Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2014 21:04:49 +0100
Partition or federation?
Powerful forces are at work hoping to frustrate efforts to find a political
settlement to the crises in Yemen, writes Mohamed Al-Said Idris
Friday,28 February, 2014
Yemen, like many of the other countries of the Arab Spring, appears to be
fated to a period of extended instability, the worst aspect of which is that
the effects of foreign intervention and foreign interests far outweigh the
effects of internal factors.
The National Dialogue Conference, in which most if not all the Yemeni
factions participated, began its activities in 2013 as an essential attempt
to save the country's revolution and to save the country from the perils of
civil war and internal strife and the mounting repercussions of that strife.
Among the other spectres that loomed then was that of a possible "American
solution," one originally tailored for Iraq on the ostensible grounds that
it would be the cure-all to that country's crises, and holding out the idea
that partition was the key.
The National Conference convened to ward off the spectre of partition as the
consequence of the internal strife that in part had taken the form of the
secessionist call advocated primarily by the Southern Movement.
Formed in 2007, this is made up of a number of political groups and forces,
most notably the larger portion of the Yemeni Socialist Party that governed
the southern half of Yemen following independence in 1967 and subsequently
entered into a partnership, following the unification of Yemen in 1990, with
the General People's Congress (GPC) headed by ousted former president Ali
Abdullah Saleh.
However, there were three movements driving the country towards possible
partition. There was the campaign launched by the Southern Movement to
avenge itself against the unified state and revert to the era of the great
split that had divided historic Yemen into a northern state and a collection
of smaller states in the south that the Socialist Party brought together in
the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) following independence.
There was also the Houthi drive emanating from the northern governorate of
Saada and expanding towards the capital Sanaa and having its sights set on
founding a Zaidi theocracy. As Houthi Zaidiya doctrines have come to have
much in common with Twelver Shia ones, the Houthis have become prime
candidates for Iranian support, and their movement has fired Tehran's
ambitions to insert a Shia state or statelet in the southern flank of the
Arabian Peninsula.
With this Houthi-Shia tide came a third source of peril in the escalating
warfare that Al-Qaeda was waging in many Yemeni governorates, together with
the increasing US strikes against Al-Qaeda bastions in Yemen. All the
foregoing was combining to turn Yemen into a failed state.
The National Dialogue Conference that was initiated in order to address
these dangers and ward off their threats to national unity was originally
supposed to finish its activities within six months, which is to say in
September 2013. For various reasons, its term was extended to 25 January
2014, on which date it held its closing session with high-profile Arab,
regional and international attendance.
Before this closing session, the Conference adopted a Dialogue Charter by a
large majority vote, one of the articles of which called for the creation of
a federal state to replace the current centralised state system. The
participants at the Conference also agreed to create a 22-member committee,
headed by President Abd-Rabbou Mansour Hadi and representatives of all the
political forces in the country, to study the possible options for a federal
system and approve one of them.
There were three basic options on the table, all of which had been discussed
at length during the National Dialogue. The first two were a six-region
federal state with four regions in the north and two in the south, or a
federation consisting of two large regions, one in the north and the other
in the south. The participants hailing from the Southern Movement were the
chief advocates of the latter option, as it could prelude a return to the
two separate states that had existed before unification in 1990. The third
option was kept open and left to the committee members to decide.
On 10 February, the committee concluded its activities. It had adopted the
first option - the six-region formula - by a large majority. Foremost among
the committee members to vote in favour were the representatives of the
Islah (Reform) Party, the Nasserist Party, the GPC, the Justice and
Construction Party, and representatives of women and youth.
Voting against it were the representatives of the Socialist Party and the
Houthi group that calls itself Ansar Allah (Champions of God). Both of these
groups lashed out at the committee, criticising the way it was formed and
combining their justifications for opposing the selected option with harshly
worded threats and warnings.
Suddenly the clock was being turned back to the period before the National
Dialogue. Once again, the warring groups were reproducing the options of
failure and failed solutions and pitting Yemen against challenges that
threatened it with partition and civil war.
FEDERATION OR PARTITION? Those who have cheered the committee's approval of
the six-region formula see it as a decision that will safeguard Yemen from
fragmentation and the imposition of the secessionist option favoured
especially by the Socialist Party and extremists from the Southern Movement.
They also hold that the purpose of the federal formula is to promote modern
government and administration in the regions that will have the power to
supervise and address their particular issues and concerns related to
development, progress and security and stability.
The chief guarantee of the success of the federal system, according to the
supporters of the committee's decision, will be the constitution. The
drafting of this is set to become the focus of national activity in Yemen in
the coming months in the framework of a new interim phase ushered in with
the extension of the current president's term of office for a year in order
to oversee the completion of this task.
The hope is that the new constitution will enshrine a number of principles
recommended by the committee. According to officials from the committee,
regions should have the option to modify their internal administrative
boundaries (as defined by the existing boundaries of their component
provinces) and jurisdictions after one or more electoral term. This process
would be subject to specific regulations as established by a law issued by
the legislative authority in each region.
The committee also called for guarantees to ensure the true partnership of
each region in the federal legislative and executive authorities. One
mechanism towards this end would be to implement the rotation of the post of
speaker of the legislative assembly. At the regional level, the principle of
partnership among the constituent provinces would be ensured by guaranteeing
that no one province dominates the regional cabinet.
The committee members further stressed that they had taken into account such
factors as geographic contiguity, demographic homogeneity and social
relations, and economic capacities in their determination of the constituent
provinces of the regions and that they had resolved to retain a special
status for Sanaa and Aden in view of their political and economic
importance.
These recommendations were supported by some representatives of the Southern
Movement who had participated in the National Dialogue, which set them apart
from most other leaders of that movement who, from the outset of the
dialogue, had remained bent on southern secession.
