Manchukuo Puppet Palace: Inside the Faux Empire of Pu-Yi

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
International Relations, Regional History, Travel

We got the Changchun light rail✽ to the Puppet Emperor’s Palace train station. The palace entrance was on a wide street with a coterie of policemen guarding the gate. Tickets were acquired in the booking office/souvenir shop opposite at a cost of 70 CN¥ per head (pensioners with ID, passport, free).

Although it said on a site website that you could hire an audio guide in English for the museum, the counter staff indicated that there were none available. Unfortunately, this deficiency was felt during the tour because there was a great lack of explanatory notes in English for the exhibits as well.

For a lot of people, outside China, the tour could be a very informative one, especially if your only prior knowledge of the last emperor of the ultimate Chinese (Qing) dynasty comes, for example, from a less than impeccable historical source such as films like Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor.

With the use of language aids or without them, exploring the physical structures of the former Manchukuo (Manchu State) Imperial Palace provides a fascinating insight into a dark chapter of official life in Dongbei under the Japanese military occupation of the 1930s and 1940s.

‘Emperor’ Pu-Yi, his ’empress’ and the rest of the royal family lived in grand accommodation at the behest of their Japanese masters. Notwithstanding that the Pu-Yi regime was a contrived one propped up by a foreign invader and effectively wielded very little actual power itself in the region, the elaborate parts of the whole, the palatial splendour, were certainly befitting of a royal palace. Pu-Yi’s residential quarters and that of his family were definitely on the de luxe end of comfortable.

The palace layout divides into two main sections, the royal family’s area and the regime’s administrative area. This second section was larger than I had anticipated, comprising the offices and buildings allocated to the phoney emperor’s apparatus of government, his secretariat and other administrative functions.

One of the most interesting and sought-out items in the museum’s exhibits is the personal vehicle which belonged to Pu-Yi, a 5.7m long black car✪ housed in its own (garage) section of the complex. The “king-sized” vehicle is quite a rare old 1930s auto, a famous “Bubble Car” – American made by the Park Automobile Co. There’s a little souvenir annex attached to the ‘garage’ for car enthusiasts to secure a momento.

The palace contains a lot of Pu-Yi paraphernalia and minutiae, personal items like his traditional ceremonial garb, his official uniforms, his BP device and his trademark circular spectacles. Wall photos and information extracts chart the last Chinese monarch’s story from the imperial palace to incarceration to rehabilitation and life as an ordinary private citizen.

The environs of the palace buildings are well worth a ramble through. Within the grounds are gardens which are charming if (or because) they are a bit quirky. Next to this is a fish pond with a fountain and rockeries. Close by there the emperor’s swimming pool, sans water and it’s tilework is in quite a poor, dilapidated state.

The outside feature of the palace that most captured my imagination though was below it: an air-raid shelter. The increasingly paranoid puppet monarch (no doubt alarmed by the fading fortunes of Japan in the world war) had his own underground bunker constructed. The rooms in the bunkers were grimly threadbare, starkly contrasting with the lavish living quarters of the palace above.

Elsewhere there apparently used to be a tennis court and a small golf course on the grounds. To leave the palace you need to go through an inner gate which looks like the exit, but it’s not, the actual exit going from the palace to the street is further down a hill. As you walk, to your right look for the palace’s horse racetrack (still operating, there was show-jumping happening while we visited). The entire perimeter of the palace is surrounded by high concrete and brick walls.

For the historical narrative of Japan’s Manchurian Puppet-State in the Thirties and Forties, refer to my June 2019 blog entry, Manchukuo: An Instrument of Imperial Expansion for the Puppet-masters of Japan

For Pu-Yi to end up as the joker in the pack of playing cards sold at the Puppet Emperor Palace Museum would seem to many in China to be a apt footnote to his story.

︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︹

✽ light rail but still heavy security…even though we were travelling only four stations on a city subway network, we still had to submit to the body wave scanners and screening process and the baggage through the electronic detection belt

✪ about seven metres in length

The Russian Far East: Russia’s Far Flung Territory in North-East Asia 2

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Inter-ethnic relations, International Relations, National politics, Political geography, Regional History

For most outside observers, the Russian Far East as a geographical region is pretty much indistinguishable from the vast Siberian landscape. This is hardly surprising when you consider that until 2000 the Russian Far East was lacking in officially defined boundaries❋. Historically, the Russian state in its various forms has tended to ignore the RFE region, commonly seen as a neglected outpost of empire, populated by hardy Cossack settlers, impoverished peasants and those detained there against their will. The population, at its highest point not reaching much beyond eight million, has dwindled since the end of the communist system◘.

