudi intervention, and American drone warfare are dead end options. The
beginning of a constructive approach is to take root causes of the current
conflict into account. Several need to be considered. There is a long
experience of division in the country between the north and the south, and
this means that any unity government for the whole of Yemen can only be
sustained by an iron-fisted dictator like Saleh or through a genuine
power-sharing federalist kind of arrangement based on decentralized autonomy
and a weak central governmental structure. Beyond this, the country bears
the scars of Ottoman rule intermixed with a British presence in Aden and the
surrounding area, vital to earlier colonial priorities of controlling the
Suez and the trade routes to the East.
Additionally, and often forgotten and ignored, Yemen remains a composite of
tribes that still command the major loyalty of people and reign supreme in
many locales. The modern European insistence on sovereign states in the
Middle East never succeeded in overcoming the primacy of Yemeni tribal
identities. Any possibility of political stability requires subsidizing and
respecting Yemen's tribes as Saudi Arabia did during Saleh's dictatorship
(1990-2012) or creating a multi-colored quilt of autonomous tribal polities.
When the background of the north/south split and persisting tribalism are
taken into account recourse to the Shia/Sunni divide or the Riyadh/Tehran
rivalry as an explanation of Yemen's strife-ridden country is more than a
simplistic evasion of a far more complicated reality. It is a cruel and
futile fantasy.
What should be done, given this overall situation? One potential key to
achieving some kind of peace in Yemen is held by policymakers in Washington.
So long as the U.S. Government remains beholden to the rulers in Saudi
monarchy, to the extremists running Israel, and insistent on striking at
AQAP targets with drone missiles, this key is unusable. This combination of
factors is what makes the wider political turmoil in the Middle East stuck
on a lethal fast moving treadmill. How to get off the treadmill, that is the
question for which there answers, but as yet no relevant political will.
There are two obvious moves, neither ideal, but with the modest goal of a
first step in creating a new political order: first, negotiate a ceasefire
that includes an end to the Saudi intervention; secondly, establish a more
credible revival of the National Dialogue Conference that two years ago made
a failed attempt at Gulf initiative in Sanaa to find a power-sharing
arrangement. It did not help matters then that two successive Houthi
representatives at the diplomatic discussions were assassinated on their way
to participate. What is needed is establishing a political transition
sensitive both to the north/south split and the strength of Yemeni tribes
coupled with massive economic assistance from outside, as well as the
establishment of a UN peacekeeping presence tasked with implementation and
the termination of all forms of external armed intervention. Nothing less
has any chance of working.
Such a rational path is currently blocked, especially by the intense
militancy of the aggressive Saudi leadership of King Salman bin Abdul Aziz
Al-Saud, and his son, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Secretary of Defense, the
apparent champion of military intervention. The United States, with its
special relationship to Israel, its strong ties to Saudi Arabia, and faith
in drone led counterterrorism seems to be swallowing the central
contradiction between opposing both its real adversaries, AQAP and ISIS, and
its implicit ally, the Houthis. Instead of treating the enemy of their enemy
as a friend, Washington has reversed the proverb. This Gordian Knot is
strangling the people of Yemen. Cutting it will require a drastic break with
current policy. The way forward is evident, but how to get there is not, in
the meantime the bodies pile up in what has long been considered the poorest
country in the region severely stressed by the prospect of severe water
scarcities.
C 2015 Richard Falk
Richard Falk
Richard Falk is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human
rights. An international law and international relations scholar who taught
at Princeton University for forty years, since 2002 Falk has lived in Santa
Barbara, California, and taught at the local campus of the University of
California in Global and International Studies and since 2005 chaired the
Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Read more articles by Richard
Falk.
The Yemen Catastrophe: Beset by Contradictions of Will and Intellect
Published on
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
by Global Justice in the 21st Century
The Yemen Catastrophe: Beset by Contradictions of Will and Intellect
by
Richard Falk
. 9 Comments
.
. A boy and his sisters watch graffiti artists spray on a wall,
commemorating the victims who were killed in Saudi-led coalition airstrikes
in Sanaa, Yemen on May 18, 2015. (Photo: Reuters)
. Any attempt to provide a coherent account of the political strife
afflicting Yemen is bound to fail. The country is crucible of contradictions
that defy normal categories of rational analysis. If we look beyond the
political fog that envelops the conflict the tragic circumstances of acute
suffering imposed on the civilian population do emerge with stark clarity.
