I’m delighted to present the fifth episode in my “Yemen vs. Empire” trilogy(?)! And we’re not done quite yet. In attempting to document the war in Yemen we’ve all been looking at for the past decade, I realized there was no way I could fit it all into one video. So with today’s video we’re covering the final fall of Ali Abdullah Saleh, from 2011-2017. The next, and final, for sure this time, Yemen vs. Empire video will cover the conflict from the Saudi-Emirati invasion in 2015, down to the war’s end in 2022.
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Video Transcript after the jump…
So you guys know Yemen used the Arab Spring to turn into a completely different country, right? So much of Yemen is timeless. The stark beauty of its environment and its architecture. Its rich culture, which has much more credible links to the time of the Koran than any of its neighbors. But over the past 13 years Yemen has experienced a complete political revolution, a sort of world turned upside down. The people that mattered then, are not the people that matter now, no matter how badly outside actors from the Persian Gulf to Washington, DC want to pretend otherwise.
Fundamentally this is a story about Yemen’s dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and the extraordinary lengths he went to to stay in power from the late 1970s until 2017. His presidency outlasted the North Yemeni state it started in, absorbing the south into a United Yemen in 1990. As late as 2014 Saleh looked triumphant. This is where we left him at the end of the last episode of this Yemen vs. Empire series. He used a surprise alliance with his old Houthi enemies to not just restore himself to power, but to humiliate his old bosses in Saudi Arabia and Washington, DC as well. Saleh’s final contortions, prompted by the Arab Spring, twisted Yemen’s politics in unpredictable ways, but his entire 40 year career molded Yemen’s hierarchy into a brittle construction that has not survived him.
So much of the story of Yemen’s past decade of war has been about outside actors trying and failing to piece together the shards of what Saleh broke. Countries like the United Arab Emirates and Iran, that have been willing to work with newer forces, have had much more success than Saudi Arabia and the United States, who have spent the past decade trying to live in the world before 2011.
To tell the story of the end of Saleh’s system, and the end of Saleh, we’ve got to start back in 2010, and the supposedly rational system that had run Yemen for three decades. As we’ve laid out in earlier episodes, Ali Abdullah Saleh sat at the top of this system, working closely with Sheikh Abdullah Al-Ahmar, and Ali Mohsen, his most trusted general. This troika was a dictatorship, but it had a logic that worked for a while. Each of the other two men represented a key part of Yemen’s power structure. If you spend 10 minutes googling Yemen, the first thing you’ll learn is that it’s a tribal society, and the Al-Ahmar family was at the head of the powerful Hashd tribal confederation. Yemen was also a military dictatorship, and Ali Mohsen spent 50 years at the heart of the country’s military. Outside governments and businesses had deep economic ties, not just with Saleh, but with the other members of the troika as well. Yemen also has a much deeper and more serious tradition of elections than most of the rest of the region. These elections were always managed to some extent, and always had the same result, a Saleh victory, but there were real, national political parties with offices all over the country. The General People’s Congress was more Saleh’s political party. The Islah party was more affiliated with the Al-Ahmar family, and later with Ali Mohsen. Islah also derived a lot of legitimacy from its association with Islamism, which was a growing factor in Yemen in the 1990s and 2000s, much like the rest of the Arab World.
Over the course of 9 years of war, Saudi Arabia has been able to benefit from the support of almost every element in Yemen’s 2010 power hierarchy, including the remnants of Saleh’s party and family power left behind after his death in 2017. But even with all of that support, Saudi Arabia’s invasion has been a complete failure. In the next episode we’ll provide a chronology of Yemen’s past decade of war. Today we’ll talk about what happened to Yemen’s old power structure.
2011 boom
In early 2011, as the Arab Spring uprising spread out from Tunisia, President Saleh thought he could manage things. He had successfully danced on the heads of snakes, as he put it, to maintain and expand his presidency through 30 years of chaos. In January 2011 he even got more ambitious, attempting to revise the constitution to give himself another presidential term. Noticing the role that Tahrir or Liberation square had played in Egypt’s downfall, he smugly filled the Yemeni Capital’s Tahrir square with an encampment of his own well paid supporters.