(Map image: www.eurogeologists.eu)

In the early to mid 1990s there was some optimism shown by Russia’s rulers that much needed development could be injected into the country’s Far Eastern region. There was a belief or at least a hope in Moscow that the Russian Far East (RFE) could create a viable niche for itself, that it’s vast repository of natural resources could be utilised to target the growing Asian markets whose own raw materials had a finite life and would soon be running low. Some even touted RFE as potentially the “next Asian Tiger” [‘The Next Asian Tiger? Promoting Prosperity in the RFE’, (Lawrence DiRita), The Heritage Foundation, 18-Aug-1994, www.heritage.org].

Russia’s principal city in the east, Vladivostok, became the Free Port of Vladivostok, the host of a Russian-sponsored event, the Eastern Economic Forum, which it was hoped would provide a platform to attract foreign investment to the region. Rhetoric from Vladimir Putin, assuming the reins of the post-Soviet federation at the end of the Nineties, proclaimed that the development of RFE would be “a national priority for the 21st century”, [‘Accelerated Development of the RFE’, (Igor A Makarov), Russia in Global Affairs, 29-Oct-2018, www.eng.globalaffairs.ru].

Russia’s vulnerable eastern flank ~ Russia, with one eye on the geopolitical implications of an underpopulated eastern flank of the country and its underperforming economy, certainly had the motivation to develop the region. The hitch in the early 21st century has been, as ever, the pitfalls of implementation…a myriad of problems confronted Putin. RFE lacks for infrastructure and labour (#resource rich but people poor). Moreover the country was experiencing an economic slowdown. Russia’s only option if it was achieve any meaningful development was external investment, it needed new partners to propel it. Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Crimea however led to the imposition of economic sanctions by the West, which along with falling oil prices further harmed the nation’s economic situation [Dhananjay Sahai, “Russian Far East and Central Asia: Impediments to Sino-Russian Partnership”, ORF Issue Brief No. 280, February 2019, Observer Research Foundation, http://www.orfonline.org].

The People’s Republic of China, Russia’s new best “enemy-friend” ~ Russia’s unpropitious economic realities have steered its approach to the development of RFE. To get China on board Russia had to provide economic incentives to the Chinese to invest in RFE. Chinese businesses and migrants initially flooded into the region, at its peak in the 1990s there were over 200,000 Chinese living and working in the region. Chinese suppliers and retailers were also thick on the ground in RFE. A Chinese market trader in Vladivostok (Photo: AFP)

Russia’s opening up to China was not without misgivings from Moscow, it had reasons to be wary of opening the door too far to China. The IMF calculates that the Chinese economy is 78 times bigger than Russia’s…Moscow is aware of the risks to its economic sovereignty of becoming over-dependent on its dynamic, powerful neighbour. Accordingly Russia has tried to balance China’s weighty imprint on RFE and Siberia by wooing South Korean and Japanese investment, and from India as well [ibid.; ‘Russia seeks to balance China in Far East; woos Indian investment’, (DR Chaudhury), Economic Times, 24-Jul-2019, www.economictimes.com].

The new Sino-Russian rapprochement has greatly enhanced the trade ties binding the two heavyweight Asian countries – Moscow now sells its natural gas and advanced weaponry to the Chinese and Beijing reciprocates mainly with manufactured goods. With the common enmity/rivalry towards the US a further bond, Russia in the present decade has unequivocally pivoted towards China✧.

Backlash against the Chinese presence: Fears of Chinese irredentism ~ The presence of the Chinese in RFR has prompted a backlash from local Russian workers and a pushback from local Russian media and politicians. Workers and the communities complained that the burgeoning numbers of Chinese workers deprived locals of job opportunities (Chinese companies tend to employ their own countrymen and women on their Russian projects) [‘Why Russia’s Far East Struggles to Lure Investors (Op-Ed)’, (Richard Cornelius), The Moscow Times, 25-Jan-2018, www.the.moscowtimes.com; Sahai, loc.cit.] . Subsequently, the Russian government decreed that 80% of workers employed on Chinese projects must henceforth be local (ie, Russian) [Chaudhury, loc.cit.].

New ‘besties’ Xi and Putin toast one another (Photo: AP)

Bilateral relations between China and Russia have been talked up recently…this year Chinese premier Xi Jingpin told Russian media that Russo-Chinese relations were “at their best in history”. Notwithstanding this upbeat tone, concerns about the encroachment of the contiguous Chinese in RFE continue to be held by Russians, and such disquiet is fuelled by some Russian media outlets. A suspicion and a fear that lingers here is one of “being demographically (as well as economically) swamped by the giant next door”⌂ [‘The Chinese influx into Asian Russia’, (Alexander Kruglov), Asia Times, 13-Jun-2019, www.asiatimes.com]. The existence of unknown numbers of illegal Chinese immigrants in the region adds to the resentment of local Russian settlers in RFE. The influx is often interpreted as “an expression of a China de facto territorial expansion” (invasion fear-mongering) [‘Chinese in the Russian Far East: a geopolitical time bomb’, This Week in Asia, www.amp.scmp.com].

