Daily Times

A UN sponsored Yemen Peace Conference that was to start in Geneva has been indefinitely postponed. The talks were meant to end weeks of heavy fighting and the Saudi-led air campaign against Houthi rebels amid a humanitarian crisis that has left millions in the Arab world’s poorest country short of every necessity of life, especially food and fuel. The UN urged all parties to attend the talks, which were announced last week, without any preconditions. Earlier, efforts were also made for peace talks in Saudi Arabia by the exiled government of President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi. But Houthi rebels rejected the offer by demanding that peace negotiations be held in a neutral country. The latest setback for the new round of peace talks meditated by the UN came as fighter jets from the Saudi-led coalition pounded Shia rebel positions in the capital and across the country in fresh rounds of airstrikes. These new talks were also not accepted by everyone wholeheartedly; the Houthis and the former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, backed the talks and said they would participate but exiled Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi demanded that the rebels should first withdraw from the cities they had seized before being allowed to participate. However, there was still hope that the talks would resume but after the talks have been postponed those hopes seem to have been dashed.
With ground combat worsening only peace talks can provide relief to ordinary Yemenis. The most important aspect of the war is not its intensity but the disintegration of Yemen’s domestic political, social and tribal alliances. With each passing day the country is being divided on sectarian, regional and tribal lines. National character, which is the most important element to bond together a state, is deteriorating every day. Yemen has several notable cleavages. First, there is a basic north-south divide that, at one time, divided it into two countries. There is also a religious divide of Shias and Sunnis, and strong rivalries exist between different tribes and leaders. All the warring sides in Yemen should be aware of the hard reality that there is no other solution than a political settlement and no one can win this war just through military means. All sides have declared their willingness to enter talks but none have taken steps so far to halt the fighting.
The ongoing scenario in Yemen presents four potential possibilities for the future. The first is civil war. If the exiled government and rebels will both stay adamant on their stances then this existing internal conflict will further deteriorate into an unlimited civil war. Yemen will become another Libya or Syria and civil war may continue for years to come. The second possibility is the division of the country. If division continues among parties, it seems likely that they will solidify and polarise to avoid further conflict with the Houthi group in the north and others centred in the south representing a return to pre-unification in 1990. The division of Yemen into two separate states once more would arguably represent an even greater danger to stability than the proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran or the wanton barbarism of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Ansar al Sharia or, for that matter, Islamic State (IS) and the al Sham offshoot in Yemen.
The third possibility is retreat. The Houthi rebels may retreat if a good deal looks likely and/or they lose their nerve based on international pressure. This also seems to be a very remote possibility as the Houthis are the most dominant force on the ground as of now. Last comes a political solution. All the parties may realise the ground realities and may be convinced, including the Houthis, to stay in the dialogue and negotiation process to find a political and peaceful solution. The Houthis may be beyond the point of no return now and it may be equally difficult for other parties to sit with them in dialogue. Hopefully, reason will prevail and the parties will realise that all the above scenarios makes them all losers.
Now by weighing each of these possibilities only the possibility of a political solution seems to be in the interest of every warring faction in the Yemen conflict. It is a reality that Yemen remains a poor country with high unemployment, poverty, malnourished youth and illiteracy. With the ongoing conflict the situation will deteriorate. Yemen is surviving on foreign aid; without it, Yemen will fall into the abyss. Yemen’s economy — an oil-producing one since the 1990s — ran out of steam and foreign investment, primarily because of endemic corruption in the political class. The Yemeni leaders have to decide whether they want to make Yemen a failed state or at least a sovereign nation. Above all, the parties must take a serious look at their actions and the implications. They must stop focusing on their personal interests and focus on Yemen’s national interests. Politics and talks is the only way forward. This largely depends on the political will of Yemeni leaders. They all bear responsibility for the current state of affairs, as well as responsibility for finding a way to pull the country back from the brink.

The author is a columnist for the Middle East and Af-Pak region and is editor of a geo-political news agency. He can be reached at manishraiva@gmail.com