Good evening, everyone, welcome to Middle East Centre. My name is Michael Wilson and the director of Middle East Centre, and it gives me pleasure to introduce you to the eighth and final Friday seminar series of Hillary term. Thank you. Welcome to all of you joining us here in Oxford to welcome to everybody who's joining us online, our friends and colleagues elsewhere.
This is the last of the series this term, and for the last two weeks of the seminar series, we focussed on crises in the region, but regrettably rather fallen away from the public eye, despite the fact that they are very regrettably very much ongoing conflicts and crises. Recent events in Eastern Europe, of course, have only pushed discussion and coverage of events even further from the international attention.
But at the time, at the same time, I think they are also remind us in a very reminiscent of the crises. Indeed, as those of you who came to our events on last week, there were clear parallels between what is going on in Eastern Europe and what is going on in the two countries we're looking at. Last week we looked at Syria this week where we looking at Yemen with four and perhaps even since the events in Ukraine represented the biggest humanitarian crisis on the planet.
And despite this fact, Yemen has not attracted the attention and the coverage deserves. I know where Middle East sentiment coverage as much as we should. Now, much of this neglect is attributed to the fact or certainly to the argument that there's a relative dearth of people with specialist knowledge of the country outside of Yemen and therefore very pleased to have us with this head tonight, someone who is a genuine expert on Yemen. But moreover, is in doubt.
Oddly, the leading expert on Yemen in the UK, a good and long standing friend of the Middle East Centre, Helen Lackner, has worked on and written on Yemen for nearly 50 years. She has written and coached, edited no fewer than six books on Yemen, including most recently Why Yemen Matters in 2014 Yemen in Crisis. The Road to War in 2019, which is a new edition, is coming out this summer. Yes. Yeah. And also later this year, Yemen poverty and conflict.
So we really have a speaker who is uniquely qualified to talk about the ongoing crisis in Yemen. Helen has a number of his books I mentioned. I think you have copies of all available, if you will be interested. Last chance, last chance to get them zaharias and presumably signed by the author if necessary. Yes, right? But therefore, with no further ado, Alan. OK. Good evening. Thank you very much for coming and competing with all the other events that are happening locally.
Let alone getting away from the latest news on Ukraine. I just want to say one thing about Ukraine as we are all flooded at every news bulletin from the beginning to the end with dreadful human interest stories and how awful it all is for the Ukrainians.
I think people suggest just trying the case just simply change the name from Ukraine to Syria and Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Congo and maybe a few others, and realise that all those people are suffering just as badly and have done for a lot longer. If you look at the death toll in Congo, I mean, it's beyond belief. Over the last 20 years. So I won't go on because, you know, this is a an incredibly sad topic. And as far as I'm concerned, nothing further will be said on this topic tonight.
Very briefly, I want to go over a few dates and somehow there's a few anniversaries. One of them that really shocked me a couple of weeks ago that we shouldn't have done, which marked the fact that Abdul Jabbar Mansur Hadi has now been president of the internationally recognised government for 10 years. Now, that isn't immediately apparent from the way he has governed the place or what he has done there.
But I thought this worth noting. I think it's also worth noting, given the earlier talks in the last term in particular that now are in the 11th year after a very major set of popular uprisings took place in Yemen, and they were partly involved in the resulting war, which has taken place since.
I think also, you know, 2014 was the year the Houthis Saleh put a coalition or whatever alliance took over summer, which lasted for three years, because by December 17, the Houthis killed Saleh, and that was quite an important thing. And then there's two sets of agreements that have been signed or something that have taken place with one of them was actually never signed since then. That was supposed to contribute to peace.
And they are the Stockholm Agreement in December 2018, which was not signed, and that he had agreement in 2019, which was supposed to bring about peace and cooperation between the internationally recognised government and the Southern Transitional Council, which is one of the southern separatist organisations.
And the last anniversary is that later this month, we will have the seventh anniversary of the internal internationalisation of the Yemeni Civil War, which means that the suffering and killing in Yemen has now been going on for a full seven years. So I think this is kind of something that I thought was probably good to start with.
Now, very briefly, because I don't know to what extent people here are familiar with Yemen or not, so I may be saying things that people know too well, and maybe some of us don't. I want to start by saying who is fighting whom and who is involved in the war. So basically, we have on one side, the internationally recognised government of Hadi, which is officially based in Aden with most of its main ministers, are sitting in Riyadh and a few elsewhere.
And it is supported by what's known as the Saudi led coalition, which is indeed Saudi led. But where the UAE is playing a major role, I think the UAE until very recently had a successful public relations operation by letting it be called always the Saudi led coalition and keeping in the background, whereas in fact their involvement has been, if not as intense as that of the Saudis.
