What Comes Next in Yemen
What Comes Next in Yemen
January 23, 2015
Yemen entered a new political crisis this week as President Abdu Rabu Mansur Hadi and his Prime Minister and cabinet announced their resignation rather than comply with demands from the country’s Houthi Movement. The collapse of the government makes it unclear who – if anyone – is in charge of the country; some factions within Yemen are trying to exploit the new political vacuum, and the situation has far reaching effects for U.S. counterterrorism operations and the geopolitics of the region. However, alarmist claims that the country is collapsing into a terrorist state are wildly overblown – Yemen faces an uncertain future that will be decided by disputing factions that may turn violent, but this does not mean the end of order or governance. It will be tempting for the United States to respond to by doubling down on its emphasis on counterterrorism and its support for allies who are permissive of U.S. military operations, but this will be unsustainable as long as the United States does not also couple its approach with an emphasis on economic and political reform that was promised but not delivered in Yemen.
What just happened:
Who are the Houthis? The most powerful political actor in Yemen right now is a group widely known as the Houthi Movement (formally called Ansar Allah, “the followers of God”), a religious revivalist movement established in the 1990s as an effort to preserve Yemen’s Zaydi Shia heritage from the growing influence of Saudi-funded Wahabbism. The Houthis fought in a series of wars against the central government in Sanaa between 2004 and 2009, eventually forming a semi-autonomous enclave in Yemen’s Saada province. They have also clashed frequently with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP); the Houthis see AQAP as the worst manifestation of the Wahabbist influence in Yemen, while AQAP sees the Houthis as Shia apostates. Houthi leaders frequently use anti-American rhetoric and the organization is known to receive Iranian support, but the Houthis are a uniquely Yemeni movement, not a vassal or proxy. The Houthis participated in Yemen’s popular uprising in 2011; their grievances resonated with a broader segment of the Yemeni public, and they were represented at the Yemeni National Dialogue to develop a political transition following President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s resignation. Since then, though, the Houthis have taken advantage of military reforms and political weakness in Sanaa to exert more control over the country. In September 2014, they seized Sanaa and pressured the government into signing a peace accord. For many Yemenis, the Houthis’ aggressive assertion of power over the government has squandered the goodwill they had built up since 2011, writes Adam Baron for the European Council on Foreign Relations. [For a more detailed primer, see Jeb Boone via Global Post, 1/22/15. Adam Baron, 1/23/15]
Who is in charge? It is not entirely clear who is in charge in Yemen, but there is still a tenuous acting government in Sanaa today functioning according to the Yemeni constitution. Houthi leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi seems reticent to take control of the government and issued a series of demands to President Hadi instead of supplanting him, but this prompted the resignation of Hadi’s cabinet and then, several hours later, Hadi himself. According to the Yemeni constitution, President Hadi’s resignation must be accepted by the parliament. For now, though, because Hadi never appointed a vice president and his entire cabinet has resigned, nominal control of the government passes to the Speaker of Parliament, Yahya al-Rai’i, a member of Saleh’s General People’s Congress party. However, as Gregory Johnsen notes, the parliament has its own issues with legitimacy: The last parliamentary elections were held in 2003, and the process of succession is based on a constitution that was about to be replaced. The Yemeni parliament will meet on Sunday to determine the government’s response to these events. Meanwhile, the Houthi Movement organized public rallies today in support of their actions and intimidated protesters who tried to begin a sit-in at Change Square, the site of Yemen’s 2011 protests.
How did this happen? The Houthis’ assertion of power and the government’s resignation has been interpreted by many as the collapse of the deal that ended Yemen’s popular uprising in 2011. That agreement, known as the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) deal for the international coalition that coordinated its signing, included President Saleh’s resignation in exchange for amnesty, a popular referendum to appoint Hadi his successor, and a timeline for a national convention to draft a new constitution and new elections. “Saleh’s departure in 2012 was not the start of a political transition in Yemen but the culmination of a grand bargain between contending factions of the country’s political class, brokered by U.S. diplomats; a bargain which avoided both genuine elections and accountability for the government’s bloody crackdowns on protestors,” journalist Tom Finn wrote today. Since then, the process has consistently been undermined, especially by Saleh, who has reportedly cooperated with his former enemies in AQAP and the Houthi Movement to encourage the further destabilization of the country and its transition. [Tom Finn, 1/23/15]
How does Yemen’s crisis fit into the region? The government’s collapse in Sanaa “is a major setback for US and Saudi diplomacy, a limited victory for Iran and a plus for al-Qaeda,” Bruce Riedel, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote yesterday, cautioning against placing too much emphasis the Houthis’ ties to Iran. “Iran has been providing arms, money and expertise to the Houthis since at least 2011, if not earlier; its diplomats have hailed the Houthis’ success. But the Zaydis are not Iranian pawns nor partners like Hezbollah,” he wrote. “They are an independent force. The Houthis’ Zaydi faith is considered by many Iranian clerics as a disguised form of Sunni Islam.” The end of the Hadi government, though, is problematic for Saudi Arabia, which helped usher him to power and has maintained an extensive, informal patronage network among Yemen’s tribes to exert influence for decades. This feature is unlikely to change under the new Saudi king. “The Saudis have spent over $4 billion trying to prop up Hadi. The rest of the Gulf Cooperation Council has provided billions more. All aid is now suspended. The Saudis are reportedly encouraging Sunni tribes to resist the Houthis, an old Saudi tactic,” Riedel wrote. The greatest danger is that both Saudi Arabia and Iran will exacerbate the sectarian undercurrent of Yemen’s power struggle, which would play into AQAP’s hands, Riedel noted. An AQAP spokesman has already expressed the organization’s support for the political instability, saying, “We operate better in such circumstances.” [Bruce Riedel, 1/22/15. AQAP spokesman via the Intercept, 1/22/15]
