Yemen will only stop teetering if cooperation replaces conflict

Charles Glass offers a history lesson on Yemen and debunks the notion that the conflict there has echoes of the Cold War in its binary make-up

Illustration by Pep Montserrat for The National

The Romans called Yemen Arabia Felix (literally, Happy Arabia). It was where the sands of Arabia Deserta ended and the lush mountains that supplied the empire’s temples with incense began. Rome traded with the merchants of southern Arabia’s coast, but it did not attempt to conquer the country until 26BC. Then, the Emperor Augustus dispatched a Roman legion from Egypt under Aelius Gallus to bring the unruly hill tribes under Roman suzeiranty.

Like many later expeditions to take Yemen, Aelius Gallus’s campaign ended in disaster. Thousands of soldiers died of thirst and disease before they arrived. Arab tribes then beat them in battle, and Aelius Gallus retreated. Rome did not again attempt to extend the Pax Romana into the mountains. Instead, it resumed trading with the coast and left the tribes inland to their favourite sport, fighting one another.

External powers that subsequently interfered in Yemen should have heeded the lesson Rome bequeathed them. Yemen is the Afghanistan of the Arab world, where outsiders meddle to their detriment. Yet, as in Afghanistan, foreigners could not resist invading whatever the cost.

The Omayyads attempted to impose their rule from Damascus in the late seventh century, but they so alienated the Yemenis that the country’s legendary fighters ceased volunteering to expand the empire. The Abbasids of Baghdad maintained at best a tenuous hold on the highlands, and the governors they appointed to rule the Yemenis launched their own revolts.

Out of the baffling governance in the most fertile land of the Arabian Peninsula came a dynasty, the Shiite Zaydi imamate that maintained local power for a millennium until the republican revolution of 1962. The deposed imam sought protection from his neighbouring monarch in Saudi Arabia, while the military junta that overthrew him turned to Egypt to save their new republic.

Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had overthrown King Farouk in 1952, sent troops who escalated the civil war. His army was accused of using chemical weapons on primitive tribal warriors and lost 10,000 soldiers, a humiliation even if the Saudis did not manage to reimpose the Imamate. Anyone who sees history in terms of the Sunni-Shiite divide might reflect that the dynasty the House of Saud supported was Shiite. The threat of the time was republican and socialist, embodied by Nasser and his call to all Arabs to elect their own rulers and unite the Arab nation. Fear of republican revolution trumped the sectarian divide.

The Zaydis practised their own form of Shiite Islam, about which they were not ideological. They dwelt for the most part in peace with the majority Sunnis of the Shafi’i school of Islamic jurisprudence, setting an example for other mixed Sunni-Shia countries.

Abu Bakr Al Shami, a Yemeni, wrote recently: “My local mosque’s Friday sermon is delivered by an Egyptian sheikh from Al Azhar (a Sunni), the Zaydi call to prayer is given, the Imam leading the prayer is Zaydi, and the congregation is evenly split. My own family is evenly split between Zaydis and Shafi’is, and those that prefer to call themselves just Muslim and leave the details to one side.”

The latest conflict in Yemen has echoes of the Cold War, when the US and Soviet Union portrayed local conflicts as instances of big power rivalry. Now, it’s not the struggle between communism and capitalism, but between Sunni and Shiite, meaning between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

However, the Cold War dichotomy never worked in the Arab world. No matter how many times American secretaries of state told the Arabs that their mortal enemy was in Moscow, they saw an adversary in Tel Aviv that had expelled almost an entire Arab population from their homes between 1947 and 1949 and occupied the rest of their country in 1967.

Sunnis and Shiites, despite the fanaticism of some in their ranks, have nothing to fight about. In some countries, Shiite minorities are demanding equal rights and a share of power. In Iraq, Sunnis are doing the same. This is no reason for either faction to annihilate the other. Open warfare between the sects was almost unknown before the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 established a sectarian government in Baghdad.

Outside powers are circling Yemen again, as they did in 1962. Iran gives some support to the Houthi fighters among the Zaydi population. The former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who received and has now lost the support of Saudi Arabia, fought the Houthis for most of his term in office. Now, he is allied to them.

Iran has always been the power to which Shiites in the Muslim world have looked for protection, just as Sunnis used to look to Istanbul under the Ottomans and Egypt under Nasser.

Sunnis these days turn to Saudi Arabia, which has the cash if not the armed might of Egypt. That may explain why the Saudis turn for armed forces to Egypt, once their implacable foe, and Pakistan. It is unlikely any Egyptian officers or soldiers are old enough to remember their country’s last adventure in Yemen, but the veterans who survive in hospital wards and coffee shops should tell them about it.

The western opening to Iran over the draft nuclear accord alarms the Saudi guardians of Sunni orthodoxy, but it should do the opposite.

As with Soviet-American detente and Russian glasnost in the 1980s, it presents an opportunity to break out of meaningless conflict. The satellite states of Eastern Europe claimed their independence when change came to Russia.

Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen may be able to avoid partisanship in the Sunni-Shiite divide if Saudis and Iranians seize the moment to replace confrontation with cooperation. What are they fighting for anyway? No one expects the Iranian hordes to conquer the Arab world, and the Wahhabis are unlikely to make much headway in converting the Iranians.

Meanwhile Yemen is suffering like Iraq and Syria. Weapons pour in, foreign powers take sides and the war intensifies with more deaths, destruction and displacement. The Red Cross, already overextended in Middle East wars, is desperately trying to fly in medical aid to the war’s victims. Foreign residents are desperate to evacuate.

A Houthi spokesman called for negotiations. Someone should talk to them. To the Romans, Yemen was the land of frankincense and myrrh. To the rest of us, it is the birthplace of coffee. Perhaps this is the moment for us to wake up and smell it.

Charles Glass is journalist, publisher and author of several books on the Middle East, including the upcoming Syria Burning: The Islamic State and the Death of the Arab Spring