It's also very important, and they also amongst the major decision makers on the outside of Yemen, and they are fighting the Houthis now the Houthis. Sailor, who lives as I've just explained, but since December 2017, it is exclusively the Houthis and the Houthis do not only have a very strong and strengthening military capacity, but they are now ruling and governing and they are indeed governing and they are indeed governing in a particularly unpleasant manner.
But that doesn't stop it from being real. About 70 percent of the Yemeni people now there are other groups involved in the war and that. One who is led by Patrick Saleh, who is the nephew of ex-President Ali Abdullah and who has his own forces, which were previously mainly in the West Coast and have recently moved elsewhere.
The Southern Transitional Council, which is one of these southern separatist movements and which is dominant for various reasons which we could go into later in question time and then various other regional groupings. They are the Tehama front and various other southern groups, etc. in the background. And all of these are militarily in the hands of arms trade, which is extremely important, also diplomatically and also to some extent, tactically with with intelligence information available.
Basically, the US, the UK, France and other Western states who are opposing the Iranians, who are providing some technical assistance and some sophisticated weaponry to the Houthis and in the background also maybe sometimes from the United Nations and women who are trying to mediate and bring about peace. So that's it. So militarily, very briefly, the current situation is that there's basically a stalemate.
There's been a stalemate now for many years. There's occasional moments when something's changed in the in the second half of last year, the Houthis appear to be making massive progress in their attack on my head, which had now been going on for two years. But they were then repelled in November December by the arrival of some other troops from elsewhere. So basically, one has a situation where the movement military movement is not that significant up to now.
You have, you know, the the focus on the fighting for quite a long time in the last few years has been around Marib at the moment this month, it appears not to be. That doesn't mean that it won't be next month. So these things are changing very regularly, and I'm not sure we want to go. Another issue that needs to be addressed is the ongoing struggle between the Southern Transitional Council and the internationally recognised government.
Now that again actually has a fair amount of stalemate in the terms of physical control. But it's so it's at least as active in terms of and constant skirmishes and conflict as the situation around Marib.
Now to talk about negotiations and peace, which is something that people do hear about, and we have every month a meeting of the United Nations Security Council that addresses Yemen, where the United, the special envoy speaks and usually the humanitarian person speaks and sometimes somebody when a person who is employed or who is connected with the United Nations Hodeidah agreement and speaks,
and they basically always deplore the lack of progress of it's worth pointing out that we now have a new U.N. special envoy since last August, who was previously the special envoy, the ambassador to Yemen of the European Union. He has taken a different approach from his predecessor, who himself had not achieved very much, to put it mildly. In his three years of tenure, but thanks to his great success, he's now been appointed the chief of the whole humanitarian situation in the UN system.
So while this is basically no significant progress has taken place in terms of ending the fighting and very few people who are familiar with Yemen are expecting any significant progress in in any kind of a hurry. It's worth asking why isn't this war ending? And I think of basically three or two reasons and the third, which is the conclusion, which is first, that the fighting groups still think they can win.
The WHO says if they think of where they were in 2000 or even where they were in 2010, when the last war against Saleh took place and where they are today can see a clear upward trend of increasing power and increasing control, and therefore they are not inclined to to basically to withdraw or to give in.
And on the other hand, the internationally recognised government is in a position where if it if it agrees to any serious changes to any serious peace, it will instantly and automatically sign this death warrant. And therefore, it's not about to do that. On the other hand, at the same, we'll have at the same time, because do you have a situation in which there are a small number of war profiteers who are doing extremely well out of this war?
And they are not only people who are trading in weapons and such objects that very much. One of the big focus of this fighting of the profiteering is connected with fuel and fuel supply. And that's a very long and complicated scene that I won't go into.
But I think it's something that I always say it is that it is shocking and shameful and any as strong a word as anybody can think of to look at the complete indifference that all these warmongers have to the conditions and disastrous living conditions of the vast majority of the Yemeni population and those, you know, repeating it doesn't change it. Unfortunately, now, because of the military war has not been and any sense and roaring success.
The internationally recognised government has basically developed and started a financial and economic war and is hoping to to defeat the WHO sees basically through economic and blockade effectively. And, of course, that economic war and this and its implications again cause more suffering to the population and precious little to the leaders on any side.
But the main features of this war were basically started in 2016, when they transferred the central Bank of Yemen from summer to Adam, which resulted in having two competing central banks, both of which are operating, one of which has things like the Swift code, while the other controls the details and the information, and all the main operations that are needed.
