Sections from the Yemen spring

The first breezes of revolution in Yemen had in fact begun to arrive before the Arab Spring process. But unlike the others, these breezes formed a multidirectional air current in which the many calculations and conflicts of many countries were superimposed. Yemen, which has serious potential for wealth owing to its strategic location and its underground energy resources, has fallen victim to these very advantages, and is a country that has been left weak because of these features.

Alongside Iran, Saudi Arabia and the US, Yemen is also one of the arenas of conflict between Russia and China and their international rivals. At the same time, interestingly, there is also a high level of consciousness and awareness in Yemen of what this game of states costs them. This leads the people to develop a more critical attitude toward their own rulers.

For that reason, there has always been an open or covert opposition holding Ali Abdullah Saleh, who ruled the country for 32 years with international aid, responsible for this situation. Serious doubts have also begun to form among Yemenis about the US seeing itself as having a standing right to be involved, on the grounds that Yemen is an al-Qaeda base. The doubt ranges from doubt about al-Qaeda's real strength to the claim that it is a myth that produces for the US the right to intervene anywhere it wishes, whenever it wishes, using al-Qaeda as a pretext.

Indeed, with each passing day, the number of Yemenis who believe that al-Qaeda does not have as much of a presence as is supposed, and even that there is in fact full cooperation between al-Qaeda and America, is growing.

This cooperation effectively gives the US the opportunity to interfere in Yemen's internal affairs as much as it wishes, even in the situation that has arisen after the revolution. For example, Abdulmajeed al-Zindani, head of the Muslim Scholars Association, who had previously been elected to the National Dialogue Conference, which has been formed to prepare the constitution and lead the country to the elections of 2014, which has been designed to represent all segments of the country, and which is expected to hold its first meeting on March 18, can be excluded from this Conference by an American veto.

The US effectively finds the right to make this intervention on the grounds that Zindani is linked to al-Qaeda; yet, as those who know him know, he has nothing whatsoever to do with the al-Qaeda mentality. Removing people like Zindani, a true scholar and intellectual, from the National Dialogue Conference means nothing other than an effort to interfere in Yemen's revolution and bring it under the guidance of the secular-liberals. Still, let us say this much: Yemenis have great expectations of the Dialogue Conference.

The National Dialogue Conference, formed by the interim administration set up after Saleh, consists of 500 people and was designed to represent all segments of society as far as possible, but there is no shortage of debate about how fair this representation is. The dispute experienced in Egypt after the revolution in the debate "constitution first or parliamentary elections first?" has been resolved differently here. In Egypt, the Islamists had insisted that the process of making a constitution should not begin without recording who has how much representation, that is, without parliamentary elections. Here, however, no serious objection is heard to the constituent assembly being formed before elections on estimated representation proportions.

Yemen's difference from Tunisia, Libya and even, to a degree, Egypt is that, even though Ali Abdullah Saleh's party (the Mu'tamar) was in government, opposition parties were also allowed to operate and, to some extent, free elections took place. This has therefore created a situation in which the governing cadre has not needed to be changed entirely even during a revolution.

In fact, here too the revolution was expected to be bloody, just like the one in Syria, because Saleh had made clear that he would not hesitate to resist the revolutionaries in the most violent way. But the division of the army prevented such a situation. When one of the most important figures of the army, whose relations with the Ikhwan were being discussed, took the side of the revolutionaries, Yemen got through the revolutionary process with fewer losses. Even so, some 2,000 people lost their lives in this process.

Today the strongest party aspiring to power, the Islah Party, finds broad support from the base of the Muslim Brotherhood, but the party does not officially consider itself affiliated with the Ikhwan. More precisely, the Ikhwan itself refuses to be represented by a party, because it insists on remaining a supra-party movement of da'wa. Even so, the number of those who draw an identity between the Islah Party and the Ikhwan is not small.

Meanwhile, in Yemen, where traditions are very decisive, the rules to which the tribes are subject are also a factor that facilitated getting through the revolution with less bloodshed. It is said that one of the most important stages leading to Saleh's overthrow was that, by violating tribal traditions himself, he suddenly enlarged the opposition against him. For example, his bombing of the house of Zindani, a great Islamic scholar, is something that Yemenis, even pro-Saleh ones, could never accept.

With this and other actions that violated traditions, Saleh himself prepared the end of his 32 years of power, which he had carried on, for better or worse, among the Yemenis.