Table of Contents
Tribes and Politics in Yemen: A History of the Houthi Conflict
By Marieke Brandt
About the Book
About the Author
Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Yemen and the World: Beyond Insecurity
By Laurent Bonnefoy
About the Book
About the Author
Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Yemen Endures: Civil War, Saudi Adventurism, and the Future of Arabia
By Ginny Hill
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media and Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Tribes and Politics in Yemen
By Marieke Brandt
About the Book
Tribes and Politics in Yemen tells the story of the Houthi conflict in Sa’dah Province, Yemen, as seen through the eyes of the local tribes. In the West the Houthi conflict, which erupted in 2004, is often defined through the lenses of either the Iranian-Saudi proxy war or the Sunni–Shia divide. Yet, as experienced by locals, the Houthi conflict is much more deeply rooted in the recent history of Sa’dah Province. Its origins must be sought in the political, economic, social and sectarian transformations since the 1960s civil war and their repercussions on the local society, which is dominated by tribal norms. From the civil war to the Houthi conflict these transformations involve the same individuals, families and groups, and are driven by the same struggles over resources, prerogatives, and power.
This book is based on years of anthropological fieldwork expertise both on the ground and through digital anthropological approaches. It offers a detailed account of the local complexities of the Houthi conflict and its historical background and underscores the absolute imperative of understanding the highly local, personal, and non-ideological nature of internal conflict in Yemen.
About the Author
Marieke Brandt is a researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology (ISA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. Her research focuses on tribalism, tribal genealogy and history, and tribe–state relations in Southwest Arabia.
Scholarly Praise for Tribes and Politics in Yemen
‘An excellent book . . . an indispensable read to anyone with an interest in Yemeni politics, both past and present.’ — The Middle East Journal
‘Brandt . . . has delved deeply into the emergence and evolution of the Houthi phenomenon and explains in extensive detail the entangled and incredibly complex roots of the conflict . . . she has done so thoroughly, convincingly and admirably . . . an invaluable glimpse into the complexity of Yemeni society and politics.’ — Journal of the British Yemeni Society
‘The most detailed and comprehensive analysis to date of the Houthi conflict in Yemen, providing critical insights into the rise of the Houthis as a national movement and how a local conflict metastasized into a regional one. Published as the Saudi-led “Operation Decisive Storm” is still in full swing, this long overdue and well-researched book will help readers understand how Yemen became a laboratory for new wars in the Middle East.’ — Gabriele vom Bruck, Senior Lecturer at School of Oriental and African Studies; author of Islam, Memory and Morality in Yemen: Ruling Families in Transition
‘As a writer and researcher on Yemen, this is the book I’ve been waiting for. A thorough, painstakingly assembled account of the rise of one of the world’s least understood rebel groups – it makes for a riveting read. This is an indispensable addition to the pool of knowledge on Yemen and a must read for everyone who wants to understand why we are here today.’ — Peter Salisbury, Senior Research Fellow, Middle East and North Africa Programme, Chatham House
‘Marieke Brandt’s book is a fascinating piece of ethnography and history. Through exceptional fieldwork in the northern highlands of Yemen, it explores the minute details and roots of a political and religious phenomenon that remains fundamental to our understanding of the contemporary Arabian Peninsula.’ — Laurent Bonnefoy, researcher at the CERI/Sciences Po, author of Salafism in Yemen: Transnationalism and Religious Identity
‘This book provides a deep and comprehensive insight into the complex “Houthi conflict” by studying its political, tribal and personal dynamics. Brandt pays great attention to the wide spectrum of local causes that explain the conflict’s onset, persistence, and expansion on the basis of a “bottom-up” social anthropological approach.’ — Horst Kopp, former professor at University of Erlangen-Nuremberg; researcher on the urban and rural geography of Yemen
‘Brandt’s detailed, even intimate, analysis of the Houthi movement’s history, internal social dynamics and relations with local and regional actors is essential reading for understanding its current and prospective role in Yemen’s politics. Beyond Yemen, the book demonstrates the importance of anthropological analysis in explaining local and national politics.’ — Helen Lackner, Research Associate at London Middle East Institute, School of Oriental and African Studies; author of Yemen in Crisis: Autocracy, Neo-Liberalism and the Disintegration of a State
Additional Information
October 2017
480 Pages
$39.25 (list price)
Cloth ISBN: 9781849046466
Where to Purchase
Hurst Publishers
Excerpt
From the Introduction: “The Interior View of a War”
If anthropology has any raison d’être [...], it is to allow us to confront the written schema of the intellectuals with the richer and untidy welter of living practice.
Martha Mundy1
Al-ḥarb dāʾiman tatruk fī l-nufūs ashyāʾ... wa hādhā mā ẓahara ḥattā al-ān khilāl al-ḥarb bi-mā an al-nās kulluhum fī khandaq wāḥid wa fī makān wāḥid lākin yaẓill fī l-nufūs shayʾ min al-māḍī wa māsīhi wa mukhallafātihi.
[War always leaves something in the souls ... and this is what became evident during the war: all people are in the same place and in the same trench, but in the souls remains something of the past, its tragedies, and its aftermath.]
Former governor of Saʿdah
In March 2015, Operation Decisive Storm put the international community’s spotlight on Yemen. Seemingly from one day to the next, a military coalition of predominantly Sunni states led by Saudi Arabia began shelling military installations, arms stockpiles, airports, streets, bridges, and infrastructure throughout the country. Operation Decisive Storm was the coalition’s response to the occupation of the capital Sanaʿa and the conquest of further parts of Yemen by the Houthis or, as they call themselves, Anṣār Allah.
