Yemen transition stays above the fray

Repeated spasms of violence and winner-take-all political scrambles continue to plague the Arab states that experienced revolutions - all except Yemen.

For more than two months, 565 Yemenis representing a cross section of the population have gathered in a luxury hotel on the outskirts of Sana, the capital, trying to hammer out the shape a future government will take.

It is formally called the National Dialogue Conference, and it is the closest any of the 2011 Arab revolutions has approached to a peaceful transition from despotism to democracy.

“It is the only negotiated transition that exists in the context of the Arab Spring,” said Jamal Benomar, the U.N. special adviser on Yemen. “It is a genuine process. Nothing has been cooked in advance.”

President Barack Obama focused renewed attention on Yemen last week with his speech on national security, both for the contentious U.S. drone attacks there and for the scores of Yemenis still being held in the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He announced that he was lifting the moratorium against repatriating Yemenis.

More than half of the remaining 166 prisoners are Yemenis, and among them 56 are low-level inmates long cleared to go home. They are expected to be transferred on a case-by-case basis. Obama had barred their repatriation after al-Qaida of the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, a militant group based in Yemen, claimed responsibility for trying to blow up a passenger plane headed to Detroit in 2009.

The Yemeni government is hoping that the United States will help underwrite a new program to rehabilitate the detainees, said Rajeh Badi, a media adviser to Yemen’s president. Washington must provide evidence of wrongdoing if it wants any of them put on trial, Badi said. The fear that they might join extremist groups is “exaggerated,” he said.

A common sentiment among Yemenis is that the low-level detainees have suffered enough, and that the 56 due to be released are likely to pose little danger. Overall, there are some 90 Yemenis in Guantanamo, Badi said, and Yemeni officials doubt anyone still considered a real threat will be released.

In Washington, however, critics of the Obama administration tend to focus on recidivism. Exact numbers for Yemen are vague, particularly since the estimated two dozen sent home previously faded away from any government oversight in the chaos of the 2011 revolution.

Perhaps the most spectacular example of recidivism is Said Ali al-Shihri, the deputy head of AQAP, who has been reported killed at least twice by the U.S. and Yemeni governments, yet rises Lazaruslike each time. A Saudi repatriated from Guantanamo, Shihri fled to Yemen in 2008 after graduating from the Saudi rehabilitation program.

In Yemen, Obama’s announcement was taken as an endorsement of the national dialogue.

Optimists laud the process as a successful - if messy and imperfect - attempt to forge a more representative political system. Pessimists fret that it is merely a lull in the violence that troubled the country until about a year ago, with explosive issues such as the desire of the south to secede posing the threat of bloodshed.

“We have not gotten to the solution,” said Abdul-Ghani al-Eryani, a political analyst and an adviser to the conference. But the dialogue “changed the political dynamic and the balance of power in the country,” he said.

He and others listed three main reasons that they believed the dialogue could work in Yemen while it failed elsewhere, most disastrously in Syria. First, the fragmentation of power, especially within the military, was such that no one faction thought it could prevail.

Second, a small group of elder statesmen cajoled the various factions into avoiding civil war. Third, the Persian Gulf states and the international community were united on Yemen. The U.N. Security Council was involved early, and it unanimously threatened international sanctions against anyone who threatened the peaceful transition.

“We finally got some benefit from being poor and insignificant,” Eryani said. “The international community is not fighting over interests in Yemen.”

Yet the problems of poverty, alienation, corruption, unemployment and weak or nonexistent government services, which spurred the revolution in the first place, have not evaporated, nor have various powerful players retired.

Electricity shortages plague the capital, for example, because tribes angry at the lack of services cut the power lines. Last week Sana got about three hours of electricity per day, said residents reached by telephone. Saudi Arabia has provided assistance, but billions of dollars in aid pledged by Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have not been paid.

Front Section, Pages 7 on 05/26/2013

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