Collateral damage from an illeigal war: Yemen: On which side?

By François Burgat, Le Monde diplomatique, April 2003

YEMEN is preparing for a general election this month. Because it has been sapped by economic austerity and the concessions it has had to make to its partner, the United States, in the fight against terrorism, the ruling regime is adopting an authoritarian stance to counter the Islamist opposition, and overturning a longstanding alliance.

To understand what is at stake in the elections on 27 April, we need to go back in time. In May 1990 North and South Yemen, both one-party states, joined to form a single country. In 1993 Yemen held its first general elections in which the three main political forces and many smaller parties took part. The General People’s Congress Party (GPC) and the Southern Yemen Socialist Party (YSP), which had ruled the north and south respectively, were joined by the Islamist Islah (Reform) party (1), which backed the GPC. As a reward for Islah’s support, the GPC let it win 62 seats (more than the 56 won by the socialists). It was also given six government positions. For some time after the elections Yemen seemed to show what a democratic transition could do for the Arab world.

But the multiparty system had a military basis: each party kept control of its own troops (real armies in the case of the GPC and YSP). Up to May 1994 the peaceful coexistence of 3m southerners and 12m northerners depended as much on the balance of forces as on the political institutions. That year civil war broke out, and ended with the rout of the secessionist YSP. The party did not run in the parliamentary elections in 1997, shifting the balance of power. The GPC, led by President Ali Abdullah Saleh, no longer needed Islah as an ally to beat the YSP and went back to its one-party ways, with an absolute majority in parliament and all but one of the government portfolios.

Two years later, in September 1999, after 21 years in power, Saleh had his fifth election success in a row. The political arena seemed smaller than ever before. Though Saleh claimed to be the first president to be elected by universal suffrage in the Arabian peninsula’s only republic (2), he carefully selected his sole opponent from his own side: only GPC candidates were allowed to run in the election. Yemen went back to a system similar to other countries in the Arab world (Egypt, Iraq or Syria). Pressure from the US speeded up this trend, prompting a major reappraisal of the alliances on which Yemen’s stability depended.

The GPC’s alliance with the Islamists was deep-rooted, outweighing any repression they suffered. In 1948, long before the foundation of the GPC, the Algerian Fudhayl Wartilani, an envoy of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, had played a decisive part in the first post-second-world-war attempt to change the regime in North Yemen led by the Zaydi imam, Yahya Hamid al-Din, and to establish a constitutional imamate.

Fifteen years later civil war followed the overthrow of the monarchy (1962-70). Militants closely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, including Muhammad Mahmud al-Zubeiri (3), were instrumental in the pact that enabled tribal forces, in many ways the monarchy’s military arm, to switch to the republican side.

From 1978, when he came to power in the north, Saleh made use of the factions in the Islamist movement, including radicals, to fend off a succession of opponents, former Zaydi royalists, pro-Egyptian Nasserists, and socialists from the south and north. His relations with Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar, the head of Islah, show the unusual approach on which the balance of political power rested. Al-Ahmar regularly chaired Yemen’s parliament thanks to the votes of the GPC. In exchange he secured the support of the Hashid, the largest tribal confederation, and Islah, the main Islamist party, over both of which he presided. At the fulcrum of the alliance between the regime, the tribes and the Islamists, al-Ahmar’s imminent succession will be of critical importance to the future of Yemen.

Islah lost its government posts in 1997 and joined the opposition, but still backed Saleh in the 1999 presidential elections. Having won the elections, Saleh wanted to use his newly acquired legitimacy to exert pressure on the opposition parties. Increasingly personal attacks on al- Ahmar signalled deteriorating relations between the GPC and Islah. Meanwhile, the end of the dispute with Saudi Arabia deprived the Islamists and their allies among the northern tribes of some of the financial support they traditionally received from the Saudis. At the same time the US demanded greater law and order and gave technical support to special forces controlled by Saleh’s son, Ahmed. This strengthened the president’s authoritarian inclinations and encouraged him to clip the wings of al-Ahmar’s Islamist supporters.

A timid law on devolution, adopted in February 2000, paved the way for the election of multiparty local and regional councils. But to secure its supremacy, particularly over Islah, the Saleh regime committed serious irregularities. The third reform of the constitution, approved in February 2001 by referendum, confirmed this trend. It created an upper chamber, by converting the consultative council into a majlis al-shura, And it prolonged the presidential mandate from five to seven years.

