Daily Times

“They didn’t want the monkeys anymore because of the political situation.” This statement was issued by the director of the zoo at Skansen, Jonas Wahlstrom when, after a spat on human rights violations, the Saudi government refused to accept four monkeys from Sweden that were supposed to be placed in a zoo in Riyadh. The reason for the refusal was not the abundance of these marmosets in the kingdom, though in the hierarchy of this totalitarian dynasty there may not be a dearth of those having feebler brains than these. Curiously it was the diplomatic spat that sealed their fate. In this monkey business, whether the monkeys themselves had to suffer is a matter for conjecture! However, the Swedish defence industry that was supposed to sell ammunition worth billions of dollars to the monarchy — though this standoff is denied as a reason for this cancellation by the Swedish Prime Minister (PM) – ended up getting a raw deal. Not only did the grouchy Saudi authorities in their inflated petro-dollar based narcissism recall their ambassador from Sweden, they also denied the Swedish foreign minister a speech, which she was supposed to deliver at the Arab League meeting held in Cairo. This opportunity was offered to her in return for a principled stand of official recognition of the Palestinian state by Sweden. This makes the latter the first European country to do so. For Palestine it is a landmark decision in the history of one of the most beleaguered nations of the world suffering its own holocaust.
Certainly, it is comical to note how Saudi Arabia found a speech by the Swedish foreign minister offensive that, according to the BBC, “called for freedom of association, assembly, religion and expression and for Arab nations to focus attention on women’s rights, women’s representation and their adequate resources.” It is ironic that the state of Israel is guilty of identical sins/crimes by brazenly flouting the same principles in the case of Palestine. This is how the union of two opposites on a single hegemonic platform of an imperial power can be analysed and explained. Earlier the foreign ministers of other equally totalitarian tiny Arabian states, while lauding the human record of the Saudi government, declared this speech a “blatant violation of the internal affairs of the Kingdom”. Can we have a bigger though equally crude joke akin to this one? Declaring the US as a symbol of peace alone is capable of competing with this.
Lest we forget, we need to focus on a new war on terror launched this time indirectly by the US through one of its stooges, Saudi Arabia. The country chosen for this calamity and catastrophe is Yemen, a poor, backward and disunited tribal state held together by imperial designs. A country that after the Cold War was reunited remained divided for 23 years having a pro-US-Saudi nexus in its north while its antagonist south had an anti US-Saudi government, which though like North Korea was a self-proclaimed ‘communist’ state. How a tribal state without having a productive working class can straight away pave its way to socialism/communism is anybody’s guess. An idea akin to this would have provided Marx with an opportunity to let loose a sombre grin.
Saudi Arabia claims to fight against the Houthi regime, a sect of Shias that blossomed under its close scrutiny. The dynasty did not have any problems with Ali Abdullah Saleh, himself a Zaidi Shia who ruled Yemen for 33 years with an iron fist. The timing for initiating this war becomes more perplexing since Sanaa, along with the whole of the north, had fallen to Houthi rebels way back in September 2014, and a month later the outgoing president of Yemen, Hadi, was discarded and dumped by the General People’s Congress, his own political party. On January 21 he resigned from presidency only to flee to Saudi Arabia on March 26, declaring himself the rightful president of his country. Akin to all tin pot dictators and despots, this ‘elected president’ too found a refuge in his mentor state. On the very next day of his arrival in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia triggered a war against “incubated rats” as dubbed by one of the Kuwaiti journalists whose country too is a part of this “alliance of belligerents” that lacks the spine to attack their real enemy, the Zionist state of Israel. The mantra is always the same: the resumption of stability and democracy. In this case, saving democracy sounds like a farcical and fanciful notion since the war is led by a country that can endure the taste of any medicine but democracy, which is likely to prove lethal for the very existence of this dynasty of terror.
Houthis, as is widely known, are Shias belonging to the Zaidi sect, the fivers, who unlike other Shias (the twelvers) in their beliefs are very close to the Sunnis. Their proximity to Sunni Islam can be judged from the fact that when their founder, Zaid-ibn-Ali, took up arms against the Umayyad caliphate he was not only supported by Muslim jurist Imam Abu-Hanifa, considered to be the founding father of Sunni Islam, morally but monetarily as well since he secretly urged the people to collect funds for Zaid. Even now the upsurge of this sect is closely linked to the socio-economic realities of Yemen. Of course, they are looking to exterminate the religious discrimination set afoot by the ruling class of Yemen in association with Saudi Arabia but the movement has transcended these petty motives. Are Houthis conscious enough to discern between real issues and the ones related to the grey areas of emotions/religious sentiments is hard to say but their slogans related to anti-imperialism are mature enough to narrate their position in the current situation. Finding a power vacuum in Yemen they decided to seize the opportunity of turning the “war of position”, as Gramsci has put it, into a “war of manoeuvre”.

(To be continued)

The writer is based in Australia and has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com