How many Chinese in RFE? ~ The official numbers contradict the basis of this concern. According to the 2010 Russian Census, the number of ethnic Chinese residing in Russia had fallen to just 29,000 (a mere 0.5% of RFE population). However some estimates put the actual total of Chinese at between 300 and 500 thousand [ibid.]. Any figures for the region it should be noted are very fluid and quite speculative. A significant proportion of the population comprises temporary migration and shuttle trade, Chinese merchants who travel back and forth across the border to ply their wares without ever settling permanently in RFE [‘Ethnic Chinese in Russia’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Conspicuous Chinese visitors now make up the largest sector of Russian tourism, especially to RFE and Irkutsk/Lake Baikal (only two hours from Beijing by plane). Local Russians are perturbed at the behaviour of Chinese tourists to Lake Baikal, patronising Chinese businesses only, their litterbug tendency to leave rubbish strewn around the lake…most worrying to the Russians about the Chinese influx is that it might presage Beijing’s designs on reclaiming the area lost to Tsarist Russia (see “Thorny issue” below). All this contributes to a growing strain of Russian ‘Sinophobia’ in the Far East region [Kruglov, loc.cit.].

Lake Baikal

What probably ‘spooks’ the Russians the most are the stark demographics at play: the Chinese provinces bordering Russia’s Far East contain 110 million people, dwarfing the approximately six million Russians across the border [ibid.]. Dissatisfaction with Putin’s RFE policies are reflected in the 2018 gubernatorial elections in the region – voters rejected the Kremlin’s candidates, sending a clear message of disapproval to their federation president [‘Putin is losing Russia’s Far East’, (Leonid Bershidsky), Bloomberg Opinion, 24-Sep-2018, www.bloomberg.com].

Some scholars have sought to debunk the theory of a Chinese takeover, arguing that the Chinese population in RFE was being checked by several factors current in effect (an upsurge of regulation by the Russian authorities with new controls on Chinese markets; the overall poor economic prospects of the Russian Far East and a resultant shrinking consumer base for Chinese commodities) [‘The Myth of a Chinese Takeover in RFE’, (Xiaochen Su), The Diplomat, 19-Jun-2019, www.thediplomat.com]. 〨 Heihe, Chinese boomtown in Dong-Bei region

Thorny issue on the Chinese side ~ The border areas surrounding RFE are a lingering cause for resentment from the Chinese perspective. Under the 1858 Treaty of Aigun Tsarist Russia coerced the Qing Dynasty into ceding more than 600,000 square kilometres of Chinese territory to it. This was followed in 1860 by the Convention of Beijing. The effect of both concessions was that the Russian Empire acquired territory on both sides of the Amur River, giving it control of the Primorye region. Known in China as the “Unequal Treaties”, the 19th century episode still engenders public resentment among the Chinese, sometimes fuelled by dissident groups such as Falun Gong (see also ‘Border clashes’ in FN) [Sahai, loc.cit.; ‘Chinese in the Russian Far East’, op.cit.]✠.

In the prevailing climate Russia and Putin’s commitment to the development of the Russian Far East remains hamstrung by the Russians’ inability to go it alone. Enlisting the help of China, though necessary, is deeply problematic for the Kremlin. It is in fact a delicate balancing game for Moscow, on the one hand it fears becoming economically subordinate to PRC, but it wants Chinese investment because it needs it to go forward. Yet the complexities of the RFE region doesn’t make for a seamless process, it doesn’t deliver the degree of Chinese investment required or desired [‘Russia struggles to attract Chinese capital to its Far East’, (Vita Spivac & Henry Foy), Financial Times, 05-May-2019, www.amp.ft.com]. In the meantime the shortcomings of Russian policy on RFE✪ are a hand-break retarding the region’s development.

Footnote: 1̳9̳6̳9̳ ̳B̳o̳r̳d̳e̳r̳ ̳c̳l̳a̳s̳h̳e̳s̳ ̳– i̳n̳c̳i̳d̳e̳n̳t̳s̳ ̳i̳n̳ ̳t̳h̳e̳ ̳S̳i̳n̳o̳-̳S̳o̳v̳i̳e̳t̳ ̳s̳p̳l̳i̳t̳ Chinese and Soviet troops engaged in a series of isolated military clashes on the eastern border during 1969 (beginning when Chinese platoons attacked Soviet soldiers stationed on Zhenbao Island in the Ussuri River (a reaction to long-standing grievances held by China over Russia’s 19th century acquisition of hitherto Chinese territory)❅. A ceasefire was negotiated by Beijing and Moscow late in 1969, but subsequent bilateral negotiations took until 2008 to settle the matter of who had territorial control of what in the region…as shown above however, the border issue continues to engender lingering grievances up to the present day.

