Embassy closures put Yemen aid at risk

An anti-Houthi protest in Sana'a after the withdrawal of US embassy staff-Photo: Mohammed Al-Ariqi

By Almigdad Mojalli and Joe Dyke

SANAA/LONDON, 12 February 2015 (IRIN) - Hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Yemen are in further jeopardy following the evacuation of key Western embassies, analysts and aid workers warn, amid fears of a major food crisis in the import-dependent country.

The United States – which has averaged $200 million a year in aid to Yemen in recent years – the United Kingdom, France and the United Arab Emirates hurriedly withdrew their embassy staff this week, blaming the country’s “deteriorating security situation” following the resignation of the government last month.

Among the development aid that could be put on hold is crucial support to the Yemeni economy, its education systems and its military.

“When people look at the embassy closures they think it is just an embassy. In reality, [the closures] trigger various donor countries to put their funding on hold,” said Adam Baron, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations who studies Yemen. “In a country like Yemen, that is very dangerous.”

“Some of the big aid programs from European donors will be frozen in all likelihood,” a senior aid official told IRIN on condition of anonymity. “You have agreements with the government, but when there is no government they will be frozen.”

A fractured relationship

It was past 2am on Wednesday morning when cars carrying the American embassy staff wove through the capital Sana’a to the airport. The convoy was provided security by the same Houthi movement that was the main reason the Americans were fleeing.

The Houthi rebels – a predominantly Zaidi Shia Islam group from northern Yemen – have been gaining strength since September, creeping closer to full control of Sana’a. Last month, after days of clashes, the internationally-recognised government stepped down – leaving the Houthi in control.

Then on 6 February, in what some have called the final move in a coup, they unilaterally announced a new constitutional declaration establishing a 551-member parliament. This has prompted both peaceful protests against their rule and fresh threats from Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in the country – with the group already feared to have seized a military base.

The anti-American Houthis allegedly used the US withdrawal as an opportunity to ransack the embassy. “After dropping the staff [off at the airport], … the [Houthis] plundered all the weapons and armoured cars,” said a senior American diplomat, who asked to remain anonymous for security reasons.

Aid under threat

Yemen’s economy has long depended on foreign aid for its survival. In the absence of a functioning government, much of its development aid is now expected to be either suspended or delayed. 

Since 2011, the US has given Yemen more than $800 million in aid, while the European Union gave around $120 million in 2014. While short-term humanitarian aid is unlikely to be immediately affected, support to the economy, education, healthcare, and the military could be.

On 9 February, the EU strongly condemned the Houthi power play, saying it considered the constitutional declaration to have “no legitimacy.” Nabila Massrali, spokesperson for the EU, said that while development aid had not been formally suspended, “further implementation of programs is under review in light of current political developments.”

Yemen’s economy was already suffering after Saudi Arabia suspended its more than $1 billion annual aid late last year in protest at the Houthi takeover. The money was often used to prop up the Yemeni central bank's accounts.

“Yemen’s economy is going to be at risk of collapse if foreign aid is withdrawn,” Baron added.

Without support, the government may not be able to pay its civil servants, while the value of the Yemeni rial could plummet. Such a fall would hugely raise the price of importing food.

Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, is already dangerously reliant on imports of staple foods and almost half of its citizens don’t have enough to eat, according to Oxfam.

Trond Jensen, head of the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Yemen, said that while some emergency aid was continuing, he was “concerned about a potential economic crisis that would leave many Yemenis very vulnerable.”

Yemen already has some of the highest malnutrition rates in the world, comparable – in some parts of the country – to those in Somalia in the lead-up to the 2011 famine there.

Aid work under threat

For aid organisations trying to prevent a disaster, the embassy withdrawals and security situation also complicate their operations.

Hashem Awnallah, senior technical adviser at the US-based aid agency Pure Hand for Mankind, said he expected disruptions to his and other American-funded projects in the coming days now that his organisation’s focal points at the US embassy have left. “There will obviously be implications of the closures,” he said, “however the full impact may not be felt immediately.”

He said he hoped embassies would establish a system to allow them to manage aid remotely.

Other NGOs IRIN spoke to said they were monitoring the situation and would not rule out withdrawing their foreign staff if the situation continues to deteriorate.

Back from the brink

The crisis is already prompting residents to flee Sana’a for fear of being caught up in the violence. “I am very worried about my family. I can’t afford to wait until I lose any of my relatives,” said Naji Mohammed Saleh.

