The return of the spirit to the republican culture threatens the rule of the Houthi gang in Yemen

On September 26, 2023, demonstrations erupted in three major cities in Yemen, Sana’a, Ibb, and Hodeidah, to celebrate the anniversary of the revolution that established the republic and challenge the rule of the Houthi group. The demonstrations surprised the Houthi supporters, and instead of calling in security forces, the group’s gunmen in civilian clothes spread out in the streets, firing into the air in an attempt to disperse the celebrants, turning the celebration of the revolution’s anniversary into a confrontation between gunmen’s bullets and protesters’ stones.

The citizens' outing was spontaneous, but it was not surprising. The demonstrators did not follow an organized political body that disputes the Houthi group's rule and urges them to demonstrate. Rather, they were citizens who, with different orientations, came out to defend the republic after they saw the Houthi group's rule as a threat to it. This was due to the emergence of the religious ideas on which the group was founded, which contradict the idea of a republic, as its opponents see it. Because of this apprehension, opposition to the group and resistance to its rule began on a narrow scale, then increased and expanded to include broad sectors of society that reject the Houthi group's rule and uphold the values of the revolution and the republic.

The establishment of the Republic of Yemen in the mid-twentieth century was historically and geographically strange, as neither the previous decades nor the regional environment nor the local terrain indicated that it was imminent. As for history, the social and political conditions in Yemen on the eve of the revolution in 1962 did not bode well for the possibility of establishing a republic. About 90 percent of Yemenis lived in the countryside and worked in agriculture, herding and fishing, while the cities were marked by the appearance of feudal eras, as Russian historian Elena Golubovskaya says in her book "The September 26 Revolution in Yemen." The conflict between the tribal structure and the imamate system prevented the emergence of a modern political system.

The hospital buildings were left behind by the Turks and had not undergone any renovations. In fact, the Imam converted the hospital that the Turks had built for their soldiers into a royal palace called the “Dar al-Saada” Palace, a fact that was repeated in many sources and was mentioned by Taqiya, the daughter of Imam Yahya Hamid al-Din, in her memoirs.

Due to the poor health care, diseases and epidemics such as malaria, typhoid, smallpox and tuberculosis were mercilessly claiming the lives of Yemenis. In her book “I Was a Doctor in Yemen,” French doctor Claudie Fayan, who came to Yemen ten years before the September 26 Revolution, conveys tragic scenes about the health situation in the country at the time. She recounts her visit to a hospital in Taiz and seeing patients on the verge of death without treatment, and her feeling afterwards that she was “living in a damned nightmare.” She described the situation as exceeding everything she had read about extermination camps.

As for modern education, before the revolution, only a small group enjoyed it, almost exclusively the sons of the upper classes of the Imam’s household and his assistants from the Sayyids and some sons of judges. While the education of the rest remained limited to Quranic schools. Imam Yahya abolished the Teachers’ College that had been established by the Turks and turned it into government property. Then, in 1925, he turned the Turkish governor’s rest house into what was called “the Scientific School,” which was the first school of science funded by the state.

As for education there, it was similar to the Al-Azhar system, and the duration of study there was twelve years after primary school. There were similar scientific schools in other cities, but the duration of study there did not exceed seven years. There was a school for orphans established by the Imam in Sana’a, from a charitable perspective with the aim of “getting closer to God,” as stated in the interpretation of Ahmed Obaid bin Dagher in his book “Yemen under the Rule of Imam Ahmed.”

Imam Ahmad noted that his father's downfall was due to his disregard for the times. Since the late 1940s, he began to understand the demands of the constitutionalists, the most important of which was communication with the world. He opened embassies in a number of countries, received ambassadors, formed a government, and eased restrictions on trade. When the Free Officers removed the king from power in Egypt in 1952 and established the republic there, the Imam was keen to strengthen his relationship with Cairo, to protect himself from its hostility. In return, Cairo stopped publishing the newspaper "Voice of Yemen", which some of the opposition had been publishing from Cairo.

Technical development contributed to getting Yemen out of the siege. Amin al-Rihani says in his book "Kings of the Arabian Peninsula" that resorting to technology was limited to the army, which used aviation and wireless. Officers were in contact with the world and with merchants who wanted to develop trade routes. The Free Officers Organization was established in the army at that time, influenced by its Egyptian counterpart, and succeeded, like it, in attracting broad segments of society to its project for change. Thus, the coup turned into a revolution. Abdel Nasser supported the revolution as a result of his annoyance with the fluctuations of Imam Ahmad and his search for a victory to compensate for the failure of unity with Syria, which prompted Saudi Arabia and Britain to intervene and support the remnants of the Imamate by exploiting the division of the northern tribes against themselves.