The main impact of this has been that you now have a incredibly vast differential in the exchange rate to the dollar for the Yemeni people in the area under the algae control supposedly and the area under the U.S. control. And here it's important to remember that Yemen imports about 90 percent of its base.
Foodstuffs I this basic grains and staples, let alone massive amounts of fuel, so you now have at the latest count a few days ago, one USD is worth 600 Yemeni rials or give or take one in New Zealand, whereas in the rest of the country, it's now worth one thousand one hundred. It rolls up to one of the at some point last December. So the cost of living, the cost of surviving for Yemenis is incredibly high. And another aspect, of course, of this war is the payment of salaries.
One point two million Yemenis, teachers, administrators, health staff, etc. And they pay the salaries you would try inadequate to the best of times, haven't been paid or have paid only very occasionally since that happened. So since 2016. Now you'd think that in the areas that is not controlled, but it is. So we have, you know, and both of the houses and the others are running oil and gas black markets, which again benefit a few people.
So and of course, the anti-U.S. groups are very dependent on financial and other support from Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The Houthis are dealing with this by since they have very little access to foreign currency by basically taxing anything that moves. And that includes humanitarian aid, and it also includes having a multiplicity of taxation and customs points throughout the country. Again, we don't want to go on forever, so I shall move on to the next one. This is really.
Looking at why we have such a fundamental conflict in Yemen and this first slide is focussing on the issues which have to be addressed in Yemen, regardless of the war or no war, peace or no peace. These particular factors will remain major constraints and are very important to, you know, Yemeni development. And so first, we have the limited natural resources and economic potential water scarcity, which is well known but is very important.
There's been a mismanagement of agriculture and fisheries resources. The country has a low level of industrialisation and it meets supplies of oil and gas. Had the war not occurred, oil would have more or less by mouth by now. Gas has some potential, I think, 17 trillion something or other.
And that's, you know, although it has reasonable potential, it is limited basically by a the cost of the infrastructure to export it and b the fluctuation of gas markets worldwide, particularly if we look in the foreseeable future ignoring the current emergency. Climate change, which of course, also includes the issue of water that is becoming an increasingly important factor,
and I'll talk about that briefly later on. Another factor is that Yemen still has a rapid population growth, which is almost three percent per annum. So we have a doubling of the population in 50 and so in 20 years. And finally, and I think that's extremely important is the low level of skill and the low quality of education in Yemen.
Solving and responding to the earlier list of problems I've given can be done very effectively and has been damaged and buying a highly skilled labour force that can take initiatives and operate in the kind of economy developed by in the 21st century. This low level of education and still high levels are even of illiteracy mean that it's very difficult for Yemenis to benefit from this. More quickly and in a more temporary way, the silence autocratic regime left a legacy of divisions.
The ill management of unit of the process of unification and after 1990 certainly contributed to the southern separatist movement is divided and rule policy again contributed to the current fragmentation and the prevention of new political forces has basically also affected today's situation, where there's very few new people prefer to be involved in the in the discussions or anything.
And of course, the regime was known to be very corrupt. But I must say corruption is a feature that the new relevant today. At the economic level, I think there was a clear concordance between the neoliberal economic policies of Saleh, who was in favour of basically providing financial and other support to the clique of his friends and therefore enriching a small group of people.
And the neoliberal policies of the international financial institutions they were there was no conflict between these two. And again, obviously none of these things were focussed on addressing the needs of the poor of the Yemenis or Yemenis in general. So again, I shall try and be brief on this one. I think it's important to note that you know what's been going on for seven years.
Yemen has been going on for millennia and dealing with it all in one hour is will guarantee missing out and forgetting a fair number of important things that need to be said. So as I just said, one of the main causes of underlying causes of stresses and tensions in Yemen are the very high level of poverty and social fragmentation. Yemen is the poorest country in the Arab world. I mean, what we're talking about pre-war. Needless to say, it hasn't improved and social fragmentation.
As I've just described, there was a series of six wars between the houses and the Saleh regime between 2004 and 2010. From 2007 onwards, there was a separatist movement in the South, which has developed and is ongoing. You had a whole series of tensions between the formal political parties in the in the early parts of the of last decade, mainly between the Saleh G.P.S. General People's Congress and the GNP.
The Joint Meeting parties, which was a conglomerate of the Islamist and tribal Islamic Party with all of the other important parties. So it included some Zaidi parties, and it also included the socialists and the nationalists and the Baath. And they were kind of forming a kind of coalition. You could say that there was increasing tension around the elections and electoral law. And again, these are things that you know, we can't deal with in this amount of time.