Baron said that for Yemen to avoid a nightmare scenario, the Houthis had to abandon their aggressive stance. In a speech on 10 February, Houthi leader Abdel Malik al-Houthi struck a slightly more conciliatory tone, speaking of dialogue with his rivals and foreign powers.

Yemen Rebels Say They Will Form New Government

  The New York Times

By ROD NORDLANDFEB. 6, 2015

SANA, Yemen — The Houthi rebels in Yemen, who effectively forced the country’s president and cabinet to resign last month, announced on Friday that they intend to dissolve Parliament and take control of the country, which does not now have a functioning government.

Houthi officials said the plan would be put into effect quickly, but they conceded that the process might take weeks to complete. They said they would name a national council to replace the Parliament, which would in turn choose a committee to select a new president.

“The revolutionary movement has always been quick — it won’t take that long,” said Ali al-Imad, a member of the Houthi political bureau. “It’s not important when, so much as that we now have a political road map.”

The apparent power grab by the Houthis threatens to further destabilize a country whose previous government had been a significant American ally in the fight against Al Qaeda, which has a major presence in the impoverished country. It may also worsen Yemen’s relationship with its wealthy northern neighbor, Saudi Arabia, which already has cut off badly needed aid to Yemen because of the growing power of the Houthis, who are believed to be financed by Iran.

Yemen has been without formal leadership since Jan. 22, when President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi and his entire cabinet abruptly resigned. The Houthis had surrounded the presidential palace and effectively put Mr. Hadi under house arrest. An agreement the two sides reached to ease the crisis and overhaul the government swiftly fell apart, leading to the resignations.

The Houthis mainly belong to a Shiite Muslim sect, the Zaydis, who make up nearly one-third of the country’s population and are dominant in the north. The Houthis are anti-American, but they are even more opposed to Al Qaeda, whose regional affiliate is powerful in the Sunni tribal areas of Yemen, particularly in the oil-rich east and south.

The plans for a new government, decreed unilaterally by the Houthis in the name of their “revolutionary committees,” were announced at a meeting of many of their leaders and officials at a government building, the Republican Palace.

The announcement came after the apparent collapse on Thursday of talks among the Houthis and Yemen’s many political parties that were aimed at forming a government to replace Mr. Hadi and his cabinet. Houthi militiamen closed off a wide area of the city around the palace on Friday, including Tahrir Square, the focus of many antigovernment demonstrations in the past.

“People have expectations, and we’re trying to fulfill those expectations,” said Leyla Lutf, a top official of the Arab Spring party, which is aligned with the Houthi-led revolutionary committees. She, too, was unsure how long the new process would take, but she said, “When you know the target, you know how to reach it.”

Houthi leaders portrayed the plan for a new government as the product of a consensus among Yemen’s political factions. When it was announced, a spokesman, Jamal Asodi, said the new government would be “based on the Constitution,” but he added, “so long as it does not conflict with the revolution.”

Abdul Karim al Khiwani, a prominent dissident journalist and Houthi supporter, said that “all walks of life” were represented in the revolutionary committees and that only “one or two” of Yemen’s parties opposed the new plan.

One of those opposed is Islah, an important Sunni Islamist party whose reluctance to agree on a presidential committee with other parties was one of the reason the talks failed Thursday.

The unilateral declaration by the Houthis was also likely to be unpopular in southern Yemen, where separatist sentiment is strong, and in tribal areas where the Yemeni government and the Houthis have tried to win Sunni loyalties away from extremist groups like Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Northern and southern Yemen were separate, often antagonistic, countries from 1968 to 1990.

Criticism of the Houthis’ action came quickly on Friday. “This is a clear coup against democracy and constitutional legitimacy,” said Majid Alshadadi, 35, an education ministry official from Ibb Province. He accused former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has allied himself with the Houthis, of being behind the move. “This is the beginning of the end of the Houthis,” he said.

The plan calls for the Houthis’ revolutionary committees to select a 551-member national council. The council will take the place of the national Parliament, which continued to meet despite questions about its legality even before Mr. Hadi resigned. The new national council is to choose a five-member presidential commission, which in turn would choose a new president, according to the statement that Mr. Asodi read at the palace.