He quickly realized his mistake. Other squares in Sanaa, and public spaces across the country swiftly filled with diverse opponents of his regime. It was an extraordinarily hopeful time.
After three solid decades of Saleh’s cruelties and manipulations, all of Yemen’s diverse factions were ready for change. This included Yemen’s established, more or less tolerated opposition parties, like the Islamist Islah party, as well as more dynamic elements representing both the North and South. Women played a significant role in the uprising, including journalist and human rights activist Tawakkol Karman, who won a 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts.
By March it was clear that Saleh was in serious trouble. This prompted a huge mistake. On Friday March 18th, regime supporters opened fire on mostly peaceful protesters, killing at least 45 people.
For decades Saleh had ruled Yemen in partnership with General Ali Mohsen and the Al-Ahmar family, the leaders of the Hashed tribal confederation. This arrangement had been fraying for years, mostly over succession issues, as we covered in the last video. After the March 18th 2011 massacre, Saleh’s troika finally dissolved, with elements of the military and the Islah party now fully against him and his regime.
Saleh hung on for another 8 months after losing his troika. The rest of the ruling elite made common cause with the Houthis, the Southern Separatist forces, and the rest of the Yemeni people. Saleh could not resist the combination of all these forces. After an assassination attempt and returning from what had looked like exile, he finally gave up the Presidency in November 2011.
2012-2014 (Boom)
Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, Saleh’s Vice President, took power in November 2011, and had that power formalized in February 2012 in an uncontested election. His biography, which I described earlier in this series, should not have filled anybody with confidence.
“Remember how I said there was one humilating exception to the irrelevance of South Yemens’s 1980s political figures? Well that would be Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, the guy who just acted as Saudi Arabia’s fake Yemen President for the past ten years. The 1994 civil war made his career.
Hadi had been on the losing side of the 1986 massacres in the South. He fled to North Yemen. In the 1990s Saleh wanted some sort of political legitimacy for his pillaging of the south, and Hadi became his willing tool. As Yemeni minister of defense he oversaw the Crushing of his southern home. In 1994 He was rewarded for this betrayal with the position of Yemeni Vice President. He held this position as Saleh’s puppet until 2012, when he turned on Saleh and became Saudi Arabia’s puppet president. “
Despite the fact that Hadi was loathed throughout Yemen, the United States liked him, because he was even more willing to let us bomb Yemen for counter terror purposes than Saleh was. The Obama administration’s point man for the Yemen crisis wasn’t anybody who cared about development or democracy or Yemen’s future. It was John Brennan, a counterterrorism advisor to the president who later became the head of the CIA. Despite the fact that the US obsession with bombing Yemen after 9-11 had helped bring about the fall of the last government, bombing Yemen remained the US focus during the transitional government as well, helping to doom it to destruction. Other than the continued bombing, we were content to let the Gulf Monarchs handle the rest of the Democratic transition.
Hadi was elected for a two year term in February 2012, but there was no opposition. The understanding was that he would be done in February 2014, when real elections would replace him. Saudi Arabia ended up propping him up as the fake “internationally recognized” president all the way down to 2022.
In her book Yemen in Crisis, Scholar Helen Lackner identified two crucial problems with this attempt at a transition to democracy, related to security and the military. The first is the fact that Saleh was allowed to stay in Yemen, with most of the great fortune he had created as president, and with his patronage networks and military connections largely intact. The new President Hadi, was more independent of Saleh than many had initially expected, but with his military appointments, it seemed that Hadi was just trying to replace Saleh’s network with a network that was directly loyal to Hadi. Yemen desperately needed to make its military less central to government if democracy was going to have any chance. But the US prioritized our relationship with Yemen’s military over what was best for the country, as we do everywhere else. Al Qaeda was supposedly such a priority for us that a weaker military was unimaginable.
