How does civil disobedience defeat the Houthis?

Examples of Houthi defeats in the past period

Last May, a heavy transport driver named Omar Al-Dayaa formed an initiative called the White Flag to open the roads that the Houthis had closed for years, after two unilateral announcements by the government and the Houthis of their willingness to open some of those roads.

Within a few weeks of announcing the initiative on social media, several figures joined it, and it was later known as “The White Flag.” The group was formed from new figures who had not previously been deeply involved in the political and social conflict in Yemen.

Omar Al-Daya is one of the figures coming from the transportation profession. He is followed by tens of thousands on Facebook and YouTube and is concerned with publishing everything related to transportation. The initiative succeeded in opening the Marib-Sanaa road via Al-Bayda, which is a non-main road, closed for years, but the hopes and efforts led by Al-Dayaa are also focused on the Sanaa-Aden road via Al-Dhalea, and the Marib-Sanaa road via Nihm.

In anticipation of a similar initiative in Taiz by figures who mainly live in Houthi-controlled areas, Al-Houthi partially opened a road for travelers and travelers between Al-Hawban and the city of Taiz, without allowing commercial trucks to pass, while keeping 23 roads between Taiz, liberated from the Houthis, and Taiz, which it controls, closed.

At the beginning of this July, the Mineral Water Factories Association organized an open strike in rejection of Houthi’s decision to raise illegal taxes on it 20 times, in the name of the Teacher Fund. The union, which forms the legal framework to defend about 80 mineral water factories, resorted to civil disobedience.

During the two weeks of the strike, the union achieved an important partial victory, forcing Al-Houthi to back down from imposing 20 riyals on each carton of water to only five riyals. While the union pledges more, because the five riyals exceeds the percentage of one fifth, and it is absolutely illegal even according to the Houthi laws.

According to the Yemeni news agency "Saba", which is controlled by the Houthis, the retreat from the imposition of twenty riyals to 5 riyals came under the directives of Al-Mashat, who originally issued the basic directive to raise it from one riyal to 20 riyals.

The two examples above present two rare cases of Houthi retreat in the face of effective, unarmed popular pressure against the Houthis. The Yemeni government was unable to extract any such concessions during twenty years of war with the Houthis.

Despite the Houthis’ Zaydi Jarudi Imami doctrine, its entanglement with Iran, the experience of the Guardianship of the Jurist, and the experience of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, he has become fully aware, especially since the 2022 truce, that he can no longer rule by force as he used to do from the heart, and that the years of rule by terror are no longer effective.

In other words: Al-Houthi has a good ability to pick up signals of anger coming from the people against him, but as a group representing the Iranian occupation, he is unable to respond to them, and because he is also a criminal Jarudi group, but even criminality has a limited ability to rule by force, and so we saw that he made limited retreats. Regarding the issues of opening roads and imposing fees on water factories.

It is important to build on those experiences, continue to propose many of these battles in which the people can succeed, force the Houthis to make concessions, amplify those concessions and build on them, and begin an organized phase aimed at restoring all the rights that the Houthis destroyed, from the republic and its democratic system to citizenship and dignity. for every body.