A few months earlier, in September 2014, the Houthis had seized the Yemeni capital. They seemed to appear out of nowhere on Yemen’s national stage. People had known for some years that an on-and-off war had been waged between the Houthis and the government in Yemen’s northernmost provinces, Saʿdah, al-Jawf and northern ʿAmrān, but other domestic challenges—the easily accessible and much more ‘vocal’ South, the global impact of al-Qaeda in Yemen—had attracted far more attention from researchers, journalists, and the global public. The flow of information from Yemen’s extreme north was further impeded by the inaccessibility of its often rugged, mountainous terrain, and of its tribal customs and traditions (often despised and denigrated by urban middle-class Yemeni intellectuals), as well as an information blockade by the government, which had tried to hush up the conflict since its eruption in 2004.
And so it happened that the largest and most brutal conflict in contemporary Yemen, which at the time of writing had been dragging on for twelve years, received at best passing attention from many scientists and journalists. Only in 2014 did public attention turn to the Houthis, when—rather like Gellner’s ‘wolves’2—they left their remote northern strongholds, pushed into central parts of Yemen, seized the capital, and continued their march towards Aden, literally hunting down Yemen’s weak transitional government and eventually forcing it into Saudi exile.
The Book
Since the Houthi conflict began to hit international headlines in 2014, it has often been defined against regional contexts, such as the Iranian-Saudi proxy war or the Sunni-Shia divide. This is not to say that these regional conflict drivers were insignificant, but they have primarily served to reduce the Houthi conflict to a catchy denominator, thereby obfuscating its local dynamics and complex nature.
What I wish to do here is to explore these local or ‘grassroots’ dynamics of the Houthi conflict at its roots: in the Saʿdah region, Sufyān and al-Jawf in Yemen’s extreme north. The aim of this book is to reconstruct the conflict’s development by giving full play to its local drivers: the micro- and mesopolitical, tribal, and personal dynamics that shaped the manner in which those individuals and communities directly involved in the conflict calculated their interests, concerns and ambitions, vis-à-vis each other, the Houthi movement and the old regime (in itself a complicated set of constantly shifting alliances, often animated by local factors). Rather than focusing on regional and inter- national forces, this book gives attention to the wide spectrum of local causes that explain the conflict’s onset, persistence, and expansion: shifting internal power balances, the uneven distribution of resources and political participation, the accumulation of mutual grievances, growing sectarianism and tribalisation. It records, so to speak, the very local narrative of the Houthi conflict.
The research question is related to anthropology’s traditional—and, in many ways, enduring—preference for small-scale networks, local communities, and other micro-entities. In pursuing its empirical goals, this book builds on the socio-cultural anthropological theories of Eickelman, Piscatori and al-Rasheed, who emphasize the importance of local people in the implementation of policies, ideologies, and religious hermeneutics. It is often local people (rather than authorities such as religious scholars, states, and so on) who invoke the symbols of those policies to reconfigure the boundaries of civic debate, public life, and conflict.3 These actors do not lead the debates, but they formulate the local agendas, shape the reality of political practice and enact policy on the ground. On this basis, the present book focuses, in a typically anthropological fashion, on ‘peripheral’ views and perceptions rather than adopting a more centralized view.
This ‘bottom-up’ social anthropological approach, as applied here, entails working with individuals and groups not normally taken into account by sci- entists of those disciplines working with broader theories and using top-down approaches. The bottom-up approach thus invites us to discover issues and interdependencies that are often unseen or marginalized, but which are nonetheless meaningful. Martin has called these individuals and groups, and their specific rituals and actions, ‘unidentified political objects’ (objets politiques non-identifiés).4 He argues that focusing beyond the repertoire of political and/or sectarian parties, their programmes, representatives, and discourses is a vital and rewarding task, because scientists too often restrict their investigations to a rather limited repertoire of research objects. Research programmes that are ‘locked in’ on a particular path often reproduce and elaborate already known discourses and fail to identify new questions, as researchers involved in these programmes believe that the main objects of inquiry have already been identified. In such cases, scientists pursue their chosen path, not realizing that they are surrounded by a lively welter of ‘unidentified’ objects that could be, and often are, politically significant, maybe even more so than ‘identified’ political objects. On the other hand, and for the same reasons, social anthropologists find it hard to communicate the kind of macro-evidence and abstraction often expected from them by colleagues in other fields.
I am aware of the methodological and epistemological difficulties involved in the task of reconstructing and interweaving the multifaceted narratives of hitherto ‘unidentified’ objects. My methodology, as outlined below, embraces a combination of literature- and fieldwork-based approaches with the aim of deepening and broadening understanding to give a richer, hopefully ‘truer’ account. Yet written sources on local details were few, sometimes non-existent, and often I had to rely on competing oral narratives. This work had its rewards, challenges and limitations. People always had a lot to say about their situation, and the categories they used were not always sound and precise. Their narratives were complex, discursive, person-bound, at times even inherently contradictory, and offered subjective viewpoints rather than an ‘absolute truth’.
In considering the Houthi conflict, however, it does not suffice to point to the existence of competing narratives and the impossibility of producing ‘objective truth’. This book deals with living individuals, most of whom became actively involved in an increasingly brutal and inhumane fratricidal war, a fact that required that I work with the utmost sense of neutrality, care- fulness and responsibility. Throughout the research process I have strived to deconstruct my sources’ often biased—at times even offending—narratives and representations, and to countercheck and balance their statements. The very fact that this book is about the words and deeds of living people imposed on me an academic and moral obligation to aim for maximum balance and neutrality in my representations and conclusions, despite inevitable doubts about the existence of an ‘objective truth’.5
The Houthi conflict is multifaceted and complex, and its local narrative as recorded here constitutes only one of manifold ways of approaching and explaining the conflict. The many other narratives of the Houthi conflict sometimes complement each other, sometimes compete: the sectarian narrative, the domestic political narrative, the boundary narrative, the proxy war narrative, and so on. The Yemeni government has its own version. Foreign nations have their different claims. It would be extremely interesting to learn about the internal dynamics and narratives of the subverted armed forces. Certainly none of these narratives—including the ‘grassroots’ account recorded in this book—can, in isolation, fully explain the conflict. This epic conflict is too large to be read from a single perspective, on a single ‘plateau of analysis’, whether sectarian, religious, economic, tribal or political.
