Yemen: Geopolitics by proxy or more chronic civil war?

March 30, 2015
Do collapse of Yemen’s government and air strikes led by Saudi Arabia reflect geopolitics by proxy or chronic civil war?

Do collapse of Yemen’s government and air strikes led by Saudi Arabia reflect geopolitics by proxy or chronic civil war?

The answer is important and perhaps less certain than many observers think.

The view arises naturally that attacks from Saudi Arabia against Houthi rebels in Yemen primarily embody Sunni-Shia animosity, a force of foundational importance in the Middle East. Geography gives Saudi officials compelling reasons to hold this view.

The Houthis are Shiites, discussions of which inevitably lead to Iran, which also supports not only Iraqi Shiites battling Islamic State jihadists in Iraq but also Syrian President Bashar al-Assad of the Alawite branch of Shia Islam and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Saudis and their Sunni neighbors understandably fear a Shia squeeze. And they know Iran’s partner in the Syrian enterprise is Russia, once Iraq’s patron and a longtime ally of Yemen. From here the imagination leaps toward troubling possibilities.

Yet the Houthi uprising has a strongly local focus that might be receiving insufficient attention.

A northern tribe, the Houthis follow the Zaydi branch of Shia Islam, which differs in ways from Iranian beliefs and from those of the Shafi’i branch strong in Yemen’s south. Houthi leaders backed an unsuccessful insurrection against the upstart government in Sana’a in 1964. This was before 2 decades of hostility between North Yemen and what became Marxist South Yemen. Although those countries united in 1990, relations between the north and south have stayed rocky.

In the north, Houthis fought the government six times during 2004-10. Also in that period, a secessionist movement, not the first, flared in the south.

The latest mayhem thus reflects fierce factionalism that is not new in Yemen. While needy elements of this incendiary system welcome imports of bread and bullets, the country’s many antagonisms look inward.

Civil wars are less governable from outside than Yemen has proven to be from Sana’a. Riyadh and Tehran might profitably remember this lesson of history before either wades into a bottomless bath of blood.

(From the subscription area of www.ogj.com, posted Mar. 30, 2015; author’s e-mail: [email protected])