There was a succession crisis in the Salafi camp, and I think it's important to note that, you know, the existing political parties 10 years ago. And indeed still today, we're very well, you know, to find differences in proposed political policies between them was really not that easy. I mean, yes, you could say Islam had an Islamist trend, but you know, they were. I mean, the allegiance to any party in Yemen was not fundamentally based on the proposed policies of state parties.
I mean, the nationalism, the nationalist by their name. But you know, none of these parties had real policies. If one goes into the history of the JPC, it's very clear that that it's not. It wasn't the one thing which I think could have helped the Republic of Yemen avoid fighting or certainly improve its overall economic condition would have been the into disintegration in the Gulf Cooperation Council, which would have many advantages, I think, for all sides.
It was systematically excluded, and I think that also contributed to, you know, it was another, we could say, proximate cause of the war. Now, I want to just talk very briefly about the humanitarian crisis. So the humanitarian crisis, as Michael just said, is described as the worst in the world and there's been a lot of that has been quite a bit of criticism recently about its management.
And there's the there's also currently a an internet and an evaluation of the overall intervention, and it's fairly clear that it whole, you know, it could have been done a lot better. It said it may not be the worst in the world. I think if you really look at what's happening in happened in Syria over that decade. You know, it's it's also pretty bad. However, there's no doubt that the humanitarian crisis is extremely serious.
In Yemen, there are 16 million people who are, as they now say, food insecure, which means that they are hungry and 20 million who need some kind of support. I was just looking at some figures from the WFP and others, and they claim that they did a great job in managing to provide support and food distribution for about 11 million people. So that leaves five million who didn't get anything in recent months.
So we are talking about a situation where there is not a famine in Yemen, nor is there likely to be, but there is a very major crisis. And that and you know, not only is the food situation grave, but also medical situation, infrastructure and all other aspects are very serious. It's also important to differentiate between what is done under the UN system through the Humanitarian Response Plan and what is financed by people of Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
The Saudis have a thing called the King Salman Relief Fund, which also does put money into the UN system, but also operates a lot independently. And the UAE operate primarily through the UAE Red Crescent. The UAE Red Crescent has is reputed to be operating in a very partial based system in a very biased manner.
The King Salman fund is also to some extent operate in primarily in areas where we are on the IRG side, or at least not on the Houthi side, but they also provide a fair amount of funding to the UN system, which is used everywhere.
If you look at the I mean, without going into the details of each yes, funding the main year where there was a high level of funding a 20 19 when 18 seven percent of the humanitarian response plan was funded, which was the best in Yemen and possibly one of the best in the world. I mean, usually humanitarian response plans tend to be funded at around 60 to 70 percent. The reason 2019 was so highly funded is because both the Saudis and the Emiratis put in a significant amount.
I think about one and a half billion between them. If I remember, right? If you look at what's happened in 20 and 21, you can see that the funding has been much lower even from a lower basis, lower requirement basis. I think that's very, you know, it's very important because there are many issues. Of course, the houses have been accused, I think, very correctly of.
Influencing the list of beneficiaries of making sure that the, you know, putting taking people off the list if they don't like them, but even without that, the lists that have been used have been very out of date and they have not been updated for a whole host of political reasons, which can be blamed on, I think, all parties concerned. I think another element that is the problem trust. I mean, the vast the overwhelming majority of humanitarian assistance is going into basically food security.
So it's both food distribution and cash distribution, which is mostly used for food purchases. Another thing which, you know, operating on an emergency basis is one thing and reasonable when you are in a few days of an emergency or even a few weeks, that when you're getting to year seven, some of it is beginning to look a bit permanent and that, you know, different approach.
It could be much cheaper and more effective, and particularly in things like domestic water distribution and medical assistance and things like that. But if you look overall at the situation, most years have been underfunded.
And it's also important to note that if you look at the death toll in Yemen, which is, you know, getting worse by the end of twenty twenty one, estimated to be three hundred and seventy seven thousand people, the vast majority of these people have been people who have died directly or indirectly from lack of food and malnutrition and aspect that are not directly war related. And that's partly connected with the blockades. It's connected with all these other factors that I've just mentioned.
So I'll finish with a few words on the environmental issues. As mentioned, you know, we've had water is a very, very fundamental problem in Yemen. This level of scarcity is very high. Again, it's a situation that should not be regarded as one size fits all because it varies enormously from area to area, both in terms of the type of water that's available and the quantities and what it can be used for.
It's worth remembering for those who are not familiar with Yemen, that Yemen has no permanent reserves, has no lakes, obviously hasn't got any glaciers are melting or anything of that sort. All the only, basically, it's groundwater and rainfall prior to the war, and probably not. That changed since one third of the water used annually was not replenished. So it came from fossil aquifers and therefore it's being mined and will no longer be available.