“Change will come quickly,” Mr. Khiwani said, adding that the revolutionary committees began meeting immediately after the announcement on Friday, and that senior security officials were present. Even so, he said, it may take weeks to establish the new government and name a president.

Yemen faces a serious economic crisis and is running out of money. Just how much longer it can continue paying public-sector workers is an open question, and a worrisome one because the government is the largest employer in the capital.

“To some extent, things are kind of on pause right now, and running on autopilot,” said April Longley Alley, the senior Yemen analyst at the International Crisis Group. “The Houthis have a pretty solid control over the security situation in Sana. It’s been quiet for a couple weeks. But that can’t go on forever without a political compromise.

“The Houthis know that, and other groups do, too,” she continued. “They’re going to start butting up against some hard fiscal realities.”

The Houthis’ television station, al-Maseera TV, broadcast an announcement Friday evening calling on members of the revolutionary committees to celebrate the new plan by setting off fireworks, which soon lit up the skies over the capital.

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Shuaib Almosawa contributed reporting. 

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Photo Comment:

Houthi fighters patrol Sana, the capital of Yemen, which does not have a functioning government and has been without a president since Jan. 22. Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

          

In Yemen, Hard Times as Rebels Take Charge. But What Else Is New?

 

TheNew York Times-

By MONA EL-NAGGARFEB. 6, 2015

SANA, Yemen — Twelve-year-old Nefisa Nasser lined up four jerrycans by a faucet on the side of a busy street, patiently waiting her turn to fill them with water. She completed the daily routine, capping each container and sliding it into a wheelbarrow that she pushed back home through the clamor of morning traffic.

“Sometimes she comes back crying,” said her father, Muhammed Nasser, as Nefisa sat nearby on a folded bedspread. “Of course it pains me,” he said, “but our circumstances are difficult.”

Difficult is just how life is in Yemen, yesterday, today and every day. It does not matter that the president and his cabinet have resigned, that the government has not functioned for weeks, or that the gunmen in control of the streets say they plan to set up a new regime to their own liking.

Families have always had to struggle to get through their days in a country where the government has long been incapable of delivering essential services. There is hardly any running water now — and there was hardly any before the political crisis.

“In this country, people are accustomed to managing their lives without the state,” said Abdullah Alrahabi, who dug a well years ago on his property to supplement the critically short supply from the official system. He also supplies water to neighboring schools and mosques, and provides the free outlet Ms. Nasser uses every morning. “We don’t even rely on the state for the most basic services,” Mr. Alrahabi said.

Take Mr. Nasser, for example. He spent one recent morning, as he does many mornings, negotiating to reduce the fines on traffic tickets issued for a minibus he owns and rents out. Then he borrowed $250 to put the vehicle back on the street. At home, his wife prepared lunch for their five children and a few visiting relatives, just as she almost always does, without running water or electricity.

She strapped a flashlight to her forehead and used the water her daughter brought to cook a dish made of dough and broth.

To be sure, Yemenis are now confronting a whole new level of political uncertainty. The Shiite Houthi militia from the north has taken over the capital and has announced plans to name a new national council and eventually a new president. Southern separatists are fighting to break the country back up into two independent states. The former longtime president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was driven from power by popular protests in 2012, appears to be using old loyalties to renew his sway.

But people here say everyday life is unchanged.

Mr. Alrahabi, a manager in the president’s foreign relations office, said he continued to go to work, as he has done for 20 years, knowing that he is performing a perfunctory role in a system with crippled institutions.

“Let’s just say we live in a quasi-state,” Mr. Alrahabi said plainly.

That sentiment echoed from door to door in the capital, exposing the deep social disarray at the heart of the current political crisis. Yemenis have withstood the momentary leadership vacuum not by relying on state institutions but by turning to geographic, religious and tribal safety nets that have never been fully united under a strong, shared national identity.

The fissures in Yemen today are largely the legacy of Mr. Saleh, who ruled for decades and deliberately kept the formal state frail while emphasizing his personal hold on power, experts and officials here said.

“His role is that of the devil,” said Hasan Zaid, a minister of state and a member of the cabinet of Mr. Saleh’s successor, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who resigned two weeks ago. “You keep discovering how weak state institutions are. The army and police are sizable, but they are closer to militias belonging to the former president and his family than to a national force.”