In practice, this approach has been a complete failure. The military we cherished has been fragmented, and the vast majority of it has turned against the United States and Israel. The chaos of the failed transition, and the wider war that broke out in Yemen has also seen Al Qaeda elements win vastly more power than they would have otherwise, briefly taking serious territory in the Abyan and Hadramaut governorates. Both of these episodes of Al Qaeda nation building were quickly squashed, but there’s no doubt that the US prioritization of counterterrorism over the Yemeni Democratic transition has led to a significantly worse terror situation.
Beyond the military, Helen Lackner has also pointed out that the transitional government failed to represent the parties that had done the most to throw Saleh out of power. The traditional elites that had turned on Saleh at the last moment, like the GPC and the Islah party, were well represented. But the Houthis, and the more nascent, but growing southern forces, that had been struggling against Saleh for years were almost entirely left out of the government.
Many analysts have also argued that the Hadi government, which was intended to be a transitional one with limited power, was making major changes to Yemen’s economy and society in service to outside powers, selling off state assets and making long term deals with no democratic input from the Yemeni people or the country’s newer powers.
NDC Boom
The great solution, which was intended to solve all Yemen’s problems, usher in democracy, and make up for Saleh & Hadi’s corruption, was the National Dialogue Conference, which finally launched in March of 2013. Considering all the outsized hopes that were put on this conference it’s perhaps not surprising that it failed.
The Houthis were better represented at the conference than they were in the transitional government, but they still had less than 10% of the delegates, despite already being one of the most powerful forces in the country. Politicians from the South were actually over represented at the conference, in part in an attempt to marginalize the Houthis, but the Southern Separatist factions were underrepresented. This looks especially bizarre a decade later, when the Houthis and the Southern Separatists are far and away the most powerful political forces in Yemen.
The Conference was meant to last six months, but ended up taking ten. Instead of settling the country’s conflicts it ended up highlighting them. The diversity of interests represented, and the conflicting agendas of outside powers led to stagnation, not solutions.
A vital subplot, about to be the main plot, of this transitional period was the steady rise in Houthi power. Much of Saleh’s last decade as president had been about trying to crush the Houthis of the North.
Between 2004 and 2010 this effort failed miserably. Saleh’s brutality had won more support for the Houthis, and by the last round of conflict in 2010 they were mostly in control of the entire Northern Sadah province. Remember that though this may not look like much on the physical map, the North is where most of Yemen’s population is, so government loss of control in Sadah was a big fricking deal. Across 2010, during and after the fighting, Houthi control spread to the north of Hajja province, giving them their first access to the sea. They also worked their way further into Amran and Al-Jawf provinces.
Between Saleh’s fall in 2011, and the Saudi invasion in 2015, Houthi power consolidated in these areas, as what was left of the central government worked more and more frantically to cut them out. Despite the transitional government’s efforts, Houthi influence grew steadily on the streets of Yemen’s capital Sanaa as well.
But the Houthis, or at least some factions of the Houthis were willing to give peace a chance in the years after Saleh’s first fall. They attempted to rebrand as a more official political movement, giving themselves the name Ansar Allah. They sent representatives to the National Dialogue Conference, including some of their most experienced leaders. Many of those Houthi leaders, who were willing to give peace a chance, ended up getting assassinated. It’s never been fully established who did the assassinating. In January of 2014, the NDC closed with the murder of another Houthi leader, and the announcement that President Hadi’s term in office, which was supposed to end in February, would be extended another year. https://www.reuters.com/article/world/yemeni-presidents-term-extended-shiite-muslim-leader-killed-idUSBREA0K136/
Shortly after the end of the NDC, Hadi announced his solution to the autonomy issues that the Houthis and Southern Separatist movements had newly made a priority. Hadi’s plan, splitting the country up into six regions, was unacceptable to both movements. The South was to be divided, and the Houthis were to be deprived of their hard-won access to the sea, and any participation in the country’s petroleum industry.
