What Factors Can Contribute to Peace in Yemen?
Introduction
With an estimated death toll over 60,000 fatalities since 2016 (ACLED, 2018), the Yemen civil war has been labelled the “…world’s worst humanitarian crisis.” (Lowcock, 2018:1).
The violent conflict displays a multi-faceted nature. With ideological, resource, and geopolitical conflict dimensions, civilians have been mercilessly caught in the crossfire.
Whilst there are a number of factors that can contribute to peace in Yemen, this essay highlights two fundamental factors that could act as vital influences to engender peace in Yemen:
- The multilateral suspension of arms sales and smuggling, allowing the re-establishment of governance, social systems and access to essential services and
- The latent capabilities of the Yemeni people to make peace, reconcile and build lasting networks of resilience across the nation.
The Conflict in Yemen
Owing to the cascading effects of the Arab Spring in 2011, Yemeni anti-government protesters successfully enabled the resignation of longtime President Ali Abdullah Saleh; transitioning power to his then vice-president, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi.
The Hadi-led government struggled to deliver reforms that would end historical corruption, reduce unemployment and improve economic conditions. Combined with endemic food insecurity, the government endured attacks from Jihadis of varying affiliations such as AQAP (Al-Qaeda), Southern Separatists and the emergent threat of the Houthi movement; primarily from members of the Zaidi Shia Muslim community.
The Houthi movement, borne from a perceived lack of social justice and equity, took advantage of the country’s turmoil to gain territorial control of the north of Yemen.
Gaining in momentum and support from Yemeni citizens, the Houthi movement became dissatisfied with the outcomes of the governmental transition and gained control of the capital Sana’a in 2015. With key territory captured, the Houthis attempted (but failed) to take control of the entirety of Yemen. In doing so, Hadi fled to Aden in March 2015.
Disconcerted neighbouring Saudi Arabia led a coalition which received logistical support from the USA, United Kingdom and France, with the intent of reinstating the Hadi-led government.
The militarised conflict, having ensued for over 4 years, has been viewed by many as proxy-war, localising as a regional ideological and economic conflict between Shia majority Iran and Sunni majority Saudi Arabia (Salisbury, 2015).
Despite the regional (military) support the Hadi-led government received, efforts to re-establish security, basic services and the building of infrastructures that can economically revitalise the nation proved ineffectual.
In the multi-stakeholder battle for territory, the Saudi government reinforced the established blockade of Yemen in 2017 under the pretence of reducing the smuggling of weapons across Yemen’s borders, most notably from Iran. In doing so, the blockade has exacerbated the humanitarian crisis, owing to sharp and unaffordable rises in food and fuel costs, forcing Yemenis into poverty.
The ceasefire agreed as part of the UN-brokered Stockholm Agreement in December 2018, has led to the reopening of the crucial trade and logistical port of Hodeidah, thus opening humanitarian corridors.
However, as of February 2019, “Eighty percent of the population, 24 million people, will need some form of humanitarian or protection assistance in 2019…” (OCHA, 2019), with crisis metrics indicating a dire situation.
Factors That Have Contributed to Conflict in Yemen
Utilising the Conflict Tree model, Figure 1. Illustrates the root causes, the core problem and the effects of the conflict in Yemen:
Hill, 2017) subscribed to by a confederation of select, participatory tribes, enmity was caused within Yemeni society by the isolation and structural violence (Galtung, 1969) that hindered equity, wealth distribution and social mobility.
This animosity was leveraged by the Houthis, Southern Separatists and Al-Qaeda to set up a chain of events that have caused the intra-country conflict.
With two main factions, Houthis and Yemen government, backed by a consistent flow of weaponry, violent conflict has consistently pervaded throughout Yemen, the effects of which has led to devastating consequences for the citizens.
Evidenced by the Stockholm agreement, assisted inter-faction dialogue is required to restore social systems that can provide communities with vertical frameworks of resilience.
This can be sustainably achieved through the ceasing of weapon sales/smuggling, providing the communities with the opportunity to utilise their horizontal frameworks of resilience to advocate for the warring parties to communicate and resolve their disputes.
