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Yemen: Why a Regional Approach?

By Nima Khorrami

Yemen is a multifaceted country with diverse ethnicities, cultures, and religious affiliations where anti-Western sentiments are at a record high. As such, any direct western involvement in Yemen can give rise to the already tense anti-Western attitudes in the country with Western governments being perceived as supportive of a regime that is greatly discredited among the public. Therefore, U.S. and European officials are better advised to limit their direct role only to the modernisation of Yemen's armed forces and intelligence-sharing while also seeking to encourage and push for a comprehensive set of regionally supervised policies in order to address socio-economic problems in Yemen.

The Yemeni market is set to suffer from three negative trends in the coming years. Yemen depends heavily on oil production. Analysts predict that its petroleum output will fall to zero by 2017. The government, which receives the vast majority of its revenue from taxes on oil production, has conducted virtually no planning for its post-oil future. This has wider security implications given that it is not clear who and under what arrangements will provide Yemen with its required energy, or how the government might generate financial resources for itself.

Demographically, Yemen’s population – already the poorest in the Arabian Peninsula – is expected to double by 2035. An incredible 45 percent of Yemen’s population is under the age of 15, and widespread and continuing economic stagnation has provided a fertile recruiting ground for extremist groups, particularly Al-Qaeda.

Environmentally, this large population will soon exhaust Yemen’s ground water resources. Given that a full 90 percent of Yemen’s water is used in highly inefficient agricultural projects, this trend portends disaster.

There is thus an urgent need for agricultural reforms as well as diversification of economic activities of the state with a push towards more heavy industries. This requires heavy subsidies from the international community and Yemen's oil-rich neighbours certainly have the financial resources to be among the main donors.

Furthermore, provided that in most cases extension of tribal protections to AQAP elements are based on political calculations rather than ideological affiliation, it could be inferred that prominent tribes in Yemen seek socio-political autonomy in their respective regions. Thus, community driven approaches to development and security stand a good chance of proving effective.

Given the GCC states awareness of and familiarity with cultural sensitivities in Yemen, community-based approaches to security initiated by these states can have a transformative effect on security-related behaviours within communities, and between communities and security providers. In this way, local populations themselves are responsible for maintenance of stability within each community with the help of a familiar outsider and that they will not feel subordinated to security providers.

Similarly, community-driven development projects can deliver high rates of return, robust local participation, and moderate scalability thereby creating social cohesion by giving locals a sense of ownership over communal achievements. This is critical to the success of deradicalisation efforts because social cohesion defends communities and tribes from the excesses of populist/leftist and Islamic social justice discourses. Specifically in the South, separatist movements and AQAP are gradually finding a common ground in social justice discourses to stage their fights against the state.

However, great care ought to be taken because community based projects can create parallel institutions outside of existing power structures thereby affecting state-communities relationships in weak and fragile states. As such, the Yemeni government may appear as the main obstacle to implementation of such policies due to its fear over its ability to maintain a hold on power. Only GCC states, especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE, with their historically cultivated, tribal links to the Yemeni elites can address the regime's concerns satisfactorily.

In short, it seems that a regionally implemented approach to Yemen's myriad problems has been the missing component of Western strategies in the Yemeni theatre due to, in part, their inadequate knowledge of GCC states’ interests and concerns. This is of paramount importance because Western strategic interests will be better served if GCC states are proactively engaged in stabilisation efforts in Yemen.

Persian Gulf states have concerns over the possible domestic repercussions of having a strong republican government in their backyard and they may prove reluctant to contribute to nation-building efforts there. One way of overcoming this problem, perhaps, is to present the need for their involvement in Yemen as a need for their leadership in containing terrorist threats in the region and the preservation of the status-quo for the sake of their own economic growth and security.

Nima Khorrami is a security analyst with the Transnational Crisis Project.

Shifting Sands is the blog of the Middle East International Affairs Programme at LSE IDEAS, analysing current events in the Middle East and contributing to the ongoing deliberations over policy prescriptions.