Eastern border conflict (Image: History Forum)

↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↝↜↝

❋ the catch-all descriptor “Siberia and the Far East” (Rus: Сибирь и Дальний Восток) had hitherto been used to refer to Russia’s territories east of the Urals, making no clear distinction between “Siberia” and the “Far East” [‘Russian Far East’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]

◘ under Putin’s Russia, Moscow enacted the Russian Homestead Act (2016) which was aimed at encouraging Russian and Ukrainian citizens to settle in the Far East okrugs with the incentive of obtaining 2.5 acres of free land

✧ in the process incurring a substantial loan debt to China

⌂ some of the Russian fears border on the irrational, such as the Siberian speculation that the Chinese want to annex Lake Baikal to monopolise all of its precise fresh water reserves exclusively for Chinese consumption (Kruglov)

✠ the dispute and custom leads some Chinese to continue to refer to the RFE capital Vladivostok by its old Chinese name ‘Hâisenhēnwâi’

✪ reforms affecting RFE have been only partially implemented; there is a paucity of enlightened new strategies to revive the region (eg, a genuine trade liberalisation is sadly lacking); and the planning round it is bereft of a clear, overriding vision for the region [Makarov, op.cit.]

❅ in the same year there was Sino-Soviet military clashes on the western border (Xinjiang/Soviet Central Asia) as well

The Russian Far East: Russia’s Far Flung Territory in North-East Asia 1

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Inter-ethnic relations, Politics, Regional History, Social History

Vladivostok, the principal city and port of Far Eastern Russia, is nearly 4,000 miles from the Russian Federation’s capital, Moscow, yet it is only some 830 miles from China’s capital, Beijing. That stark fact of geography goes a good way to explaining the Russian Far East’s destiny. The inhospitable remoteness of the wild East from the capital of Russia, be it under empire, union or federation, has in its history never been until very recently❉ in the forefront of the minds of the country’s political leaders.

RFE today: the demographics
Russian: Дальний Восток России/ Dal’niy Vostok Rossi (trslit. Russian), literally “The distant East of Russia”.

Where exactly is it? The Russian Far East is a vast region within the world’s largest single-state political entity; roughly RFE extends from Eastern Siberia and Lake Baikal through to the Pacific coastline.
Area: 6,952,000 kms (comprising 40.6% of all the Russia territory)
Population according to the 2010 Census: 6.3 million (constituting a population scarcity of less than one person per square kilometre).
Composition: the majority are ethnic Russians and Ukrainians, with traditional indigenous and other ethnic minorities – including Mongols and Buryats, Aleuts and Inuits, Chukotko-Kamchatkan peoples, Koryats, Turkic peoples, Korean people (Koryo Saram).
Political division: RFE comprises four oblasts, three krais, an autonomous okrug (Chukotia) and the Sakha Republic⚛️.

Historical background
The Russian Empire, emerging out of its tentative, early Moscovy origins, was not quick to explore (and eventually conquer) the regions to the east of the Russian heartland. Exploration of the area got its impetus and propulsion under the rule of Ivan the Terrible (Tsar Ivan IV) in the late 16th century. Cossack Hetman Ermak’s 1581 victory over the Khanate of Sibir led to other eastern expeditions by other Russian atamans and ultimately to the defeat of the other khanates (the Golden Horde) and the incorporation of their lands under the Russian imperial banner. Aside from empire-building, the Russians were motivated by the mystique that had attached itself to the Asian hinterlands to the east, the reported vast quantities of wealth thought to be on the other side of the Kamen (a traditional name for the Urals)[‘Meeting of Frontiers: Siberia, Alaska and the American West’, (Library of Congress project), www.frontiers.loc.gov].

The image many hold of Sibir

Once the explorers and the conquerors had established the territory in the name of the tsar, the trappers, traders and merchants followed in their footsteps, populating the enormous reaches of Siberia. The promyshelenniki typified these pioneers, the frontiersmen who harvested and distributed the lucrative fur trade, much sought after by the European market. Finally, in 1639, the Russians reached the Pacific at the Sea of Okhotsk with Ivan Moskvitin’s expedition [ibid.].