Key Factor for Peace: The Discontinued Sale of Weapons
Enabled by governmental disharmony and a lack of peacebuilding interventions within Yemen, human reactions to violence from armed conflict conspire to generate a cycle of revenge and hatred against the perpetrators. Based upon the ‘Overview of the Nine Levels of Escalation’ (Glasl, 1999), factions within Yemen have sunken deep into stage 9, where “There is no way back and the annihilation of the enemy is sought, even if the price is self-destruction.”
With such deeply entrenched hatred between factions, interventions from external parties can assist in reversing the seemingly intractable conflicts and enable Yemeni’s capability to engage in practical, resolution focused dialogue; this can be achieved through the cease of arms sales to warring factions.
The United States, United Kingdom, France and Germany have supplied arms either directly to the Saudi-led coalition or indirectly through the violation of terms laid out within End User Certificates by clients of the aforementioned states. These certificates state that weapons cannot be re-sold or used by a third party without consent, however, reports of evidence of this resale to groups within Yemen are surfacing (Deutsche Welle, 2018).
The most notable impact of the sale of weaponry was the aerial bombing conducted by Saudi Arabia allegedly targeting Houthi rebels at the Red Sea port of Hodeidah. The port is vital for the import of food into Yemen, with approximately 70% of Yemen’s imported goods entering this port (WFP, 2018) The impact on food and medical supplies has severely hampered humanitarian operations.
Foreign intervention, headed by the UN, led to the Stockholm agreement in December 2018. From the ceasefire, agreed as a result of the talks, the death toll reduced by 20% (ACLED, 2019). Despite numerous violations of the ceasefire, the interventions enabled a ground-breaking dialogue that allowed for humanitarian access.
This served as an example that through the suspension of armed conflict, disrupted by either the reduction or termination of sales of munitions, the foundations of conflict resolution and peacebuilding can be laid.
Governments are increasingly recognising their implicit role in the Yemen crisis; through public pressure and the advocacy of NGOs emphasising Governmental responsibility in playing a vital role in ending the supply of arms to warring factions that inhibit peacebuilding activity.
Germany, Belgium and crucially, the United States has ceased arms sales via a Senate created ‘War Powers’ resolution to cut off American military support for the Saudi-led coalition, who are under increasing scrutiny for their involvement in the conflict (U.S Senate, 2018). However, similar measures are required for the parallel supply of weapons from Iran to desist.
Suspension of arms sales to Saudi-led coalition, disruption of Iran-derived supplies and impartial peacebuilding interventions are vital factors to commence dialogue that can secure peace in Yemen.
Key Factor for Peace Two: Resilience Focused Peacebuilding
Conflicts may end either with a circumstantial dwindling of wills or through peace agreements. However, if the underlying causes of the conflict are left unaddressed, then the root causes of conflict are likely to reappear, constituting in a resumption of violence. This is known as negative peace (Galtung, 1996).
Civil wars are notoriously difficult to peacefully resolve long term, therefore, the pathway to sustainable peace within Yemen will require a highly motivated three-step process of Peacemaking, Reconciliation and Resilience Building that will lead to a lasting transformation.
The principal component to transforming the conflict will be through Peacemaking initiatives that seek to ‘rebalance’ the relationships between parties; addressing inequity from the outset by ensuring that from the design phase of the agreement, there is an ethos of co-creation via an egalitarian approach. This will be particularly beneficial for the Houthis as, despite their territorial control, the Yemeni government have significant foreign financial and military support.
A peace process that contains clear goals and that incentivises the observance of the agreements (Sisk, 1997) can provide both parties with clear outcomes to work towards. To increase the accountability of the warring parties, the cascading of these deliverables could be communicated to the citizens of Yemen and to foreign investors in the state.
Setting a strict timetable to avoid ’spoilers’ (Zahar, 2008) may prove futile, as it may be argued that stakeholders within the conflict have already shown ‘spoiler’ behaviour in the gradual non-compliance of the ceasefire agreed within the Stockholm agreement (OSESGY. 2018). Therefore, a gradual, iterative process of developing a consensus model of rich understanding, that enables inter-faction cognizance of opposing party needs, is vital within a conflict-sensitive approach to peacemaking.