Silvia L. Peneva, Editor

Yemen’s Reluctant Insurrection

By Christopher Swift

On February 2, Yemeni President Ali Abdulla Saleh stunned Western observers by announcing that he would not seek re-election or install his son as his successor. Presented as part of a package of concessions to Yemen’s political opposition, the move tabled a constitutional amendment that would have allowed the 68-year old leader to remain in office for life. "I will not extend my mandate and I am against hereditary rule," Saleh declared during a parliamentary session. “The interests of the country come before our personal interests.”

Saleh’s motives were arguably more pragmatic that altruistic. Coming in the wake of popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, the president’s pledge was widely perceived as an attempt to placate the protesters massing in Sana’a’s central square. The announcement also recalled the 2006 Yemeni elections, where Saleh made--then and subsequently abandoned--a similar promise to retire. With more than two years remaining in the president’s current term, many Yemeni observers saw this latest pronouncement as a tactical rather than meaningful development.

The same could also be said for the Yemeni government’s recent economic initiatives. From slashing personal income taxes to raising salaries and pensions for civil servants and the military, the ruling General People’s Congress party (GPC) has moved swiftly to stem frustrations stoked by rising food prices and endemic unemployment. Tuition cuts and employment programs for university students suggest similar motives, addressing grievances that might drive Yemeni youth to the barricades.

Government inducements have their limits, however. With oil revenues falling nearly 50 percent since 2008, Saleh’s domestic largess now depends on foreign aid. And with most of Yemen’s growing population living on less that £1 per day, concessions to government workers are unlikely to ease the country’s crippling structural poverty. A looming agricultural and ecological crisis compounds these challenges. Despite falling water tables and a rising population, as much as 60 percent of the country’s fresh water is still used to cultivate qat, a narcotic plant ubiquitous in Yemeni homes and markets.

None of these trends favour stability. Nor does the intermittent Houthi rebellion in the north or the simmering secessionist movement in the south. Nor, for that matter, does the persistent presence of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and its presumed infiltration of indigenous tribal networks. With the government writ increasingly limited to Sana’a, and with an estimated 9.9 million small arms circulating within a population of 23 million, there has been no shortage of speculation regarding Yemen’s possible collapse.

Enter the revolutionaries. From Algiers to Amman, an unprecedented wave of Arab populism is now demanding greater liberty and accountability from reluctant and often recalcitrant regimes. Frustration with corruption and nepotism saw the fall of Tunisian dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in January. Anger over economic stagnation and police brutality sparked the uprising that forced Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak into early retirement. Yemen is no different. With an estimated 20,000 protestors massing in Sana’a on February 3, many Western observers wondered whether Saleh would suffer the same fate.

At first blush, the similarities between these countries are noteworthy. Each is an Arab republic with a strong presidential system. Each is dominated by nationalist ruling party and associated oligarchies. Each cast itself as a bulwark against radical Islamist militancy. Each maintained a repressive internal security apparatus. Against this backdrop, the populist impulses evident in Tunis, Cairo, and Sana’a appear--at least superficially--to reflect shared grievances.

Indigenous dynamics tell a different story, however. The Tunisian uprising evolved from economics to politics, with street protests over unemployment, food prices, and poor living conditions opening the way for lawyers and trade unionists seeking free expression, electoral politics, and an end to official corruption. The Egyptian revolution evolved in the opposite direction. Sparked by activists protesting police impunity and the country’s Emergency Law, the movement transformed itself as ordinary Egyptian mobilized against high unemployment, low wages, and endemic corruption. Both uprisings were dynamic, organic, and spontaneous, with the dominant actors operating outside the established order.

Recent protests in Yemen lack this organic spontaneity. Though inspired by images from Cairo and emboldened by the victory in Tunis, protestors have not organized general strikes, mobilized the masses, or maintained continuous, self-sustaining demonstrations in central Sana’a. To the contrary, the otherwise sizable protests have been scripted affairs staged by Yemen’s political opposition. Even the so-called “Day of Rage” held on February 3 exhibited a pro forma quality, with protestors disbanding in a manner reminiscent of past opposition rallies.

