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In its third year of war, Yemen risks fragmentation
The president has no country to rule
http://www.economist.com/news/middl...o-country-rule-its-third-year-war-yemen-risks
FROM the balcony of his hilltop palace, the governor, Major-General Ahmad bin Bourek, surveys Mukalla, the port and capital of Yemen’s largest province, Hadramawt. It is not yet his kingdom. But to mark the first anniversary of the expulsion of al-Qaeda, the jihadist group that seized the city in 2015, he declared a public holiday and hosted thousands of grandees at a conference at which he pushed his demand for autonomy. Flunkeys distribute badges with his portrait, hang banners proclaiming him leader along the city’s highways and organise military parades. Backed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which last April wrested back control of the port in an assault by land and sea, he sees a new political map of Yemen emerging from two years of war. “We can’t wait for them to liberate the rest of the country,” he says. “If the conflict lasts much longer, Yemen will split into duwailat (principalities).”
If so, it would be reverting to type. For 139 years, the British avoided the north and nannied 14 bickering sheikhdoms across southern Yemen. When the British Empire withdrew, socialists in the south formed their own republic, and proceeded to make it a crime even to communicate with northerners. South Yemen united with the more populous, tribal and rugged North Yemen only when the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving the south bereft of an external backer. After 27 years of forced but tempestuous marriage, its politicians have now latched onto the UAE, looking for separation again.
Taking on responsibility for the south as part of the Saudi-led coalition to take Yemen from northern Houthi rebel forces, the UAE has established at least six operating bases across southern Yemen. While the Saudis bombed from the air, the Emiratis put thousands of troops on the ground, trained perhaps 30,000 Yemeni fighters in and out of the country to fight the Houthis and al-Qaeda and pumped $2bn into projects designed to revive a battered and neglected land. “Southerners will never again be governed by Sana’a [Yemen’s capital in the north],” says Reyad Yassin, a former foreign minister and Yemen’s ambassador to Paris, on a visit to the UAE. Even the bottled water is called “South”.
United in resentment of the north, southerners agree on little else. Formally, President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi, a general from the southern province of Abyan, rules over all the territories the coalition has recovered. Yet signs of his power are almost as hard to find in the south as in the rebel-held north. The odd poster bearing his image is strung from lampposts too high to tear down. Checkpoints fly the former South Yemen flag, not that of a united Yemen Mr Hadi professes to govern.
Mr Hadi still controls the country’s central bank, and hoards some 400bn Yemeni riyals (about $1.6bn) he recently had printed in Russia. But local governors find ways to diversify. Frustrated at Mr Hadi’s reluctance to hand over Hadramawt’s share of Yemen’s oil revenues, its governor—like his al-Qaeda predecessors—levies duties at Mukalla port. Surcharges on fuel imports for distribution countrywide, including to Sana’a where the rebels hold sway, he says, raise $16m a month. He threatens to declare independence if Mr Hadi refuses to grant him devolved powers by September.
For Mr Hadi, Aden, 550km (350 miles) west, is an even more urgent challenge. In the early summer of 2015, the Emirati presidential guard and their Yemeni protégés drove out northern rebels who had taken most of the city four months earlier. But the turf wars unleashed by liberation have dampened the celebrations. Mr Hadi’s son now inhabits the presidential palace in Aden (Mr Hadi himself spends most of his time in Saudi Arabia), but in the rest of the city the governor, Aidarus al-Zoubaidi, has asserted control. Much of the police force he has raised comes from his home province of Dali, north of Aden, whose tribesmen massacred Mr Hadi’s Abayan tribe in 1986. “I override the president for the benefit of the city,” Mr Zoubaidi explains.
Back to the bad days
Amid the ruins, old vendettas have resurfaced. Over 3,700 people have been killed in the battles for Aden since 2015, say local doctors. In contrast to Mukalla’s well-swept streets and whitewashed walls, rubbish and graffiti abound. Marginalised under northern rule since 1990, Aden had long found solace in nostalgia. It recalled colonial times when it was the Arab world’s premier port, with its first refinery; or the Soviet era when it had beach parties, and northern practices like qat-chewing, the veil and polygamy were banned.