What comes next:
What will happen in Yemen? The political situation in Yemen is likely to remain fluid for the immediate future. Even the most knowledgeable Yemen analysts have warned that “If anyone tells you they know what is about to happen in Yemen, they’re wrong.” Still, there is a foreseeable range of possibilities. The best case scenario would be that the political crisis revitalizes Yemen’s transition process. The situation in Sanaa demonstrates the need for constitutional reforms and the election of a legitimate government. In fact, the demands made by the Houthis earlier this week support this process; the deal reached between Hadi and the Houthis on Wednesday, before Hadi’s resignation, called for amendments to the stagnated constitution negotiations and the equitable distribution of government posts to underrepresented groups, including not only the Houthis, but also Yemen’s marginalized southern secessionist movement. However, some analysts doubted the Houthis would act according to the spirit of this agreement, based on their previous disruptions of the National Dialogue. Already, some Yemeni factions are taking advantage of the political uncertainty. On Wednesday, security officials in the southern city of Aden closed access to the city and a wing of the country’s southern secessionist movement issued orders to cease “dealings with and instructions from Sanaa.” Saleh, who has consistently worked behind the scenes to manipulate rivals and destabilize the situation to his advantage, will also likely work towards reasserting himself. Much of what happens next will depend on the political loyalties of the military, which have not been tested yet in this context.
However, this does not mean the wholesale collapse of Yemeni governance, even as Yemeni political factions jockey for power in the coming weeks. Though much of the country is unfairly characterized as “ungoverned,” the country is undergirded by traditional tribal governance which has been much more prominent than Sanaa in maintaining order in many parts of the country. Saudi Arabia’s patronage networks may become an even important line of contact and influence if the central government erodes.
What won’t happen in Yemen: The Wall Street Journal editorialized on Tuesday that Yemen was heading towards “a de facto partition of the country into two radical camps,” the Houthis and AQAP. “We could face two terrorist havens,” the Journal claims. This reduction of the country to the sum of its terrorist groups is far too common and wildly inaccurate. Both AQAP and the Houthis are niche groups within Yemeni society that have capitalized on popular grievances to receive greater support – and the violence exercised by both groups has often squandered that support. The Journal ignores the vast majority of Yemen’s population which rejects both the Houthis and AQAP, and forgets the hundreds of thousands of Yemenis who participated in month after month of rallies throughout the country in 2011 calling for political reform and inclusive, representative governance. [Wall Street Journal, 1/20/15]
What the United States can do: What’s happening in Yemen wasn’t caused by the United States, but it is influenced by U.S. policies that have focused on counterterrorism at the expense of political and economic concerns. U.S. officials are right to be concerned about the continuity of U.S. counterterrorism operations against AQAP – those operations have been supported by Hadi, who reportedly signs off on every strike, and senior U.S. officials worry that a new government would be less permissive. But that would not mean an end to U.S. counterterrorism operations. Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers suggested earlier this week that the United States could work – and indeed has been working – with the Houthis on counterterrorism operations. Barbara Slavin reports, “Vickers…stated, The Houthis are anti al-Qaeda, and we’ve been able to continue some of our counterterrorism operations against al-Qaeda in the past months.’ Asked after the public event whether that included lines of intelligence to the Houthis, Vickers said, ‘That’s a safe assumption.’”
The United States should instead take a broader approach to counterterrorism in Yemen. The Wall Street Journal writes that the United States “has to do more to prop up its allies, if necessary with troops on the ground,” but this misses the fundamental lesson of the Arab Spring. The United States is overinvested in military and intelligence ties to political leaders that lack popular support. When it comes to U.S. counterterrorism in Yemen, “We have been using the wrong tools by and large,” Amb. Barbara Bodine, the U.S. representative in Sanaa from 1997 to 2001, told NPR yesterday. “If you don’t get at the economic drivers and you just go after the extremists’ symptoms, you’re never going to get ahead of the game.” The United States will continue to fight AQAP in Yemen, but if any counterterrorism gains are to be sustainable, it must be matched by a U.S. commitment to help usher Yemen towards an inclusive, representative government and economic stability. That’s true not just of Yemen, but of fighting radicalism around the world – part of what NSN Board Chairman Brian Katulis has called a “global values agenda” that has gone missing from American foreign policy. That is what has faltered in the last three years, not U.S. counterterrorism operations. [Barbara Slavin via Al-Monitor, 1/22/15. Barbara Bodine via NPR, 1/22/15]
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