Fearing the growing strength of his government’s military and intelligence agencies, Mr. Saleh had created parallel security bodies and placed them in the hands of his son and nephew. After he was ousted in the wave of Arab Spring revolutions, Yemen’s various security forces polarized, serving the interests of competing power centers rather than the state and doing little for the security of ordinary Yemenis. And the provision of basic services, in a country facing increasing violence and persistent poverty, only worsened.

“We should hide how we live,” said Moneef Almaqtari, 20, as he walked home in the popular Belaily neighborhood of Sana, not far from where Ms. Nasser draws her water. Mr. Almaqtari ducked his head under the clotheslines strung outside his door, where a pair of washed disposable baby diapers were hung.

“It is not a home, it’s a hut,” Mr. Almaqtari said as he walked to the kitchen, where his sister was making flat bread on a gas stove. He earns $200 a month as a supermarket cashier, he said, but his father and two of his brothers are construction day laborers and they rarely get work these days. All their earnings are pooled to buy food. “This is the only life I ever knew,” he said, “but with every president, the crisis gets worse and we suffer more.”

How much influence Mr. Saleh still wields is unclear, but the legacy of his years in power and the fractured state he led is palpable in the attitudes of Yemenis on the street.

“We never feel like the government is there, anyway,” said Taghreed Abdul Wahab, 21, a student at Sana University who stood with a group of classmates preparing for a geography test.

Their exams were postponed after the latest spate of violence, but they complained more about persistent problems on campus like favoritism and corruption, which they said are never addressed. “Students with lower grades can be admitted to medicine over others because they’re from the right family or they know the right people,” Ms. Abdul Wahab said.

Belal Hussein, 25, a graduate with a business degree who supervised an exam earlier in the day, overheard the conversation. Mr. Hussein introduced himself as a government employee who has not been paid his salary in seven months.

“They keep saying they have no revenues,” he said.

Mr. Hussein’s job is to keep track of employee attendance at the Commission for Public Lands, a body that manages state property. He admitted that he accepted bribes to mark colleagues present who had missed work because they had second jobs.

“How else am I supposed to live?” Mr. Hussein asked.

Yemenis refer offhandedly to the revolution set off in 2011, when the Arab Spring began, and its aftershocks as “the crisis.” The instability it brought allowed the Houthis to sweep into the capital, driving out the old leadership and promising reform. But many Yemenis have reason to be skeptical.

Back in Al Belaily, Mr. Nasser waited for lunch to be served.

“So far, the Houthis haven’t done much for us,” he said as his children gathered for the meal. He looked at the basic food spread on the floor. “On Fridays,” he said, a little embarrassed, “we also eat chicken.”

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.Shuaib Almosawa contributed reporting 

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Photo Comment:

 The Houthi rebels who now control Yemen announced plans Friday for a council to replace Parliament and choose a committee to select a new president. 

Yemen faces economic crisis as Saudi mulls pulling plug

* Photo: Peter Salisbury/IRIN

 SANAA, 1 December 2014 (IRIN) - Saudi Arabia is considering stopping financial support to Yemen, a move that could tip the country further towards economic collapse, Yemeni, Saudi and Western officials have said.

Since rebels from the Houthi movement took hold of the capital Sana’a in September, Saudi Arabia, which has provided an estimated US$4 billion to keep the Yemeni economy afloat since early 2012, has been reviewing its economic support for its southern neighbour. Among the key disbursements put on hold is $700 million in military aid.

The deliberation comes at a time when fears of an impending economic collapse have risen, with UN envoy to Yemen Jamal Benomar warning it was unclear “whether [Yemen] would be able to continue to pay its civil servants after the end of the year”.

The ghost of 2011

Yemen’s economy, already fragile before the country’s 2011 uprising, was decimated by the unrest and elite infighting of that year. The transitional administration of President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi has struggled to restore growth or provide basic services, and the poverty rate has remained stubbornly above 50 percent since early 2012.

The only reason the government has been able to stay afloat since 2012, officials and analysts say, is the largesse of Saudi Arabia, Yemen’s northern neighbour. While the donations have never been made official, in 2012 Riyadh is believed to have deposited $1 billion at the Central Bank of Yemen and given the country a further $2 billion in oil and fuel products to help shore up its finances. In July 2014, Riyadh again bailed Sana’a out, providing $1.2 billion in cash to help pay for fuel and another $435 million to help the government make welfare payments. 

