An Inside Job: One Of The Gulf Initiative's Mistakes - One Of Saleh's Men His Successor
02 October 2014
By Abdulrahman Al-Rashed
Yemen's capital Sana'a has been both attacked from the
outside and stabbed in the back by insiders. The prime
minister and the interior minister staged a coup
against the state in favor of the assailants, while
Houthis shelled the city from all sides. Sana'a
suffered a sad and difficult night, opening a new era
in which the whole country is now placed in danger. As
to why and how such a situation arose, there are many
factors that led to the siege and the collapse of
state authority.
First of all, let's keep in mind that the overthrow of
Yemen's longtime president Ali Abdullah Saleh was not
going to be quick and easy. Two years on, he has
succeeded in disrupting the country's domestic
situation indirectly. Among his allies are the Houthis
and the Houthi Ansar Allah organization, which share
some traits with Lebanon's Hezbollah and the Islamic
State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and which rejected
reconciliation and declared its leader a caliph.
The objective of former president Saleh's supporters
is to sabotage any alternative to their rule in the
hope that they will return to power. The Houthis' plan
is to control the northern strip of Yemen with Iranian
support. They have therefore triggered the crisis by
attacking cities and staging protests and
confrontations to obstruct government services in the
capital.
Although evil powers have left their mark everywhere,
we must note that in Yemen there are rivals—Northern,
Southern and tribal factions and political parties—who
cannot come together in one government with ease. It
seems that Saleh and the Houthis—the new Yemeni
regime's biggest enemies—succeeded in taking over most
of the capital on Sunday, and they may succeed in
taking control of the rest of Yemen. However, their
success will only be temporary, as the parties that
accepted the outcome of the reconciliation process
will later reject any Saleh–Houthi–ISIS domination.
Saleh was removed from power due to massive popular
protests and amid something approaching a consensus
among most political parties and tribes in the country
that he had to go. Ever since his removal, he has not
stopped trying to sabotage the Gulf Initiative, the
agreement that united Yemen's different factions
around a plan for a reconciliation process and a
political transition. This may not have been a perfect
solution, but it was only intended to be temporary,
until such time as the transition is completed and
crises are overcome.
During the current crisis, United Nations Special
Envoy to Yemen Jamal Benomar has sought to broker a
political agreement to end the current disputes, and
managed to attain many concessions to satisfy the
Houthis and those who stand behind them. He can now
see that their aim was not to so much to find a
solution as it was to pave the way to their taking
power by force. This raises questions for the UN,
which sponsored the transition and reconciliation
process. The UN reassured Yemen's pro-secessionists in
the south, prevented the division of the country, and
urged Yemen's neighbors as well as global powers to
help protect the state from collapsing in order to
prevent a political and humanitarian crisis. The
question is: what will Benomar do now, now that the
Houthis and their supporters have betrayed him?
Keeping silent over the Houthis' takeover of Sana'a is
similar to accepting the ISIS takeover of Iraq's Mosul.
The Ansar Allah group is composed of religious
extremists who want to impose their beliefs on other
Yemenis. Their presence in Yemen will inevitably mean
that disturbances will last for many years. This is
the aim of Iran, the Houthis' foremost funder. The
same goes for Saleh's supporters, who spread chaos and
benefit from the naďveté of the Gulf Initiative which
left the door open for him to leave with all his money
and men, even though he was well-known as the fox who
slyly ruled Yemen for three decades and kept state
funds stored outside the country.
One of the Gulf Initiative's mistakes was that it
accepted one of Saleh's men as his successor—Abd
Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, a man with no character, skills or
political knowledge that could qualify him to manage a
country with problems as serious as Yemen's.
Al Rashed is
the general manager of Al -Arabiya television. He is
also the former editor-in-chief of Asharq Al- Awsat,
and the leading Arabic weekly magazine, Al Majalla. He
is also a senior Columnist in the daily newspapers of
Al Madina and Al Bilad. He is a US post-graduate
degree in mass communications. He has been a guest on
many TV current affairs programs. He is currently
based in Dubai.