The Battle for the Arab Spring

by Lin Noueihed

  The population of Sa'ada is mostly Zaydi, members of an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam who are estimated to make up slightly less than half of all Yemenis – including Saleh's own tribe. In the 1990s, Zaydis in Sa'ada had set up a group called the ‘Believing Youth’ as a means to protect their religious and regional identity against external influence, especially the puritanical Wahhabi form of Sunni Islam that is practised and promoted by Saudi Arabia. After local protests in 2004, the authorities tried to arrest Hussein al-Houthi, a Believing Youth leader and an outspoken member of a prominent local family. Saleh subsequently sent forces into the province to quell what had become an armed rebellion, killing Houthi in September 2004 but triggering several confused bouts of war over the next five years that would again come to the fore in 2011.

  Sa'ada had an international narrative too, with Saudi Arabia launching a military intervention after the fighting spilled across its border in 2009. Saleh had long stoked fears in Riyadh, claiming from an early stage that the Houthis were backed by Iran, and sought to establish a new Imamate in the north-west while also linking them variously to Al-Qaeda, Gaddafi's Libya and Lebanon's Hezbollah.

  Another narrative, which only later became clearer, was an apparent proxy war between different Yemeni military units and their commanders. Rumours spread that General Ali Mohsin al-Ahmar, a member of the president's Sanhan tribe, who headed the army's First Armoured Division in the Sa'ada wars, was at increasingly bitter odds with Saleh's eldest son, Ahmed Ali, who headed the elite Republican Guard. Mohsin, a powerful potential rival to Saleh in his own right, was against the idea of Ahmed Ali inheriting power. A WikiLeaks cable released in 2010 suggested that Saleh officials had, a year earlier, provided the Saudi military with bombing coordinates that were centred on Mohsin's headquarters in Sa'ada. According to the document, it was only when Saudi pilots raised doubts about their target that the bombing raid was called off.4 Other rumours claimed that Saleh had deliberately supplied the Houthis with anti-tank missiles in a bid to weaken the military units under Mohsin's command. These tensions would blow up into open warfare in 2011.

  The Houthi rebellion highlighted not only Yemen's political, regional and tribal strains, but also its economic fragility. The total direct cost of the Sa'ada wars was estimated at over $1 billion, and even if Riyadh stumped up some of the bill, it was nonetheless enormously expensive for a country that was rapidly running out of money. Oil exports had been the backbone of the economy since unification, but Yemen's energy resources are expected to dry up completely some time in the 2020s.5 Oil production declined from 450,000 barrels per day (b/d) in 2000 to about 260,000 b/d in 2010, equivalent to just three per cent of Saudi Arabia's output, but nonetheless the source of about three-quarters of Yemen's government revenue and 90 per cent of its exports.

  Nor was oil the only commodity in short supply. Yemen's annual renewable water supplies per capita are barely more than 10 per cent of the Middle East and North Africa average, with its groundwater supplies being rapidly depleted by a 24 million-strong population that is easily the quickest-growing in the region. The state has lacked the resources and the authority to manage its water resources, failing to prevent illegal wells, mass wastage and inefficient forms of irrigation that are drying up stocks at an alarming rate. Resource scarcity has also incurred a sizeable human cost, one study estimating that armed disputes over land and water kill 4,000 Yemenis each year. 6

  About a third of the country's groundwater is guzzled by a single crop, qat, whose narcotic, chewable leaves have contributed in no small way to Yemen's woes. In one of the world's most impoverished countries, a depressingly large proportion of household income is set aside for daily purchases of the plant. A World Bank survey in 2007 found that 72 per cent of men and 33 per cent of women were regular users, with more than half of male consumers spending at least four hours every day chewing the bright green leaf.7 From the early afternoon, pick-up trucks roll into markets across Sana'a to meet the ever-reliable stream of customers eager to stuff their cheeks with snooker ball-sized clumps of the plant. Various government and international campaigns have tried to wean Yemenis off their habit, especially in the north, where it is much more prevalent, but with little apparent success.