This, combined with the murder of most of their more moderate leaders, ended the Houthis attempts at peaceful reconciliation. Over the course of 2014 and early 2015, they took over most of the country. Their extraordinary rise would not have been possible without the complicity of Ali Abdullah Saleh, the fallen dictator who had spent the past decade trying to destroy them. But it wasn’t just Saleh.
In 2014, all the other factions in Yemen, old and new, thought they had bigger issues to worry about than the Houthis. The traditional Saleh, Ali Mohsen, al-Ahmar Family troika had finally shattered in 2011. But Saleh was still in the country, and President Hadi was now introduced to the war of all against all at the top of Yemeni politics. This struggle continues to this day, despite the fact that the Houthis have spent the past decade removing players, one by one, and forcing the competition into smaller and smaller chunks of Yemeni territory.
The 2014 fate of the Al-Ahmar family, previously seen as the bedrock of Yemen’s political system, provided an early indication. In February, the Houthis completed their takeover of Amran province, the heart of Al Ahmar power, and that family has never recovered.
The death blow for the Hadi government seems to have been dealt by the international community in July 2014. As a condition for future aid, the International Monetary Fund required the transitional government to raise diesel prices. This, combined with Hadi’s two year failure to improve Yemen’s economic conditions, brought the people back to the streets. The tumult gave the Houthis the excuse they needed to take over Sanaa, the country’s capital, in September of 2014. For neither the first nor the last time, idiotically stringent IMF requirements managed to turn a country over to the enemies of democracy.
Saleh, the wily old player was ready for his final gamble. He had spent his last decade in power fighting the Houthis, but after his fall in 2011, precisely when is still a matter of some debate, he started working with them. The unholy Saleh-Houthi alliance was the largest factor in the quick Houthi takeover of the country, but President Hadi was also interested in using the Houthis against his rivals Ali Mohsen and the Islah party, gravely misjudging the true threat to his regime. In September of 2014, PresidentHadi thought he could work with the new Houthi masters of Sanaa. By February 2015 he would be fleeing his supposed capital, and by March of 2015 he had fled the country entirely, rarely to return.
2015-2016 boom
Saleh had turned the tables on his enemies one last time. By allying with the Houthis, he managed to thwart his former Saudi and US patrons, and also clear out the rest of the ruling class. Theoretically, this left a lot of powerful, disgruntled people for an outside invader to work with. This was likely a big part of the Saudi and UAE decision to invade in March 2015.
Since 2015, the invading coalition has made very little progress into the places where most yemenis live. But they had Ali Mohsen, Hadi, the Ahmars, Yemen’s desert based oil industry, and thanks to the US and the United Nations, a lot of control over Yemen’s central bank and oil driven finances. Best of all, after winning it back in mid 2015, the invading coalition had Aden, probably Yemen’s second biggest city, the old capital of South Yemen, and one of the most strategic port cities in the world. But, as we have learned over the past 9 years, the coalition didn’t really win back Aden, the southern separatist forces did, and they have their own agenda.
In the first decade of this century, the Houthis of the North opted for large scale armed resistance, but the South was slower to adopt it. The failure of Southern Secession in the 1994 civil war, may have left activists less likely to take up arms. The savage repression after 1994 certainly gave them enough reason to fight. Post-Unification South Yemen is one of the only examples I can think of where a wide program of land reform was reversed, making peasants landless again in service to landlords who had fled decades earlier. By 2009 some southern factions began to take up arms again, thanks to Saleh’s trademark hyperviolent reaction to peaceful protest. But most of the Southern movement was more committed to peaceful negotiation than the Houthis were, all the way up until the point that the Houthis invaded the South.
The only thing that has ever unified the South is resistance to the North. It seems like every Southern locality has its own wannabe government. I would be a much bigger fan of the idea of Southern Secession if it weren’t likely that a new South Yemen would quickly shatter into a bunch of competing, maybe even warring, mini-states.
