September.. The struggle between right and wrong

The September Revolution was not born of the moment. It was preceded by signs that almost toppled the Imamate in Yemen in 1948. The revolutionaries wanted it to be a constitutional Imamate, after they despaired of change at the hands of Imam Yahya and his successor Imam Ahmad, but it was unable to withstand and survive. The revolutionaries themselves returned to try again in the 1955 coup, but Imam Ahmad overthrew him. In both attempts, the revolutionaries' goal was reformist. This was what the political awareness of change in Yemen had reached at that time, and what the circumstances of the stage permitted.

Despite the blood that was shed, the lives that were lost, and the prisons that were filled with the free people of Yemen, Imam Ahmad was not smart enough to realize that a real need for change had come. He was governed by the same ideology that governs the remnants of the Imamate today, and which had ruled it in the past, the ignorant racist, dynastic claim to the divine right to rule. At that time, the Yemeni people were looking forward to a better life.

In September, circumstances had changed somewhat. The Hashid and Bakil uprisings, and the attempted assassination of Imam Ahmad in Hodeidah prior to the revolution, had reinforced the conviction among the liberals that the reform approach had run its course. The liberals realized that there was no hope left except to carry out a revolution with a higher goal, relying on the army to uproot the Imamate, not only including the ruling system, but also bringing about a change in its inherited intellectual and social assumptions, and reshaping the consciousness of society.

Yemen's misfortune is that it was afflicted with an Imamate that used religion as a cover for political domination over the Yemenis. The nature of the conflicts prior to the advent of the Imamate in Yemen was generally tribal and regional, to which the Imams added a sectarian and religious conflict in which the Imamate element played a negative role. The Imamate consecrated backwardness and slavery, and instilled in the minds of the simple people a divinity, as the Imam is a ruler by the command of God, a haughty, arrogant and even bloody ruler.

The revolution overthrew the Imamate regime, and it was a major event. The revolution succeeded in its first decades in fragmenting the ideological, intellectual, and doctrinal system of Imamate rule, but it quickly cooled in the face of the thought and culture of the Imamate, which was not without roots. Its leaders, who succeeded one another in power, thought that the Imamate had died with the death of the Imams, and they did not know that the fall of the Imamate politically did not necessarily lead to its fall intellectually. The political system was defeated. Some of their deacons were waiting for the opportunity to revive the concept again, and that happened.

Politicians, both rulers and ruled, bear the burden of what their political differences caused in the first decade of this century, which turned into an irrational, suicidal and irrational bloody conflict, which the Houthis carried out, and in which Iran saw an opportunity for expansion, and in which the international community allowed the coup to remain and possess the means of power, despite the Arabs’ rejection of the coup by all Arabs.

Our responsibility today as Yemenis towards the consequences of the coup and the war is great. We are certainly concerned with defeating the Houthi coup and confronting Iranian expansion. We still have the opportunity to make a lot of effort to achieve the goal. Restoring the state, with what that means in terms of returning to the values of freedom, justice and equal citizenship, is a major and sacred national mission. We have a strong and effective will, and a right that will not be lost. We have also built a good political discourse that has stirred and continues to stir sincere national feelings, but we do not have enough means to help achieve those noble goals.

We will continue to confront the coup, and at the same time we will continue to search for a way out of the severe crisis that is raging across us. We will proceed with the roadmap, because consensus among all political components is good for Yemen, and we will not find a formula for national consensus that will restore stability and security to our country better than the outcomes of the National Dialogue Conference.

There is no way out but to go towards a federal state, which the Houthis and those who follow in their footsteps have rejected, and some of them are suspicious of it, and it is rejected by those who are tempted by the blind centralism that has brought us to a state of crisis and war, a federal state with a strong, non-authoritarian center, and regions free from bureaucracy, regions that are partners in power and wealth, a federal state that cannot be built without recognizing and accepting democracy as a method of governance.

(From the author's page)