YEMEN CAN NO LONGER BE

ignored.

That is the message of last

month’s “Friends of Yemen” conference

in London, attended by U.S. Secretary of State

Hillary Clinton, together with senior officials

from 25 other states. It is also the message of

next week’s high-level Gulf Cooperation

Council conference, to be attended by Yemeni

officials as well. Even The New York Times’s

Thomas Friedman spent a few days in Yemen

recently.

Why the sudden interest? Simply put, a nearperfect

storm of trouble in the domestic, regional

and global arenas has intersected in a way that

has forced Yemen onto the international agenda.

Back in the days of the Roman empire,

Yemen was known as “Arabia Felix” (properly

translated as “fertile” or “productive”), the

source of lucrative spices coveted in the salons of the eastern

Mediterranean. But until modern times, Yemen has mainly been a

remote and largely ignored tribal region, ruled by Zaidi Shi’ite imams.

Apart from neighboring Saudi Arabia, which fought a border war with

Yemen in 1934, Yemen was almost entirely off of the radar screens of

regional rivals and global powers until 1962, when a coup led by

Nasserist-leaning officers thrust the country into wider regional currents.

Yemen became “Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Vietnam,” as Egypt’s 70,000

troops became embroiled in intra-Yemeni strife, in what became a fiveyear

proxy war between Egypt, head of the Soviet-leaning radical Arab

camp, and Saudi Arabia, lynchpin of the conservative, pro-Western Arab

states.

The Saudis would remain extremely sensitive to Yemeni developments.

Anew threat came from Britain’s former colony of Aden, the radical

Marxist state of South Yemen, underpinned by East German intelligence.

Its collapse and incorporation into a united Yemen in 1990 was a

victory for Arab nationalist values, but the new larger Yemeni state posed

a new potential threat on Saudi Arabia’s border adjoining the strategic

passage from the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean. Yemeni President Ali

Abdallah Saleh’s support for Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait was

the last straw for Riyadh, which summarily expelled 800,000 Yemeni

nationals from the kingdom, dealing a major blow to the Yemeni economy.

With Iraq’s defeat in 1991 and Saddam’s overthrow in 2003, Saleh

could do little but seek to mend ties with the GCC club of oil-rich states.

The last decade has been especially difficult for Yemen, moving

it into the category of “fragile,” with the potential of joining the

club of “failed” states. To be sure, Yemen has always been poor,

with limited state capacity, but it was usually able to maintain an

internal balance of forces between competing tribes, religious sects

and political factions. This apparently is no longer the case, thanks

to the sheer weight of domestic difficulties and their intersection

with toxic regional and global currents.

The latest Arab Human Development Report

paints a stark picture: Yemen’s population

growth has been among the highest in the world

(2.7 percent annually), with nearly half of its 23

million people under the age of 15; over onethird

of the population is undernourished, which

especially affects birth weights and child development;

average life expectancy is only 62

years; unemployment stands at nearly 30 percent;

the maternal mortality rate is 400 per

100,000 live births (rates for Western countries

and GCC states are in the single digits); urbanization

rates stand at 5 percent annually, creating

significant water stress, especially in the capital

of Sana’a; and the country’s oil resources,

which provide 25 percent of the country’s GNP,

are rapidly being depleted.

Against this background, three concurrent conflicts are tearing at the

country’s fabric. In the north, a five-year conflict between the authorities

and so-called Houthis, representing a Zaidi revivalist current, has taken

thousands of lives, displaced a quarter of a million persons from their

homes, and spilled over the border into Saudi territory, evoking memories

of the 1960s. This time, however, the Saudis are supporting the ruler

in Sana’a, their former nemesis President Saleh, against the opposition.

What makes this conflict more than just another local affair is the

Iranian dimension: the Saudis are convinced that the Houthis receive

substantial support from Iran, as part of its effort to project power into

the sensitive Red Sea region along its soft underbelly, and Iran has done

nothing to disabuse them of the notion. Meanwhile, in what was formerly

independent South Yemen, disgruntled elements representing the

factions defeated in their 1994 war of secession are becoming increasingly

emboldened.

And finally, of course, there is the al-Qaeda dimension. In recent

years, Yemen has become a different sort of “felix,” providing fertile

ground for al-Qaeda recruiting and training, exemplified most recently

by the Nigerian who failed in his attempt to blow up a U.S. airliner. The

U.S. “war on terror” has expanded to Yemen, both in direct action by

special units and predator drones, and in the training of Yemeni security

forces. Complicating matters even further is the country’s strong Salafi

Sunni Islamic current, which was ironically encouraged both by the

Saudis and President Saleh, resulting in considerable sympathy for al-

Qaeda among the population.

Can Western and GCC involvement turn Yemen in the right direction?

Alternatively, is Yemen headed towards an Afghanistan- or even a

Somalia-like scenario? Something in-between? Stay tuned.

 

 The author is the Marcia Israel Senior Research Fellow at the Moshe

Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel Aviv

University.