Realignment of Yemen's Identity Politics

Yemen in Sam Kalda's illustration

*As a blogger on Human Rights issues in Yemen for the past six years, I am stunned by the growing polarisation in the country; to take an even-handed stance for human rights is either viewed as a treasonous act or as a sectarian bias. If you criticise both the Saudi-led Arab coalition airstrikes and the Houthi-Saleh alliance forces, the supporters of both camps accuse you of supporting one side over the other. It’s us or them, both sides maintain; no middle ground.

Throughout my activism, it was easy for me to remain in that middle ground due to my mixed Ethiopian-Yemeni background which influenced my strong faith in fundamental human rights for all people, regardless of their colour of skin, ethnicity, gender, religious belief, etc. Having myself lived some of the ugly consequences of the abuse of human rights, in my case, that is racism, I developed a great sensibility of Yemen’s identity politics. Today, I perceive how people's definition of their identities in Yemen - whether in line with tribal, sectarian or class-based affinities - is realigning itself along with the new political order.

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Growing up in Yemen, a country with a strict hierarchical class system was not an easy thing, especially for someone like myself with mixed-ethnic identity. My story, like the story of many multi-ethnic Yemenis, goes back to the time when my two Yemeni grandfathers, frustrated by the economic and political situation, had a leap of faith and left Yemen to find a better life elsewhere.

Yemeni ports served as a conduit for migration. Due to geographic proximity, the African horn was the destination for many migration waves coming from Yemen. Going east was also a popular destination for southeastern Yemenis. For my northern grandfathers, Ethiopia was the choice of destination. They settled and married two Ethiopian ladies (my grandmothers) and had children (among them are my later-to-be my parents). It is estimated that there were 300,000 - 400,000 Yemenis in Ethiopia at that time. Following the revolution of 1962 in the north of Yemen, the revolution of 1963 in its South and the dictatorship of Mengistu in their host country, many Yemeni migrants, including my grandparents, decided to go back to their home country in the 1970s. Some were forced to go back to Yemen by the emergence of communism in Ethiopia and its nationalisation policies that ripped them off the little wealth they worked hard to create, yet some were lured by the political change that had taken place at home. With a revolutionary perspective, Yemen’s former president, the late Ibrahim Al Hamdi was a key figure in calling on Yemenis abroad to return as he embarked on the road of nation-building. Thus, my Yemeni-Ethiopian parents migrated back to Yemen.

by Sam Kalda

Pro-Houthi Rebels Detain Prominent Writer, Al-Madhaji & Other Dissidents

Before holding the executive directory of the
newly-founded, SCSS, Al-Madhaji has
been a prolific writer on democracy, politics
 and human rights issues in Yemen.  

 "The Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies (SCSS) strongly condemns the detention of its Executive Director, Maged Al-Madhaji, by armed forces loyal to the Houthi rebel movement. On Saturday morning, September 19th, Madhaji was arrested at a protest demanding freedom for Yemenis held extrajudicially by the Houthis and their allies, along with journalist Mahmoud Yassin , Bassim Al-Warafi and the founders of Mwatana Organization for Human Rights, Radhya Al-Mutawakel and Abdulrasheed Al-Faqih. Mutawakel has been released. Regretfully, the rest remain in detention.

Today's arrests of civil society activists constitute the latest in a series of blatant civil liberty violations that have seen armed groups in Yemen attempt to silence dissident voices in the country." –SCSS 

Dozens of journalists and anti-Houthi activists have been abducted and detained by pro-Houthi rebels for over the past year. 

Yemen wants peace! (postcard from Scotland)

I had the honour of being part of launching the 'Women in Conflict Initiative' run by Beyond Borders in Scotland (21-24, Aug) which allowed me to hold meetings with a number of Scottish politicians, European parliament members, EU & UN diplomats. More importantly, I hung out with some courageous women MPs & peace activists from Iraq & Syria over the past 4 days. Trying to find ways of cooperation, we, the activists couldn't stress enough how important it is to provide all the humanitarian assistance possible for our people. We, activists from Syria & Yemen especially were repeating over & over: we must stop the starvation of our people.

Violence comes in different forms. Starvation is one form, and the bombs dropped over the heads of our people is another form of violence. Thus, I'm grateful for those who helped me have this chance to speak in Scotland. Since I was there, I named and shamed the EU's role in allowing shipping weapons used in Yemen by Saudi-led coalition (proofs are here).. I urged the crowd to engage in the least solidarity act that's in pushing their politicians to stop the weapons shipment, & stop the violence. That might be a tiny step towards making peace. Until then, the bleakest the situation in Yemen gets, the more Yemen wants peace–and it wants it Now!

First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon expressed the importance of solidarity Scotland ought to show to women in different conflicts in MENA region.  

One of the great things in the festival was meeting one-to-one with UN diplomats where we, the women activists voiced our concerned directly - the importance of providing humanitarian assistance to our people was in our top priority. 

Calculation

Photography/ Abdulrahman Jaber.