The establishment of the republic, despite its achievements, was not enough to eliminate the specter of the Imamate. In an article published in the fall of 1970 in the New Left Review, Fred Halliday argues that the revolution succeeded in its first years in wresting political power from the Imam and his aides, establishing a new ruling coalition based on tribal sheikhs and merchants, and developing industry in a way that led to the emergence of an emerging working class.

Following this reconciliation, the authority of the tribal sheikhs replaced that of the Hashemites in the republic, which reshaped the republic in a way that made it more acceptable to the Saudi rulers who were wary of the liberal tendencies of the revolution. Abu Bakr al-Saqqaf argues that this led to a redrawing of the republic to suit regional interests. Fred Halliday notes that the Yemeni National Assembly was reconstituted to include eighteen royalists and six royal ministers, which reinforced this trend. Diplomatic relations were thus established between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, and the resistance of the remnants of the royalist forces was put to an end. Both the coup and the reconciliation were linked to the mistakes of the revolution’s leaders and to the interventionist and expanding approach of Abdel Hakim Amer and Sadat, which led to the political settlement that was concluded, according to the former head of the Yemeni Journalists’ Syndicate, Abdel Bari Taher.

The alliance between Saudi Arabia, the tribes and the Hashemites in Yemen contributed to undermining the republic and weakening the progressive nationalist and leftist forces that were at the forefront of the resistance to defend Sana'a during the siege. In this context, Abdul Raqib Abdul Wahhab, the leader of the popular resistance that broke the siege of Sana'a, was assassinated. His comrades were persecuted in various ways, such as exile, imprisonment and the appointment of some of them to diplomatic positions, with the aim of removing them from the political scene. The revolutionary organizations were liquidated under the pretext of preventing partisanship, which was confirmed by the head of the Republican Council, Abdul Rahman Al-Iryani, in his speech in May 1970 at a student conference, when he said: "Partisanship begins with influence and ends with betrayal."

According to Al-Bardouni in his book “Republican Yemen”, this reconciliation sponsored by Saudi Arabia resulted in the return of the properties of the returning royalists and those involved in the reconciliation, which had previously been confiscated, along with the confiscation of the properties of the ruling family and senior royalists who had returned to supporting the republic. This was contributed to by Al-Eryani’s hostile stance towards partisanship. This line led by Al-Eryani succeeded because it had a basis in the army, because the Free Officers organization had no political extension outside the army on the one hand, and because these officers were tied as a secret group to the Nasserite experience on the other hand, which made them less able to build political alliances outside the army.

The process of reducing the contents and values of the republic continued, and instead of creating a national integration that would end the legacy of the Imamate, tribal, regional and sectarian tendencies grew, undermining the republican idea. After the assassination of President Ibrahim al-Hamdi in 1977, who was seeking to reduce the influence of the tribal sheikhs, Ahmed al-Ghashmi took power for a short time before he was assassinated in 1978. After that, Ali Abdullah Saleh, supported by Saudi Arabia, came to power in the late 1970s.

During Saleh's era, the military and tribal character of power was consolidated. Four years after the unification of Yemen in 1990 between the north and the south, which was considered a dream that would advance Yemen, a war broke out between the two parts. As a result, public achievements were eliminated, and sectors in the south that had been subject to the state under the socialist regime ruling before unification were privatized. Tens of thousands were laid off from their jobs, and neoliberal policies based on economic openness subsequently prevailed, causing a steady rise in the unemployment rate in society.

Several factors combined to lead to the emergence of the Houthi group in the late 1990s. At the beginning of the decade, the Believing Youth Cultural Movement was established to revive the Zaidi Shiite sect, which is the sect of most of the population of the northern Yemeni governorates. The movement benefited from the political openness that characterized that period, and aimed to confront the Muslim Brotherhood’s infiltration of the tribal structure and the spread of the Salafi-Wahhabi tide supported by Saudi Arabia. Muhammad Azzan, Secretary-General of the Believing Youth Forum, says that this Sunni activity provoked the Zaidi environment, as its way to eliminate the idea of the Imamate was to spread religious ideas hostile to it, rather than to provide services and projects that would establish the value and importance of the republic. This resulted in the emergence of a Zaidi resistance to the republic.