Yassin Makawi, a member of the committee representing the Southern Movement,
said that the six-region federal formula "achieves for southerners, in
particular, and northerners, in general, what all previous civil wars failed
to achieve." He added that the federal partitioning "is only a first step
towards the restructuring of the south in the framework of forthcoming
institutions" and that the elected assemblies would be instrumental in
setting on course legislation that followed through on the guarantees
adopted by the National Dialogue.
An antithetical stance was voiced by the other camp in the Southern
Movement, as well as by the Socialist Party which had boycotted the National
Dialogue Conference. The tenor of this was made explicit by the Supreme
Council for the Southern Movement at the outset of the Dialogue last year.
"This step emanating from the Gulf Initiative does not concern the
southerners, who demand freedom, independence and the restoration of the
state of [South Yemen]," it said.
The Council added that "the [National Dialogue] initiative was not conceived
to resolve the southern question, but merely to resolve the crisis between
the government and the opposition in the north."
Ali Salem Al-Beidh, formerly the PDRY president who became Yemeni
vice-president after unification, was harsher in his criticism of the
six-region federal solution. It was "no more than a game that will have its
day," he said, adding that he had been opposed from the outset to engaging
in a Dialogue "aimed solely at solving the problem of the fight over seats
in the government in Sanaa" and that he did not expect the powers-that-be in
Sanaa to produce anything approaching a democratic system of government.
In sum, "the southerners reject the decision of the committee because it
will not produce anything new as the social forces are incapable of carrying
it out," Al-Beidh said. He also expressed his conviction that the government
in Sanaa "has come under the international mandate of the countries
sponsoring the Gulf Initiative" and that although the six-region federal
decision may not favour any one particular country, "the governments that
sponsored the Gulf Initiative played a part in this decision given that the
government in Sanaa is under their mandate."
THE HOUTHI POSITION: Houthi challenges to the federal project have
compounded the problems now facing it.
Houthi spokesmen have protested that the six-region plan as devised by the
presidential committee will "divide Yemen into rich and poor." Their proof
of this has been that the plan attaches the province of Saada - the Houthi
bastion - to the region of Azal, together with Amran, Dhamar and Sanaa. This
runs counter to the principles of the committee, they say, as in their
opinion Saada is culturally, geographically and socially closer to Hajja and
Al-Jawf, which have been attached to the regions of Tahama and Saba,
respectively.
The Houthis believe that the committee's decisions regarding the composition
of the regions have been informed by Saudi pressures. Saudi Arabia, they
say, seeks a large tribal and oil-producing hinterland in Yemen,
particularly in the oil-rich regions of Hadramawt and Saba which have close
tribal links to Saudi Arabia.
According to Houthi spokesman Mohamed Abdel-Salam, "[the federal decision]
reflects the view of certain forces and does not promote true partnership.
It is neither a solution to the southern question that it was meant to
address, nor to the other problems in the country." He denied that Saleh
Hira, president of the political council of the Houthi group, had taken part
in the committee, stating that the participant had been Hussein Al-Ezzi, who
had refused to sign the committee's report.
Another reason cited by Houthi spokesmen for their opposition to the federal
scheme is that it cuts Saada off from access to Red Sea ports. Some
observers take this to mean that the Houthis fear that they are being
deprived of links to abroad and, specifically, to foreign support.
At another level, the Houthi rejection of the federal plan coincides with
their ongoing battle with a number of tribes affiliated with the Islah
Party. These confrontations, raging in the province of Amran and the Arhab
district near Sanaa airport, are only rivalled in their ferocity by the
battles waged by Al-Qaeda in many parts of Yemen against the state and the
Americans.
It appears, therefore, that the federal decision, given such formidable
opposition and the ongoing strife in the country, will not solve the crises
in Yemen, even if its stated purpose is to resolve the contests over power
and wealth in the country. These conflicts are intimately connected with the
evolution of the state and the diverse political, social and economic
factors that led to the creation of two separate Yemens, unification and
civil war. It is a history brimming with conflict.
The signs are that the conflict will not now end and that it will ultimately
cause the collapse of the federal state if, indeed, it comes into being. In
that event, Yemen faces the prospect of the dismantling of the Yemeni nation
state, for the establishment of which so many Yemenis sacrificed their lives
and that had revived Arab hopes for comprehensive Arab unity when the Yemeni
republic was declared in 1990.
Unfortunately, it appears that the enemies of comprehensive Arab unity have
not been satisfied with partitioning the Arab nation and preventing its
unification. Since they proclaimed the Greater Middle East project on the
eve of the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, they have been
working to repartition the earlier partitions and to re-fragment the already
fragmented Arab lands. The purported justification has been to create more
homogeneous countries to replace what they have called "failed states" that
were heterogeneous in their ethnic and religious composition.
The collapse of the federal state in Yemen, if that occurs, will parade
beneath the call to create homogeneous statelets based on ethnic, religious
and sectarian divides. Another name for that repartitioning and further
fragmentation will be the rival of the Great Middle East project. That
project failed in Iraq. But its architects have not given up, and thwarting
the establishment of the federal state in Yemen may be an end in and of
itself in order to extend the experiment elsewhere in the Arab region.
Partition or federation?
Region 1: Hadramawt Provinces: Al-Mahra, Hadramawt, Shebwa and Socotra
Capital: Al-Makalla Region 2: Saba Provinces: Al-Jawf, Mareb and Al-Bayda
Capital: Mareb Region 3: Aden Provinces: Aden, Abyan, Al-Lahj and Daleh
Capital: Aden Region 4: Al-Janad Provinces: Taez and Ibb Capital: Taez
Region 5: Azal Provinces: Saada, Amran, Sanaa and Dhamar Capital: Sanaa
Region 6: Taha
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