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
Yemen and the World: Beyond Insecurity
By Laurent Bonnefoy
About the Book
Contemporary Yemen has an image problem. It has long fascinated travellers and artists, and to many embodies both Arab and Muslim authenticity; it stands at important geostrategic and commercial crossroads. Yet, strangely, global perceptions of Yemen are of an entity that is somehow both marginal and passive, yet also dangerous and problematic.
The Saudi offensive launched in 2015 has made Yemen a victim of regional power struggles, while the global ‘war on terror’ has labelled it a threat to international security. This perception has had disastrous effects without generating real interest in the country or its people. On the contrary, Yemen’s complex political dynamics have been largely ignored by international observers—resulting in problematic, if not counterproductive, international policies.
Yemen and the World offers a corrective to these misconceptions and omissions, putting aside the nature of the world’s interest in Yemen to focus on Yemen’s role on the global stage. Laurent Bonnefoy uses six areas of modern international exchange—globalisation, diplomacy, trade, migration, culture and militant Islamism—to restore Yemen to its place at the heart of contemporary affairs. To understand Yemen, he argues, is to understand the Middle East as a whole.
About the Author
Laurent Bonnefoy is a CNRS researcher at CERI Sciences Po, Paris. A specialist in Islamist movements and politics in the Arabian Peninsula, he is the author of Salafism in Yemen: Transnationalism and Religious Identity and has published in numerous international academic journals.
Scholarly Praise for Yemen and the World
‘This is an outstanding book, an incisive and in-depth look at Yemeni international interactions over the past two centuries. Bonnefoy’s examination of migrants, merchants, and refugees, and literature, song, and poetry takes the reader on a far richer and highly compelling journey than others have done.’ — Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, Fellow for the Middle East, Rice University Baker Institute for Public Policy, and Associate Fellow in the Middle East & North Africa Programme, Chatham House
‘Bonnefoy deftly weaves together historical and contemporary analysis through the lens of transnational flows of ideas, people, and claims. This is essential to a better understanding of what is (and is not) new about Yemen’s axes of conflict and potential for sustainable peace.’ — Stacey Philbrick Yadav, Chair of the International Relations Program, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and author of Islamists and the State: Legitimacy and Institutions in Yemen and Lebanon
‘A splendid documentation of Yemen’s synergies with the world, both in history and contemporary times. Bonnefoy has done a superb job of persuading us of Yemen’s vital position in the global community.’ — Marieke Brandt, Austrian Academy of Sciences Institute for Social Anthropology, and author of Tribes and Politics in Yemen
Additional Information
October 2018
265 Pages
$49.95 (list price)
Cloth ISBN: 9781849049665
Where to Purchase
Hurst Publishers
Excerpt
From the Introduction:
With a peculiar feeling of avidness, elation, envy and despair, I contemplated the attitudes struck by free and pure souls in the dust-dry bush. It seemed to me I had found a paradise I had dreamed of or known inside myself in an age lost to memory. And I stood there on the threshold.And I could not cross it.
From one encounter to the next, from one frustrated yearning to another, I felt the no doubt childish but increasingly pressing need to be admitted into the innocence and freshness of the dawn of the world.
Joseph Kessel, The Lion
Yemen has gained an image in contemporary history of an inaccessible, forbidden land shut out from the world. This reputation does not arise solely from its rugged terrain and a capital, Sanaa, perched at an altitude of 2,300 metres. Its rulers have long made sure to safeguard the country’s political, religious, historic and cultural specificities and authenticity. In the 1920s, Imam Yahya Hamid al-Din, monarch of the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen – based in the mountainous region in the northwest, where most of its population is concentrated – chose the path of isolation. On the strength of his victory over the Ottoman occupation, ousted once and for all in 1918 to make Yemen a sovereign state, he openly asserted his preference for autarchy, even if it meant that he and his people would only “eat straw.”
Imam Yahya could then rely on a political regime that had held sway over all or part of Yemen, almost without interruption, for a millennium. The religious and political legitimacy of the imamate was grounded in Zaydism, a branch of Shia Islam specific to Yemen, dominant in the highlands and for which the imam embodied temporal and spiritual leadership due to his noble genealogy as a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed. The imam thus ruled over the tribes, who in turn played their role as the armed wing of the imamate.
However, perception of a society and polity withdrawn from the world clearly requires a nuanced approach. As will be seen, the history of Yemen is marked by the intrusion of foreign powers as well as by information flows and exchanges. Yemen is not limited to the Zaydi areas long dominated by a particular imamate. The Ottomans, twice throughout history, as well as the British and later the Saudis, contributed to establishing the country’s internal and external borders and structuring the exception represented by the port city of Aden. In the southern and eastern plains, where the population is primarily Sunni, the Zaydi imamate was either absent or fragile and disputed. Between the highlands of the northwest and the coasts, two distinct trajectories thus developed.
An Object of Fantasy
Entering the breaches in the country’s apparent confinement, foreign travellers from Europe believed they were enjoying an exclusive privilege. This notion was based on the sentiment so aptly characterised by the French novelist and adventurer Joseph Kessel, of being “admitted into the innocence and freshness of the dawn of the world.” After all, was it not in Aden where Cain buried his brother Abel? Was not Sanaa founded by Shem, son of Noah and legendary ancestor of the Semites, after the Flood? Was not Yemen the land of the famous Kingdom of Sheba?