  The socio-economic curse of qat is one reason why Yemen was ranked 133rd out of 169 countries in the UN's 2010 Human Development Index, which measures indicators like poverty, inequality, education and health, and noted that more than a third of Yemenis are illiterate and almost a fifth live on less than $1.25 a day.8 Schools, hospitals and basic infrastructure are hopelessly inadequate in a country where, outside the cities, you can drive for hours without seeing many obvious signs of the state.

  Even before the Arab Spring, Yemen's fragile political structure was in a state of stagnation, if not outright crisis. In early 2009, Yemen's political parties had agreed to delay parliamentary elections to allow time for dialogue on reforming the electoral and constitutional framework that Saleh and the General People's Congress (GPC), the apparatus he had formed in 1982 to rule the YAR, had moulded to their own needs since 1990. Yemen's first post-unification presidential elections were in 1999, with Saleh essentially running unopposed and winning 96 per cent of the vote. A second poll in 2006, deemed to be freer and fairer, saw Saleh win a second seven-year term with 77 per cent of votes.

  The GPC had dominated the Yemeni parliament since unification, and in 2009 held 235 out of 301 seats. The largest opposition party was Islah, or Reform, a tribal-Islamist alliance headed by one of the north's most powerful families, which in 2002 had loosely coalesced with the four other main parties to form the Joint Meeting Parties (JMP). With a long-held conviction that political institutions were tilted so steeply towards Saleh's power bases that democracy in Yemen had become the flimsiest of veneers, the JMP had lobbied for electoral and constitutional reform to level the playing field. On the eve of the revolt, however, talks with Saleh and the GPC were at an impasse.

  On top of all this, Islamic militants were attempting increasingly bold and frequent attacks, both inside Yemen and internationally, that had long provided another snake's head for Saleh to dance on – and some would say deliberately charm. Their rising ambitions in the years before the Arab Spring had become most associated with Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), an entity that developed from a small and fairly ragtag group of fighters returning from the Afghan jihad in the 1990s and was formed in early 2009 with the merger of the Saudi and Yemeni Al-Qaeda franchises.

  Shortly after being appointed head of the CIA in summer 2011, General David Petraeus labelled AQAP as the ‘most dangerous regional node in the global jihad‘.9 Opinions were divided on whether that was true or not, but they were certainly another layer in the quagmire of a country that, even before 2011, was already defined by its conflicts. Southern separatists were gaining traction, Houthi rebels were battling Saleh's forces and formal political institutions were paralysed by disagreements between the main clans that controlled them. Now, a surge of popular protests would add a new ingredient to the mix.

  Springtime in Arabia

  Like their counterparts around the region, a younger generation of Yemenis was inspired by events in Tunisia to take to the streets in early 2011. The JMP, frustrated by the meagre progress in reforming the dysfunctional political system, had organized licenced rallies in January to demand reform within the system, rather than the removal of the president. From the very start, however, youth activists and more strident elements of the formal political parties, like Tawakul Karman – an Islah party member who would share the Nobel Peace Prize later that year – were calling for Saleh to step down.

  But it was the electrifying news of Hosni Mubarak's departure on 11 February that began to transform the organized, relatively moderate rallies into much more organic, spontaneous and large-scale demonstrations calling for Saleh's downfall. Mimicking the slogans used in North Africa, like irhal, or ‘get out’, and al-sha'ab yurid isqat al-nizam, or ‘the people
want the fall of the regime’, what started as small-scale rallies soon gathered their own momentum. Thousands of demonstrators marched in several major cities, including Sana'a, Aden, Ibb and especially Ta'iz, the country's industrial and intellectual capital and considered to be more secular than other Yemeni cities.

  At this stage, protesters appeared to be united under the banner of removing Saleh and ensuring that Yemen did not miss out on a historic wave of change that, in mid-February, seemed like the start of a domino effect that might bring down governments from Morocco to Bahrain. Students in Sana'a, separatists in the south and even some elements of the Houthis in Sa'ada, were discussing ways to work together and, for the time being, putting aside the fact that they had divergent goals and aspirations. An estimated 100,000 people took part in a demonstration in Ta'iz on 25 February, with tens of thousands coming out in Sana'a and Aden as the JMP, which had been overtaken by organic, unorganized marches, also announced their support for the movement.

