Yemen’s Houthi rebellion and Bani Hushaish: what’s really going on?
June 16th, 2008 by Torstein Schiøtz Worren
Since 2004 the Yemeni government have fought several wars in Yemen’s northernmost governorate Sa’da against a movement calling itself The Believing Youth, mostly known as ‘The Houthis’ after its late founder Badr ad-Din al-Houthi. According to the government, the movement is aiming to re-establish the Shia-Zaydi imamate that ruled Yemen until the republican revolution of 1962. However, anyone who has spent time in Yemen knows that government sources cannot be trusted, and due to the information blackout that has been in effect related to anything to do with the conflict, hardly any independent sources exist. The few journalists who have braved the government ban on writing about have been arrested. The most well-known is Abdulkarim al-Khaiwani who only last week was sentenced to six years in prison for ‘belonging to a terrorist cell’ after writing about the wars in Sa’da.
Very little information exists about what is going on in Sa’da. According to human rights activists and NGOs, 100 000 people have been displaced in the province since 2004, 50 000 only this year. How many that have been killed are not known, but conservative estimates are in the thousands; and many of the victims are civilians. The government’s tactics of indescriminate bombing of whole villages is what journalists like al-Khaiwani have been punished for trying to uncover. Although the conflict has been going on since 2004, there have been various mediation efforts, and an official comittee from Qatar has been to Yemen several times to broker a peace deal. When cease-fire agreements have broken down, both sides have been quick to blame the other. What seems clear, though, is that the government has only agreed to negotiations in the first place when the military offensives have stalled in the extremely hostile and difficult mountainous terrain of northern Yemen.
So who are Houthis and what is really going on?
Trying to portray the movement as an illegitimate force of extremists, president Ali Abdullah Saleh and his ministers increasingly paint the conflict in sectarian rhetoric. They say that the Houthis are extremist Zaydis, a branch of Shia Islam that was established in the northern part of Yemen in the 9th century, and claim that the Houthis seek to establish themselves as a Hizbollah-like organisation with the backing of Iran. What the president forgets to mention is that the Zaydis constitute between 35-50 percent of the population of the country and that he himself, as are most Yemenis north of the Sumara Pass halfway to Aden, is Zaydi.
Historically, there have been relatively little friction between the Zaydis and Sunnis (of the shafi’i school) of Yemen as there are few doctrinal differences between the two. Yemeni Zaydiism has few of the elements that are typical of the Iranian ‘Twelver’ Shiism. What has happened in Yemen instead, is a slow ‘Sunnification’ of the mainstream Zaydi population in a Sunni-Wahabi direction. Extremist Islamism has long had a relatively free reign in Yemen and the government has been accused of making deals with extremists whereby they are excluded from persecution in Yemen as long as they do not target Yemeni interests. The extremists are furthermore useful for the regime as private militias doing the dirty work in the various conflicts. They were widely used when the government in 1994 crushed an uprising of loyalists of the former Marxist South Yemen unhappy with North Yemen’s dominant role in the unified Yemen, and they are reportedly being used again in Sa’da to fight their Shi’a enemy. Most people in the former North Yemen rarely contemplated their religious affiliation before the current conflict. Now, however, sectarian identity is being brought to the fore, as the government labels the rebels heretics and traitors. Random imprisonment of Zaydis in areas of conflict is taking place, and in Sana’a Zaydi imams are reportedly being removed from mosques in favour of Sunni preachers.
This sectarian rhetoric is a very dangerous development in a conflict that is probably mostly about politics. The political exclusion of large segments of the Yemeni population (see earlier article) has lead to various counter-reactions in the population. In a country like Yemen, where the government’s power extends only as far as the asphalt road, armed uprisings in the countryside should come as no surprise. The Yemeni government, and above all the president himself, has always bought legitimacy through the linking of loyalty and development. Powerful tribes and their sheikhs have been tied into the political system by the promise of roads, wells and schools. In the remote areas, though, few have seen the benefits of joining the Yemeni state. Political disillusionment is a likely catalyst for the rebellion.
Fighting just outside of Sana’a
Until now, few people have taken an interest in the conflict as it was confined to a far-away governorate on the border with Saudi Arabia and seemingly waged against a band of rugged tribal elements with unknown grievances. However, since the latest flare-up that began in April that has lead to the heaviest fighting since 2004, the conflict has taken a worrying turn. It started with the spread to Harf Sufyan in Amran governorate only two hours’ drive north of the capital. Then, a month ago, the government reported that it was combating Houthi fighters who had infiltrated the Bani Hushaish district, one of the most fertile districts of northern Yemen, just outside of Sana’a and overlooking Sana’a International Airport. By the end of May, the rebels had supposedly been defeated and the approaches to Sana’a were said to be secure, but for the past two weeks the fighting has continued with the government’s use of helicopters, fighter jets and artillery. The huge security presence in the capital shows just how worried the government is, and this turn of events points to a different dynamic that is only now becoming clear.
What until now has been portrayed as a limited tribal conflict could in fact have become a much larger uprising against the increasingly repressive regime of President Saleh. The fighting in Bani Hushaish points to a shift in loyalties and the recruitment of local tribes in Bani Hushaish to join the rebellion. If this is the case, the potential for an escalation as new tribes join with the Houthis to overthrow the regime, is likely. Yemen is already struggling with widespread unrest in the southern governorates that sees the former North’s domination as colonialism. Rising food and fuel prices are making life difficult for the large segments of population that are living in poverty. Could this mean that people of different tribes and backgrounds are drawn to the Houthis in order to generate change, basically at any cost?
Not surprisingly, the government response is more of the same: increased repression. Sa’da governorate is already largely cut off from the rest of the country with telephone and mobile networks closed and strict control of all traffic and trade. In the government view, the civilian population is largely to blame for letting the rebels operate in their towns and villages, and this is how any outbreak of violence is perceived. According to the latest edition of the English-language newspaper the Yemen Times, Bani Hushaish is facing a blockade of petrol and foodstuffs. According to an official of the office of the Sana’a governorate, the aim is to make life as difficult as possible for the locals to make sure they stop supporting the rebels. The logic is similar to that of economic embargos elsewhere:
“The way Yemeni society is structured in tribal areas would never allow state control without the locals’ acceptance. By creating this siege, we are pushing the locals to understand that they must cooperate with the state against the Houthis even if they are their relatives or neighbors,” said the Sana’a Governate Office source. “When they begin to starve and their source of income is interrupted, they will eventually hand over the Houthis in their area. Also, we try to prevent any ammunition or supplies from reaching the Houthis in Bani Hushaish in order to weaken them,” he added.
This strategy has so far failed miserably in Sa’da and only led to more suffering and resentment. If the strategy will lead to the banishment of the Houthis from Bani Hushaish remains to be seen, but it could also mark the beginning of a much more dangerous turn in the conflict.