The country has forever stirred the imaginations of travellers from the West just as it has those from the Orient and other regions of the Arab world. In the thirteenth century, without having set foot on land, Marco Polo mentioned (in the tales of his travels) Aden and its sultan, whom he had heard described as “one of the richest kings in the world.” This port, in the southwest of the country, served as the confluence between the Rasulid sultanate based in Taiz, about one hundred kilometres to the north, and its many trading partners in Asia and Africa.4 In the Middle Ages, the sultanate, a regional power structured around a centralised and punctilious administration, was based on a Sunni dynasty from Central Asia whose influence for more than two centuries reached as far as the holy places of Mecca and Medina, where it came into conflict with the Egyptian Mamlukes. In 1513, after the Rasulids collapsed, the Portuguese failed to take control of Aden, the strategic importance and exceptional geographic potential of which they had long since realised. Aden, built at the foot of a volcano – Jebal Shamsan – is a natural harbour sheltered from the wind at the crossroads of overland and maritime trade routes between continents. From the early seventeenth century on, trade, particularly in coffee from the port of Mocha (from which the bean derives its name) on the Red Sea, gave rise to interactions between European importers, Ottoman administrators who had settled in Tihama since 1538, explorers and Yemeni merchants. In his monumental Essay on Universal History, the Manners and the Spirit of Nations published in 1756, Voltaire drew inspiration from the accounts of merchants and explorers to write about Yemen:
It is the most pleasant country on earth. The air is sweetened, in an eternal summer, with the scent of aromatic plants that nature grows there without need of cultivation. A thousand streams descend from the mountains providing a perpetual cool that tempers the heat of the sun beneath always leafy green shade.
The German Carsten Niebuhr, sent by the King of Denmark, was the first European to undertake a methodical inventory of the customs and practices in use in various parts of Yemen, including the highlands of the interior under the authority of the Zaydi imamate. After the death of his travelling companions in 1763, he continued his exploration alone for four more years.7 His description of the sizeable Jewish community – which, like the Falasha of Ethiopia, is reputed to have lived in isolation, removed from the debates and evolutions characteristic of their Sephardi and Ashkenazi coreligionists – reinforces the idea that his was a voyage into the very foundations of “Judeo-Christian civilisation.” The specific nature of Yemeni Jewry was a real source of fascination, exploited to great effect by the Israeli government in the mid-twentieth century when, through Operation Magic Carpet, it endeavoured to protect and transfer this population, then facing acts of violence in the context of rising Arab nationalism in the wake of the founding of the Hebrew state.
The strategic importance of Yemen’s position at the crossroads of continents was confirmed in 1839 when the British took control of Aden. Also playing a significant strategic role, Perim Island in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait (which separates the Arabian Peninsula from the Horn of Africa) had already been a sought-after prize in the battle between European powers. When Ferdinand de Lesseps commenced work on the Suez Canal, interest in this tiny piece of land redoubled. The British captured it in 1857, allegedly only a few hours before a French flotilla arrived.9 Eleven years later, French merchants bought Sheikh Said, a peninsula not far from Perim, from a local chief, but the transaction turned into a fiasco and France never actually exercised any sovereignty over it. The tiny size of Perim and its inhospitable climate also prevented any development and precluded the installation of a British military base. The only structure built on this island in the middle of a strait 30 kilometres wide – whose poetic name in Arabic translates as “Gate of Tears” – was a lighthouse.
In Aden, on the other hand, Her Majesty’s subjects built colonial infrastructures, while continuing, like the other European imperialist powers, to ignore the country’s interior and areas controlled by the Zaydi imamate. Even if competition among the major powers during the phase of colonial expansion proved to be less fierce than elsewhere, the fascination of European intellectuals for the country was no less evident. It was manifest in a number of limited but significant interactions. Oddly enough for the colonial power, Aden and the hinterland have only inspired few British artists and intellectuals, at least much less than ones stemming from continental Europe. In 1856, fifteen years prior to starting work on the Statue of Liberty, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi brought back among the first photographs of Yemen, particularly of the ports of Mocha and Hodeida on the west coast. In 1934, another prominent French figure, André Malraux, in search of traces of the Kingdom of Sheba and the legendary Queen Bilqis mentioned in the Bible and the Quran, could only fly over the country without landing his plane. He was shot at by tribesmen surprised to see a plane skimming over their village at low altitude in the central province of Marib. The intellectual nevertheless brought back from this very short trip enough material for an essay – La Reine de Saba: Une “aventure géographique,” [The Queen of Sheba: A Geographic Adventure] and the satisfaction at being an accomplished archaeologist as well as a valiant hero. Filmmaker René Clément, who later would direct the award-winning Jeux Interdits [Forbidden Games], spent time in the highlands in 1937. During a military parade, he surreptitiously filmed the sovereign, Imam Yahya, who was intent on guarding his seclusion. Clément was thrown in prison for a few days for obscure reasons, and afterward put together a documentary he entitled L’Arabie interdite [Forbidden Arabia]. These stolen images of the sovereign are the only ones in existence of a man who died in 1948, at a time when the cinema was a widely-used medium and had already served for decades to disseminate government propaganda.
The poet Arthur Rimbaud and philosopher Paul Nizan are among the most notable visitors from France to Aden to have left a strong impression on the francophone imaginary. A half-century apart – from 1880 to 1891 for the former; in 1929 for the latter – each of them sought and believed to have found there an answer to their personal malaise. The stifling heat of the port and the austerity of a then cosmopolitan but already dilapidated commercial city served to reveal a generational and existential crisis. These features also enabled the travellers to fulfil a fantasy marked by a radical break, resentfulness and the colonial imaginary. Published in 1931, Nizan’s novel Aden, Arabie is the formal expression of this perception, the lament of a young man who at age twenty would not “let anyone say those are the best years of your life.” In the 1880s, Rimbaud’s not-always legal dealings in Aden – at a time when he had stopped writing poetry, as well as the somewhat platitudinous letters he wrote to his family and the rare pictures of him there – reflect a distress that was actually the disabused extension of his poetry and the scorn he felt toward the city he had adopted as his home. In a letter dated May 1884, Rimbaud wrote, “It is obvious that I didn’t come here to be happy.” Writing in the same era, British author Rudyard Kipling was no kinder to Aden than Rimbaud and Nizan, comparing it in his 1894 poem For to Admire to “a barrick-stove that no-one’s lit for years an’ years.”
