Yemen expert Stephen W. Day examines the failure of Yemen peace talks at WaPo’s Monkey Cage blog:
Many analysts depict the current fighting as a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Others describe it as a sectarian conflict between Muslims who identify with opposite sides of the Sunni-Shiite split, which of course also characterizes Saudi-Iranian tensions. There are elements of truth to both perspectives, yet they over-simplify a complex problem. The real reason that war may prove impossible to end while maintaining territorial integrity of the country is: Yemen lacks national cohesion.
Yemen has lacked cohesion from the start of its historic unification in 1990. Within two years, a string of political assassinations poisoned the atmosphere leading to civil war in 1994. Thereafter, unity was only maintained by military force as then-President Ali Abdullah Saleh consolidated gains on the battlefield, while strangling the population’s political and civil rights. Yemen has a long history of warfare and assassination, and it has never enjoyed long periods of stable government under one national ruling authority. Instead, its past is characterized by multiple authorities and regional fragmentation.
Regular readers may have already heard something like that before:
Here’s the thing about The Republic of Yemen, wherein all this drama is currently taking place: it shouldn’t exist. Yemen was the first part of the Arabian peninsula to really develop civilization, thanks to its geographic importance at the entrance to the Red Sea and its close proximity to Ethiopia, but it’s also been incredibly resistant to unification. Even in the periods when Yemen has been controlled by larger empires, usually centered in Egypt, those larger empires have never had great control of anything apart from a few key cities. The geography of the area, with port cities and oases surrounded by vast stretches of mountains and/or desert, has never lent itself to unification.
The “Federation of South Arabia” and the “Protectorate of South Arabia” were essentially colonial administrative units for the Brits, not united political entities. But very quickly in the 1960s, a lot of things started to compress. The Yemen Arab Republic shoved coastal Sunnis into a polity with highland Zaydis and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen mashed together a whole bunch of disparate city-states. The two new countries naturally started fighting each other, because the PDRY went Communist and, you know, Better Dead Than Red or whatever, but a scant two decades later they not only reached a peace deal but decided to unify, with the Yemen Arab Republic taking the dominant position in the new combined government and its president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, becoming president of the new nation. Two countries that probably never should have existed combined to form one big country that had even less historical reason to exist than its two components. That the North and South fought a civil war only four years after unification was probably a sign that things weren’t going so well, but the North won and managed to sweep southern separatism back under the rug.
As Day says, the “unity” of “Yemen” has often seemed more like the pet project of outside powers (like the Saudis and the US), who prefer one state teetering on the brink of failure to a bunch of tiny states creating their own kind of chaos, than of the Yemeni people themselves. And hey, maybe those outside powers are right; maybe breaking Yemen up into constituent statelets that better reflect the area’s fragmented history would actually be worse than the status quo (though you can’t help but think that the bigger Saudi concern is that some of those statelets would have some historical claims on territory that lies on the Saudi side of the border). But the present strife is clearly exacerbated by the fact that none of the groups who are fighting amongst themselves can claim the support of enough of the country’s population to actually set the terms for peace talks.
It should be possible to try a federal Yemen, one where regional governments are fairly autonomous but still ultimately responsible to a single national government in Sanaa, but the Houthis object to that course because they’d be stuck in the relatively resource-poor northern highlands that mark the traditional homeland of Yemen’s Zaydi population. The Houthis launched their assault on Sanaa when President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi started talking seriously about the idea of devolving power to the regions. They and their ally, former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, have never been keen on federalism, and in fact Yemen’s 1994 civil war (which Saleh won) was fought in part over Saleh’s refusal to permit greater autonomy to southern provinces. Day thinks it’s too late for federalism now and that the country will have to be partitioned, but even that assumes that you figure out some way to end the current civil war, and it’s far from clear how to do that. Right now, the Houthi-Saleh alliance stands as the big winners (apart from Al-Qaeda and ISIS), so they have no incentive to compromise for peace, but they also lack enough popular support to end the war on their terms. It’s not a recipe for a quick end to the conflict.
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