The Emiratis have attempted to give the city a facelift, but while schoolgirls welcome their new computers and freshly painted classrooms, they worry about getting to school safely: kidnappings, night-time gunfire and explosions cause their trepidation. The presidential palace should be Aden’s safest place, not its most frightening, says Kholoud Mousa, a 19-year-old whose school lies below.
Southern secessionists maintain what order there is. Young men bristling with guns careen in pickups along pavements. Some officials now feel confident enough to move around Aden without bodyguards. But although the South Yemen flag is more common, al-Qaeda’s ensign also appears on alley walls. Soon after the Emiratis restored Aden’s national library, extremists blew it up. The previous governor was assassinated. The current one has survived multiple attempts.
Yemen’s riyal has slumped against the dollar. Prices continue to rise. Mothers from poorer suburbs nurse shrivelled bundles in hospitals. Malnourishment was a fact of life before the war, but eight children have starved to death in Aden’s hospitals so far this year, against 11 all of last. Despite over $100m worth of Emirati investment in generators, blackouts have increased. Power cuts last most of the day because Mr Hadi refuses to pay for the fuel.
“He wants to stymie my efforts to deliver,” says the governor, who accuses the president of recruiting al-Qaeda fighters lest their cold war heat up. At the airport, the governor’s and the president’s men have already come to blows.
The Emiratis are beginning to tire of their bickering wards. Officials who hoped that Aden would be a model for the rest of Yemen now fear that leaving the south on autopilot might only condemn the country to instability. And that might engulf the whole Arabian peninsula. Thousands of fighters they have trained have gone AWOL (after collecting their pay). Motivating recruits to push north is an uphill task even with the payment of bonuses. Those who were happy to fight for their own homes seem unenthused about fighting for somebody else’s.
“Why should we stand up another failed South Sudan?” asks an Emirati analyst. “If you want to stabilise an area, the first thing you put right is the governance,” says a former British diplomat in Yemen. That, clearly, has yet to happen.
The president has no country to rule
http://www.economist.com/news/middl...o-country-rule-its-third-year-war-yemen-risks
FROM the balcony of his hilltop palace, the governor, Major-General Ahmad bin Bourek, surveys Mukalla, the port and capital of Yemen’s largest province, Hadramawt. It is not yet his kingdom. But to mark the first anniversary of the expulsion of al-Qaeda, the jihadist group that seized the city in 2015, he declared a public holiday and hosted thousands of grandees at a conference at which he pushed his demand for autonomy. Flunkeys distribute badges with his portrait, hang banners proclaiming him leader along the city’s highways and organise military parades. Backed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which last April wrested back control of the port in an assault by land and sea, he sees a new political map of Yemen emerging from two years of war. “We can’t wait for them to liberate the rest of the country,” he says. “If the conflict lasts much longer, Yemen will split into duwailat (principalities).”
If so, it would be reverting to type. For 139 years, the British avoided the north and nannied 14 bickering sheikhdoms across southern Yemen. When the British Empire withdrew, socialists in the south formed their own republic, and proceeded to make it a crime even to communicate with northerners. South Yemen united with the more populous, tribal and rugged North Yemen only when the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving the south bereft of an external backer. After 27 years of forced but tempestuous marriage, its politicians have now latched onto the UAE, looking for separation again.
Taking on responsibility for the south as part of the Saudi-led coalition to take Yemen from northern Houthi rebel forces, the UAE has established at least six operating bases across southern Yemen. While the Saudis bombed from the air, the Emiratis put thousands of troops on the ground, trained perhaps 30,000 Yemeni fighters in and out of the country to fight the Houthis and al-Qaeda and pumped $2bn into projects designed to revive a battered and neglected land. “Southerners will never again be governed by Sana’a [Yemen’s capital in the north],” says Reyad Yassin, a former foreign minister and Yemen’s ambassador to Paris, on a visit to the UAE. Even the bottled water is called “South”.