Saleh’s present mandate will last till 2004; he can then be re-elected for another seven years, by which time his son, Ahmed, will have reached the age of 40 and be eligible to run for the presidency.

In 2000 Islah lost control of the religious teaching institutions it managed. After 11 September 2001 the government stopped grants to foreign students at Al-Iman university and refused to renew their visas, forcing several hundred of them to leave the country. The offensive did not just affect Islah’s radical wing, linked to Sheikh Abdul Majid Zandani (4). On 24 October an incident degenerated into a shoot-out between the police and the guards of al-Ahmar, whose son was seriously wounded during demonstrations in front of the US embassy. Pressure from the judiciary on the opposition press grew, encouraging restrictive legislation on associations.

The political atmosphere suddenly worsened on 28 December, at the opening session of Islah’s third party congress. The deputy leader of the YSP, Jarallah Omar, was assassinated under circumstances that are still unclear. The government promptly claimed his assailant was an Islah supporter. But Omar had just given a speech urging socialists and Islamists to unite against the corrupt regime and its repeated attacks on civil liberties. Whoever was behind the killing, it was the end of the alliance between the GPC and Islah, rooted in the military victory of the north over the southern socialists in 1994 and the relative stability that had followed.

In its drive to eliminate Islah, including its modernist wing associated with Muhammad Qahtan, the party’s political director, and Muhammad al-Yadumi, the secretary general, the Saleh regime is now counting on its traditional YSP opponents. It has allowed the party’s exiled leaders to return home. But it is also looking for allies among the religious movements. In exchange for various concessions it has gained the support of the Salafist followers of the ultra-orthodox Sheikh Muqbil al-Waadi’ee, who died in 2001—since the Salafists are against voting, the hope is that they will deprive Islah of some support. Saleh will do everything in his power to prevent Islah winning a representative number of seats in the next parliament. After years of shunning Saleh, many Zaydis in the north now seem ready to vote for him.

Yemen’s recent diplomacy has been realistic and effective. It has succeeded in effacing the memory of its support for Saddam Hussein in 1990, and in May 1999 it restored normal relations with Kuwait. It has also settled its border disputes with Oman. The longstanding problems along the frontier with Saudi Arabia came to an end with an agreement in Jeddah in June 2000 (5). In 1998 it took its dispute with Eritrea over the Hanish Islands to the International Court of Justice in The Hague. In December 2000 it was a valuable mediator in the Somali conflict. Saleh has visited foreign capitals too, and restored diplomatic relations with the Vatican in 1998. Despite the incident involving the oil tanker Limburg attacked off Mukallah last October, Yemen has remained on good terms with France: it is now part of a priority support zone which should increase bilateral cooperation.

Two events are important in this process of restoring links with the world. In April 2000 Saleh met President Bill Clinton, sealing Yemen’s reintegration among respectable states. In January 2002 Yemen joined the select Gulf Cooperation Council (6), initially with observer status. But cooperation with the US has grown tense: Yemen adopted a firm line on Palestine from the start of the second intifada, and several times it has dithered before cooperating in the fight against terrorism. Last November the CIA used a missile launched from a drone to eliminate six suspected al-Qaida activists in the desert near Marib. Three American doctors working in a hospital in Yemen were killed in an attack in December. Nonetheless the US seems determined to go on supporting the Saleh regime.

(1) Rémy Leveau, Franck Mermier and Udo Steinbach (ed), Le Yémen contemporain, Karthala, Paris, 1999.

(2) With more than 96.3% of votes in Yemen’s first-ever presidential election.

(3) See Chroniques Yéménites, 1993-2002, published by Cefas, San’a, Yemen.

(4) President of the Consultative Council and reputedly linked to Osama bin Laden.

(5) In exchange for a strip of land, which probably contains oil, Yemen gave up any claim on two provinces (Jizan and Najran) ceded by Imam Yahya in 1934 under the Treaty of Taif. See Renaud Detalle (ed), Tensions in Arabia: The Saudi-Yemeni Fault Line, Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, Baden-Baden, 2000.

(6) The Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (GCC) is a regional organisation created in 1981 by Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates.