The tragedy of the Yemenis today is not limited to the suffering they are experiencing due to the war that has been going on for nine years. However, this tragedy extends beyond the painful present to the future, whose features have become hostages to this reality and its complex conflicts, to the war and its intertwined parties, circumstances, and outcomes. Consequently, this kills the Yemenis’ dreams of reaching a bright and promising future.
Although Yemen has been accustomed to the outbreak of wars and conflicts in the past and in its recent and distant past alike, the worst thing that Yemenis are suffering today is that the current conflicts have not been limited to causing damage to the structure of society and its institutions, but the damage has affected the hopes of Yemenis in general, which has not been witnessed in the conflicts of the past period. This is because the differences and disagreements at that time were pushing the different parties to meet under the banner of Yemen and its major issues.
This happened in wars and conflicts after the revolutions of September 1962 and October 1963, whether those occurred between the two parts of the country or in disputes and conflicts within each part separately. The interest of Yemen—at least in theory—brought together the parties involved in every round of the conflict that the country witnessed, despite the positions of some political forces and parties regarding the primacy of their own interests and agenda at the expense of the overall Yemeni interest at some stations and stages. However, the legacy of the war and current conflicts raises concerns about the future of Yemen and the hopes of the Yemenis; which, in the past, rose above wounds, overcame conflict, and conquered suffering no matter how great it was, and for which sacrifices were made easy.
Besides, the conflicts of the present time are dominated by parties that have no connection to the Yemenis’ past or their dreams. They were never part of the national debate that the national forces waged for sixty years. Actually, these new forces did not take the lead on the scene due to their competence in political and administrative performance or because they gained the trust of the people. Rather, they took the lead because their supporters and financiers decided to push them to the forefront to implement their agenda, achieve their goals, and protect their interests. Therefore, the content of the national discourse declined politically, culturally, and socially, and the language of private interests and suspicious agendas has become the most present in the deliberations of the current situation. In the absence of a national discourse among local forces, which can be described as sub-national, many facts that were most prominent in the history of conflicts in the recent and distant past were absent.
On the other hand, the national forces were disputing among themselves over the means leading to the achievement of lofty and noble goals that are common denominators among all the different, conflicting, and competing forces. For example, the forces of the revolution differed in the way they dealt with the remnants of the imamate and colonialism against which the revolution took place, but these conflicting forces agreed on the necessity of protecting and defending the revolution and working to achieve its goals and principles.
An example of those disagreements in past conflicts is the disagreement over the mechanisms for implementing Yemeni unity, the ultimate goal for which the Yemenis have struggled for decades. Therefore, a war broke out between the two regimes in the northern and southern parts, but soon the two sides agreed on a common word, which is Yemeni unity. The evidence for this is that the two rounds of war in 1972 and 1979 were followed by unitary agreements, namely the Cairo Agreement, the Tripoli Statement, and the Kuwait meeting.
This confirms that the common denominator had the loudest voice if the voices of the ruling forces, movements, organizations, and regimes were raised, and the noble goals that the Yemenis agreed upon were the most glorious and prominent ones present whenever the dispute raged or the drums of war sounded.
On the contrary, what appears today in terms of the emergence of unforeseen forces, lackluster projects, deficient visions, and uncreative ideas—all this indicates that the projects of fragmentation and dependency and the ambiguous discourses related to them have begun to register their presence at the expense of the Yemeni project, on which the different parties have long agreed and the dissenters have come together.
