After almost a year of bloodshed caused by his refusal to leave power, Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh has agreed to step down. He plans to live in exile in Saudi Arabia’s capital Riyadh in a palace not far from the new home of another deposed Arab president, Tunisia’s Zine Al-Abedin bin Ali.
A three-star general, Saleh seized power in 1978 in a military coup after the brutal murder of two successive presidents had plunged North Yemen, as it then was, into chaos. In the following three decades, he presided over the unification of his country with South Yemen and then, when the south tried to regain its independence, led his army to victory in a civil war.
Had Saleh left power last year, he’d have entered Yemen’s history as a successful leader. To be sure, his regime was as corrupt as any in the Arab world, and his penchant for nepotism and cronyism as repulsive. Nevertheless, he gave Yemen many years of peace and stability and a measure of economic growth. More important, perhaps, he allowed a much greater space for dissent than most other Arab regimes.
The problem was that, like other Arab leaders, he didn’t know when it was time to leave.
I last saw Saleh in 2010, when the popular uprising against his rule had already started, first in the form of a split within his own tribe and then through protest marches in the capital Sana and the great port city of Aden.
He seemed to be in denial, admitting that his government had lost control of several key provinces, but insisting that his “lucky star” would help him restore his authority.
In Mukalla, the capital of Hadhramaut, he’d become the chief character for stand-up comedies in teahouses. In Aden, people spat when hearing his name. Even in Ta’ez and Hudaidah, inside his stronghold of northern Yemen, he was no longer popular.
Toward the end, Saleh had persuaded himself that he could hang onto power thanks to support from Saudis who had first helped him come to power and to US financial and military aid to help him fight al Qaeda in Yemen. He didn’t realize that, by plunging the country into civil war, he was paving the way for an al Qaeda takeover in some of the remoter provinces of this patchwork of tribes and ethnic communities.
Even if Saleh’s retirement goes through as planned, it may not mark the end of Yemen’s troubles. The next leader will have a lot on his plate: Restoring government authority on at least six breakaway provinces; weeding out the remnants of armed groups backed by Iran close to the Saudi border. and destroying al Qaeda’s bases along the southern coasts.
Washington should use its great influence in Yemen to prevent the continuation of military rule under another name. Saleh is clearly trying to perpetuate his party’s rule through his favorite deputy, Abdrabuh Mansur — if necessary, via a fraudulent general election.
Such an outcome would only suit al Qaeda and the pro-Iran Houthi group, which both wish to divide Yemen into two halves. The northern half would become part of Iran’s hoped-for “Islamic” empire, while the south would make up for the bases that al Qaeda lost in Afghanistan and Iraq. Plunged into chaos, Yemen could become a second Somalia, just across the water in the Horn of Africa.
Saleh may be gone, but the problems he helped create remain.