Another thing that's important to remember is that the distribution of water and the distribution of the population are not, you know, and not complementary. So one of the areas that have the highest population densities, which are the mountainous areas, are areas where water is very difficult to stock and retain, and therefore they're more dependent on rainwater.
Which brings us to the next aspect of the will of the climate situation, which is that with climate change, rainfall has become both more unpredictable in timing and more unpredictable in quantities.
So while you still have a large number of people who are dependent on rain fed agriculture, they cannot, you know, they used to be able to plant the seeds in March, and they knew the rain was going to make and plant the seeds in March, and they might get flooded next week or the rains might not come at all. So you end up losing everything.
And not only is the unpredictability and timing, but also the the, you know, the types of downpours have become increasingly violent and short, and therefore the absorption of the water into the into the ground water into the shallow aquifers does not, you know, it doesn't happen because if you have this and the terraces have been destroyed, basically everything gets washed away. So, you know, you have that problem, then you have some problems of floods and droughts.
See, there's no water, nothing grows and there's nothing available to be drunk. And you know, if you look at floods again, you have a few, if not every, five or six or seven years in specific areas. If you look at last year, you had three or four major floods in most of the country. I think that's pretty unprecedented. You've also had new massive storms that have happened and cyclones again, much more frequently.
We don't give people time to recover from that from, you know, the previous flood by stocking up on food or stocking up on drains, you know, before they get the next one. So that really aggravates and reduces what they now call resilience. And I want to talk briefly about this affair ship now. While the English word Sasha is most certainly the most inappropriate terminology to just discuss this particular ship.
You may have heard about it. It's the first. So she's just floating but floating something. Basically, it's a floating storage ship, which is seven miles off the coast in the Red Sea and which contains 1.1 million barrels of oil has been there is falling apart or it's not falling apart. It could blow up, it could sink, it could rust any time. The situation has been extremely serious now for many years. There's been big efforts to try and deal with this.
The U.N. has tried very hard, but again they had different departments in charge of the issue at different times. And basically until now, nothing was done because ultimately the squabbling between the WHO and the IRGC prevented anything from being done. The squabbling was based over what would be done with the sale of this 1.1 million barrels of oil.
It ignores the fact that after sitting seven years in all, previously five or six years in basically disintegrating tanker, the value of this oil is. Debateable and certainly would not command the price per barrel of the cost of oil either today or even when it was at its lowest point in recent months. In addition, of course, to the fact that officially it would be embargoed and wouldn't nobody be allowed to buy it now?
This situation may have changed. I'm saying May, because it's happened before that. That appeared to have been agreements to solve it and to do it. But I think it's possible that this time it might work because an agreement was signed this week on the fifth whenever. Between and that's the interesting point that was signed between the U.N., which is basically in charge of dealing with this, the Houthis who control it.
And the third party is a very big business company responsible for importing most of Yemen's grains. So the internationally recognised government has not been involved in this at all. They could try and sabotage it, but they've said that they will. They want this problem solved, so it will be embarrassing if they do. But it does prove and it also that the agreement basically formally gives the WHO sees what they want,
which is they don't want this oil to be removed. They want the oil to remain under their control. And this agreement, so it says that the ship, a new tanker, would be brought and this oil will be transferred to that new tanker. And then what happens in future remains to be discussed. So I think it's important because it might show a solution.
It's also important because this is a threat that for all those who have been at all aware of, it could not only destroy living conditions all over the Yemeni coast, but depending on the wind in the season, way up into the Red Sea and possibly the whole of the Red Sea.
You know, it's a very I mean, if it and it could still happen if it either sinks or explodes, it will be a very, very, you know, all the previous ones that we've heard of Exxon Valdez or whatever their jokes compared to what would happen if this thing collapsed. To conclude, I just want to say that I apologise for not covering more things, and I've thought there are many things while talking that I should have covered and that I have.
So maybe some of you will ask questions do that. And I look forward to the questions. I do want to remind everybody that the Yemeni people continue to suffer from this war and this situation, and there's no no immediate prospect for improvement, which is something that I think is extremely sad. Just one final thing I know anybody who's read Yemen in crisis will note that I start by saying, I hope that when you read this book, things will have war will have ended.
And I'm just about to write an updated preface for the second edition. I'm going to repeat that. I said that five years ago, and I'm probably going to try and say it again. And I hope that next time, if they have any third edition, I won't have to say it. Thank you. Thank you very much. Had another sobering view of Yemen. The thank you particularly for looking at the environmental and economic.