Yakutsk (capital of Yakutia)

Yakutia, a land with a grim past to match its climate
Yakutia in RFE’s north, today the Sakha Republic (Coordinates: 66°24’N 129°10’E), (not to be confused with the Sakhalin Oblast comprising the Sakhalin and Kuril Islands) achieved legendary notoriety during the Soviet era. Described as “a prison without bars”, Yakutia was the location of somewhere in the region of 105 to 165 of Stalin’s Gulags. Between 1930 and 1950 the Soviets operated brutal forced-labour camps where many victims of Stalin’s autocracy were tasked with building the USSR’s infrastructure in conditions that were intolerable harsh and unbearable cold (arctic permafrost, frozen tundra, etc)⊙.

Contemporary Yakutia typifies the dilemma of RFE. The present government’s commitment to developing RFE is viewed with cynicism by most in the Sakha Republic. The town of Mirny (37,000 inhabitants) is the unofficial diamond capital of Russia, 25% of the world’s commercially mined diamonds are found here❂. In addition the region is blessed with ample deposits of gold and coal. Another more niche commodity found below ground in the republic are the bones of prehistoric woolly mammoths – many of which find a ready home on the black market [‘Left Behind in Russia’s Far East’, (Dmitriy Frolovskiy, The Diplomat, 24-Jul-2019, www.thediplomat.com].

Yakutia locals see the development priorities and benefits accruing from the new emphasis on the RFE differently to that of Moscow. In their eyes the increased wealth extracted from the region goes one way only – back to the centre. This has deepened Yukutians’ sense of isolation from “the mainland” (as the locals sometimes call the rest of Russia). Notwithstanding that the Republic of Sakha is critically underpopulated (around 1M residents in an area of 3,103,200 sq km), many locals also express dissatisfaction with the federal government’s recent attempts to bolster the depleted population of RFE with new intakes of migrants, largely from the ‘Stans’ of Central Asia’ [ibid.].

Norilsk, another ‘Gulagtown’ trying to live down its past
Current day Norilsk is overshadowed by a similar back story to Yakutia’s gulag towns…a remote location in Krasnoyarsk Krai, also supra-Arctic Circle, with no roads or rail lines into the city. Norilsk-Talnakh contains the largest-known deposits of nickel-copper-palladium in the world. In the days of Stalin’s “campaign of terror” Norilsk was “a node in the network of similar camps that Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (described) in the Gulag Archipelago” [‘Norilsk: The remote Russian mining town uneasy about its gulag past’, (Tom Parfitt), The Times, 06-May-2018, www.thetimes.co.uk].

Norilsk Golgotha, a monument to the city’s gulag prisoners

Repopulating RFE with Eastern Ukrainians
Ukrainians have been (forcibly) resettled in Siberia and RFE since the 17th century. In the formative years after the Russian Revolution of 1917, Ukrainians resettled in the area known as Zeleny Klyn◚ (sometimes also called Transcathay) tried to secede from the newly established Bolshevik Far Eastern Republic and create their own Eastern Russian entity, Green Ukraine. Fast-forward to 2016, President Vladimir Putin, in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, launched a Ukrainian resettlement program, voluntary this time with inducements of free land in underpopulated northern towns like Igarka for refugees from East Ukraine [‘Green Ukraine’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; ‘Meeting of Frontiers’, loc.cit.]. The free land carrot had already been offered to Russians living in the Federation to migrate to the Far East.

The follow-up second part of my Russian Far East blog piece will deal in more detail with contemporary developments in RFE including Putin’s desire and strategy to turn the region into an economic powerhouse, and the vexing question of foreign investment in RFE, especially that of China.

_____________________________________________

❉ the current and greatly enhanced interest shown by the ultra-nationalistic Putin government in Russia’s Far East will be more thoroughly addressed in Part 2 of this blog

⚛️ oblasts, krais and okrugs are terms for administrative divisions with a fair degree of elasticity, although okrug is sometimes rendered as ‘district’ (raion)

⊙ known to get down to temperatures of -70° Celsius

❂ the ALROSA group of companies accounts for 95% of the country’s diamond production and dominates the Russian Far East’s economy

◚ literally “the green wedge”

Contemporary Yemen: A Vulnerable Pawn of Convenience in a Regional Cold War

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Inter-ethnic relations, International Relations, Military history, Regional History

Background to the present imbroglio

The unification of the hitherto bifurcated Yemen in 1990 left the North Yemen strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh holding the reins of power. At the same time, a future stakeholder in the country, the Zaydi Shi’a group Ansar Allah✽, was about to emerge on the scene. Ansar Allah, better known as the Houthis (after their leader Hussein Badr al-Din al-Houthi), was tentatively etching out a spot for itself in the Yemeni political landscape. Cynically, the opportunistic Saleh initially tacitly supported Ansar Allah’s formative endeavours to establish itself, sensing that the Houthi rebels would be a distraction and impediment to Saudi Arabian schemes to meddle in Yemen.

