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2017.02.013. LEONID ISAEV. ENDLESS WAR, OR AGAIN ABOUT YEMEN // "Neprikosnovenny zap as", Moscow, 2016, № 6 (110), P. 238-248.
Keywords: Yemen, Middle East, Arab spring, political crisis, peace talks, M. Hadi, Saudi Arabia (SA), the GCC, the UN Security Council.
Leonid Isaev,
Senior Lecturer, Department of Political Science, National Research University "Higher School of Economics"
Yemen, writes L. Isaev, remains one of the most unstable countries of the Middle East. Anarchy, separatism, religious strife, foreign intervention, terrorist groups - this is far from a complete list of the problems besetting the Yemeni Republic today.
On April 21, 2016 in Kuwait under the auspices of a special UN envoy for Yemen, Ismail Ould Sheikh Ahmed there started the peace negotiations between the National delegation of Yemen (it included representatives of the Ansar Allah and the General People's Congress - GPC) and "the Riyadh group", which is nothing else as a government in exile, controlled by Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who is called "the legitimate President of Yemen". The peace talks which lasted for three and a half months were unsuccessful. If the National delegation of Yemen based its proposals on the real balance of forces prevailing to the time, the "Riyadh group", by contrast, insisted on rollback and restoration of the two year-old situation.
Each side believes its standpoint fully justified. M. Hadi and his supporters base on international law, appealing to the strict observance of two fundamental, from their point of view, normative legal acts: the Peace Initiative of the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (GCC) of November 2011 and the UN Security Council Resolution of April 14, 2015. Both
documents make the position of the fugitive president and his government more winning than those of their opponents. Thus, Article 1 of the Resolution requires that the Houthis withdrew their troops from the capital - Sana'a - as well as from all the occupied areas on a unilateral basis, completely lay down all the "extra arms" and stopped the activity that relates to the scope of the authority of the legitimate government of Yemen. It is evident, that implementing of even this single provision is able to force the Ansar Allah out to Yemen periphery, both in a geographical and in a political sense.
In their turn, the representatives of the National delegation of Yemen keep to the standpoint of political "realism," proposing to base on the configuration of forces, which existed by the beginning of the negotiations. From their point of view, the only way to resolve the crisis situation would be to convene the provisional coalition authority - the Presidential Council, composed of representatives of all the warring parties. However, the adoption of such proposal of M. Hadi, considering his lack of real support in Yemen, would turn this figure into a political outsider, limiting his career by the term of validity of the newly formed power structure. Under the situation that has come about at the negotiations the main claims of the parties - the establishment of the transitional authority and the disarmament of the Houthis - were not denied by the opponents; however, they failed to agree what should be done in the first place.
The situation of the recent months favors rather Sana'a, and not Riyadh. Primarily this is due to the fact that the military aggression launched by the coalition headed by SA against Yemen revealed the resource limits of the Kingdom. The Saudi army managed to meet the minimum program, limiting the expansion of the Houthis. In the meanwhile SA did not hide the fact that it was North Yemen it sought to weaken and to support the South -South Yemen was not particularly dangerous for the Kingdom. North Yemen has always been characterized by rootedness of
tribal structures and weakness of state institutions, while in the South the situation is reverse. Tribal solidity of the North explains in many aspects its military superiority over the South.
The conventional "front line" which took shape in the summer of 2015, dividing the Houthis-Saleh camp and its opponents, almost perfectly coinciding with the former border between the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen and the Yemen Arab Republic, is maintained up to this day. It is important that a prolonged pause in the fighting makes continuation of the military campaign on the Arabian Peninsula less and less likely, especially considering the enormous financial costs of SA, where the budget deficit in 2015 reached 98 billion.
The real balance of forces prevailing in today's Yemen, works against Hadi. Time is playing into the hands of the government in Sana'a, that is, the Houthis and Saleh: the longer M. Hadi will remain a nominal President in exile, not in control of the situation at home, the less incentive it will be for the world community to recognize him as a legitimate President.
The appeal to the GCC Peace Initiative as the way of settling the political crisis in Yemen today looks divorced from reality. First, this mechanism has already shown its failure. M. Hadi has never acted as an impartial "moderator" of the National Dialogue, the new Constitution was never been adopted, and all the terms of the transitional period established by the Peace Initiative of the GCC, have long expired. Secondly, in 2016 there arose the need to resolve a conflict fundamentally different from the one that took place in Yemen five years ago, during the "Arab spring". If in 2011 the question of the regime change and peaceful transfer of power from Ali Abdullah Saleh to the new head of the state was in the first place on the agenda, in the course of recent events the conflict transformed into an inter-religious and inter-ethnic clash, and the number of participants has increased markedly.
After the failure of the peace talks, the Kuwait the authorities of Sana'a started to look for legal frameworks guaranteeing the functioning of the governmental political institutions regulated by them. Basing on the Constitution of 1991, the authorities in Sana'a announced the convening on August 13, 2016 of an emergency session of the House of Representatives. The legitimacy of this institution of state power caused the least quantity of complaints from the conflicting parties. The main decision of the House of Representatives was convening of the Presidential Council under the chairmanship of Saleh al-Samad, the head of of Ansar Allah political bureau. The representative of the General People's Congress was appointed The Deputy Chairman.
The situation in Yemen from the beginning of the "Arab spring" is completely put at the mercy of the GCC, headed by SA, which launched their Peace Initiative. However, the Arabian six lacks the experience in resolving such complex conflicts. A significant disservice for the peacemaking was the fact, that that Riyadh became both a mediator and a party to the conflict at the same time. This resulted in the failure of the political settlement and reluctance of the Kuwaiti leadership to provide a platform for continuation of the senseless negotiation process. In general, the failure of the Kuwaiti talks and subsequent steps taken by the authorities of Sana'a, make the situation in Yemen even more confusing and uncertain, and reduce to zero the probability to reach a compromise in the event of a resumption of peace talks under the auspices of a special UN envoy on Yemen, the researcher notes.
Author of the abstract - V. Schensnovich