Part of the issue has been the failure to trim fuel subsidies. Yemen heavily subsidizes fuel in the local market, costing the government more than $3.3 billion - about a quarter of all spending - in 2013.

In August, the government cut subsidies, leading to a price increase of up to 95 percent for fuel at the pump. It partly reversed the decision less than two months later, decreasing fuel prices by 25 percent after the takeover of Sana’a by rebels from the northern Houthi movement, a Shia group with whom the Saudis have fought in the past.

Since the Houthi takeover no new Saudi funds have been disbursed, including $700m in military aid agreed as part of the bailout package in July. A number of diplomatic and government sources told IRIN that although there is unlikely to be a formal announcement that funding is being frozen, Riyadh will at the very least take a "go-slow" approach to transferring further funds to Sana'a until it is clear that the money will not financially benefit the Houthis.  

“In conversation with [Yemeni] officials, they have been saying that they are not going to bring money to Yemen just to reinforce the Houthis,” said a senior Yemeni official, part of whose responsibilities is to report on government spending and finances. “And whatever Saudi Arabia does, you know the other GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] countries will do.”

Two other Yemeni government and Western diplomatic officials confirmed that the $700 million had been expected but had not as yet been delivered.

This has exacerbated other trends towards financial collapse. Attacks on an important oil pipeline and electricity infrastructure in restive Mareb Province have cut off revenues and forced the government to import expensive fuel from abroad.

Thus the government is running short on dollars. Foreign currency reserves fell from $4.4 billion to $3.8 billion between September 2013 and September 2014, pushing the country towards a currency crisis. With the remaining reserves the bank can only afford to cover 4.8 months of imports, a record low.

Estimates of when the government would run out of money vary from the end of 2014 until early March 2015, but government officials and advisers make it clear that fiscal collapse is imminent. “If there is no intervention, it is not a question of if, it is a question of when,” said the Yemeni official.

In line with other GCC officials, a senior Saudi diplomat said no formal decision had been made to halt aid or funding to Sana’a, but added that Riyadh is reviewing the situation in Yemen. “We will see how the new government [formed in early November] does,” he said. “If they can act independently [of the Houthis], then maybe we can work with them.”

Saudi officials are also said to be frustrated that the $435 million they gave Sana’a in July has not been distributed to the Social Welfare Fund (SWF), the state body tasked with overseeing welfare payments to 1.5 million of Yemen’s poorest people. According to people familiar with talks that took place earlier in the year, the funds had been touted as the first in a series of payments to be used to underwrite the Fund’s costs.

A source at SWF told IRIN the government did not disburse the funds needed to make the first quarterly payment of 2014 - which had been due in January - until August. The second tranche followed in September, but SWF is yet to receive payments for the third or fourth quarters, both of which should have been made by this point in the year. “In the past, we paid at fixed times,” the source said. “Now we don’t know if or when we will be able to pay.”

Humanitarian crisis

The economic crisis is having an impact on the humanitarian suffering and any further collapse could be disastrous. More than 15.9 million people - 60 percent of the population - require some form of humanitarian assistance.

“Yemen remains one of the major humanitarian crises in the world and the outlook for 2015 shows that the humanitarian crisis in the country has gotten worse,” said Johannes van der Klaauw, Yemen Humanitarian Coordinator for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

“A large number of poor people in Yemen rely on welfare payments. Late [payments] make it difficult for them to meet their obligations including basic expenditure like buying food for their families… There are expenditures that a human being cannot postpone like buying food or medicine for a sick child.”

“Yemen is experiencing new waves of increased conflict, while the risk of an economic meltdown cannot be ruled out,” he added.

Hanalia Ferhan, country director at international NGO ACTED, said there would be a significant impact if the government were unable to pay salaries. “The financial and economic situation has affected the country across the board,” she said, highlighting the high prices of food imports and severe fuel shortages as key concerns for poor Yemenis.

“The communities we work with are in the most rural, hard-to-reach parts of the country. They were already in a dire situation a year ago… and the situation has not improved.”

Abdulfatteh, a 47-year-old bus driver who would only give his first name, pointed to a mounting queue of trucks and cars at a petrol station on the outskirts of Sana'a's Old City. "It's very bad now," he said. "No electricity, no [petrol], no diesel… There is no work and there is no security. I think it will only get worse.”

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*A Yemeni man stands in front of a barricade of burning tyres during fuel riots in Sana'a, 30 July 2014