Plundering Yemen and Its Post-Spring Hiatus

This chapter analyzes the aggressive role KSA played in the negotiation phase of the post-2011 crisis in Yemen. A close reading points to a long-term ambition to annex large areas of Yemen rich in oil and water. Methods used for the last century to realize these goals of robbing Yemen of its wealth included first support of pliable locals to help upset stability in the country. Parallel to supporting local politicians is the more recent strategy of paying for the training, arming and logistical support of radical Islamic groups today known as Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), Ansar al-Shari‘a, Islah Party (the Muslim Brotherhood) and more recently Da‘ish/ISIS. Now that these tools have also failed, as evidence by the drawn-out war starting in 2015, it is quite possible a direct invasion is intended to secure KSA’s goals, perhaps at the expense of the UAE, a chief, at least in theory, partner in the current war on Yemen.

Coda

Rule number one in Arabia’s Fight Club: Don’t Fuck with Yemen. Rule number two in Arabia’s Fight Club: DO NOT Fuck with Yemen. Haykal Bafana THIS BOOK SUGGESTS THAT we can only offer answers to the question of why destroy Yemen by taking a broader perspective, one that, perhaps surprising to many, puts Yemen at the heart of many global processes over the last century. The attempt to explain the recent horrors transpiring in South Arabia seems to also reveal Yemen’s contributions to the modern world and thus shed light on the very amorphous nature of global affairs. In this way, global events share common origins with local Yemeni ones, thereby revealing that the trajectories of socioeconomic, political, and intellectual trends often originate, pass through, or end in South Arabia, rather than pass it by....

Making Yemen Dance

It is in this chapter that I begin my detailed revisionist accounting of Yemen’s recent history. Crucially, I do so by emphasizing the global dynamics behind events occurring in Southern Arabia since 2000. The focus will be to identify the origins of the so-called Arab Spring in 2011. I incrementally “retell” what led to the direct confrontation between different groups in Yemen. Quickly identifying these factions may prove useful here. The most important, are a cluster of parties crudely reduced to the “Houthis” found in the Northwest in Yemen. As of March 2015, when Saudi Arabia, the US/UK and UAE initiated a war to reassert hegemony over Yemen, this coalition of parties known as “Huthis” aligned with the Ali Saleh who commands considerable support within the Yemeni military services. Their main rivals are the so-called southern separatists. These southern Yemenis have forged a precarious alliance with other rivals of the “Huthis,” including Islamist groups under the protection of competing external powers—ostensibly pitting Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE against each other—as well as with “President” Hadi, whom the US and Saudi Arabia/UAE claim to be the head of Yemen’s “legitimate” government.

Birthing Revolution

“Revolutionary” Egypt that functioned as the crucial tool, through an occupation regime that established structures tailored to force Yemen’s incorporation into the global economy. Informing the bureaucratic imprints of this attempt was the hegemonic doctrines of modernization. And yet, those efforts proved short-lived, and a failure. Through its ubiquitous presence in universities and deep infiltration into the new multi-lateral institutions charged with bringing change to the Global South, theories of modernization and the prescriptions for how to realize it became unquestioned (social) science. Reflecting the power of the postwar society which produced these theories, within a few years, modernization’s ideals and the various blueprints to realize them were applied by most international donor agencies and governments. Presented through various multi-lateral organizations and directly implemented by way of aid agencies, it can be observed that throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, the actual discourse of modernization imposed a narrowed idea of what was both correct economic practice and necessary for the global economic order envisioned by the Bretton Woods agreements to take place

The Region That Pumps the Heart of the Cold War, 1941–1960

This chapter offers a modest historical scan of the contours of the early Cold War while introducing Yemenis whose roles as potential surrogates for global interests both ignited new political opportunities in the country and redefined what constitutes the modern state. Forming a generation of reformists known as the ‘asriyyun, “modernists,” urban intellectuals cultivated an alliance between the Free Yemeni Movement (FYM) or al-Ahrar al-Yamaniyyun (Free Yemenis) and the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) based in Egypt. The resulting coalition of rivals against the Imamate reflected the currents of the larger world and eventually overpowered peoples still resisting global finance capitalism. This chapter tells the story how the Cold War constituted both a threat and opportunity. What happened in Yemen in this period was not solely the consequence of external forces imposing their demands on local societies. Indeed, because Yemenis’ repeated resistance frustrated the ambitions of global powers – British administrators, American oil conglomerates, Soviet strategists, French colonialists in Djibouti, and Egyptian would-be heroes of the Third World – these foreign interests had to adopt new policies towards first Yemen and then with the larger Middle East.

The Quest for Global Hegemony Starts There

This chapter offers what the historiography tells of Yemen’s rise as a modern, unified (and recently fragmented, chaotic polity). Starting from the beginning of the twentieth century when Yemen was administered by the Ottoman and British Empires, the narrative repositions Yemen as being at the heart of modern European imperialism until World War II. This chapter challenges conventional wisdom by way of providing an accounting for how and why European financial interests sought and finally, through appropriated state resources in Britain, France, Italy, Ottoman Empire gained access to Yemen’s natural and human resources. Beyond this, accounting for the arrival of the United States in this manner by the 1920s seems critical. It is in fact by way of engaging Yemen and the larger Red Sea, often on local Yemeni terms, that the very modern institutions and practices synonymous with American Empire emerge. This rethinking the nature of the relationship Yemenis had with an emergent globalist regime starts with clashes locals had with British capitalist interests, by the mid-nineteenth century firmly entrenched in South Yemen. The relationship that would help create Saudi Arabia, for instance, is drawn specifically from the fact British bankers could not subordinate the ruling family of Northern Yemen—the Imams—forcing them to resort to new tactics, including promoting the rise of KSA and ultimately political Islam as we know it today.

Wrong from the Start

The migratory, labor, cultural and administrative history of the both North and South Yemen has been neglected. By exploring through Cold War era documents just how invested various internal actors were in transforming Southern Arabia’s relations with the larger world it is possible to add another angle of interpretation to the larger book’s project. It is argued that by leveraging competing external interests, a new set of operatives within Yemen’s political classes emerge. Looking closely at the manner in which the British global empire provided an interactive context for Yemenis, it is possible to highlight the global threads linking indigenous politics with the larger world. Be they Marxist inspired guerrillas whose use of violence help expel Britain from South Yemen in the late 1960s, the early advocates for a retrenchment of Salafist orthodoxy (with deep links to Saudi Arabia), or those merchant families long servicing the trade networks linking Southeast Asia, East Africa with the Middle East, Yemen’s new generation of political actor receives close inspection throughout this chapter.

Introduction

“So for you this is a moral issue?” “Because you know, there’s a lot of jobs at stake. Certainly if a lot of these defense contractors stop selling war planes, other sophisticated equipment to Saudi Arabia, there’s going to be a significant loss of jobs, of revenue here in the United States. That’s secondary from your standpoint?”...