Exploiting geopolitical tensions in Yemen

The escalation of geopolitical tensions and their economic repercussions poses a fundamental challenge to local communities, starting with their repercussions on the living conditions and the challenges of food security. In addition to the conflict in the Middle East, which casts its shadow over the economic equation, the Russian-Ukrainian war is escalating, which may double the pressure on the world’s wheat and oil supplies, in addition to the adoption of monopolistic policies by major powers that enhance their control over global markets.

On the other hand, it ignores the consequences of its policy on poor societies. Like other societies, Yemenis face these risks, in addition to the complex challenges of the economic situation that has been entrenched by years of war, and the repercussions of the conflict in the Middle East, in which Yemen is a support arena, in addition to the war authorities’ exploitation of regional and international crises.

At the local level, geopolitical tensions and their economic repercussions interact with the deep-rooted economic crisis, as well as the results of the economic policies established by the war authorities, including their entities and systems. Ten years of war have not only undermined the central state, at the institutional and functional levels, but have also undermined the state’s sovereignty over scarce resources, in contrast to the dominance of conflicting powers over resources and the means of spending them.

However, the Presidential Council, as well as the recognized government, did not adopt an austerity economic policy to cover this deficit, and the inflation of the expenses of the Presidential Council’s authority, its committees, and government agencies, and the fact that officials receive their salaries in hard currency, doubled the waste of foreign currency in exchange for the exposure of the local currency.

On the other hand, the involvement of the Presidential Council’s authority forces and their networks in the process of speculation in foreign currency, and also smuggling it abroad, has accelerated the process of the collapse of the local currency, which has recently reached an unprecedented collapse, in addition to the Presidential Council’s forces’ investment in the current economic crisis (economically and also politically, in contrast to their reliance on pumping deposits to stabilize the price of the local currency) without any real treatments to stop its collapse.

It has consolidated the state of economic instability that has led to the feeding of the black market economy at the expense of a state-supervised economy, which has made the economic situation in the “Council” areas subject to these conflicts, in addition to enhancing the unreliability of dealing with official economic institutions, represented by traders’ reliance on private banks to organize the process of importing goods. In addition, the failure of the Presidential Council’s authority through the government to activate a monitoring mechanism for local markets and to control prices has created price diversity between one region and another in favor of war networks and their influential figures.

In addition, geopolitical turmoil and navigational risks in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden over the course of a year have contributed to reducing commercial activity in ports under the authority of the Presidential Council, including affecting food and fuel flows.

In contrast, the unity of power in the case of the Houthi group does not mean facilitating the lives of citizens and sparing them additional humanitarian and social challenges, but rather diversifying the forms of looting and investment in addition to imposing unfair economic policies that monopolize the state’s resources for its own benefit, and employing the geopolitical unrest resulting from its war as a supporting force in the camp of the Islamic resistance. In addition to monopolizing the state’s resources for the benefit of operating its various agencies, which deprived government sector employees of their salaries, it strengthened its grip on commercial life, whether at the level of export or import.

This resulted in the migration of national capital from the areas under the group’s control, as well as the stagnation of economic life, and then the loss of job opportunities for sectors of society. The group also adopted economic alternatives to double its resources, from the hostage economy to the prisoner economy, and most importantly, raising taxes on internal commercial movement, which doubled the prices of food in the areas under its control.

While the group’s tax policy remained a manifestation of its management of power, in recent months it has exercised a broader mechanism that has affected all aspects of daily life, to circumvent the economic challenges it faces as a result of the impasse in political negotiations, and also to avoid the impact of the sanctions that have affected a number of its local and regional networks.

In addition to this (and this is more important), its battles in the waterways it supervises to support the Islamic resistance in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, although they have consolidated its popularity, have turned into a profitable means of generating more resources. According to the experts’ report, the group has obtained millions of dollars from imposing fees on commercial ships in the Red Sea, and also in the context of investing its position as a force to support the resistance, by adopting an economic boycott policy against major companies loyal to Israel, as the group has prevented the entry of these companies’ products into the areas under its control, while marketing alternative local goods, at double the prices of imported goods, and of course for the benefit of the group and its commercial networks.

In the wake of geopolitical tensions and regional and international crises, the mechanisms of plundering Yemenis are working, which have been entrenched by a divided economic reality managed by the war authorities, while the disruptions to navigation in Yemeni waterways have doubled the living challenges facing citizens, starting with the decline in the flow of food and fuel to Yemen, as well as the rise in their prices, to the transformation of international donors and international humanitarian organizations into more serious humanitarian crises, such as the war in the Gaza Strip and also in Lebanon, which has led to harm to the poorest classes.

While governments in any society are keen to protect the weak classes from economic shocks, the war powers in Yemen, while ignoring these catastrophic challenges, have allocated support and social security means to their classes, and to the families of fighters close to them in the case of the Houthi group, and to their networks and beneficiaries in the case of the Presidential Council authority, in exchange for excluding the Yemeni public, not only from the resources of their state, but also from any level of protection that would enable them to live with dignity.

*Quoted from Al-Araby Al-Jadeed