WORLDVIEW:A US counterterrorism deal could be in jeopardy after the transfer of power
IT ALL looked a bit like one of those old Soviet-era elections. One candidate, and he the outgoing vice-president. But Yemen’s election on Tuesday was more than just the seamless transfer of power within a regime. Expectations are high that, one year on, the Arab Spring – slowly, bloodily, and with distinctively Yemeni characteristics, after 33 years of autocratic rule – has had its eventual way with another Arab dictator, the fourth it has toppled: the ailing Ali Abdullah Saleh.
Unlike Egypt and Tunisia, where crowds swept rulers from power, or Libya and Syria where uprisings turned into all-out war, Yemen’s slow-burning revolution, assisted by international pressure from Arab neighbours, rich Gulf states, and an increasingly disillusioned US ally, led to Saleh’s negotiated departure (with a promise of immunity from prosecution).
Until now seen as a canny survivor, who leaned heavily in recent years on US support, Saleh’s rule was associated with corruption, nepotism and violence.
From the 1980s on, the mujahideen war against the Soviets in Afghanistan through 9/11, he milked the threat of al-Qaeda and other militants to leverage counterterrorism funding and weapons from the US and the Saudis to bolster his power within the country and neutralise opponents.
Over the last year, however, his authority crumbled as members of his government and senior army officers joined the ranks of the opposition and Saleh repeatedly turned his guns on demonstrators, killing an estimated 200.
The election was not peaceful: seven died in gun battles. But turnout reported at about 60 per cent has given some hope that Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi, a 66-year-old former general and quietly long-serving vice-president since 1994, may be able to set the country on a new course.
The vote, as the Economist put it, is not so much one of confidence in him – despite his years at the top he is not well-known – but “an expression of relief” to see the back of Saleh. Opposition figures warn, however, that they fear the old president, who left on Thursday for more medical treatment in the US, will still retain influence. His family and tribe have dominated the Yemeni military for the past three decades
Hadi, who has been elected for a two-year transition term under the brokered agreement, will preside over a cabinet made up of equal numbers of Saleh supporters and members of a coalition of opposition groups. He will open a national dialogue to draft a new constitution.
Economically he faces a huge task: Yemen, population 25 million, is the poorest country in the Middle East with widespread poverty, growing malnutrition and water shortages.
Politically, as one locally based diplomat has put it, the country over the Saleh decades has gone “from theocracy to military dictatorship to semi-democracy to kleptocracy, through phases of division, unification and, repeatedly, civil war”, to be ruled by an “unholy trinity” of the military, its myriad tribes and, in swathes of the countryside, the Islamists.
Yemen remains deeply divided. A separatist movement in the south has not reconciled itself to the unification of the country. There are sectarian tensions in its north, and the growing presence of what western officials describe as al-Qaeda’s most dangerous affiliate, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (Aqap), both in the north and the southern Abyan province. There, Islamist militants from Ansar al Sharia, have overrun the provincial capital of Zinjibar. The group is accused by the Yemeni government of simply being a proxy for Aqap.
For years, Saleh has allowed the US to strike at Aqap in Yemen using drones and missiles from Djibouti, and US special operations forces built up the specialised anti-terrorism units, run by Saleh’s family members, that were widely seen as US surrogates.
What has been described as the US’s “forgotten war” is deeply unpopular and counterproductive in Yemen because of civilian casualties, the most effective of recruiting sergeants for Aqap.
President Barack Obama’s first known authorisation of a missile strike on Yemen, on December 17th, 2009, killed more than 40 Bedouins, many of them women and children, in the remote village of al Majala in Abyan.
In late January this year, according to a chilling report on a country where the government writ barely runs by the Nation’s Jeremy Scahill, the US carried out a series of air strikes in Abyan, and at least two other strikes around Zinjibar that “targeted al-Qaeda leaders who are on the US terrorist black list”.
Anti-US feelings have also been stoked by the reality that the US- trained forces have been diverted during the last year from the fight against Aqap to the capital Sanaa to protect Saleh from his own people. Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, in a euphemism worthy of “collateral damage”, acknowledged late last year that the “political tumult” has caused the US-trained units “to be focused on their positioning for internal political purposes as opposed to doing all they can against Aqap.”
For Hadi the continuing US relationship is a key immediate challenge.
“Whether a new government will maintain the same type of counterterrorism relationship Saleh had with Washington is very much in question,” Scahill reports.