ANALYSIS: Who Hijacked Yemen’s Democratic Revolution?
Saleh is now Yemen’s honorary president under a deal brokered by the Gulf Cooperation Council. On the one hand the agreement forced him to transfer power to his vice president, but on the other, and to the dismay of many of his opponents, it afforded him immunity from prosecution. Under the arrangement, among the things for which he might never have to answer is his possible role in the deaths of many of the participants of a largely non-violent uprising against him.
Change Square in Sana’a was, and remains, a tent city of anti-government protest, primarily driven by Yemeni students and non-government organizations demanding democratic institutions. Hundreds of protestors in Sana’a, Ta’iz and other cities in Yemen were reported killed by government security forces over the months; five deaths occurred the day after Saleh signed the GCC deal.
The square has become an important social and political institution in Yemen’s capital and is regarded as one of the symbols of the Middle East’s extraordinary Arab Spring. No doubt, the Change Square protests have somewhat altered Yemen’s political landscape, but the students and their supporters are frustrated that Saleh is still a part of that landscape. New elections have been scheduled for February, but some say Yemen’s political spring is over.
The complexities of Change Square
“The youth movement was inspired by the Arab Spring, but it was later hijacked by the elites who have the military, financial and political power,” said Khaled Fattah, a guest lecturer in Middle East Studies at Sweden’s Lund University.
Fattah believes that some of the forces that exploited the student movement were Saleh’s traditional political rivals, members of the al-Ahmar family that found the youth movement useful for its own purposes. At the same time, students were up against a Saudi Arabia fearful of a youth-led movement on its southern borders and U.S. concerns that combatting terrorism in the region required a stable Yemeni government.
The movement was, after all, inspired by urban Yemenis, Fattah said. “We need to remember that this is an urban movement and 70 percent of the population lives in rural areas. So the youth movement is focused in major urban centers,” he said. “This is now being shown in Egyptian elections where Islamists now dominate the scene.”
“The major thing they have done is, day after day, taking to the streets and they’ve been steadfast in their demands for Saleh to step down,” said Gregory Johnsen, a doctoral candidate at Princeton who conducted field research on Yemen politics and governance for several years.
“I think they feel abandoned by the United States and the U.N. and the international community that supported the GCC deal,” said Johnsen. The students feel the agreement “will not remove Saleh or punish him for crimes against the Yemeni people over the last three decades.”
A movement reflective of Yemen
“We’re looking at a very murky situation in what’s been termed the youth movement,” said Johnsen. “There’s a great deal of power there, but none of it has been harnessed very well.”
Basically, the students grew up under the party politics of the president and wanted no part of it.
Johnsen believes seasoned politicians manipulated the power and the message of the youth for their own political ends. “So the youth have essentially been a field on which people like President Saleh, General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar and some of the tribal sheikhs have been able to play out their own designs for power.”
The immediate political future of Yemen now appears to be out of the hands of the youth movement. Opposition leader Mohammed Basindwa was recently named transitional prime minister of Yemen by Saleh’s vice president, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi. The vice president assumed responsibilities as head of state in a transitional government that is to turn over power to a popularly elected government in two or three months.
In the interim government, the ruling General People’s Congress Party and the Joint Meeting Parties, a coalition of opposition parties, divided amongst themselves its 34 ministerial seats. The ruling party maintained control over defense, oil and minerals, foreign affairs and 14 other departments. The opposition received the remaining portfolios, among them interior, finance, education, agriculture, water and electricity.
Even as politicians now try to restore order under a so-called reform agenda, Yemen government still faces major challenges: continued fighting with Houthi rebels in the north, a youth movement that feels months of protest centered in Sana’a have been ignored by Saleh and northern political elites now sharing transitional powers, renewed rallies in Aden and Ta’iz for southern independence, economic problems and water shortages all but ignored during Saleh’s final months in office.
Continuing efforts by the U.N. envoy to Yemen, Jamal Bin Omer, to draw in the youth, the Houthi and southern activists who are divided between more democracy and ending a 21-year union with North Yemen have so far not brought much success.
Ben Omer’s effort is daunting, said Johnsen. “It’s sort of like the little Dutch boy who tried to prevent a flood by sticking his finger in the dike.” Yemen, added he, has too many factions and Omer “just doesn’t have enough fingers.”
The youth movement faces the same problems, according to Osamah al-Fakih, a University of Sana’a student who works for the Youth Leadership Development Foundation and remains active in the Change Square events.
“There is no room or stage for youth to participate effectively in the transitional period,” said al-Fakih, whom we reached on his cell phone in a Sana’a café.
“Within the youth camp there are many camps which is [the] norm in Yemen,” al-Fakih said. “Total fragmentation.”
Al-Fakih described the atmosphere in the tent city in Sana’a’s Change Square as something akin to an intellectual bazaar. “Having different youth groups is very normal because when you pay a visit to Change Square, you are going to find that people belong to different cultural, social and political groups, and they come from many other parts of the country.”
Change Square – only a beginning?
It was frustrating for all of us, al-Fakih said, but he believes that Saleh’s immunity issue is not yet a closed case and that justice will eventually prevail. “I think that it is temporary because those who [are] responsible will be charged for the crimes they committed. They should be charged and have a fair trial.”
All in all, al-Fakih is optimistic. He says the youth’s role now is to serve as watchdogs of the activities of the transitional council of ministers and of the February election.
“Which is an excellent role to play, actually,” said Lund University’s Fattah, “and that is a mirror of the new spirit of the region for the youth to be completely involved, engaged in political life to the extent of watching how elections are going. I am sure future governments in Yemen and the region will have elements of the youth movement in the government.”
But what’s more important, says Fattah, is that the processes that the Arab Spring has set in motion now seem irreversible.
“I think the genie is out of the bottle… demanding freedom and democracy is out of the bottle and it is so difficult to bring the genie back into the bottle. I don’t know if I am using the correct metaphor, but there is no going backwards to doing nothing about autocratic regimes.”
The message was not lost on Karman. When she gave her Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, she, although fluent in English, chose to speak in Arabic because, to her, her target audience were Yemenis and other peoples in the Middle East.
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