Yemen.. Violence and Identity

The environment of violence in Yemen is consistent with the nature of the de facto authorities, because they are tools that generate violence, whether through their identity and the social and regional distinctions they produce that violate equal citizenship, or their undermining of the police, security and judicial institutions, in addition to the fact that the composition of the security (and also military) apparatuses, based on identity alignments and their privileges, has transformed them into tools of violence and organized crime, from their violation of the law to their use of power to violate the rights of citizens and protect criminals belonging to their regional or sectarian gangs.

If the suspension of the law has rendered civil society unable to seek redress for its rights, it has pushed other sectors to resort to extralegal means to extract what they believe to be a kind of justice, including inventing methods to pressure the de facto authorities.

It is important to realize the role of identity effects and its operations in generating an environment of violence, from its authoritarian manifestations to its identity biases and the societal oppression and violation of citizenship that it creates. If the sectarian identity of the Houthi group has remained the most prominent form of demarcating the environment of violence, including diversifying violations, from sectarianizing the public sphere and the control and security structures to confiscating the personal and restricting freedoms, then other de facto authorities also operate within the identity framework to generate an environment of violence, including investing it functionally and politically, even if it varies according to its identity and declared ideology, as well as the political and civil margin in the areas under its control, and the forms of civil and societal resistance that it allows.

The secretions of identity, with its sectarian and ideological content, remain the most effective in generating an environment of violence, as it, through its management of a single form of authoritarian hegemony based on monopolizing benefits, works to displace the other, whether sectarian, political, or specific societal areas, from the right to partnership guaranteed by the Yemeni constitution, in exchange for mortgaging citizenship from rights to duties with the privileges of loyalty to identity in the first place, in addition to emptying the civil space with its control and security institutions, of its function in implementing justice.

In the appointments of ideological identity and its influence as a major factor in generating an environment of violence, the experience of the Southern Transitional Council, a de facto authority in the city of Aden in particular, is an example of the constraints of identity and its oppressive condition. In addition to its control over the public and personal sphere, subjecting it to its biases, it, through imposing a coercive framework identity based on regional dimensions (the South-North binary), includes a lower level of identity, the Dhale-Yafa alliance, which dominates the authority of the “Presidential Council” and its various apparatuses...

We say that the de facto authority (the Southern Transitional Council) is thus consecrating a narrow regional and rural factional hegemony, working to limit privileges to its political elite and the social forces allied with it, in exchange for excluding other southern regions from the circle of political representation, and also from privileges. Moreover, through its ideological discourse or practices, it draws on the conflicts of the past, by removing the city of Abyan, whether political elite or social forces, from the circle of representation, which has doubled the cases of violations based on regional dimensions, whether in the criminal aspect or the political aspect, as well as its claim to monopolize the representation of political identity.

In this case, the supposed southern identity, before society, made it fence the environment of violence with political content, by antagonizing the competing forces, whether those who come from the northern regions or the southern forces from outside its regional league, and then stripping them of citizenship, and thus making them a target for violation. Also, the "Transitional Council"'s transformation of affiliation to ideological identity as a means to consolidate its authority on the ground, and before that, providing protection to its network of allies, doubled the levels of violence and violation in the city of Aden, in addition to influencing the independent judicial and control structures. In addition to spawning regional entities loyal to it, it employed them politically, by adapting various cases to arrest opponents, in addition to (and this is the most important) the role of its security services in generating an environment of violence, as well as disrupting the presence of the "Presidential Council" as a consensual authority in the city declared a temporary capital, by obstructing the activation of security and control entities to control violators, in contrast to narrowing the civil margin.

The war authorities’ investment in the effects of identity in imposing and generating an environment of violence is parallel to the role of their security and police apparatuses, including the military, as their fundamental imbalances arise from the fact that they were founded on belonging to the identity of the authorities, whether sectarian, political or regional, and thus were a functional tool for the de facto authorities in suppressing their opponents and violating the rights of citizens.

On the other hand, it consolidates the interests of its ruling elite, in exchange for providing protection, and also exchanging benefits. If the geography of the security and police apparatuses in Yemen has, to a large extent, become a geography of violations and violence that affect society, then the uncontrolled state of the apparatuses affiliated with the authority of the Transitional Council has made them today an umbrella for violence and crime.

In contrast to the encroachment of identity entities that support criminals, it is obvious here that society resorts, with the disappearance of civil means of resistance and protest against the oppression of the authorities and the demand for the handing over of the perpetrators, to methods outside the law, which means committing another violence, manifested by the return of the phenomenon of revenge in some Yemeni cities, as well as the spread of kidnapping crimes, in addition to means of pressuring the de facto authorities to hand over the perpetrators, such as blocking roads.

If the tribal protests, which have become an almost daily scene in Sana’a, are a manifestation of the imbalances of justice and the collapse of the Yemeni state, then the tribal activities that the Ja’adin tribe resorted to in the city of Abyan, against the backdrop of the kidnapping of one of its members (Colonel Ashal), by threatening to cut off the Abyan-Mukalla road, as a means of pressure to hand over the perpetrators, is a disastrous (albeit realistic) reflection of the deterioration of the justice system, and also of the tyranny of the identity authorities and their apparatuses and their violation of the lives of Yemenis.

*Quoted from Al-Araby Al-Jadeed