Yemen's presidential gambit

Posted By Ginny Hill Wednesday, May 16, 2012 - 2:01 PM

Yemen's recently installed President Abed Rabbo Mansour al-Hadi surprised many observers by moving swiftly to establish control over the battered nation's military. His efforts, backed by an unusually assertive United Nations mediation effort, offer a rare glimpse of hope for a nation battered by more than a year of instability and political conflict.

Few believed that the new government would be able to dislodge the entrenched power of the family of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh. But Hadi has already moved to sideline two prominent members of that family faction. Mohammed Saleh al-Ahmar, Saleh's half brother and commander of the air force, Saleh was "promoted" into a position of impotence. Tarik Saleh, Saleh's nephew and commander of a powerful brigade encircling Sanaa, was offered a new posting in the remote eastern desert province of Hadramaut.

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Time to freeze Saleh’s assets

Posted By Jeb Boone Thursday, November 10, 2011 - 11:31 AM

On Monday, French Foreign Minister Alan Juppe stated that freezing Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh's assets should be discussed as soon as possible. Such an assets freeze has been an action pushed by nationwide protesters for months and is widely seen as the first step that must be taken if Yemen's 10-month long political stalemate is to come to an end.

After being tricked into believing that Saleh would sign a Gulf Cooperation Council brokered power transfer deal three times, the international community has finally realized that Saleh has no intention of leaving power until at least 2013, the end of his official presidential term of office. Other than using language to "condemn" the killing of peaceful protesters, an ineffectual U.N. resolution, and asking nicely, an assets freeze would be the first real attempt to put pressure on President Saleh to step down.

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Sticky wicket at the U.N.

Posted By Omar M. Dajani Wednesday, September 21, 2011 - 3:25 PM

It's Palestine season at the United Nations! As the world's governments field their teams and their talking points for the next round of diplomacy's most bruising sport, some of you watching from home may be wondering how to judge who the winner is. Your confusion is understandable: Palestine has been on the U.N.'s agenda since Britain placed it there in 1947; and, like other games invented by the British, this one is interminably long and difficult to follow. Use this guide to make sense of what happens next.

You can expect almost everyone to jump into the fray in New York this season, but four teams are especially worth watching: the Palestinians, the Israelis, the Europeans, and the Americans. Here is what each needs to do to win.

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Don't Let the Israeli Embassy Disaster Kill Egyptian Democracy

Posted By Marc Lynch Saturday, September 10, 2011 - 8:11 AM

Friday's attack on the Israeli Embassy in Cairo by protestors marching from Tahrir Square and the subsequent harsh security crackdown could become an epic fail for the Egyptian revolution. That's not because Egyptians shouldn't protest against Israel if that's what angers them, and it's not because the incident is likely to escalate to war. It's because the incident could easily become an excuse for the Supreme Council for the Armed Forces (SCAF) to postpone elections, expand rather than surrender its Emergency Law powers, and avoid the transfer of power to a legitimate civilian government. What's more, these moves might now win applause rather than condemnation among key constituencies: revolutionaries who were already skeptical of elections, liberals worried that Islamists will win, and Americans and others abroad worried about the implications of Egyptian democracy for Israel.

This would be a terrible mistake. The absence of any legitimate political institutions seven months after Mubarak's fall and the SCAF's arbitrary and unaccountable rule are what created the political vaccuum which has brought Egypt to this edge. Yesterday's chaos should not be taken as a reason to postpone a democratic transition. It should instead be a powerful reminder of the urgency of sticking to the timeline for elections and getting on with the business of building an Egyptian democracy. Those who care about Egypt completing its revolution should now be doubling down on the urgency of a real democratic transition -- not backing away from it.

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Algeria, revolutionary in name only

Posted By John P. Entelis Wednesday, September 7, 2011 - 3:19 PM

The news that Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi's wife and three of his children found political refuge in neighboring Algeria comes as no surprise given the country's long-standing effort to reaffirm its revolutionary heritage, drawn from 132 years of colonial occupation and nearly eight years of a war of national liberation. Yet this historically-rooted revolutionary struggle was long ago routinized. The resulting bureaucratically defined and elitist directed nationalist myth is intended as much to sustain the political status quo as to serve as an exemplar of peoples' revolt against hegemonic rule, whether foreign imposed or domestically conspired.

Algeria's reluctance to abandon its fellow revolutionary in Libya flows from an outdated yet still dominant ideological frame of reference through which Algeria sees the world and wants to be seen by it. It also reflects an unwillingness to accept the new geopolitical and strategic realities that the Arab Spring has brought to North Africa and the Middle East.

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