Although it disregarded the highlands in the northwest, Yemen’s colonial history established a dualism between north and south, fixing an internal boundary, however artificial, and giving rise to very different political trajectories in the two entities. In the south, Aden, a colonial city, represented an exception to the rest of the country, mobilising its own symbols and myths. The Yemeni hinterland, on the other hand, including areas under British domination and the independent northern imamate, remained largely unknown and uncontrolled by the European powers. It was perceived as being populated by tribes that supplied soldiers to the imam or a few sultans who had only local influence. While in the north, centralisation revolving around the Zaydi imamate continued throughout the first half of the twentieth century, including in predominantly Sunni areas, this was not the case in the south, where British colonial rule adjusted to the fragmentation of its local contacts between micro-emirates and sultanates subordinated to the crown. The coastlines of both north and south around cities such as Mocha, Hodeida and Mukalla were seen as the preserve of Sinbad the Sailor’s descendants, with these locales supposedly unchanged for centuries and featuring frequently in the adventure novels of the French writer, and occasional arms dealer, Henry de Monfreid.
The island of Socotra, 350 kilometres from the Yemeni coast and just east of Somalia, reinforced this feeling of backwardness and isolation. Accessible by boat only a few months of the year due to the monsoon winds, and for a time closed to foreigners, the island harbours a remarkable number of endemic species that has earned it the nickname “Galápagos of the Indian Ocean”. Among its plants, the most famous are the unmistakable Dragon Blood trees, with their distinctive shape and whose blood-red sap was collected and sold in antiquity to be used as a dye. The Greeks, starting with Herodotus, described the place, nicknaming it the Island of the Phoenix, and in the 1970s, a stubborn rumour claimed that the Soviets had set up a secret military base there. This proved unfounded, and the few thousand Socotris remained quite removed from the upheavals affecting the world until the early 2000s, when UNESCO recognised the island for its biosphere and tourism began to timidly develop. Their specific language, their frugal lifestyle and their enduring pastoralist social structure all continue to exert fascination.
In addition to the illustrious predecessors previously mentioned, a few European “explorers” broke through the barrier between the colony in Aden – open to the world – and the rest of the country, crossing the desert areas and the high plateaus. The Franco-Ottoman Orientalist Joseph Halévy, the German Hermann Burchardt, who photographed the land and the Jewish population, Joseph Kessel, who in 1932 published Fortune carrée, Cesare Ansaldi, an Italian physician who treated the imam and recounted his experience in IlYemen nella storia e nella leggenda [Yemen in History and Legend] published in Rome in 1933, the British Freya Stark, Harry St John Philby and Wilfred Thesiger, fascinated by deserts, in addition to a few other British settlers and administrators were all privileged travellers who sought to realise an Orientalist dream. At the time, the country exuded the sweet smell of secrecy, adventure and the unknown.
The notion that the interior lived in total isolation, whether as result of the imam’s will or the imperial powers’ lack of interest, is a misconception. Many scientific and trade missions attest to this. These interactions, however, just like the projects of American archaeologist Wendell Phillips in the 1950s, for instance, often only further nourished a biased imaginary. In 1971, the Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini shot The Walls of Sanaa. It is an appeal – a rather clumsy one in retrospect – for the preservation of the old city by maintaining its backwardness, “in the name of simple people that poverty has kept pure, in the name of the dark centuries’ grace,” the director pleaded. This romanticised approach was even more explicit when Pasolini returned to Yemen in 1973 to shoot Arabian Nights in Sanaa and Zabid, with scenes featuring beautiful naked young men. These foreign incursions, full of goodwill on the surface, thus contributed to turning Yemen into a fantasy that still retains a distinctive flavour many decades later.
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
Yemen Endures: Civil War, Saudi Adventurism, and the Future of Arabia
By Ginny Hill
About the Book
Why is oil-rich Saudi Arabia involved in a costly and merciless war against neighbouring Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East? Why, with billions of dollars of British and American weapons, have the Saudis lost the upper hand to the Houthi rebels?
In this first authoritative account of the present conflict, Ginny Hill delves into a country still dominated by the pernicious influence of career dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh, who masterminded patronage networks that kept the state weak, allowing conflict and inequality to flourish. After three decades, he was forced from office by street protests in 2011. In the chaos following his departure, civil war and regional interference plague the country. While the Saudis battle the Houthis—whom they believe are backed by Iran—ISIS, Al-Qaeda and separatist groups compete to exploit the broken state.
This fascinating portrait of modern Yemen vividly reveals the key personalities and events of the last thirty years, and how—despite everything—Yemen endures.
About the Author
Ginny Hill is a visiting fellow in the Middle East Centre at the LSE who has covered Yemen for more than a decade as a journalist and policy advisor. She founded the Chatham House Yemen Forum and recently served on the UN Panel of Experts on Yemen. Hill has worked for al-Jazeera English, the BBC, Channel 4 News and ITV.
