Atlantic Community:Open Think Tank Article "Stabilizing Yemen"

February 16, 2011 | 3 comments | Print | E-Mail Your Opinion

Stabilizing Yemen

Alexandra Lewis: While Yemen is often associated with only terrorism and al Qaeda, its extensive troubles are largely the result of a weak economy and state. The key to overcoming the political and economic instabilities lies, not only in traditional humanitarian and development aid but in establishing a sense of legitimacy between the government and the people.

There has been a phenomenal increase in international attention paid to Yemen over the past five years, particularly in relation to the fluctuating nature and location of the global war on terror. This trend is directly connected to the recent resurgence of Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP), whose operatives are based primarily in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Throughout 2010, the American Central Intelligence Agency began expressing concerns that AQAP's Yemeni branch had grown considerably in size, absorbing many of those Yemeni fighters who had returned home from Afghanistan following the Coalition's relative military successes there. The Government of Yemen in the meantime, under President Ali Abdullah Al Saleh's, has acknowledged that the role of terrorist organizations on its soil may be exaggerated by the media, but continues to petition its neighbors and allies for support in its struggle to restore order and security.

While Yemen is classed as a least developed country by the United Nations and is sometimes referred to as a fragile state by the international community, donor support now reflects a distinct trend towards the securitization of aid away from other more traditional priorities. Narratives of humanitarian assistance and development are increasingly being replaced by the new language of stabilization, whose operational parameters center upon risk containment and economic growth. USAID's stabilization strategy, which was initiated in 2009 to represent an American commitment of $150 million to the Yemeni cause, is the most effective illustration of this shift. It has been accompanied by a corresponding commitment by the British Department for International Development (DFID) of £29.8 million, earmarked predominantly for the Yemeni Social Development Fund under the auspices of promoting economic and political stability. The question is whether this new language will succeed in bringing positive change to Yemen or aggravate existing challenges, and whether stabilization will succeed in overcoming threats to international security where its ideological predecessor, democratization, failed.

Since its formation in 1990, Yemen has faced one nation-wide civil war for partition, six tribal wars in its northern peripheries and a growing separatist movement in the south. These conflicts are rooted in chronic underdevelopment, widespread social inequality, resource competition and weak state capacity. Together, they represent strained law-enforcement and military services, as well as a bountiful recruitment ground for terrorist insurgents, who are able to tap into and accelerate the rapid radicalization of Yemeni communities. High rates of unemployment and great disparities in prosperity and development between rural and urban areas, as well as between central and peripheral governorates have catalyzed this process. International and regional donors have responded by providing the country with bilateral and multilateral financial assistance. The trouble is that while much of the funding is offered to large international governmental and nongovernmental organizations to help build governmental capacity, to provide basic services for the Yemeni people and to initiate emergency responses to Yemen's multiple crises: direct support is given to the government almost exclusively in the form of military assistance, building upon the state's base of authority while failing to improve its legitimacy.

There are many reasons for this, of course, but while many Yemenis now only receive essential services from third party organizations and are free from taxation and central administration, their sole point of interaction with their government becomes a military one, unsurprisingly diminishing their faith in the state as a positive support structure. Moreover, the active support that Saudi Arabia has offered President Saleh in his war against northern rebels, as well as the military aid he has received from America to build upon the country's counter-terrorism capacities, have given the multiple ongoing conflicts in Yemen added religious dimensions that have doubled their intensity. The resulting crisis of government legitimacy that has spread across the country has manifested itself most recently in a string of protests inspired by the political unrest in Tunisia and Egypt of December 2010 and January 2011.

If Yemen's crises are to be overcome through regional or international interventions, then such interventions must focus not only upon humanitarian assistance and stabilization, but perhaps also upon fostering the creation of a constructive and complementary relationship between the government and its people. At present, Yemen's import economy exists almost exclusively upon dwindling natural resources and protracted relief that has done little to overcome the root causes of its fragility. Multilateral assistance has obscured the need for local service provision, responding to basic human needs while neglecting that those needs have arisen from a lack of state capacity to provide for them. With the shifting of international policies away from democratization towards stabilization, we now have a unique opportunity to redefine the operating language of the humanitarian sector. Let us do so by helping fragile states to generate security and prosperity at the same time for their own people, without making government policy makers choose between financing one or the other.

Alexandra Lewis is a researcher and doctoral candidate at the Post-War Reconstruction and Development Unit of the University of York.