(Source: www.edmaps.com)

The residual grievances of South Yemen at the perceived inequity of the earlier unification (Saleh, previously president of North Yemen, clearly favoured the numerically larger north in the new state’s distribution of resources) led to a resumption of civil war in 1994✦. After a brief conflict the southern army was defeated gifting Saleh a fairly free rein to shore up the foundations of the unified republic.

By around 2000 the political dynamic within Yemen was shifting after the government sealed an agreement with Saudi Arabia over a border demarcation issue (Treaty of Jeddah). Saleh’s view of the Houtsis had changed from initially having considering them a useful buffer to Saudi interference in Yemen to something potentially menacing to his own position controlling the republic.

Saleh meeting Russian leader Putin

Saleh’s crackdown
In June 2004 Saleh’s government outlawed Ansar Allah, hundreds of Houthi members were arrested and a reward offered for the capture of commander al-Houthi, now public enemy № 1 in the republic. In September Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi was killed in fighting between Yemeni military and the rebels. The fighting continued in 2005, now with the dead leader’s brother, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, in charge of the insurgents. The government-Houthis conflict results in hundreds of casualties, the fighting was punctuated by ceasefires and Saleh grants a partial (and temporary) amnesty to Houthi fighters in 2006, a device which helped the Yemeni leader to get re-elected in the 2006 elections. The fighting resumed in 2007 until another truce was brokered between Abdul-Malik al-Houthi and Saleh, this time with the assistance of neighbouring Qatar.

Operation Scorched Earth
The persistence of the conflict led Saleh to launch Operation Scorched Earth in 2009 with the aim of crushing the Houthi resistance in their stronghold of Sana’a. Concurrently, Houthi militias engaged in fighting with Saudi troops in border clashes in the north. Saleh accepted another ceasefire in February 2010 with the rebels…while at the same time the Yemeni military launched “Operation Blow to the Head” to try to silence both the Houthi rebels and Al-Qaeda militants in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The operation against AQAP extended to Shabwa in southeast Yemen.

The “Arab Spring” imprint in Yemen
The Arab Spring movement having impacted on other parts of the Middle East and North Africa spread to Yemen in 2011. People power (the Yemeni Intifada) was tentatively flexing its muscles in Yemen…there were public demonstrations against the 33-year rule of Saleh which he tried to appease with the offer of concessions (including a promise not to seek re-election). This was not enough to quell the public disquiet – Saleh (predictably) followed the ‘carrot’ with the ‘stick’…a further crackdown by the regime left a death toll estimated variously at between 200 and 2,000 Yemenis.

Saleh, again true to form, reneged on his agreement for hand-over of power (which had been brokered by the Gulf Cooperation Council). This prompt some supporters of the government (the influential Hashid Tribal Federation plus several army commanders) to switch allegiances to the regime’s opponents. A bombing seriously injured Saleh requiring him to decamp to Saudi Arabia for medical treatment. Upon his return after recuperation, Saleh again tried to avoid the inevitability of regime change but in November 2011 he was finally forced to relinquish the presidency to his deputy, Abrabbuh Mansour Hadi, who formed a unity government in early 2012.

Hadi’s unstable political inheritance

Within a short time, the rift between the Hadi government and the Houthi rebels dangerously widened…in 2014 an intensification of anti-government protests forced Hadi to dissolve his cabinet and do a U-turn on a planned fuel hike. The Houthis picked their moment to step up the pressure on the Yemeni regime…by late in the year they have extended their hold over most of the capital Sana’a and captured the strategically important port city of Hodeida on the Red Sea.

Inevitably, with the edge in the conflict moving towards Ansar Allah, Hadi was placed under house arrest and forced to resign. By early 2015, the Houthis were in control of the government in Yemen (Hadi having fled to Aden on the southern gulf). Around the same time, Islamic State, having established a toe-hold on Yemeni territory, was playing its terror card in the troubled country (ie, initiating suicide bombing of Shi’a mosques in Sana’a).

Escalation of war: Saudi Arabia joins the civil war
By 2014-15 the conflict had reached a dangerous escalation phase with the intervention of external players. Hadi, who relocated to Saudi Arabia after a Houthi counter-offensive, persuaded Riyadh to intervene in the conflict. The eager Saudis headed up a coalition of Arab states – which comprises most of the Gulf states (exception: neutral-aligned Oman), Jordan, Egypt and several North African states – with the intent of restoring Hadi to the presidency.

2015, a new phase of the ongoing civil war: the Saudi quest for regional hegemony
Saudi Arabia’s aggressive “hands-on” approach to the Yemen conflict has been attributed to various factors. The ascension of new king Salman al-Saud and his son Prince Mohammad to power in the kingdom is thought to be a prime mover.