This is not to diminish the depth of the Yemeni oppositions’ grievances. In southern Yemen, for example, protestors affiliated with the Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP) have clashed regularly with government security forces since 2008. Many of these demonstrations turned violent, spawning periodic gun battles and brutal crackdowns by state security forces. Yet unlike Tunisia and Egypt, government crackdowns in Aden and other southern cities have not fomented a national insurrection--at least not yet. Instead, populist impulses in Yemen tend to be captured--and consequently mediated--by existing social and political structures.

Fragmentation within Yemen’s main opposition movement illustrates this point. Formed in 2005, the Joint Meetings Party (JMP) is an umbrella organization comprising the YSP, the Yemeni Congregation for Reform (al-Islah), and three small left-leaning parties. Al-Islah, in turn, is a loose confederation of tribal leaders, Salafi groups, and members of the Muslim Brotherhood. This multilayered structure limits the JMP’s capacity to foster transformative change. Faced with ideological differences and coordination challenges, its constituent parties have traditionally placed greater emphasis on countering Saleh’s regime than creating a credible alternative to it.

This entrenched opposition is poorly positioned for revolutionary politics. Rather than concentrating public outrage, the JMP’s amalgamation of diverse interest and ideologies tends to dissipate it. And rather than contesting Yemen’s dysfunctional political order, its members appear confined within it. These limitations may explain the JMP’s apparent reluctance to evolve beyond staged demonstrations. With Saleh’s recent concessions creating the possibility of free parliamentary and presidential elections, the opposition may turn to the ballot box rather than the barricades.

Two wildcards might galvanize this otherwise reluctant opposition. The first is escalating violence in the southern and western provinces. As recently as February 12, reports from Aden and other cities indicated renewed clashes between government security forces and protestors demanding independence. If such strife persists, then political demonstrations could potentially devolve into a secessionist insurrection.

The second source of instability lies in the modest demonstrations now staged by students and scholars. These intellectuals share little with the average Yemeni, and seem unlikely to evoke public sympathy. Yet according to unconfirmed eyewitness reports, the Yemeni government dispatched plain-clothed police officers and pro-regime demonstrators to central Sana’a on February 11 to disperse young Yemenis celebrating Mubarak’s fall. These overreactions recall the blunders witnessed in Tunis and Cairo. If recent events offer any lesson, it is that state coercion can empower authentic dissent in powerful and often unpredictable ways.

Christopher Swift is a fellow with the University of Virginia’s Centre for National Security Law. His forthcoming book examines al-Qaeda’s relationships with indigenous Muslim insurgencies.

Shifting Sands is the blog of the Middle East International Affairs Programme at LSE IDEAS, analysing current events in the Middle East and contributing to the ongoing deliberations over policy prescriptions.

Silvia L. Peneva, Editor

The Middle East after Mubarak: Government Reactions and the International Community

By Guy Burton

The events in Egypt – the Arab world’s largest country – are having reverberations across the Middle East. The reasons for the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt are not hard to fathom. The region is dominated by strong authoritarian states which repress relatively weak civil societies. However, increasingly the region’s people have had enough, especially given their governments’ relative failures in economic and social policies. At the same time that social protection systems are undergoing retrenchment the economic growth across the region is proving insufficient to provide fast growing populations with enough jobs and incomes.

The internal nature of these protests is important, both for understanding how different governments have tackled this rising tide of public disillusion and frustration and the international community’s relatively leaden response. Moreover, it suggests that foreign policymakers need to review their responses to the protests, focusing less on the governments themselves and more on civil societies within the region.

One response: offering concessions

Poor economic opportunities and state corruption were what lit the fuse in Tunisia – literally – at the end of last year when Mohamed Bouazizi set fire to himself. Similar events took place in Egypt around the same time and last month before escalating into a nationwide protest movement against the regime. On 12 February similar motivations prompted demonstrators to take to the streets in Algeria against the government. On the same day an aide to the Palestinian Authority (PA) president announced that elections which should have taken place last year will be held by September. This came in the wake of several demonstrations in the West Bank in support of the Egyptian protests and which were disrupted by the PA loyalists – much to the disgust of many Palestinians.

