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Yemen – the next failed state?Beset by rebels, poverty, crime and corruption, Yemen increasingly looks less like a fragile state than a failed one
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Brian Whitaker guardian.co.uk, Monday 27 July 2009 12.00 BST Article historyLast week Yemen's interior ministry issued a self-congratulatory report awarding itself a 90% score for crime control during the first half of this year. Crime rates have gone up slightly, it said, but they are still below the norm and in line with "the society's development and the accelerated rhythms of life".

This is a picture that most Yemenis would find hard to recognise. Last week, for example, 10 people died in a two-day battle between Sunnis and Shias for control of a mosque. On Tuesday, an army colonel and his two bodyguards were killed in a roadside ambush. On Thursday there was a riot in the southern town of Zinjibar; mortars and rocket-propelled grenades were fired at the jail, and conflicting reports gave a death toll ranging from eight to 16. On Thursday and Friday, attacks by rebels in the north of the country killed five, maybe seven, soldiers.

On Saturday, more rioting was reported in the south; armed men set up a roadside checkpoint; a grocer was shot dead in his shop (apparently for having been born in the wrong part of the country); the homes of a provincial governor and the director of political security were raked with gunfire; and a warehouse belonging to the president's nephew was attacked with RPGs.

Yemen has long been regarded as a "fragile" state – its government has never had much control outside the cities and there are millions of weapons in private hands – but now it is rapidly taking on the characteristics of a full-blown failed state. A commentary accompanying Foreign Policy's latest Failed States Index said of Yemen:


A perfect storm of state failure is now brewing there: disappearing oil and water reserves; a mob of migrants, some allegedly with al-Qaida ties, flooding in from Somalia, the failed state next door; and a weak government increasingly unable to keep things running. Many worry Yemen is the next Afghanistan.

For the last five years the government has been fighting a Zaidi Shia rebellion in the far north, close to the Saudi border. It has officially ended several times – the first occasion being when security forces killed its original ******, Hussein al-Houthi – but it keeps springing back to life again.

Now, though, the Zaidi uprising in the north has been joined by a second insurrection in the south. Its ******, Tariq al-Fadhli, hails from an old and aristocratic family who were dispossessed of their lands by the Marxist regime that took over southern Yemen in 1967. In the early 1990s Fadhli set out to reclaim his inheritance by organising a band of armed jihadists. Eventually the Third Armoured Brigade was sent to arrest him. He was cornered in the mountains but escaped, swore allegiance to the president, gave up jihad and eventually recovered his property. Earlier this year he fell out with the president again and declared himself ****** of a southern separatist movement.

There were reports at the weekend that he is once again surrounded by security forces but arresting or killing him – as happened with Houthi in the north – is unlikely to solve the problem. Underlying both rebellions are genuine grievances that fuel their support.

Yemen, surprising as it may seem, is also the Arabian peninsula's oldest multi-party democracy. Its first free elections – with women participating as well as men – were held in 1993. But it has turned into an Egyptian-style democracy where one party dominates the political scene and maintains its hegemony through co-option and cronyism.

The result is what Khaled Fattah, a researcher as St Andrews university, describes as a "self-cancelling" state. The state, far from "being an agency for providing law, order, security and welfare for the masses", has become "an elitist fountain for providing privilege, wealth and power for a small group of people".

The response, by those who feel excluded or marginalised, is to simply ignore the state and go their own way – as Fattah puts it, "to create an alternative system to the central authority and to replace formal and legitimate channels of state-society communication with their own system". Among its more obvious manifestations are the continuing existence of tribal militias and the recourse to alternative systems of justice: some tribal sheikhs even run their own private jails.

The Yemeni government views this primarily as a security issue – and was encouraged to treat it as such by the Bush *****istration. But it's actually far more than that: the causes of Yemen's insecurity are basically social and political. Solving the problem is not easy, especially in a country with such limited resources, but it should start with a more inclusive style of government where people can feel that the state is at least trying to look after their interests rather than feathering the nests of the elite. It's very doubtful, though, whether that can happen while Ali Abdullah Saleh remains president.

Saleh, who has been in power since 1978, spent several days in hospital last week, allegedly being treated for bruises sustained while "practicising his favourite sport". If he's wise, and wants to avoid more bruising, he'll step aside now. But I don't suppose he will.