Crown Prince Mohammad

Launching Operation Decisive Storm, the coalition strategy comprised attacking Houthi targets by air, initiating a naval blockage and deploying a small ground force against the rebel forces. By April 2015 Operation Decisive Storm had given way to Operation Restoring Hope, though the earlier strategy of bombing rebel targets was continued (the US had entered the exercise full-on in the role of supplier of arms and intelligence to the Saudi armed forces). From this time through to the present, the Saudis have conducted scores of indiscriminate and disproportionate air strikes on Yemeni civilian targets (as at November 2018 officially 6,872 civilians had been killed, the majority from Saudi strikes, in the conflict according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights) (‘Yemen Events of 2018’).

Saleh, “Alsyd Flip-Flop”, re-enters the scene

Former president Saleh, exhibiting all the manoeuvrable dexterity of a classic political opportunist, now entered into a formal alliance with the Houthis (confirming the suspicions of many that he had covertly conspired in the Houthis’ overthrow of Hadi). US president Barack Obama made an attempt at crisis management by trying to bring the participating parties together but it proved unsuccessful. By August 2015 the Houthis had taken charge of the whole Shabwah governorate. In 2016 UN-sponsored peace talks broke down.

Iran and Hezbollah intervention thickens the Yemeni morass

The civil war in Yemen was further internationalised with the involvement of Islamic Shi’a Iran and Hezbollah (حزب الله)✪. With both materially backing the Houthi side, drone-operated missile strikes have been launched at the Saudi capital. The civilian cost of the ongoing war in Yemen since 2015 has been incremental and devastating…thousands killed and wounded, an outbreak of cholera and a potential famine in Yemen. Ali Saleh once again did a volte-face, finally siding with the Saudis. In 2017, while fighting the Houthis in Sana’a, the former president and perennial strongman of Yemen was killed.

The consequences for ordinary Yemenis

Between January 2016 and April 2019 more than 70,000 Yemenis (including civilians◬) have died (ACLED database tracking). The country’s humanitarian crisis is in full swing…international charity Save the Children estimate that more than 50,000 children have perished as a result of cholera and famine. In June 2018 the Saudi-backed government forces attacked the key western port of Al-Hudaydah, the main entry point into Yemen for aid (Battle of Al-Hudaydah/AKA “Operation Golden Victory”). The effect of this on desperately needed food supplies for Yemenis has been catastrophic, the country’s health system is near to collapse and the UN has reported that 75% of the population was in dire need of humanitarian assistance.(Photo: www.forbes.com)

Speculating on the Saudis and the Iranians’ “skin in the game”

Regional hegemony as a motive for Saudi Arabia’s incursion in the Yemen War has long antecedents (aggressive Saudi actions against its southern neighbour can be traced back to 1934 – just two years after the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was created). The Islamic Republic of Iran for its part is motivated by a desire to block any attempt the Saudis make to achieve hegemony in the region. While the conflict in Yemen at its core retains the character of a civil war, other complexities have overlayed the central conflict…as the European Council on Foreign Relations recently summarised the imbroglio, “Rather than being a single conflict, the unrest in Yemen is a mosaic of multifaceted regional, local and international power struggles, emanating from both recent and long-past events”. Iran and Saudi Arabia’s involvement is an extension of a Middle East Cold War which ebbs and flows between the two rival, oil wealthy countries, using proxies in conflicts in vulnerable states. This was also the case with Iranian and Saudi interference in the Syrian Civil War.

The extent of the Saudi regime’s commitment to the Yemen conflict, a full-scale operation reportedly costing Riyadh between five and six billion US dollars a month (MEI, December 2018), underlines the seriousness of the Saudis’ leadership ambitions in the region. Saudi power-flexing in Yemen and in other recent neighbourhood conflicts such as its 2011 incursion into Bahrain, demonstrates its imperative of wanting to counter Iranian influence and avoid its efforts to establish a foothold in the Gulf (Darwich).

Tehran’s investment in the Yemen conflict in the Houthi cause is much less substantial than the Saudis (materiel support, military advisors, possibly some military manpower but not Iran’s elite forces). Saudi Arabia has tended to overstate the degree to which the Houthis can be labelled mere proxies of the Iranians, but it constituted a convenient pretext for the peninsula kingdom to ramp up the scale of its own military involvement in the war✥.

Other secondary players

The Al-Qaeda ‘franchise’ has increased its activities in Yemen over the last eight years, providing better than nuisance value and plaguing the efforts of the Yemeni government (with US support) to regain control of the country. AQAP, as it is known, has made inroads in Yemen’s east and south and holds on to significant portions of territory in the area, which in 2011 it declared to be a AQ emirate. AQAP’s local jihadist offshoot, Ansar al-Sharia, is also an active insurgent in the south-east, waging war against the Hadi government, the US and the Houthis. In 2014, AQAP engaged in conflict with ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) which had established a presence in the south-eastern deserts of the troubled Arabian Gulf state (‘A-Q in Yemen’, Wikipedia).