United in resentment of the north, southerners agree on little else. Formally, President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi, a general from the southern province of Abyan, rules over all the territories the coalition has recovered. Yet signs of his power are almost as hard to find in the south as in the rebel-held north. The odd poster bearing his image is strung from lampposts too high to tear down. Checkpoints fly the former South Yemen flag, not that of a united Yemen Mr Hadi professes to govern.
Mr Hadi still controls the country’s central bank, and hoards some 400bn Yemeni riyals (about $1.6bn) he recently had printed in Russia. But local governors find ways to diversify. Frustrated at Mr Hadi’s reluctance to hand over Hadramawt’s share of Yemen’s oil revenues, its governor—like his al-Qaeda predecessors—levies duties at Mukalla port. Surcharges on fuel imports for distribution countrywide, including to Sana’a where the rebels hold sway, he says, raise $16m a month. He threatens to declare independence if Mr Hadi refuses to grant him devolved powers by September.
For Mr Hadi, Aden, 550km (350 miles) west, is an even more urgent challenge. In the early summer of 2015, the Emirati presidential guard and their Yemeni protégés drove out northern rebels who had taken most of the city four months earlier. But the turf wars unleashed by liberation have dampened the celebrations. Mr Hadi’s son now inhabits the presidential palace in Aden (Mr Hadi himself spends most of his time in Saudi Arabia), but in the rest of the city the governor, Aidarus al-Zoubaidi, has asserted control. Much of the police force he has raised comes from his home province of Dali, north of Aden, whose tribesmen massacred Mr Hadi’s Abayan tribe in 1986. “I override the president for the benefit of the city,” Mr Zoubaidi explains.
Back to the bad days
Amid the ruins, old vendettas have resurfaced. Over 3,700 people have been killed in the battles for Aden since 2015, say local doctors. In contrast to Mukalla’s well-swept streets and whitewashed walls, rubbish and graffiti abound. Marginalised under northern rule since 1990, Aden had long found solace in nostalgia. It recalled colonial times when it was the Arab world’s premier port, with its first refinery; or the Soviet era when it had beach parties, and northern practices like qat-chewing, the veil and polygamy were banned.
The Emiratis have attempted to give the city a facelift, but while schoolgirls welcome their new computers and freshly painted classrooms, they worry about getting to school safely: kidnappings, night-time gunfire and explosions cause their trepidation. The presidential palace should be Aden’s safest place, not its most frightening, says Kholoud Mousa, a 19-year-old whose school lies below.
Southern secessionists maintain what order there is. Young men bristling with guns careen in pickups along pavements. Some officials now feel confident enough to move around Aden without bodyguards. But although the South Yemen flag is more common, al-Qaeda’s ensign also appears on alley walls. Soon after the Emiratis restored Aden’s national library, extremists blew it up. The previous governor was assassinated. The current one has survived multiple attempts.
Yemen’s riyal has slumped against the dollar. Prices continue to rise. Mothers from poorer suburbs nurse shrivelled bundles in hospitals. Malnourishment was a fact of life before the war, but eight children have starved to death in Aden’s hospitals so far this year, against 11 all of last. Despite over $100m worth of Emirati investment in generators, blackouts have increased. Power cuts last most of the day because Mr Hadi refuses to pay for the fuel.
“He wants to stymie my efforts to deliver,” says the governor, who accuses the president of recruiting al-Qaeda fighters lest their cold war heat up. At the airport, the governor’s and the president’s men have already come to blows.
The Emiratis are beginning to tire of their bickering wards. Officials who hoped that Aden would be a model for the rest of Yemen now fear that leaving the south on autopilot might only condemn the country to instability. And that might engulf the whole Arabian peninsula. Thousands of fighters they have trained have gone AWOL (after collecting their pay). Motivating recruits to push north is an uphill task even with the payment of bonuses. Those who were happy to fight for their own homes seem unenthused about fighting for somebody else’s.
“Why should we stand up another failed South Sudan?” asks an Emirati analyst. “If you want to stabilise an area, the first thing you put right is the governance,” says a former British diplomat in Yemen. That, clearly, has yet to happen.