  Saleh appeared to be on the back foot. His forces had already killed a number of demonstrators, and had initially dealt most harshly with the surge of pro-secession protests in the south that repeated calls for a referendum on independence. Between nine and eighteen people were killed in the south in late February and many others disappeared, including leading figures from the southern separatist movement.10 Several GPC members resigned over the violence and, faced with increasing pressure, Saleh announced that he would not run in the 2013 presidential election, nor hand over power to his eldest son, Ahmed. For the protesters, 2013 was two years too long and would give Saleh the time to reassert control and roll back on his promises.

  In the background was the escalating enmity between Saleh's family and its biggest rival, the Ahmar clan. Both were part of Yemen's largest tribal confederation, the Hashid, which had been led for many years by Sheikh Abdullah bin Hussein al-Ahmar, who was also the speaker of the Yemeni parliament and leader of the Islah party. He acted as a vital and influential counterweight to Saleh's own family, and his death in 2007 provided another catalyst for the unstable chemical reaction that would bubble over in 2011. He left behind several powerful sons who grew openly antagonistic towards Saleh and his own family, which now began to exhibit more open signs of autocracy. ‘After Sheikh Abdullah's death, you began to see the state media refer to Saleh as “His Excellency” whereas before they would call him “brother”, observed one expert in Yemeni tribes. ‘He tried to portray a different image to before.‘11

  The most powerful of Sheikh Abdullah's nine sons publicly broke ranks with Saleh early on during the protests. After initially sitting on the fence, the fifty-five-year-old Sadiq al-Ahmar, who had inherited the Islah leadership, issued a statement in March calling on Saleh to respect popular demands and step down. Hameed al-Ahmar, a billionaire businessman who ran one of Yemen's mobile phone operators, told the New York Times in the same month that ‘there is no more government now, just gangs’.12 Another son, Hussein al-Ahmar, had resigned from the GPC in late February and began encouraging his tribal supporters and other disparate groups to put aside their differences and help topple the regime.

  A turning point in this power struggle, and in the broader disintegration of the country, came on 18 March, when snipers shot and killed some fifty-four demonstrators, mainly youth protesters, at a peaceful march close to Sana'a University. Saleh subsequently declared a state of emergency and blamed the deaths on armed groups acting outside of his control.13 The incident ignited popular fury and prompted one of the largest rallies of 2011, with an estimated 150,000 marching in Sana'a and tens of thousands across other cities. Whereas resignations had previously been a trickle, they now became a wave. Dozens of civil servants and politicians rushed to dissociate themselves from the regime. Tourism minister Nabil al-Faqih became the first cabinet member to resign, and for many more the massacre, known as the Jumaa al-Karama, or the Friday of Dignity, was a point of no return in their willingness to negotiate with Saleh.

  But the most important defections in March were military. General Ali Mohsin announced on 21 March that he would deploy units under his command to protect the protesters, signalling a split with Saleh that amounted to a declaration of armed opposition, if not outright war. It triggered a series of further defections in the military and pitted Mohsin's loyal troops, including his First Armoured Division, against the elite units, like the Presidential and the Republican Guards, which were directly controlled by Saleh's family. Mohsin had effectively joined forces with the al-Ahmar family, although there was limited physical cooperation between the two, and had taken the lid off a pressure cooker that had been simmering over the preceding years.

  The defections would have mixed effects. On the one hand they offered clear evidence that the protests were changing the status quo, and seemed to bolster the strength, numbers and resolve of the anti-Saleh opposition. But on the other, it was the moment when the pattern of the protest movement was overshadowed by bigger forces. Some independent youth groups already resented the formal political parties for piggy-backing on the activist movement for their own ends, and now what had previously been a cold war between two of north Yemen's most powerful tribal clans was becoming an open conflict. While the defections meant that Saleh had lost significant allies, it raised the possibility that even if his regime or his family were ousted, they would be replaced not by a real democracy but by a similar tribal power structure. The disparate protest groups kept up the momentum of cooperation into April, but the longer the Ahmar-Saleh conflict dragged on in Sana'a and the surrounding regions, and the more the flow of defections slowed, the more likely different sections of the opposition were to retreat back into their own specific demands.