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This article was submitted for the atlantic-community.org's competition: "Empowering Women in International Relations." It coincides with the 10^th Anniversary of UN resolution 1325 callling for an increased influence of women in all aspects of peace and security. The contest is sponsored by the U.S. Mission to NATO and the NATO Public Diplomacy Division.

You can find out more about the competition here.

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February 16, 2011

Colie Colburn, DePaul University, (7)

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How do western states, primarily the US and the UK , justify promoting the stabilization in Yemen, if it ultimately means providing monetary assistance to a state that they consider sponsors of terrorism with extensive ongoing human rights violations?

February 19, 2011

Alexandra Lewis, Post-War Reconstruction and Development Unit, Silver Contributor (34)

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I suppose there is no easy answer to this question. Firstly, all donors who provide military assistance to Yemen for stabilization purposes do so in the form of highly targeted and prescriptive military assistance. Money, training and equipment is provided by the American state exclusively for the purposes of fighting Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula, along with other terrorist bodies. Diplomatic cables recently leaked by the Wikileaks website furthermore indicate that America may have started conducting its own military operations in the country, rather than continuing direct support for President Saleh's regime. This emphasis on the fight against terrorism has, of course, in light of Yemen's other challenges, altered the language used by all political actors in the country. The Government, for its part, has increasingly begun to label Houthi and other predominantly Shia combatants "terrorists" in the hopes of enlisting international support. However, in this regard, they have only thus far received direct assistance by the Saudi Arabian Government, which considers the conflict on its border to pose a potential security risk. At the same time, rumours have spread through Yemen that Iran may be assisting the Northern rebels to further the regional Shia cause, though these have remained largely unsubstantiated. In this way, each donor working in the field of stabilization justifies their policies according to their own primary security concerns.

March 4, 2011

Alexander Kurt Sattler, -, Bronze Contributor (17)

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First in response to the first comment to this article, I would like to emphasize again that the Yemeni government is of course not suspected of being itself a sponsor of terrorism, as has also been underlined by the author of the article. Immediate justification issues in this respect therefore do not arise for Western donors. Rather, there are terrorist cells operating in regions of the Yemen not or only hardly under control of the government in Sana'a. Allegedly, the recently formed AQAP (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) is now orchestrating al-Qaeda operations in Saudi-Arabia and the Yemen. Whether new organizational structures have indeed been created or whether the merger into the AQAP is more a terrorism 'marketing gag' remains not yet obvious to me. In any case, it is not the government that uses Western aid to fund al-Qaeda in the region but the government that fights al-Qaeda by using Western aid.
One might argue, however, that the provision of military assistance and US military operations on Yemeni soil supports al-Qaeda ideologically, in the sense that it fuels anti-Western hatred. This argument certainly has some validity, and it remains debateable whether a military containment strategy does not blow back even harder. Regarding the problem that the Yemeni government receives aid despite human rights violations, it seems to me that the security argument clearly beats the human rights argument. Can we really expect the Western electorate to rebel in the face of human rights violation in Yemen if they also see the Yemen as a potential haven for individuals bombing their bus to work? I doubt that it would. But even more than only the more immediate threat by al-Qaeda, it is the threat of a failing Yemeni state and its extensive implications for the region and the world that increasingly motivates Western state to provide aid to the government in Sana'a.

Regarding the article itself, I share the expressed concern about a securitization of aid. Nevertheless, I have my doubts about statements such as 'direct support is given to the government almost exclusively in the form of military assistance'. I have risked a look at the development of US foreign assistance to the Yemen, and I could not find this. If we realistically assume that the structure of US aid (from both the State Department and the Pentagon) is representative of Western aid, then military assistance has certainly grown more than proportionally. But non-military aid has also grown significantly, if not enormously. This becomes clear if we compare the aid flows in 2006 and 2011 here: http://www.foreignassistance.gov/OU.aspx?OUID=237&FY=2011. The aid for 'democracy, human rights, and governance' has risen almost tenfold. I wonder how this goes with the above quoted statement. Does this aid not go to the government, and does it matter anyways?
I do share a reservation with respect to the securitization of aid, but this is to me more a question of narratives than a question of factual aid flows. If the Western governments too explicitly justify aid with security concerns, they make themselves hostage to the regime in Sana'a which can then deflect attention from state reform to alleged al-Qaeda threats. Aid flows will be less effective if the state apparatus cannot be motivated to actively participate in the process. And to be sure, 'motivating' a government to change itself always implies a combination of consent and coercion.

I highly recommend the following 2008/2010 Chatham House paper on the possible failure and collapse of the Yemen: http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/publications/papers/view/-/id/827/.