Tag: Yemen
Saleh won’t go
President Saleh of Yemen today again refused to sign the Gulf Cooperation Council agreement that would have him step down in 30 days. This time he is insisting on a public signing, while flooding the streets with loyalists who have trapped the American and EU ambassadors along with others in the United Arab Emirates embassy in Sanaa.
It is anyone’s guess how today will wind up. Brian Whitaker, who certainly knows Yemen better than I do, sees little possibility of the president wriggling out, mainly because the Saudis won’t let him. But I think it is a pretty good bet that we are more than 30 days from Saleh stepping down.
If he is smart–and generally he is at least wily–his security forces are likely to “rescue” the American and other ambassadors, after letting them stew a while. Even if he ends up having to sign the agreement, implementation is going to be difficult. He has slipped the leash before and will certainly try to do it again. Only when he sees the real possibility of needing the immunity provided for in the agreement will he go.
In the meanwhile, there are tensions between the opposition political parties and the protesters who have sustained the effort to oust Saleh. They have never really been united. It is the opposition parties, not the protesters, who have signed the agreement. They will need to retain the capability of putting large numbers of people in the streets if they want the transition to be a real one and not just a reshuffling of the Yemeni elite.
That is certainly what the Saudis have in mind, though that may give them more credit for a coherent view than Ginny Hill of Chatham House did in an appearance last week at the Middle East Institute. The aging and health problems of the Crown Prince seem to have cut off payments to the Yemeni tribes and reduced Saudi Arabia’s ability to impose a solution in Sanaa. Maybe Saleh’s latest maneuvers will awaken them to the need for decisive action by the GCC. Failing that, Saleh could continue to not go for a while yet.
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A right-minded but (mostly) forgettable speech
It is hard for me to knock a speech whose most frequently occurring words are “region” “must,” “change,” “people,” and “rights.” There has to be something to appreciate there. The President was particularly good on Tunisia and Egypt, supporting completion of their transitions to democracy and offering economic help, mainly through debt forgiveness, trade and investment. He was better on Bahrain than I might have expected, underlining that the destruction of Shia mosques there is unacceptable (thank you Roy Gutman for your reporting on that!).
On Syria, he was so-so, appealing once again for Bashar al Assad to lead reform (fat chance) or step aside (fat chance of that too). But that is farther than Obama has gone in the past. He gave President Saleh of Yemen a push toward the exit, but it did not seem to have any real force behind it.
The President was overoptimistic on both Afghanistan and Iraq, claiming we have broken the momentum of the insurgency in the former and established multiethnic and nonsectarian government in the latter. Both may happen, but they aren’t consolidated achievements yet.
On Israel/Palestine, the President took something like Shimon Peres’ approach: focus for now on defining Palestine’s territory and ensuring Israel’s security, solve Jerusalem and refugee return later. Rhetorical support for Israel was strong, as was opposition to the Palestinian effort to get the UN General Assembly to approve statehood. But there was really nothing new. That might be the best he can do for the moment, which is not propitious.
No mention of Saudi Arabia. A bit of talk about Iranian hypocrisy in providing assistance to Syria in repressing demonstrators, but no clarion call for rebellion there. Strong on women’s rights, inter-religious dialogue and rejection of political violence. Big throughout on self-determination (Palestinians take note), values as a focus for American policy in addition to interests, universal rights and strengthening the economic underpinnings of political transition.
A right-minded but I am afraid forgettable speech.
PS: I did not anticipate when I wrote this piece quickly this afternoon the furor that has erupted over the President’s endorsement of the ’67 borders of Israel as the basis for negotiations and eventual land swaps. It is still a bit hard for me to see what other basis there would be in a “land for peace” deal, but I take the point that this is the first time an American president has endorsed an idea that many of us take for granted. Those who object need to explain what other basis there might be for the territorial solution, other than “making the land whole.”
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Obama laps to the wrong side of history
While he is wisely not spiking the football, President Obama is still taking a few victory laps. The problem is that there are other races still going on in the stadium. He is supposed to be competing in those as well: the autocrats in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria should not be left to win their competitions. How do we think they will behave if they are successful in their current efforts to repress the demonstrations?
The picture is different in each of these countries. Obama has made it clear enough that Gaddafi must leave Libya, but the NATO military effort seems to be falling short and the diplomatic maneuvering hasn’t yet produced the desired result. In Yemen, the slippery president has refused to sign an agreement negotiated with the Gulf Cooperation Council to step down and has returned to beating up on demonstrators. King Hamad bin Isa al Khalifa in Bahrain is busy bulldozing Shia mosques, as if that will make the 70% Shia population go away. In Syria the supposed reformer Bashar al Assad has killed hundreds, rounded up thousands and subdued towns one by one using grossly excessive military force against civilians.