In the Media and Scholarly Praise for Yemen Endures
‘[A] vivid and balanced account.’ — The Times Literary Supplement
‘Yemen — a country of multiple realities, complex, layered, and explosive, where some of the hungriest people in the world strive to live. Ginny Hill is a rare outsider who has lived the country, she is superbly seasoned in its physical and political terrain. Her book is a revelation.’ — Jon Snow, Channel 4 News
‘A compelling and detailed account . . . combining a journalist’s flair with the deep expertise from more than a decade of living in, working on and writing about Yemen, Hill weaves together the stories of Yemenis from several hundred interviews in a style that is both engaging and accessible.’ — International Affairs
‘This is an extremely fine journalistic account of the turbulence in contemporary Yemen . . . provides a distinct perspective on the factors that allow Yemen to continue to exist . . . a fine read for anyone unfamiliar with Yemen to get up to speed in understanding the country.’ – Choice
‘Ginny Hill’s detailed and highly readable account […] is indispensable to understanding the story so far. […] Hill is impressive proof that academic rigour, patient and persistent reporting, good contacts and fine writing are not mutually exclusive. Her book is full of vivid insights enriched by far deeper knowledge than can be accumulated during a brief visit.’ — Ian Black, LSE blog
‘Written with the fluid cadence of a former journalist, it offers a highly accessible and important entry point for readers new to the history and politics of Yemen but also includes content that will help more seasoned readers better under- stand some long-standing puzzles . . . a well-written work of wide scope on questions of great urgency.’ — Middle East Journal
‘[Hill] use[s] her deep knowledge and experience of Yemen to not only explain the complexities of the current conflict, but also places them in an historical and social context . . . deeply emotive and engaging . . . Telling the story of Yemen and the wider region through this powerful yet still journalistic prose makes for a genuine page turner.’ — Chartist
‘The most authoritative account of the Yemen tragedy so far. Yemen Endures succeeds where others have failed in giving voice to the Yemeni people. Highly recommended.’ — Christopher Davidson, author of Shadow Wars: The Secret Struggle for the Middle East
‘Yemen Endures is an invaluable guide to the crisis that has engulfed Yemen, combining history, analysis and vivid first-person testimony — a must-read for anyone who wants to understand this bewilderingly multi-faceted conflict.’ — Robin Lustig, former presenter of The World Tonight on BBC Radio 4 and Newshour on BBC World Service
‘There are all too few books written on Yemen, fewer still that get it right. Hill’s expert guide through the quagmire is both timely and essential. This book achieves that through the author’s rare balance of insight, candour and direct experience to produce a work that will be a marker of how modern Yemen ended up in war and collapse.‘ — Iona Craig, former Times (of London) Yemen correspondent, winner of the Orwell Prize and the Martha Gellhorn Award
‘An eminently readable and highly insightful portrayal of a country in chaos. Hill’s account of Yemen’s history and torturous politics is vividly coloured by her own personal experiences.’ — Mehran Kamrava, author of The Modern Middle East: A Political History Since World War I
Additional Information
May 2017
320 pages
$29.95 (list price)
Cloth ISBN: 9781849048057
Where to Purchase
Hurst Publishers
Excerpt
From the Introduction:
When I first arrived in Yemen in 2006, this hybrid state—part dictatorship, part democracy—stood at a crossroads. Could its leader, President Ali Abdullah Saleh, steer the country towards a more stable and prosperous future, or would he and his rivals plunder the failing economy and fight amongst themselves? This book records the choices they made, and it is written as a contemporary history.
Yemen Endures documents corruption, revolution, civil war and tragic, squandered potential. It charts Saleh’s presidency, as well as the ‘Arab Spring’ protests that led to him losing office. It explains how Saleh went on to form an expedient alliance with an armed group, the Houthis, whom he had previously persecuted while he still held power. It records the circumstances that prompted Saudi Arabia to start an air campaign against Saleh and the Houthis in March 2015, which in parallel with fighting between rival domestic groups and according to United Nations estimates had killed at least 10,000 civilians nearly two years later. It also exposes significant failures in Western foreign policy.
Yemen Endures introduces the reader to a complex political culture and offers a series of face-to-face character portraits, rendering regime players, rebels and activists in their own words. To the uninitiated, Yemen is certainly confusing and unpredictable—a state of affairs perpetuated by the absence of reliable hard facts, the quixotic influence of qat and a prevalence of AK-47s. Even to the initiated (and to Yemenis themselves), there are moments when it feels that mayhem is close to the surface.
Yet society and politics are undoubtedly governed by an underlying logic, which regulates and constrains Yemen’s occasionally chaotic tendencies. Under Saleh’s protracted leadership, competing tribal, regional, religious and political interests agreed to hold themselves in check by a tacit acceptance of balance. This implicit system of power-sharing bound itself together through a dense network of personal relationships, which—in effect—formed the foundation of the regime. Access to, or exclusion from, this system was defined by marriage, military stipends, business contracts and political pay-offs. Personal interests trumped the authority of formal institutions in almost every instance.
For thirty-three years, Saleh played this system with relative ease. He co-opted his rivals and set them against each other, with an uncanny instinct for the degree of stress and strain that the system could with- stand. He also exploited outside interests to his own advantage, confident that foreign emissaries could never match his intimate grasp of patronage dynamics. However, during the first decade of the twenty- first century, the underlying balance began to slip out of kilter. Saleh’s efforts to reapportion military and economic benefits to the advantage of his eldest son, Ahmed Ali, threatened the fundamental basis of the elite power-sharing agreement.
In essence, Saleh governed by sharing the proceeds of crude oil sales, often using informal—rather than formal—channels. However, in 2002, Yemen hit peak oil, and from that point on—despite rising global oil prices—Saleh’s patronage network became inherently unsustainable. At the same time, while elite rivals squabbled over their relative distribution of favours, increasing numbers of Yemeni citizens began to lose faith in the system altogether. During the 2000s, the three main groups posing an explicit security challenge to Saleh’s regime—al-Qaeda, southern separatists and the Houthi rebels—all developed powerful messages about political exclusion and social justice.
By 2011, on the eve of the ‘Arab Spring’ uprising, it seemed there were hardly any resources left for ordinary Yemenis to share among themselves. After three decades of sustained looting of state assets, Yemen sat at the wrong end of almost every human development league table, keeping company with many countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Development indicators offered a miserable litany of hunger, child stunting and women dying in childbirth. Children and young people under the age of twenty-five made up three-quarters of the population, but youth unemployment was sky-high and the country’s economic prospects offered no comfort. Parliamentary politics—para- lysed by corruption and factional interests—had become rotten, dysfunctional and unresponsive.
