A truce has been reached in Yemen. The Saudi-led coalition’s strategy of blitzkrieg and blockade failed to eliminate resistance to the puppet government of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, which was made to resign on 7 April 2022 by its Saudi masters. Unrelenting opposition by the northern Supreme Political Council forces headquartered in Sana’a, led by Ansar Allah (the ‘Houthis’), has forced all parties to the negotiating table. The Houthis have won breathing space for humanitarian aid to arrive, though lasting peace is far from certain. WILL JONES reports.
The ceasefire is a dramatic turnaround following months of the worst fighting seen yet in the war, which has claimed at least 380,000 lives since 2015. The UN Security Council, on Britain’s initiative, voted in October 2021 to suspend the independent body investigating war crimes in Yemen, giving a free hand to the coalition to escalate the violence to horrific levels. From December the UAE-backed Giants Brigades stepped up their role in the conflict, but their intervention stirred up a hornets’ nest. The Houthis launched ‘Operation Hurricane of Yemen’ on 20 and 25 March, a blistering attack against oil tankers and an airport under construction in Abu Dhabi in the UAE. The Houthis’ capability of landing strikes there seriously threatens the UAE’s security.
The UN special envoy for Yemen, Hans Grundberg, called for a ceasefire and on 1 April, for the first time since 2016, a two-month truce was agreed. Hadi’s government and the coalition committed to allowing 18 fuel ships to enter the Houthi-held ports in Hodeidah and flights into and out of Sana’a airport to Egypt and Jordan. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have committed $1bn of humanitarian aid and $2bn to Yemen’s central bank to stabilise the Yemeni rial. Civilian deaths have fallen to their lowest level in months and fuel shortages have eased, yet the situation remains dire. The UN 2022 Yemen humanitarian response plan has raised only $1.6bn of a needed $4.7bn. UK aid to Yemen fell from £221m in 2020/21 to £82m in 2021/22, a 63% cut; Britain’s total aid to Yemen since 2015 totals £1.1bn, while it has sold £22bn worth of weaponry to the Saudi-led coalition.
The ceasefire reflects the strength of Houthi resistance, the intensity of the humanitarian crisis and shifts in the balance of power within the Saudi-led coalition. Hadi’s UN-recognised government has finally broken. Hadi himself was little more than a Saudi puppet, exiled in a hotel in Riyadh since 2015, his administration in the southern Yemeni city of Aden facing constant challenges from the separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC), backed by the UAE. In 2020 a unity government was formed including STC ministers. Much of Hadi’s cabinet fled to Riyadh in March 2021 after protesters stormed the presidential palace in anger at worsening living conditions, leaving the STC effectively in charge of Aden.
In the early hours of 7 April 2022, Hadi dismissed his vice-president and then ‘irrevocably’ transferred his own powers to a Presidential Leadership Council (PLC). It is ‘in charge of negotiating with [the Houthis] for a permanent ceasefire … and sitting at the negotiating table to reach a final and comprehensive political solution that includes a transitional phase that will move Yemen from a state of war to a state of peace’. His resignation underlines Saudi Arabia’s intention to exit Yemen. The PLC includes some northern Yemenis among its eight members but is more concerned with unifying the anti-Houthi camp than bringing peace. Leader of the Houthis, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, dismissed the authority of the PLC: ‘They brought a bunch of criminals, traitors, and thieves to power, and declared them as the leaders of the Yemeni nation. They are actually the picks of outsiders, not Yemenis.’
Developments in Yemen cannot be divorced from wider shifts in the Middle East and beyond. The US withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan and President Biden’s stripping away of military support for the Saudi-led coalition were followed by a series of Houthi victories in 2021. In August, the value of the Yemeni rial dropped to 1,000 per USD for the first time and public services collapsed in areas controlled by the Saudi-led coalition. Violent protests, supported by the STC, erupted in the Autumn over rising food and fuel prices, before the war in Ukraine put further pressure on food prices and UN grain supplies on which 80% of Yemenis depend; bread is more urgent to southern Yemenis than victory over the Houthis. Whoever governs in Aden must address this crisis or face growing popular unrest.
With US power in the Middle East being re-deployed elsewhere and an anti-Russia bloc forming around NATO, the US-backed Saudi kingdom and its allies have had to mend relations with Iran and Turkey for strategic reasons. Saudi Arabia and Iran confirmed in April 2022 that they would hold a fifth round of diplomatic talks. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Saudia Arabia on 28 April, his first visit to the country since Saudi agents brutally murdered the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Turkey will prove a crucial NATO member in any wider war; it occupies the Black Sea’s southern coast opposite Russia. Turkey hosts up to 90 US nuclear warheads at the Incirlik US-Turkish air base and seeks to extract concessions from NATO as a price for closer cooperation – such as threatening to veto Finland and Sweden’s accession to NATO unless they proscribe the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and lift bans on arms sales to Turkey.
Yet the US and its allies cannot abandon their struggle for hegemony over Yemen. Yemen’s ports lie next to the strait of Bab el Mandeb; beyond it is the Suez Canal through which passes 30% of global shipping container traffic and 7-10% of all oil and liquefied natural gas. According to the Houthis, the US is taking advantage of the ceasefire to construct new military bases in Aden and eastern Yemen in preparation for the next stage of the war. The Houthis will never be allowed peace while they threaten imperialist control of Yemen.
Imperialism out of the Middle East!
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 288, June/July 2022
