Over the past decades, Yemen has witnessed cycles of transformations and conflicts whose banners and parties were multiple. In which the nature of the victors and the defeated varied in its rounds. Consequently, it has accumulated in its stations a heavy legacy of issues that have been transferred, generation after generation, without processing or even conscious reading.
Regardless of the narratives of the victors in each of the rounds of those conflicts, it is clearly obvious to every impartial researcher that they have created a number of distortions and deep national problems whose catastrophic effects were not limited to the temporal and geographical scope of their events in the past of our national history. However, it has extended to the destruction of our present and will ruin our future as well, unless we address the issue by following the example of the societies that bravely confronted the legacy of political conflicts by researching and scrutinizing all their issues and dealing with them with courage, responsibility, and altruism. In addition to setting all the guarantees to create a break with all the practices that created these distortions. Thus, they are experiments to be studied and inspired in order to spare our society the exorbitant costs that we desperately need to avoid.
Moreover, our political history is a series of cycles of grievance and oppression that took different forms from one cycle to another and from one place to another. So, in each cycle, the identities of the perpetrators, the victims, the party, and the place change. While the constant thing was the collective will of the influential and effective forces on the ground and their tribunes, as well as those who advocated for them. Accordingly, each force and each actor sees the mistakes in the other's practices as a clear condemnation, informative and valuable inputs, and logical and coherent arguments. However, they all fade with the first completely identical incident carried out by a party that it belongs to its side, or affects a party that it disagrees with. Thus, the same justifications remain that were raised in the face of its condemnation, its facts, and its specifics when it was in the opposite position.
On the other hand, we have an accumulation full of periodic exchanges between the position of the oppressor, his tools, justifications, and methods, and the position of the oppressed, his suffering, and his cries. It is an accumulation that has not been transformed in our collective consciousness into effective measures that create a break with the behavior of injustice. Rather, on the contrary, the experiences of practicing injustice are strengthened in a way that repeats it and expands its circle and its victims.
In general, in all the past rounds of conflict, old and new, faces have changed, techniques have been modernized, and new tools have been added. However, the contents of injustice, sinful wills, justifications, terminology, slogans, chants, and promises have remained constant. Consequently, the certain result is a new-old cycle of grievances, new victims, new oppressed people, a weak society mired in backwardness, conflicts, blood, rhetoric, and the threat of new rounds of changing positions between the oppressor and the oppressed.
Since the outbreak of the current conflict, the Yemenis have experienced a state of comprehensive collapse, which has destroyed the vast majority of the gains achieved by the struggle of generations of Yemeni men and women and divided Yemen in all its aspects into circles of the overpowered and the conquered, the victors and the defeated, the displacers and displaced, the perpetrators and victims, the detainers and detainees, and the new rich people and the permanent poor people. A situation in which millions of them were forcibly trapped in cantons whose borders are carved with blood, gunpowder, grudges, grievances, and forms of coercion and abuse, the majority of which are carried out by Yemenis like them, who suddenly became armed with weapons and slogans. They are engaged in an unrestrained daily search for the functions of controlling the lives of their counterparts in citizenship and the details of their lives, according to the improvisations of their volatile moods, which make it difficult to predict the limits of their decisions, thinking, and opinions, as well as their absurdity, inconsistencies, and excesses. Tens of thousands of Yemeni women and men were stuck in emergency shelters, unable to return to their homes safely, while their kidnapped country, despite the vastness of its lands, narrowed them down. Their eyes and hearts are open to the situation, and they hope for a soon return to their lives, their homes, their businesses, and the streets that they have become familiar with.
Now, after almost ten years of the absurd and destructive war and its catastrophic economic, social, political, humanitarian, and legal consequences, in a situation that does not please a friend or an enemy, it has become one of the most incumbent duties on the leaders of all the active and influential Yemeni parties in the scene to stand on the indicators of the catastrophic situation, which they participated in creating. In addition to taking the initiative with courage and responsibility to break its vicious circle to avoid everything that would continue to push the Yemeni women and men, their entity and existence, to new levels of undermining, permissiveness, and dependence, as well as doing whatever is necessary to contribute to returning Yemen to the path of reconstruction, construction, and development.
“All the resources, structures, assets, and opportunities that the Yemenis have accumulated over many years have been violated by the new oligarchs, under the protection of armed formations, whose leaders have transformed from mere bandits, hired killers, and outlaws into influential and powerful rulers who take over public and private institutions and own billions.”
The outcome of a decade of reckless gambles is sufficient to reveal a set of facts to the leaders of various parties, and it is enough for them to voluntarily abandon their delusions and greedy ambitions. However, the most important of these facts is that Yemen is too big to be subjected to or governed by a group, formation, or party; like any society that is diverse politically, culturally, intellectually, religiously, sectarianly, socially, geographically, factionally, and economically, as well as diversified in customs, traditions, arts, beliefs, and races. In addition, there are authentic, constant, and eternal links between its various elements and components, horizontally and vertically, that make the fate of some of them linked to the fate of others, with the impossibility of canceling any component in favor of another or subjugating it. Therefore, this makes it necessary to work on managing that diversity according to an efficient and effective governance path, facilitating the movement of legitimate interests in a way that achieves social justice, equal citizenship, and the rule of law, as the only way for us to live in this country as brothers, instead of continuing to walk together on the path of destruction and war, like fools, in the words of Martin Luther King.
Besides, the intransigence of keeping Yemen one more day from the lifetime of this shameful situation, which has been forcibly pushed into its traps, is a huge and certain loss for all Yemeni women and men at all levels. Consequently, any alleged gains made by continuing to gamble on the paths of war are pure nonsense and pointless behavior—no matter how much they talk about the dignity of Yemeni women and men or their interests. Because it is nothing more than just one of the elements of continuing the crime of robbery and scandalous possession of what the Yemenis have accumulated over many years in terms of resources, structures, assets, and opportunities that have been violated by the new oligarchs; under the protection of armed formations, whose leaders have transformed from mere bandits, hired killers, and outlaws into influential and powerful rulers who take over public and private institutions and own billions.
With all the heavy costs that bloody conflicts and severe transformations have caused at all levels, the root of all of them is the struggle for power. They occurred in light of the lack of all forces of mature visions for a smooth and coherent transformation path, supported by the consensus of the various components of society towards a modern state, based on well-established institutional structures with safe paths for the peaceful transfer of power. In addition to the above, taking into account the restriction of the right to possess the means of armed force to the state institutions governed by the rule of law and also governed by the fears and concerns of various groups of society as well as achieving social justice, equal citizenship, equal opportunities, sustainable development, and stability.
On top of that, in order to reach a road map that achieves these contents, there is an urgent national need for the initiative, in order to open paths for intensive foundational dialogues on the various problems, perceptions, fears, concerns, aspirations, interests, and guarantees, in which the stakeholders from various parties, groups, and regions contribute with the aim of reaching a historic settlement that guarantees the development of effective solutions to the issue of the struggle for power, wealth, and other related issues. However, it is impossible to achieve this without starting with self-review as a prelude to creating a national will among the various parties, for which all factors will be harnessed when it is available, and without which it is impossible to make real progress even if the efforts of the whole world join together. So, only with the national will alone, many societies achieved their national liberation, and in its absence, many nations vanished.