We are not hearing much from either President Obama or Secretary of State Clinton about these developments. I would argue that the outcome of the still ongoing rebellions in the Arab world are more important to U.S. vital interests than the killing of Osama bin Laden, who wasn’t living much better in Abbottabad than he would have in Guantanamo (though he was clearly in better communication with his network). Yemen is already a weak state where terrorists hide and Syria provides support to Hizbollah and Hamas. Libya has undertaken state-sponsored terrorism in the past and may well revert in the future. Bahrain? How does the Sunni king expect his Shia majority population to react once he is finished depriving it of its political rights as well as many houses of worship?
I won’t propose a full package of solutions. What it seems to me is needed is simpler than that: a Presidential decision to make the cause of democracy in the region his own, and a tasking to the State Department to come up with the (non-military) propositions that will make it real. Failing that, Obama risks lapsing to the wrong side of history.
PS: Jackson Diehl treats the Syrian case well in this morning’s Washington Post, as does Brian Whitaker in The Guardian.
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While we weren’t watching
I admit it is hard to shift attention away from the consequences of Osama bin Laden’s death. America and Pakistan have embarked on a great debate. Sticking with the claim that they knew nothing about either OBL’s whereabouts or about the American operation to kill him, Pakistan’s government now has to explain its apparent incompetence. The Obama Administration has to explain why we should provide billions in assistance to a country that incompetent, or worse, one that harbored OBL.
These debates will go on for some time but is unlikely to change much. Congress will fulminate, but President Obama will not want to reduce aid, for fear of making the situation worse, and he will stick to his drawdown schedule in Afghanistan, starting small. Maybe in Pakistan the debate will have a broader impact: its military and intelligence services deserve a thorough airing out, though they are likely to survive with their prerequisites intact.
More interesting for the long term are the things that were, and were not, happening in the Arab world while we weren’t watching.
In Syria, the crackdown is proceeding, with hundreds more arrested in apparently indiscriminate security sweeps of major provincial centers of unrest. Bashar al Assad shows every sign of continuing. Aleppo and Damascus, Syria’s two biggest cities, remain relatively quiet. Friday will tell us whether the repression is succeeding.
In Yemen, President Ali Abdullah Saleh has managed to slip out of an agreement negotiated with the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia plus other oil-rich gulfies) to step down in 30 days. It is unclear whether the GCC, the political opposition or the protesters can do much at this point to resurrect the agreement, so it is likely both demonstrations and repression will continue.
In Libya, a kind of tottering stalemate has developed, with Gaddafi continuing to pound the western town of Misrata and to hold off the rebels in the east. Turkey has turned against the Colonel, but it is unclear whether that will make much difference. For all the much-vaunted rise of Turkey as a regional player, Ankara seems to have trouble making its weight felt with either Bashar al Assad or Muammar Gaddafi.
In Bahrain, repression is also in full swing, with the Americans seeming to bend to Saudi pressure not to object too strenuously. The regime there, in the past one of the milder ones, has been arresting doctors and nurses who provided medical treatment to protesters.
So it looks as if counter-revolution is succeeding for the moment across the region. It would be ironic if OBL’s death were to coincide with failure of the protests that showed promise of harnessing the discontents that used to be channeled into terrorism. Mr. Obama, where was that right side of history last time we saw it?
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Yemen at stake
President Saleh has refused to sign the agreement to step down in 30 days in return for immunity from prosecution. This is not really a surprise. He is notoriously slippery and has wiggled out of several previous promises to give up power.
Now the question is what the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) will do. Its oil-endowed members (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Oman) were to be the guarantors of the agreement the GCC had negotiated with Saleh and the opposition political parties. Individually and collectively they presumably have a good deal of leverage over Saleh. Will the GCC show its teeth, as it did by deploying troops in Bahrain? Or will it roll over and play dead, leaving Saleh to see if he can defeat the protests, now that he has rejected the deal with the political parties?
It is easy to imagine that Saleh is watching Bashar al Assad’s repression of protests in Syria and Muammar Gaddafi’s war against Libya’s population and wondering, “why can’t I survive if they can?” Of course the right answer to that question is that none of them should remain in power: each has delegitimized his own regime and by all rights should step aside.
But life is not often fair. I am reasonably confident that Gaddafi is finished, sooner or later, but the jury is still out on Bashar, who seems willing to imitate if not rival his father in killing and arresting Syrians. Saleh has so far been less heavy-handed in Yemen, but I wouldn’t put it past him to double down and try to intimidate the protesters. They have proven adept and savvy so far; let’s hope they can maintain their good humor, massive presence and commitment to nonviolence. They merit success.
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