AQAP’s black standard

Also active in the south are southern separatist groups, the remnants of the secessionists who unsuccessfully tried to break away from Saleh and the north in 1994. The most prominent is the Southern Movement or Al-Hirak (subsumed under the umbrella Southern Transitional Council (STC)), which engages in para-military actions, protests and civil disobedience against the Sana’a (Hadi) government (‘Mapping the Yemen Conflict (2015)’).

As the decade draws to an end, prospects for a resolution of the war in Yemen are far from sanguine. A stalemate in the campaigns suggests that there is no conceivably foreseeable military solution to the conflict. The US Congress’ attempts to freeze arms sales to Saudi Arabia have been vetoed by President Trump who is, rhetorically at least, hell bent on wreaking some measure of punitive action on an unrepentant Iran.

The political map of Yemen in 2019 is a patch-quilt of different hues. Five different entities control separate chunks of the country◚. Tiny Yemen is very much between the proverbial rock and a hard place – without the strategic importance of either Iraq or Afghanistan it is largely ignored by the US government and poorly covered by its media. As the poorest Arab country in the Middle East, Yemen is marginalised by its predicament, politically divided, economically blockaded, critically lacking in water and facing a catastrophic famine (Schewe). The crisis drags on relentlessly with the inevitable outcome a dire worsening of the country’s growing humanitarian disaster.(Photo: www.asianews.it)

Footnote: The religious mix: Shi’a v Sunni and Shi’a v Shi’a

Yemen, a predominately Arab country, is 99% Islamic in religion. According to UNHCR, 53% of the population are Sunnis and more than 45% are Shi’as, the bulk of which are adherents of the Zaydi school (‘Fivers’) – cf. the Iranian ‘Twelvers’ or Imamis sect of Shi’ism. The Zaydis mainly inhabit the northern highlands of Yemen, which also contains pockets of Isma’ilism (another sect of Shi’ism). The Salafi movement, a revivalist or reform variant of Sunni Islam, is also widespread among the Yemeni Sunnis. AQAP and Ansar-al-Sharia combatants in the south-east for instance are Salafi.
 

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✽ translated as “Parisans (or Supporters) of God” – the dissident group evolved out of a youth organisation, Al-Shabab al-Muminin, (“the Believing Youth”). The Houthi movement as adherents of the Zaydi branch of Shi’ism became activists in reaction to the aggressive spread of Sunni Islam in Yemen – particularly the Salafi strain of Sunni’ism (Reynaud)

✦ a key determinant in the war re-erupting so quickly after the last truce was that the armies of the north and south had remained unintegrated after 1990

✪ Shi’a Islamist political and militant group based in Lebanon

◬ the Saudi-led coalition forces (despite their extensive US-provided firepower) have had a clear lack of success against the Houthi rebels, perhaps explaining the coalition’s tendency to strike civilian targets in the conflict (Schewe)

✥ the largest conflict in which the Saudi Army has ever been involved (Darwich/Schewe)

◚ the Supreme Political Council (Houthis); the Hadi-led government and its allies; the Southern Transitional Council; Islamic State (ISIL); and AQAP and Ansar-al-Sharia

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Reference materials consulted

‘A Timeline of the Yemen Crisis, from the 1990s to the Present’, (Marcus Montgomery), Arab Center Washington DC, 07-Dec-2017, www.arabcenterdc.org

‘Iran’s Role in Yemen and Prospects for Peace’, (Gerald M Feierstein), Middle East Institute, 06-Dec-2018, www.mei.edu

DARWICH, MAY. “The Saudi Intervention in Yemen: Struggling for Status.” Insight Turkey 20, no. 2 (2018): 125-42. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26390311

‘Profile: Who are Yemen’s Houthis?’, (Manuel Almeida), Al Arabia, 08-Oct-2014, www.english.alarabiya.net

‘Mapping the Yemen Conflict (2015)’, European Council on Foreign Relations, www.ecfr.eu

‘Yemen: The conflict in Saada Governorate – analysis’, (UN High Commissioner for Refugees), 24 July 2008

‘Who are Yemen’s Houthis?’, (Miriam Reynaud), The Conversation, 14-Dec-2018, www.theconversation.com

‘Humanitarian Crisis Worsens in Yemen After Attack on Port’, (Margaret Coker and Eric Schmitt), New York Times, 13-Jun-2018, www.nytimes.com

‘Why Yemen Suffers in Silence’, (Eric Schewe), JSTOR Daily, 23-Aug-2018, www.daily.jstor.org

‘The Al-Qaeda insurgency in Yemen’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org