Leaders’ fear of diminishing legitimacy is echoed elsewhere. In Jordan, parliamentary elections were held in November, at the same time as in Egypt. Like those in Egypt the opposition remained unconvinced by their legitimacy; the absence of any significant electoral changes meant the main opposition, the Islamic Action Front, boycotted the poll. Consequently, over the past month King Abdullah has sought to defuse tensions by replacing his prime minister and government. The new government moved to cuts prices for key products like fuel and foodstuffs including sugar and rice. However, it is not certain that the move has been sufficient to satisfy the opposition yet. Similar concessions are being pre-empted by the governments in Kuwait and Bahrain, which have offered cash incentives and free food to head off any public disaffection.

An alternative approach: clamping down on dissent

That said, not all governments are trying to buy off the opposition. Several are making use of tried and tested methods. In Syria, for example, where the state is far more in control, the government appeared to have made a similar appeal to the population when it announced its decision to allow Syrians direct access to social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. Until now Syrians have been able to visit these sites, but they had to make use of proxy sites in order to do so. However, this may be less of a concession than it appears: direct access may make it easier for the government to monitor potential activists motivated by events in Tunisia and Egypt.

The Syrian government’s approach appears to be similar to that taking place in non-Arab Iran. At first the Iranian government sought to head off any equation between the Egyptian protests against the regime by emphasising Islamist similarities within Egypt and its own revolutionary origins in 1979. At the same time the opposition is confronting that claim by urging people to take to the streets on 14 February.

If the opposition is able to get people out in considerable numbers it will be the first time since the government clamped down on the Green Movement, which emerged in the wake of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s dubious re-election victory in 2009. However, the prospects for doing so are heavily weighted against the opposition: the government has kept its pressure up over the past two years, including intermittent arrests of prominent opposition activists at the end of last year as well as in recent weeks.

Potentially misplaced foreign fears

That the region’s governments are pursuing alternative courses has implications for external actors with interests in the region, like the US and the EU. The governments’ different approaches to these protests and the common themes underlying them – a lack of democracy, poor economic prospects and limited social security – emphasise the internal causes of the tensions at work between these states and their societies. Indeed, the origins, course and outcomes of the protests have highlighted the relative irrelevance of foreign actors.

Despite this, both the Americans and Europeans have been slow-witted in their responses to date. In Egypt, the Americans initially offered support for the now deposed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. As a result they failed to understand that he was the problem rather than the solution. Meanwhile last month the French offered to help with policing during the Tunisian protests. Presently, the US and EU have been muted in their approach to Palestine, Jordan and Syria, stressing the importance of the peace process (perceived to have now failed by many Palestinians), lending support to King Abdullah and saying little in relation to Syrians’ aspirations. The only exception to this ‘softly-softly’ approach may be Washington’s playing up of the Iranian government’s fears that the Egyptian scenario may befall it.

The reason for the American and European responses may be due to their focus on regional stability over change – especially if it leads to their main fear, the rise of radical political Islam. However, Islamism is not the cause of social tensions in the region; rather it is the symptom. Both the Egyptian and Tunisian experiences do not suggest that political Islam has been the dominant force leading the protests or even the principal beneficiary. Similarly, from a broader historical perspective, it was not immediately apparent that it would be the Islamists who would eventually prevail in the Iranian revolution against the repressive Shah.

Consequently, if the international community is to adopt a more responsive approach to the crises within the Middle East, its policymakers need to consider them in their own right rather than through the ideological prism that it has constructed to date. This means adopting a more supportive stance in favour of civil society and its demands, rather than focusing on the actions of their governments.

Guy Burton is Researcher at the Centre for Development Studies at Birzeit University and Research Associate at the LSE Ideas Centre.

Shifting Sands is the blog of the Middle East International Affairs Programme at LSE IDEAS, analysing current events in the Middle East and contributing to the ongoing deliberations over policy prescriptions.