In January 2011, a group of university students marched on the streets of the capital, Sana’a—inspired by a successful revolt in Zine el Abidine Ben Ali’s Tunisia—aiming to stake a claim in their country’s future. Within a month, hundreds of thousands of women and men were gathering peacefully at symbolic ‘Change Square’ sites in cities across the country to demand Saleh’s downfall, and an end to corruption. Initially, the protesters spoke with one clear voice: they wanted a legitimate government, which was capable of striking a new balance between the regime and state, and between the state and society. As time went on, the protest movement itself fell prey to the politics of balance.
This book tells the dramatic story of the 2011 uprising, and charts the course of diplomatic negotiations that led to Saleh’s resignation from power. It exposes a ruthless and vicious power struggle inside Saleh’s regime, which predated the popular uprising, then gradually hijacked it, and remains unresolved. It argues that failure to broker a viable power-sharing agreement—firstly within the old regime, and secondly between established and emerging power centres—rather than formal state failure, sabotaged the political transition process. And yet it also reveals the extent to which widespread self-interest and profiteering continue to stifle the country’s future potential, despite the transition of power from Saleh to his former deputy, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi in February 2012.
For several years in the immediate aftermath of the ‘Arab Spring’ uprising, diplomats spoke of Yemen’s controlled transition as a rare success story. Compared to events in Syria, Libya and Egypt, Yemen appeared to be relatively stable. However, in 2014, the Houthis—who belong to a unique Shia sect, the Zaydis—marched out of the northern mountains, overran the capital, Sana’a, and forced Hadi to flee the country. Saudi Arabia’s decision to intervene by launching air strikes in March 2015, on the basis that Iran was backing the Houthis, has implications for the internal politics of both Yemen and Saudi, as well as Riyadh’s future relations with Sana’a, Aden, and Tehran.
This book sets the problem of weak, unstable government in the historical context of long-term state formation. It starts by exploring the tentative construction of authority under the historic Zaydi Shi’i Imamate, a theocratic system of government that dominated the north- ern highlands for a thousand years (Chapter 1). It charts intensified pressure for modern statehood during the twentieth century, set in motion by the demise of the Ottoman Empire, the growth of Arab nationalism and the collapse of British colonialism. In 1962, Egyptian- backed revolutionaries deposed the incumbent Imam in Sana’a and established a military republic, supposedly embarking on the twin processes of modernization and state-building. Instead, this Cold War power-shift birthed a behemoth of mafia-style corruption when mid- ranking army commander Ali Abdullah Saleh came to power in the late 1970s (Chapter 2).
Saleh dominated national life for more than three decades—first as leader of the Yemen Arab Republic (North Yemen) and then, after a 1990 merger with the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (South Yemen), as head of the unified republic. In a country with an innovative record of killing off its heads of state, Saleh’s longevity is a remarkable feat. His promotion in 1978 followed a coordinated double murder in which assassins killed the presidents of North Yemen and South Yemen within 48 hours. (This leitmotif of Yemeni history is still playing itself out. Saleh himself narrowly escaped slaughter during the 2011 uprising, and assassination attempts on senior politicians are rife in modern Yemen.)
Initially, Saleh survived by encircling himself with kinsmen from his own Sanhan clan and appointing close relatives to key positions at the top of the army. He shared hard power among the northern tribes, through recruitment into the lower ranks of the military, and turned a blind eye towards the graft and wheeler-dealing of division commanders. This ad hoc system adapted to unification with South Yemen in 1990 and political competition, of sorts, following the establishment of parliamentary democracy in the early 1990s (Chapter 3). However, senior commanders continued to bypass the Ministry of Defence and report directly to Saleh, effectively creating standing armies, supplied by obliging arms dealers, under the control of future rivals for the presidency (Chapter 4).
By the end of the 2000s, Yemen’s military procurement system had created a spectrum of warlords, operating in close proximity to international black markets. Somalia’s civil war provided a lucrative local opportunity for Yemen’s arms dealers, but weapons trading formed only one part of an integrated illicit trading network that shifted people, guns and subsidized diesel across the busy international shipping lanes of the Gulf of Aden, which were also beset by Somali piracy (Chapter 5). According to one 2008 estimate, half of Yemen’s subsidized fuel was leaked to Saleh’s inner circle and then smuggled out of the country, to be sold at a profit for market prices in the neighbouring states of Africa and the Gulf. In that same year, subsidized diesel was costing the government around $3.5 billion, nearly half the national budget.
By 2008, Yemen’s Western donors were pushing hard for economic reforms, in an attempt to mitigate the worst effects of falling oil pro- duction (Chapter 6). Saleh had licensed a small group of technocrats who were close to his son, Ahmed Ali, to pursue the donors’ desired reforms. Donors often came away from their encounters with these ambitious young men believing that their best hope lay in supporting Ahmed Ali’s future succession. This implicit link between reform and succession politicized the reform agenda along factional lines and para- lysed the relevant government ministries. Meanwhile, Saleh demonstrated a shrewd ability to agree to the bare minimum that the donors requested, while turning the situation to his family’s advantage.
Yemenis and Saudi nationals of Yemeni origin had played a critical role in the early development of al-Qaeda (Chapter 7). In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Saleh positioned himself as a US ally and authorized a short-lived, erratic crackdown. However, donors feared that terrorism would flourish in the event of Yemen’s economic collapse, and following a 2006 jail-break in Sana’a in which more than twenty terrorist suspects and convicts escaped, the tempo of terrorist activity began to increase. In January 2009, the leaders of al-Qaeda’s branches in Yemen and Saudi Arabia announced the creation of a single entity, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and proclaimed the over- throw of the Saudi royal family as a central aim. By the end of that year, AQAP had tried and failed to assassinate a prominent Saudi prince and botched an attempt to detonate a bomb on a Northwest Airlines flight in the skies over Detroit.