Long before the outbreak of civil warfare, Yemen was known to be the poorest
country in the region, faced with looming food and water scarcities. The UN
estimates 80% of the population is in urgent need of humanitarian
assistance, 40% live on less than $2 per day. Further there are high risks
of mass famine and epidemic outbreaks of disease will occur, while
continuing chaos is a near certainty, with the prospect of yet another wave
of desperate migrants swept ashore in Europe.
. Against this background, the UN Security Council seems shockingly
supportive of a major Saudi military intervention via sustained air attacks
that started in March 2015, severely aggravating the overall situation by
unanimously adopting a one-sided anti-Houthi Resolution 2216. This Saudi use
of force is contrary to international law, violates the core principle of
the UN Charter, and magnifies the violent disruption of Yemeni society. The
success of the Houthi insurgency from the north that swept the Yemeni
leadership from power, taking over the capital city of Sanaa, was perversely
treated by the Security Council as a military coup somehow justifying the
intervention by a Saudi led coalition of Gulf countries pledged to restore
the 'legitimate' government to power. To grasp the geopolitics at play it is
clarifying to recall that the 2013 blatant military coup in Egypt, with much
bloodier reprisals against the displaced elected rulers, aroused not a
murmur of protest in the halls of the UN. Once more the primacy of
geopolitics is showcased in the Middle East. It's not what you do, but who
does it, that matters when it comes to a UN response.
. What makes it even more difficult to make sense of developments in
Yemen is the geopolitical tendency, as abetted by the media, to reduce
incredibly complex national histories and the interplay of multiple
contending forces to a simplistic story of Sunni versus Shia rivalry for the
control of the country. Such a prism of interpretation, above all, allows
Saudi Arabia to portray once again the strife in Yemen as another theater of
the wider region proxy war pitting Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies against
Iran, which is a guaranteed way of securing U.S. and Israeli backing. The
same rationale has served the Kingdom well (and the world badly) in
explaining why it supports anti-Assad forces in Syria during the last
several years. It also was the pretext for intervening in Bahrain in 2011 to
crush a popular pro-democracy uprising. If considered more objectively we
begin to understand that this sectarian optic obscures more than it reveals,
and not accidentally.
. For instance, when it came to Egypt, however, the sectarian template
was completely discarded, and the Saudis immediately used their financial
muscle to help the anti-Muslim Brotherhood coup in 2012 led by General Sisi
to consolidate its control over the country. Even when Israel attacked Gaza
a year ago, seeking to destroy Hamas, a Sunni Islamic version of the
Brotherhood, Saudi Arabia made no secret of the startling fact that it gave
Tel Aviv a green light. What emerges, then, is not a regional politics based
on sectarian priorities, but rather a pathological preoccupation with regime
stability in the Saudi monarchy, with anxieties arising whenever political
tendencies emerge in the region that elude its control, and are perceived as
threatening. Part of the truer explanation of Saudi pattern of behavior also
has to do with the Faustian Bargain struck with the powerful Wahabi
establishment, which has allowed the Saud royal clan to flourish at home
while spending billions to spread the most repressive version of Islam far
and wide to madrassas throughout Asia. The fact that the application of
Wahabism at home, including more than 100 beheadings already this year and
confinement of women to an extent that makes the Islamic Republic of Iran
appear liberal by comparison, is a further sign that international clamor of
human rights is selective to put it mildly.
The people of Yemen are paying a huge price for this brand of Saudi violent
security politics. Whether it is paranoia at work or a healthy respect for
the mass unpopularity of its policies, or some mixture, is difficult to
assess. Yet what seems clear is that much of the world is lulled to sleep,
not taking the trouble to peer below this sectarian cover story. Only scant
account taken of the fact that the real threats to regional order in Yemen
do not come from a reasonable Houthi insistence on power-sharing political
arrangements, but mainly arise from the presence in Yemen of Al Qaeda of the
Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and ISIS that have been long targeted by American
drones as part of the war of the terror ever since 2007. So while the West
supports the Saudi fight against the Shia Houthis at the same time it does
its best to weaken their most formidable domestic opposition, and in the
process further alienates the Yemeni civilian population by its military
tactics, which recruits more extremists committed to fighting against this
second form of external intervention that finds no basis in international
law and enjoys the tacit support of the UN Security Council.