Silvia L. Peneva, Editor

Egypt: The protests in historical context

By Guy Burton

It has been hard to keep up with the current protests in Egypt and what the eventual outcome might be. Indeed, only a few weeks ago, as Tunisians’ ‘Jasmine revolution’ gathered pace, it was not certain it would transfer over to Egypt. When it did it began in an uncoordinated and small-scale way.

By the middle of the week it looked as if the protestors were beginning to take control; Mubarak dismissed his cabinet and then he offered not to stand for re-election later this year. At the same time the army, a key actor, refused to use force against the demonstrators. Then, towards the end of the week, groups supposedly loyal to Mubarak entered the fray, attacking the demonstrators while the army stood by.

A leaderless movement?

What is striking about the demonstrations in Egypt is their popular nature, including people from all walks of life. Much of its organisation and coordination has taken place through the use of mobile phones and social media; supporters within and outside the country have worked around the government’s removal of Internet service to find other ways to communicate.

The movement does not appear to have any clear leadership. The former head of the UN atomic energy agency and potential presidential candidate later this year, Mohammed ElBaradei, remains a largely unknown figure inside Egypt. Meanwhile, the Muslim Brotherhood, the main opposition group in Egypt for decades, offered support for the movement relatively late.

A dominant state

The protests are against a regime which has dominated the country since the 1952 coup, which brought Gamal Nasser and the army to power. The new government provided hospitals, schools, public housing and infrastructure, but at a price. Egypt became a one-party state with civil and political restrictions on its people. To form trade unions and other organisations required government permission and intervention.

Over the following decades the political restrictions meant that the only significant extra-government actor to emerge in the decades that followed was the clandestine Muslim Brotherhood. It was constantly harassed, with its members regularly locked up.

Rising tensions

What the all-powerful state was unable to control was a changing environment. In the 1950s the government’s political restrictions were part of a trade-off which involved more social and economic development. In recent decades however the government has not held to its side of the bargain. Egypt’s population has grown and become younger while the economy has not provided sufficient jobs or income. In 1977 Nasser’s successor, Sadat, faced riots when the government removed subsidies for bread. His survival was only assured by the army’s support.

Sadat’s successor, Mubarak, learned from the experience. At the same time Mubarak recognised that more democracy might help increase development and reform. This reflected the changing political context from the 1980s and the end of the Cold War, when liberal democracy and economic growth appeared to trump socialist state planning.

The regime faced a problem though: more democracy meant political uncertainty and the regime’s possible demise. It therefore adopted a controlled liberalisation process. In the absence of other political actors, it was the Muslim Brotherhood that emerged as the main opposition. The regime’s reaction to this threat was to reverse course during the 1990s and 2000s.

Where next?

The current protests in Egypt suggest that the country may be at a critical juncture. The movement against Mubarak is more than an isolated protest and includes a wide range of people with little direct control by the Muslim Brotherhood. Meanwhile, the regime is ambivalent about greater public participation.

It is therefore difficult to predict what may happen. There is the ‘China option’, where the army steps in and uses force against the protestors, as happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Yet even if the army remains uncommitted, this will not prevent the violence being carried out by the regime’s proxies against the protestors in recent days may. By contrast, if the protestors stand firm and continue to demand that Mubarak go, his departure may not spell an end to the regime; another individual, from within the regime could be brought forward.

If the regime collapsed – by the army withdrawing support – the nature of state-society relations in Egypt would still work against the protestors. The movement would fragment, opening up space for a smaller, more organised and cohesive clique that will benefit – just as Nasser and his fellow mid-ranking officers discovered when they exploited the nationalist uprising in 1952. For the protestors to counter this, they need to ensure that sufficient mechanisms are put in place to enhance the scope, capacity and organisation of civil society in whatever model might follow Mubarak’s departure.

Guy Burton is a researcher at the Centre for Development Studies at Birzeit University and a research associate at the LSE Ideas Centre.

Shifting Sands is the blog of the Middle East International Affairs Programme at LSE IDEAS, analysing current events in the Middle East and contributing to the ongoing deliberations over policy prescriptions.

Silvia L. Peneva, Editor