During the course of the following year, the White House came to view AQAP as al-Qaeda’s most dangerous global franchise—in part, thanks to the charisma and popular appeal of a bilingual US-born Yemeni cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki. Awlaki, whose link to AQAP—initially, at least—appeared to be tenuous, was nevertheless blamed for inciting ‘lone wolf’ terrorist attacks in the West (Chapter 8). His prolific English-language web output meant he was little known among Yemenis themselves, but his physical presence in Yemen influenced US counterterrorism policy, which in turn weighted US officials’ attitudes to change and risk inYemeni politics. In 2010, the Pentagon struck a deal with Saleh to increase military aid in return for Saleh’s permission to pursue an aggressive shadow war, and put Awlaki’s name on a controversial ‘kill list’.
For the best part of a decade, the Pentagon had channelled military aid, equipment and training to bespoke security and intelligence units under the command of Saleh’s son Ahmed Aliand Ahmed’ scousins.The decision to boost military aid to these boutique units on the eve of the ‘Arab Spring’ left the Pentagon with all their eggs in one basket— effectively, supporting a single family faction—at a point when popular opposition was growing: southern separatists (Chapter 9) and the Houthi rebels in Saada (Chapter 10) were already in open revolt. At the same time, internal regime tensions were becoming increasingly acrimonious, and regime players were themselves preoccupied by the prospect of a future confrontation.
On Friday 18 March 2011, a bloody rooftop salvo directed at Sana’a’s Change Square provided the pretext for Saleh’s regime to divide (Chapter 11). More than fifty people were killed and one hundred injured when plain-clothes snipers opened fire on protesters kneeling in the streets for midday prayers. Saleh’s most powerful general, Ali Mohsin al-Ahmar, swiftly declared his support for the uprising—along with sympathetic ambassadors, tribal chiefs and cabinet ministers—and stationed his troops at the perimeter of Change Square. If senior US officials stopped short of publicly calling for Saleh to go, at first, they privately felt he was becoming more of a liability than an asset. Washington backed a controlled transition, sponsored by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, to ease Saleh out of office in return for a guarantee of immunity from prosecution.
During spring and summer, as diplomats contrived to engineer Saleh’s resignation, Yemen’s popular uprising morphed from a struggle between the regime and the street into a battle between competing regime factions (Chapter 12). The rivals’ bitter and visceral sense of entitlement was visibly exposed when violence disfigured the streets of Sana’a in May and again in September; proxy battles flared outside the capital throughout the year. In November, Saleh—badly burned and wounded after surviving a bomb blast inside his palace mosque in June—finally bowed to international pressure and agreed to stand down. He was cornered by the prospect of UN Security Council sanctions and a travel ban, and constrained by his generals’ assessment that there was no hope for an outright military victory.
Three months later, in February 2012, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi stood for election as a consensus candidate in a one-man ballot, under the terms of the Gulf-backed transition deal (Chapter 13). Hadi accepted an enthusiastic public mandate to serve as a two-year care- taker president, becoming the first southerner to hold power in Sana’a. However, two years after Hadi’s election, the substructure of Saleh’s regime remained intact—albeit weaker and divided—and initially, at least, it seemed that the transition had simply shifted the political advantage from one elite faction to another. In part, Hadi owed his position to the support of the international community, and continued to rely heavily on foreign endorsement.
As a priority, Hadi embarked on a military restructuring plan (Chapter 14) designed to break apart the fiefdoms of Saleh’s generals, in parallel with an ambitious national dialogue programme. However, security conditions were gradually deteriorating, as the transition process stalled. In February 2014, Hadi’s term had to be extended to allow for the drafting of a new constitution, a constitutional referendum, and elections to be completed. Meanwhile, the Houthis—who had been suspicious of transition politics from the outset—were moving south from Saada towards Sana’a. In September, they overran the capital, occupied government buildings, and forced Hadi to appoint a new cabinet. When Hadi approved a federal model in January 2015, which the Houthis were unwilling to accept, they kidnapped Hadi’s chief of staff, and placed Hadi himself under house arrest. They formed a new executive body and issued a new constitution, for good measure.
Saudi Arabia expressed alarm that Iran was backing the Houthis, but the precise nature of that relationship still proves hard to define. In fact, the Houthis were in cahoots with Saleh. In February 2015, when Hadi managed to escape from house arrest in Sana’a, the Houthis pursued him south to Aden, along with army units loyal to Saleh. Hadi fled first to Oman and then to Riyadh, where he requested help to defend the ‘legitimate’ government of Yemen. The Saudis started an air campaign at the end of March with Western support (Chapter 15), expecting to fight a quick war. However, two years later, with thousands dead and many more thousands wounded, and the economy in ruins, Saleh and the Houthis are still in control of Sana’a. In the south, vigilante armed groups—including AQAP, separatist militias, and a local franchise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as Da’esh)—are competing to exploit the breakdown of Hadi’s authority.
Yemen Endures argues that Saleh’s ousting from formal power in 2012 offered an historic opportunity to bolster Yemen’s weak institutions and move towards the formation of a transparent, accountable civil state. However, the international community’s decision to extend an immunity agreement to Saleh, and to leave the old elites in place, ensured that the ‘open moment’ created by the youth-led street protests was certain to be squandered. In addition, Hadi’s personal failings contributed to the unravelling of the transition project. Five years’ later, in 2017, it seemed reasonable to assert that each of the West’s primary foreign policy objectives—reducing the threat from terrorism, promoting good governance and improving the country’s development indicators—had conclusively failed.
Even before the current conflict, the poorest country in the Middle East struggled with shrinking oil resources, falling water tables and widespread hunger. By March 2017, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated that 19 million Yemenis—around two thirds of the population—required some form of humanitarian assistance, and seven million people did not know where they would find their next meal. The failure of international mediation suggests that Yemen’s wars look set to continue—possibly for many years to come; meanwhile the tasks of reconciliation and reconstruction already appear formidable. The outcome of this latest power struggle between rival groups within Yemen, and between Yemen and its Gulf neighbours, will affect the structure of the state and the future of Arabia.
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