If this was not enough to make the Yemeni crystal ball opaque, there is the
internal alignment of forces. On the one side, the 2012 successor regime to
the corrupt dictatorial rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh that is headed by its
equally corrupt former vice president, Abd Rabbaah Mansour Hadi, now
apparently 'governing' from exile, although rumored to be seeking a return
to Aden. On the anti-regime side, in addition to the Houthis, are the main
military and police forces that still respond to the authority of the ousted
leader, Saleh, who has returned to the Yemen struggle to oppose the Saudi
intervention and have helped turn the tide of battle on the ground against
the Hadi-led government. Despite this adverse battlefield reality, the Saudi
ambassador to the U.S., Adel al-Jubeir, was quoted as saying "We will do
whatever it takes to protect the legitimate government of Yemen from
falling." Tragically, what this seems to mean, is reducing the country to a
shambles that brings starvation and disease to the population, and possibly
escalating at some future point of frustration by the launch of a ground
offensive. There are confirmed reports of a massing of Saudi troops close to
the Yemen border.
At this point, it is difficult to know what would bring some kind of peace
and stability to Yemen. What we do know is that both the sectarian optic,
Saudi intervention, and American drone warfare are dead end options. The
beginning of a constructive approach is to take root causes of the current
conflict into account. Several need to be considered. There is a long
experience of division in the country between the north and the south, and
this means that any unity government for the whole of Yemen can only be
sustained by an iron-fisted dictator like Saleh or through a genuine
power-sharing federalist kind of arrangement based on decentralized autonomy
and a weak central governmental structure. Beyond this, the country bears
the scars of Ottoman rule intermixed with a British presence in Aden and the
surrounding area, vital to earlier colonial priorities of controlling the
Suez and the trade routes to the East.
Additionally, and often forgotten and ignored, Yemen remains a composite of
tribes that still command the major loyalty of people and reign supreme in
many locales. The modern European insistence on sovereign states in the
Middle East never succeeded in overcoming the primacy of Yemeni tribal
identities. Any possibility of political stability requires subsidizing and
respecting Yemen's tribes as Saudi Arabia did during Saleh's dictatorship
(1990-2012) or creating a multi-colored quilt of autonomous tribal polities.
When the background of the north/south split and persisting tribalism are
taken into account recourse to the Shia/Sunni divide or the Riyadh/Tehran
rivalry as an explanation of Yemen's strife-ridden country is more than a
simplistic evasion of a far more complicated reality. It is a cruel and
futile fantasy.
What should be done, given this overall situation? One potential key to
achieving some kind of peace in Yemen is held by policymakers in Washington.
So long as the U.S. Government remains beholden to the rulers in Saudi
monarchy, to the extremists running Israel, and insistent on striking at
AQAP targets with drone missiles, this key is unusable. This combination of
factors is what makes the wider political turmoil in the Middle East stuck
on a lethal fast moving treadmill. How to get off the treadmill, that is the
question for which there answers, but as yet no relevant political will.
There are two obvious moves, neither ideal, but with the modest goal of a
first step in creating a new political order: first, negotiate a ceasefire
that includes an end to the Saudi intervention; secondly, establish a more
credible revival of the National Dialogue Conference that two years ago made
a failed attempt at Gulf initiative in Sanaa to find a power-sharing
arrangement. It did not help matters then that two successive Houthi
representatives at the diplomatic discussions were assassinated on their way
to participate. What is needed is establishing a political transition
sensitive both to the north/south split and the strength of Yemeni tribes
coupled with massive economic assistance from outside, as well as the
establishment of a UN peacekeeping presence tasked with implementation and
the termination of all forms of external armed intervention. Nothing less
has any chance of working.
Such a rational path is currently blocked, especially by the intense
militancy of the aggressive Saudi leadership of King Salman bin Abdul Aziz
Al-Saud, and his son, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Secretary of Defense, the
apparent champion of military intervention. The United States, with its
special relationship to Israel, its strong ties to Saudi Arabia, and faith
in drone led counterterrorism seems to be swallowing the central
contradiction between opposing both its real adversaries, AQAP and ISIS, and
its implicit ally, the Houthis. Instead of treating the enemy of their enemy
as a friend, Washington has reversed the proverb. This Gordian Knot is
strangling the people of Yemen. Cutting it will require a drastic break with
current policy. The way forward is evident, but how to get there is not, in
the meantime the bodies pile up in what has long been considered the poorest
country in the region severely stressed by the prospect of severe water
scarcities.
C 2015 Richard Falk
/author/richard-falk
/author/richard-falk /author/richard-falk
Richard Falk is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human
rights. An international law and international relations scholar who taught
at Princeton University for forty years, since 2002 Falk has lived in Santa
Barbara, California, and taught at the local campus of the University of
California in Global and International Studies and since 2005 chaired the
Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