  Meanwhile, top-down efforts were also under way to push Saleh out. In April, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), dominated by Saudi Arabia, had drafted a transition proposal in which the Yemeni president would step down within thirty days and give way to a new president, who would be elected within two months. But recent efforts at external mediation in Yemen – like Qatar's efforts to broker a ceasefire in Sa'ada – had borne few fruits.

  Over the years, Washington and Riyadh had poured funds into Saleh's coffers in return for his dubious support in tackling Islamic militants. That gave him the breathing space to nurture other internal crises and argue that, for all his faults, he was the only man able to ward off chaos. Insofar as any coherent Saudi policy on Yemen could be identified, Riyadh seemed to be adhering to the approach that Abdulaziz ibn Saud, the kingdom's founder, had recommended when he apocryphally told his sons to ‘keep Yemen weak’. Riyadh had regularly meddled in its neighbour, seeing it as a threat to its own stability, but also had little desire for Yemen to become a strong, democratic and independent state.

  As part of the GCC deal, which was the only plan put forward by the international community to find a solution to the impasse, Saleh's family would also be given immunity from any future prosecution. Towards the end of the month Saleh announced that the terms were agreeable, but later refused to sign the document, stalling by demanding that the leaders of the opposition parties should have to sign the deal in his presidential palace. ‘Are we going to deal over the phone? Why don't they come?’ he complained. The frustrated GCC envoy gave up and went back to Riyadh, announcing that mediation efforts were now suspended.

  Others took matters into their own hands. On 3 June, a rocket attack on Saleh's compound in Sana'a struck a mosque where the president was praying, killing at least ten officials and advisers. The assault came a few days after Saleh's units had shelled the compound of Hameed al-Ahmar, suggesting that this was a retaliatory attack by his rivals, for whom Saleh had recently issued arrest warrants on charges of leading an ‘armed rebellion’.14 Government spokespeople initially played down Saleh's wounds, but it soon became clear that they were serious. Two days later he flew to Riyadh for medical treatment, leaving behind more violent clashes but new hope among his opponents that they had perhaps seen the la
st of their president. Saleh then made no public appearance for another month, until a short televized speech from Riyadh on 7 July that showed him weakened and heavily bandaged, claiming to have undergone eight operations and calling for dialogue to solve Yemen's problems.

  A renewed bout of violence erupted in mid-September, with an attack on mainly peaceful protesters in Sana'a that was thought to be the work of units under the command of Saleh's family. Some seventy-five protesters were killed in the space of three days as forces used anti-aircraft guns, rocket launchers and shells against protesters trying to move from Taghyeer Square into other areas of the capital. The airport closed for the first time that year, while basic utilities like electricity and water were cut down to a minimum. ‘There is genuine support for both sides, but for the regime it has probably now increased because it has manipulated fears and made the conditions harsher, so people seek a return to normality at all costs, which they think only the regime can do,’ said Abdel-Ghani al-Iryani, a Yemeni political analyst who was in Sana'a at the time.15

  Transition plans continued to stall. In early September, Saleh's deputy, Abed Rabah Mansoor al-Hadi, promised to sign the GCC deal on his behalf, but then stalled. A few weeks later, an official photo showed Saleh sitting alongside King Abdullah, reinforcing a belief among many Yemenis that Saudi Arabia was complicit in abandoning them to their fate and the rapidly deteriorating conditions in the country. Then, on the morning of 23 September, Yemeni state TV dramatically announced that a private jet carrying the wounded president had landed in Sana'a at dawn. Saleh's return was met with anger and despair by his opponents, jubilation by his supporters, and a renewed burst of clashes between the rival military units in and around Sana'a. Many expected it to fling Yemen further down the track of confused civil war that it already appeared to be set on.