Aden is by far the most populous and important part of the South, but in recent years, as Aden has established its autonomy under the Southern Transition Council, the other Southern provinces have only worked with it intermittently. This is not because of loyalty to the Saudi proxy government, but because each region wants its own autonomy. They are only loyal to a Yemeni or foreign government if it serves that goal. Unlike the Houthi territories, which have a unified government, the mostly southern territories of the internationally recognized government have never been more than a fractious coalition, and they have frequently been less than that, fighting amongst themselves.
So the limited 2015 victories of the Gulf sponsored Hadi government weren’t about UAE special forces, Saudi planes, imported Sudanese child soldiers, or the remnants of the old Yemeni ruling classes. They were about Southerners fighting for autonomy from the North. The fact that all of these coalition elements combined haven’t been able to move out of the traditional territory of Southern Yemen, in almost a decade of fighting since 2015, shows how powerless the Gulf invaders are without southern forces on their side fighting on their home turf.
2017
One of the most damning comments I have ever read on President Hadi’s internationally recognized government comes from Helen Lackner’s book. Hadi may be the first president in history who had to make carefully planned and secured official state visits to his own so-called capital in Aden. He spent most of the ten years of his two year term holed up in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia.
The old president, Saleh had pulled it off. He had humiliated all of his former subordinates, friends, enemies and Saudi & US bosses. He didn’t control the South anymore, but that wasn’t a new problem for him. From 1978 to 1990 Saleh had been president of North Yemen. Back then South Yemen was an independent, unified state that was capable of humiliating the much larger North in military conflict. Now the South was fragmented, fighting amongst itself, and Saleh was no longer reliant on US and Saudi patronage for his survival. He was free of his over ambitious middle managers too, who were now all fighting over diminishing scraps in the South. The problem with a victory this complete though, was that Saleh needed all of those supports he had swept away. He’d always run Yemen with significant outside support, in the form of weapons and money for his patronage networks. His old network of cronies had needed him just as much as he needed them. This was not true with his one new ally.
As late as mid-2017, people were still assuming that Ali Abdullah Saleh was the real power in the Houthi Saleh coalition that controlled the majority of Yemen’s population. Many thought that the battle between the old men that had controlled Yemen for decades was still more important than the upstart militia from the North. This mistake was made by many western analysts, and it was made by Saleh himself.
Over the course of 2017, Saleh’s marginalization became clearer and clearer. By August he and his inner circle had been cut out of decision making by the Houthis, and by November his movements in Sanaa had been limited. He decided to run with one of the trademark betrayals he had carried out so many times before, turning on the Houthis and announcing openness to working with the Saudis. This was a mistake.
December 4th, 2017.
Clip
When Saleh died, I had only been studying Yemen intensely for a few months, but even I could see that this was the end of an era.
17:00 clip “Saleh was Yemeni politics”
I and most other analysts assumed this would be a huge problem for the Houthis. Wasn’t Saleh’s government experience and military connections the reason they had been so successful? Wouldn’t the Houthis be lost without him?
14:00 on my reaction saying Houthis could be in trouble.
Turns out, no. Yemen had changed, fundamentally. And Saleh was the one that had changed it.
For 40 years Saleh had warped Yemeni politics to serve his political power. To enhance that power, and his wealth, he served a series of outside interests, primarily the Saudis and the United States. He pulled it off for decades, but all that wheeling and dealing finally caught up to him in 2011. Instead of taking the many easy off ramps to wealthy retirement that were offered to him, he chose to sweep away the Yemeni power structure that had turned on him by allying with the Houthis. That last gamble seemed to work, but then it killed him.
Saleh’s career, and especially his final contortions, delegitimized Yemen’s entire political system, and then he swept it away entirely. What cemented the destruction of the old order, however, was ten years of war that went on without him. We will finally cover this war in depth, in the next and final installment of this Yemen vs. Empire series, how Yemen Beat Saudi Arabia, coming sometime soon.