Hussein al-Houthi, the founder of the group, was not part of this movement. Rather, his political work at that time was with the Haq Party, which he founded with other Zaidis, and for which he ran in the 1993 parliamentary elections, winning a seat in one of the districts of Saada Governorate. Along with his reformist political work, al-Houthi’s admiration for the revolutionary path taken by Iran’s Islamists was the reason for his activity in the Believing Youth Movement. By joining the movement, he helped push it towards political work after its cultural activity was primarily represented in religious education. Al-Houthi’s lessons and sermons increased, and he frequently attacked America and Israel, and promoted the Zaidi doctrine.

In 2002, his followers chanted the slogan "Death to America, Death to Israel" in the mosques of Saada and then Sana'a and in demonstrations rejecting the occupation of Iraq. In the following two years, the matter developed into digging trenches and training followers to use weapons, as documented by Muhammad al-Alani in an article published in 2010. This shift in the movement's course provoked the authorities in Sana'a, who asked al-Houthi to stop what he was doing and surrender himself, but he refused, which led to the outbreak of the first war between the state and the Houthis in the Maran area south of Saada, a war in which al-Houthi was killed at the end of 2004. Wars between the Houthi supporters and the state were renewed after that, until their number reached six wars in 2010.

If the republic’s democratic poverty opened a back door for the return of the Imamate system, the Islamic Revolution in Iran encouraged many members of the Hashemite families to join it. The circle was completed with the efforts to inherit power that were underway at full speed in the last decade of Saleh’s rule, who began arranging to transfer the presidency to his son, the commander of the Republican Guard at the time, in addition to empowering his relatives and nephews by appointing them to sensitive military and security positions, at the expense of the tribal and political alliance that began to collapse as a result.

On the eve of the 2011 revolution, the republic was a framework of an imamate without an imam. This motivated the aspiring Imami families to work harder to “restore what they consider a legitimate right to power, which they consider a divine mandate, at least in their discourse with their supporters,” as political researcher Maan Damaj puts it. While some of these families sought to integrate into Ali Abdullah Saleh’s power structure, taking advantage of the vacuum left by his old allies, others sided with the opposition by integrating into the structure of the Joint Meeting Parties, which brought together the traditional leftist, nationalist, and Islamist parties.

This dual merger provided the Houthi group with the political cover it needed in its war with the army in Saada Governorate, in the far northwest of Yemen, from 2004 to 2010, as it helped obscure the group’s true nature and what it was seeking. Its conflict seemed to be with the corruption of the republic, not with the idea of the republic itself, and the door was opened for its alliance with the opposition, which rejected the inheritance project and the policies of exclusion and impoverishment pursued by Saleh. Although the two parties united in the revolution against Saleh, the Houthi military option was stronger than the opposition’s peaceful option.

The February 2011 revolution paved the way for the political rise of the Houthi group. The revolution broke the isolation imposed on the Houthis in Saada Governorate, and they joined the protests demanding the departure of Saleh and his regime. The group exploited the collapse of state institutions by expanding militarily in more than one place, coinciding with its obtaining political recognition. It was one of the political forces participating in the National Dialogue Conference, which was held with the aim of addressing the problems left by previous regimes, restoring the contents of the republic, and achieving the goals of the February Revolution. Two years after Saleh left power, he returned to ally with the Houthi group against the rest of his opponents. With his help and the support of his supporters in the army, the group was able to invade Sana'a and dominate state institutions without a real fight.

The February Revolution opened the door to multiple options for the future. The common denominator among the revolutionaries was their desire to eliminate Saleh’s regime, but some wanted to replace it with a democratic republican regime, and others sought to revive the Imamate.

The Houthis are interested in summer camps and provide them with great capabilities due to their failure to fully control the public and private education sector, while imposing amendments to school curricula and canceling lessons related to the September Revolution, its symbols, and civil concepts and replacing them with talk about the group’s religious symbols. The Security Council’s Panel of Experts’ briefing, issued on January 25, 2022, stated that summer camps and cultural courses targeting children and adults “are part of the Houthis’ strategy to gain support for their ideology and motivate people to participate with them in the fighting.”

The Houthis, as Ayman Nabil sees it, are betting that this will lead to the creation of a new historical awareness among Yemenis, which will root social hostility towards the September Revolution. The group’s media is keen to sanctify its leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, by describing him with what necessitates sanctity, such as repeatedly referring to him as the master of knowledge, the companion of the Qur’an, the guardian of God, and the leader of the Qur’anic march. All of these descriptions establish that he has the exclusive right to the imamate.

