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Thursday March 28, 2024

Yemen and the world

The conflict that tears apart Yemen has made that country, the Arab peninsula and the wider Middle East the centre of global attention. As a ten-nation coalition led by Saudi Arabia continues to bomb Shia Houthi rebels who forced President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi to flee to Riyadh, the accelerating

By our correspondents
March 31, 2015
The conflict that tears apart Yemen has made that country, the Arab peninsula and the wider Middle East the centre of global attention. As a ten-nation coalition led by Saudi Arabia continues to bomb Shia Houthi rebels who forced President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi to flee to Riyadh, the accelerating fighting can be looked at from many perspectives. The sectarian dimension is one; but essentially the problem goes beyond this. The tussle for power in the region, based on the Sunni-Shia factor is very real, but events there span a wider spectrum than this. Following a meeting this past Sunday at Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt, the entire Arab League now seems to be quickly becoming embroiled in the complex events in Yemen. While 10 members of the league are already part of the fighting force, all 22 nations have agreed in theory to set up a contingent of around 40,000 to crush the Houthi insurgency. What that means for each Arab state will be different, but unusually the league has broken away from tradition by demonstrating unity and taking a common stand on a situation that threatens to continue for some time to come. The repercussions of the growing rebellion in the Middle East have already engulfed nations like Iraq and Syria. There is an obvious sense of fear that more could be pulled in.
Far removed from the Middle East in terms of geographical location, Pakistan is closely connected to the powers within it in other ways. Analysts in the country point out that it really has limited choice in the matter of whether it will send its troops to join the force invading Yemen. Khawaja Asif, the defence minister, says a decision still has not been made. But with all major political parties now apparently accepting the inevitable will happen, there seems to be no getting away from this reality. The lessons of the 1970 involvement in Jordan against the Palestinians are there before us. But these are not lessons we can really do very much about. Even as troops may be preparing to go in, Pakistani nationals trapped in Yemen are being pulled out. Over 500 reached Pakistan on Sunday and more evacuations are planned from Aden and other cities. The men, women and children caught up in Yemen are obviously desperate to get out and the Foreign Office has made an assurance that it will bring them home with Saudi Arabia backing this pledge. From far away, the west contemplates its own role. Hadi, the former president, was a key ally. He has been removed. This stems from actions taken four years ago when the US helped negotiate a deal with Ali Abdullah Saleh, ousting him from leadership but allowing him to remain in the country. Saleh now leads the Houthi rebellion. Again, the west’s ham-handed approach to problems it understand poorly has not worked out and it does not seem it is doing any better to get a grip on what is happening in this precarious territory of the world. What all these countries are not realising is that the consequences of playing out the proxy war in Yemen could be disastrous with Isis looming right around the corner.