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Worldpress Review: Yemen on the Brink of War
On May 3, the U.S. Embassy in Sana'a issued a statement on the political violence in South Yemen that claimed eight lives last week. The United States stressed that "Yemen's unity depends on its ability to guarantee every citizen equal treatment under the law." What the Yemeni government calls unity, the protesters call occupation.Since protests erupted in South Yemen in May 2007, dozens were killed, hundreds injured and over a thousand arrested. As police shot into the crowds, Southern claims of institutionalized discrimination turned into calls for independence. After regional protest marches last week, Yemen began shelling the town of Radfan. Some Southerners took up arms for the first time. Southern grievances include overt theft of public and private land by Northern officials, the embezzlement of oil revenues and the subjugation of the south after Yemen's 1994 civil war. Northern citizens outside President Ali Abdullah Saleh's ruling elite are just as impoverished and face the same brutality. The Yemeni military bombed cities and villages in the northern Sa'ada province, countering an isolated Shiite rebellion that flared from 2004 to 2008. The government withheld food, medicine, and aid from the 700,000 residents in Sa'adaa practice Human Rights Watch called collective punishment. The United States and the European Union were largely silent as 130,000 Yemenis fled their homes and Hashemite men and boys were arbitrarily arrested and often brutally tortured. The state used jihadists to train and lead tribal militias in Sa'ada and convicted a journalist, Abdulkarim al Khaiwani, of terrorism for "demoralizing the military" with an article about the war. The bombing of Radfan may signal the beginning of a similarly brutal campaign in the south that deploys the deadly trio of bombing, blockade and jihadists. The state's legitimization of the jihad ideology works to repress progressives, silence critics and short circuit reform. The official media cast both Shiite rebels and Southern socialists as apostates. Six independent newspapers have been shuttered including Aden based al Ayyam. Government preachers declared a holy war against the southern separatists last Friday. After suicide bombers assaulted the U.S. embassy in Sana'a last September, the Saudi branch of Al Qaeda regrouped in Yemen. The country is a terrorist safe haven in part because Yemeni law does not criminalize jihad abroad or terror financing. As in Pakistan, aspects of the Yemeni security forces are subverted by Al Qaeda, and vast rural areas have no government presence. What the international community must recognize is that the primary dysfunction in Yemen is the criminalization of the state. The current bloodshed in the south, the resurgence of Al Qaeda and the northern rebellion all have roots in the failure of the state to act in the public interest. As Yemeni officials thwart reforms and subvert the law to protect illicit profit flows, poverty and frustration grow. Somali pirates hide their mother ships in Yemen's waters. NATO Commander, Admiral Mark Fitzgerald, said the pirates receive "a lot of the logistical supplies" from Yemen. Pirates say they receive information on ship location from Yemeni collaborators. Weapons are also smuggled to Saudi Arabia and Gaza. Yemen, the poorest nation in the Middle East, spends a third of its budget on the military. President Saleh inked a billion-dollar weapons deal with Russia in February. Narcotics from Pakistan, Iran and Syria, including millions of Keptagon tablets and tons of hashish, enter Yemen and flood the Gulf States. Yemeni children are sold to beg in Saudi Arabia and have their kidney's harvested in Egypt. In some border villages, one third of children are missing.
Posted by: 3dc 2009-05-24 |
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