The group uses its power to reshape public consciousness by extending its authority over time and place. As for time, the group elevates the value of some symbolic occasions over others. This was evident in the unprecedented celebration of the Day of Ghadir, on which the Prophet Muhammad gave authority to Ali ibn Abi Talib, as in the Shiite belief. Celebrating this occasion was not common even among the Zaidis in northern Yemen. Throughout the year, the Houthis organize a series of major events and celebrations, such as the Day of the “Scream,” the anniversary of the Prophet’s birthday, the day of the martyrdom of Hussein, and the anniversary of the killing of the group’s founder, Hussein al-Houthi, in order to promote their vision.

These events are considered by Yassin al-Haj Saleh to be “essential to the manufacture of sectarianism.” There is no place in the Houthi state’s program for national holidays and occasions. The celebration of the anniversary of the September 26 Revolution is limited to official speeches by the head of the Political Council, in which criticism is focused on the republic’s inability to fulfill its promises, and blame is directed at Saudi Arabia.

This shift was gradual. At first, the Houthis were singing the praises of the revolution and defending it. For example, Saleh al-Samad’s speech on the anniversary of the revolution in 2017 praised it and said that it “succeeded in putting the Yemeni people on the path of change and development, had it not been for the Saudi regime that stood with all its strength to confront it and thwart it.” He then added that the winds of change were strong and brought down all the attempts and conspiracies led militarily by the Saudi regime, before listing the Saudi interventions that he said aimed to contain the revolution, borrowing the dictionary of the Yemeni national movement.

In the following years, the speech of Mahdi al-Mashat, the representative of the Houthi authority, became more specific and critical. He did not stop at attacking Saudi Arabia, but also blamed the revolutionaries, accusing them of “proving the Yemeni decision to the outside” and lamenting the revolution that failed to achieve its goals, as he said. What was striking in al-Mashat’s speeches was the vilification of critics of the Imamate regime. In his speech in 2021, he asked Yemenis to deal with the anniversary of the September 26 Revolution differently from what he described as the patterns of the “defunct regime,” which he said had turned the September anniversary into “seasonal occasions for misleading, parties of insults, and exporting noise that is neither fattening nor satisfying.”

Then it came to defending the Hamid al-Din family, against whom the revolution was launched. This occurred in Al-Mashat’s speech on the anniversary of the revolution in 2023, when he called for reconciliation with history and building on it, saying: “We have forgotten for a long time and without realizing it, that we are flogging and tearing apart the collective self of beloved Yemen, present and past.” He added that “building states is a cumulative process that does not accept the language of buffoonery and a break with history as much as it is based on the language of connection and bridging experiences between generations,” in reference to the history of the Imamate, which the republican regime declared a break with.

As for the place, the group, while in power, was keen to change the names of streets, schools, and public facilities that bore the names of revolutionaries and republicans, and replace them with the names of its leaders who were killed in the war or names with sectarian connotations.

For example, the name of Al-Sab’een Square, the largest square in Yemen, was changed from the seventy-day siege imposed by the royalists on Sana’a, from November 28, 1967 to February 7, 1968, to Al-Samad Square, after Saleh Al-Samad, who was the head of the Supreme Political Council of the Houthis and was killed in an airstrike by the Arab coalition in April 2018. The name of a school in the Sana’a countryside was also changed from Ali Abdul-Mughni, the leader of the Free Officers in the September 26 Revolution, to Al-Hassan bin Ali School.

The Houthis exploited Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the war by invoking its history and anti-revolutionary and anti-republic stance in Yemen, calling it “the historical enemy of Yemen.” The Houthis have stimulated Yemenis’ memories that Saudi Arabia has always been at odds with their aspirations. This rhetoric has succeeded in alienating many, and has been reinforced by the conflicting priorities of Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

With the Houthis gaining power and the public sphere becoming crowded with expressions hostile to the republic, resistance began. It first appeared symbolically, and from the farthest point from power. The pre-Islamic history of Yemen was increasingly invoked in the public space, and interest in the Musnad script increased. A political and cultural movement emerged that is active on social media, glorifying Yemeni nationalism and calling its members “Aqyal,” a name for those who were like local rulers of their regions in the ancient Yemeni states. This is a reaction to the Houthis’ claims that they belong to the lineage of the Prophet Muhammad and their claim that they have a divine right to rule. Social media users circulated a clip of a girl refusing to chant the group’s slogan in the morning assembly at school.

Then new social customs spread, including decorating the facades of houses with national flags, and singing national songs at university graduation ceremonies. The resistance reached its peak with symbols in the funerals of national figures who founded the republic in Yemen, such as the poet Abdulaziz Al-Maqalih, who died in late 2022, as tens of thousands gathered behind the funeral. On these occasions, the republican yearning is present and the slogans and flags of the Houthi group are absent.