To provide re-assurance to actors, integrative bargaining techniques must be applied. The results of which should be mechanisms to ensure that if there is a breach in an agreement, there is a well defined, peaceful recourse in the form of renegotiation that can serve as mitigation for parties sceptical of the counter-party compliance. With this widely-communicated and educated to all actors, including a reminder of the dire humanitarian consequences acts of retaliation can cause, potential violence can be avoided.
Based upon the establishment of agreements made by faction leadership, the process of reconciliation will derive from communities conducting an intra-communal reflection on outcomes they would like to achieve. Key religious and community leaders from all factions will need to play an active role in channelling individual’s and community-wide desire for revenge into constructive terminology, leading to peace-oriented outcome goals (Väyrynen, 1991).
The enthused voices of women will be a particularly influential factor in this dialogue, perhaps not by open-public fora, due to the Islamically-derived societal practice of segregation, but via familial dialogue where they can largely be free to express their concerns to male family members. The concerns of mothers have largely advocated for the violence to discontinue, the establishment of security and educational continuity for their children (UNICEF, 2016).
Extrapolating the intra-community dialogue to inter-community and national dialogue cannot however solely focus on a conceptual shared future, but must also effectively deal with the inevitable trauma caused by conflict, thus inhibiting a sense of injustice to fester (Lederach, 1997).
Localised, community-led applications of coping mechanisms will need to be explored and it is here aid agencies must play an active role in helping citizens deal with the psycho-social issues likely to occur.
Whether through selective amnesia (Rigby, 2001), apologies or reparations, leadership at all levels must look at the Stockholm agreement as a symbol of what is possible and endeavour to mitigate possibilities of retaliatory attacks by those within their sphere of influence.
It is through that stability that resilience can be built amongst communities and national level leadership; to withstand the pressure of rogue actors seeking to fracture societal cohesion.
Conflict-sensitive programming, enabled by sufficient humanitarian access (of ‘conflict sensitive-aware’ NGOs), can use their methodologies to counter-act this by propagating extensive awareness to communities of “power relations and actors and use this knowledge to identify possible risks of, and measures to prevent, manipulation.” (Zicherman, 2011: 15)
Recognising that resilience is a product of understanding and trust across horizontal (families and communities) and vertical networks (the state), as well as the maintenance of those relationships, facilitative intermediaries can utilise Sustainable Development Goal 16 to anchor and validify their efforts to “build accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels” (UN-DESA, 2016).
Via participatory methods, a newly obtained array of coping mechanisms and localised conflict awareness (to assess and peacefully escalate potentially divisive issues), the evidenced capabilities of Yemen citizens to survive in the most challenging circumstances can contribute to enabling the installation of a unifying government and the continued building of social capital (Hawkins, Maurer, 2010).
Conclusion
The conflict in Yemen is a multi-level crisis where no single factor can resolve all known issues. To address the complex dynamics, safe spaces within a transformation framework need to be provided by actors to allow a dialogue that instigates a people-led change approach.
Peace-making actors and legal frameworks have a vital role in subjugating third-parties to contribute to enabling factors to the peace process, such as weapons provision suspension.
Whilst intra-communal conflict and the role of local communication channels to propagate opinion requires further exploration, peacebuilders must build the capacity of communities to self-reflect, analyse and highlight that they have a deep and profound shared narrative and common interest, namely the peace and prosperity of the country.
Therefore, as a consequence of stabilisation, Yemen citizens must self-empower as a collective to define an enduring set of solutions for future generations based upon resilient relationships and accountable governance.
Of grave concern to most onlookers are the wider implications of conflict if it remains intractable.
The conflict in Yemen, if unceasing, could serve a prelude to the proxy powers of Saudi Arabia and Iran engaging in direct inter-state conflict, based upon ideological and economic feuds, for control of the region. As two heavily militarised powers, this could have devastating consequences for the region.
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