When I started this blog in early 2010, I honestly thought that nobody will read it. Why? at that time, I thought because I had nothing “meaningful” to say but, still, the idea to create a blog was very attractive to me. I blame Wael Abbas and Lina Ben Mehanie for this. My plan was just to use the blog to archive my reports for the Yemen Observer newspaper where I worked as a full-time reporter. After 8 years experience working in media, today I know very well why I was insecure about creating a blog–because, as a female and a Yemeni female, I know today that I subconsciously thought I don’t have neither the ability nor the capacity to enter the world of big media corporation, and challenge the big anglophone media houses’ portrayal of Yemen. Believe it or not, thanks to Yemen’s 2011 uprising, my thinking became revolutionized transforming the insecurity to a determination.

Six years on and the blog has been receiving a wide readership - something that I don’t only feel grateful for but also feel extremely attentive to. It is wonderful to be read, especially when I aim to raise awareness on human rights issues, (I usually joke; once I’m done with all Human Rights violations, I plan to be a blogger on fashion) but the more the blog is read (Look at the right in the screen! more than half a million views. Fucking insane!), the more I feel cautious with what to write about - readers deserve accurate (whatever that supposed to mean), reliable, unbiased, informative and meaningful stories. Since the events in Yemen are nothing but relentlessly serious, I’ve always had the urge to blog non-stop, which led me several times to be overwhelmed and/or drained-out.

I’ve been quiet lately & not blogging much. I recently gone through one of the most enlightening experiences I had ever had in my life. For the past 5 months, I have been writing my thesis as I’m finishing my two-years master degree program at Gothenburg University. My research question was how Yemen’s 2011 Uprising was framed in the coverage of BBC vs. Al Jazeera English. It’s usually said, “the medium is the message”. Through a critical discourse analysis approach, I compared and focused on the articles published by these two media networks during the first 100 days of the protests in Yemen. It’s been tough focusing on the thesis, while the war is waging in Yemen and the idea of losing family members was and has been painful. Reading a good book on the psyche of traumatised people and how to heal, was a worthwhile interruption from my studies–which cost me missing the first deadline &, hence, missing the real deal of the graduation ceremony. Anyhow, I can’t complain.

Yemen at War: Worthy vs. Unworthy Victims

A guard on Monday, June 15, walks past a home destroyed by Saudi-led airstrikes in San’a, Yemen. Pic/KHALED ABDULLAH/REUTERS

*Four months on, the war in Yemen is still raging fiercely. Across the country, there have been over 19,000 casualties  - as a result of the increased violence. The number of displaced people has grown to over 1.2 million. These numbers continue to rise alarmingly as I write. Yemen, this devastated place, torn by the violence has victims unfairly perceived and treated as unworthy by all warring sides. No victim should ever be perceived as unworthy.

Looked in more details, different sides in the conflicts have different worthy and unworthy victims.

This is not to underestimate the aggression coming from other sides whatsoever, but rather for the sake of chronicling the violent episodes in Yemen’s ongoing conflict, the Houthis’ aggression comes first. Citizens in the southern part of Yemen in particular have been treated as unworthy victims by the Houthi movement’s militias and its ally, the ousted former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh’s forces since they started bombarding president, Abdurabu Mansour Hadi’s house and Aden airport on the 19th of March in Aden (before what we all know today as the start of the Saudi-led airstrikes on Yemen). 

After Hadi fled the country, Houthi/Saleh’s forces started targeting people in the south systematically on the pretext that they are takfiris and al Qaeda in the south of Yemen, then they shifted their propaganda to state they were fighting ISIS (Da’ash). All these slogans have ripped off southerners’ worthiness in the eyes of the Houthi/Saleh’s forces. At the same time, Houthis mastered stressing on local and international media alike how the Saudi-led coalition is murdering its own citizens in northern Yemen while overlooking their atrocities in the south. For Houthis, the victims of the Saudi-led airstrikes are the only worthy victims of respect and attention. On the other side, southern resistance fighters perceive and treat Houthi victims as nothing but unworthy, why? because the antagonism has reached an irreversible point. It’s astonishing how these stances are remote from any moral principle.

More importantly, despite its fragile status, the state, the Yemeni republic of the people has been the greatest unworthy victim by Houthis attempted coup d'etat against the president, Hadi in September, last year. Houthis have been cracking down on its dissidence, which includes Hadi himself, ever since their expansion from Sa’adah to Sana’a in July last year. Specifically, since September 2014, there have been dozens, if not hundreds, of civic activists, journalists, human rights defenders across Yemen who got harassed, abducted and tortured - some to death - by the Houthi militias in their own bloody purge.

Yemeni fighters of the southern separatist movement and firefighters attempt to extinguish a flame at an oil refinery in the port city of Aden on June 27, 2015, following shelling by Houthi rebels. Fire erupted at Aden's oil refinery when rebels shelled the nearby port to prevent a Qatari ship carrying aid for Yemen's devastated second city from docking. Pic/Saleh Al-Obeidi / AFP / Getty