Another new custom is playing the national anthem and chanting it in wedding halls. The family and guests wait in traditional dress, chewing qat leaves, accompanied by a singing band, as is the custom in Yemeni cities. As soon as the groom arrives at the hall, the national anthem is played, and the attendees chant it while standing in reverence. The scenes may extend to show the republican bird behind the chair on which the groom is sitting.

These weddings are mostly for the middle class, whose interests have forced them to remain under the authority of the Houthi group, but they refuse to submit to its complete dominance, and they quickly seize any available opportunity to express their adherence to the values of the republic. The lyrics of the anthem make this clear, as they emphasize the values of the republic, unity, belonging to Arabism, and humanity. They begin with the emphasis on remembering the martyrs of the republic in every joyful occasion and end with the rejection of foreign guardianship.

The demonstrations of September 26, 2023 were not born of the moment, but rather came as a result of accumulations of symbolic and silent resistance. These demonstrations took to the streets after their motives increased, and the circumstances that hindered their emergence changed. The Houthi group used to justify the use of war and siege to limit any expression of protest with the slogan “No voice is louder than the voice of battle.” With the announcement of the military truce, the official discourse changed, as Saudi Arabia began to deal with the Houthis in a friendly manner after they had been considered enemies.

This change has raised concerns among the general public that the understanding between Saudi Arabia and Iran could lead to Saudi Arabia’s withdrawal from Yemen, allowing the Houthi group to take full control of the country, which could pose a major challenge to the future of the republic in Yemen.

At the same time, popular anger at the Houthi rule increased. Social protests accelerated in the months leading up to the September anniversary, with teachers demanding their salaries and announcing a general strike. Parliamentary criticism of the corruption of the authorities increased, and social media sites were filled with talk of the levies and taxes imposed by the Houthis on the people without providing any services.

The Houthis sought to capitalize on popular anger to bolster their position, acting as if they were outside the circle of power. Instead of making concessions to their opponents, Abdulmalik al-Houthi appeared in a speech announcing his intention to make major changes, including reshuffling the government, which would exclude ministers affiliated with Saleh’s former ruling party, the General People’s Congress, and dissolving parliament, in which the Houthis have limited representation. According to Mahdi al-Mashat, head of the Supreme Political Council in Sanaa, the group was seeking to turn the crisis into an opportunity to bolster its influence, taking advantage of the situation as it had done in the war to silence its opponents.

This time, the group miscalculated. Abdul-Malik al-Houthi’s speech was met with widespread anger, and questions arose on social media about the legitimacy on which he based his announcement of radical changes. It was not, as it had been in the past, a violation of the law or the constitution, as measured by the actions of Saleh and the presidents before him. Rather, opponents saw the Houthi decisions as a demolition of the constitution based on legitimacy from outside it.

This can be compared to the statement made by the head of the parliamentary bloc of the ruling General People's Congress party at the end of 2010, when he said that the party's representatives would remove Saleh's presidential term limit, which would allow him to remain in power regardless of the constitution or constitutional amendments. According to observers, this statement contributed to adding momentum to the protests that erupted in February 2011, and led to the participation of broad popular sectors. This was repeated after Abdul-Malik al-Houthi's statements, which prompted the masses to go out on the eve of September 26.

The sudden mass demonstrations put Yemen at a crossroads, prompting Abdul-Malik al-Houthi to announce a freeze on radical changes, and the head of the Supreme Political Council issued a decision to dismiss the government and assign it to caretaker management. However, the situation did not return to what it was, as the demonstrations brought the issue of the republic and the conflict between it and the imamate back to the heart of the political scene.

The Houthi group was confused by this popular movement, and its leaders were divided into two groups; one group seeks to contain and appease the masses by praising the September Revolution and declaring its adherence to the republican system, while the other calls for a comprehensive confrontation and expresses its hostility to the republic and its support for the imamate project. This division indicates the group’s fears of the strength of the idea of the republic, and its lack of confidence in its ability to abolish it. As for the demonstrators, who were certain of their ability to confront the Houthis, they showed that their defense of the republic is still more moral than political.

Recent events indicate that the conflict between the republic and the imamate has not yet been resolved, but has returned with the growing challenges facing the Houthi group. The demonstrations that the country witnessed on the anniversary of the September 26 Revolution were not fleeting protests, but rather indicated a renewed awareness of the importance of preserving the gains of the republic. Despite the military and political dominance of the Houthis, the republican spirit remained alive in the conscience of many.

Source: Al Furat Magazine