YEMEN/UNITED STATES: Washington Sweet Talks Sana’a

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Dilip Hiro

LONDON, May 27 1998 (IPS) - The United States has begun taking a lot of interest in Yemen in recent months. Middle East diplomats and other observers are intrigued as to why, exactly.

On Monday U.S. Central Command supremo General Anthony Zinni, who heads the armada Washington dispatched to the Persian Gulf in January, paid a visit — the very first of its kind — to the Yemeni capital of Sana’a.

And showing a hitherto hidden interest in Yemeni affairs, U.S. President Bill Clinton broke Washington’s long habit of silence on Yemeni achievements on Friday, crediting its “determination to continue the democratic process and economic reform,” on th e back of a welcome message to new premier, Abdul Karim al-Iryani.

This sudden interest has fuelled speculation in the region that the U.S. wants to establish bases on Yemen’s offshore island of Socotra. Situated 1,100 kilometres from the Yemeni coast, the remote island is only half that distance away from the tip of Ea st Africa.

A military power based on Socotra can safeguard — or threaten — the sea lanes leading to and from the Red Sea and the Suez Canal and the Hormuz Straits, through which flow about one-third of the oil imports of the West and Japan.

During the Cold War the island hosted a Soviet navy base, to Washington’s chagrin, with the blessing of the then Marxist government of the then separate state of South Yemen.

The Cold War is now over, but Socotra is no less strategic.

The United States must consider its own dwindling domestic oil reserves, set to be exhausted within a decade at the current rate of extraction, and its ever increasing dependency on oil imports from the Middle East. The policy makers in Washington are ke en to secure the sources and routes of foreign oil, if necessary through military means, and are looking for the bases to back their strategy up.

The United States has had a fraught relationship with the Republic of Yemen, created by the unification of North Yemen and South Yemen in May 1990.

Within months of its establishment, Yemen found itself embroiled in the crisis caused by Iraq’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, primarily because it was then the only Arab nation on the United Nations Security Council.

With a history of friendship with Iraq under president Saddam Hussein, and a commitment to uphold Arab nationalism, Yemen repeatedly defied the U.S. at the Security Council during the Kuwait crisis.

Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Salih attempted to find an Arab solution to the crisis, but in vain. On the crucial Security Council Resolution 678 in November 1990, which authorised U.N. member states to use ‘all necessary means’ to assist Kuwait to expel Iraq from its territory, Yemen joined Cuba to vote against.

In the eyes of Washington, Sana’a then compounded its sins by pushing its own peace plan for Iraq in early January 1991.

After that there was very little that Sana’a could do to get into the good graces of the United States, despite some positive steps that would have won another nation high kudos elsewhere.

Salih’s government held a multi-party parliamentary election, based on universal suffrage, in April 1993. It was the first democratic exercise of its kind ever on the Arabian Peninsula, and in its most populous state as well.

Yet this historic event went uncredited by the U.S. state department, which also kept quiet while Salih won a brief, but bloody, civil war in the spring of 1994 to preserve the unity of Yemen.

Then, despite the post-war disruption, Yemen held the next parliamentary elections on schedule, in April 1997, which saw the fairly smooth appointment of a coalition government consisting of Salih’s General People’s Congress and the Yemeni Islah Group.

Though bulwarked by oil, which first came on stream in South Yemen in 1987, Salih’s government has also coolly handled the economic set-backs caused by the civil war and the expulsion of some 850,000 Yemeni workers from Saudi Arabia, in punishment for Sa na’a independent stance on the Iraq-Kuwait crisis.

Virtually no comment on all this has come from Washington.

Apparently still smarting from the troubles Yemen caused it at the United Nations in 1990, Washington had its nose put out of joint yet again by Sana’a this year, when it joined Qatar and the United Arab Emirates in a peninsula campaign for an end to U.N . sanctions against Iraq.

So what caused the change of mind? Among the likely reasons: the behaviour of Bahrain during the Iraqi crisis in February; the rising importance of Crown Prince Abdullah ibn Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia; the need for the U.S. to diversify its commitments i n the region.

Washington was badly caught out when, during the Iraqi crisis earlier this year, Bahrain refused to let the Pentagon use U.S. bases on its soil for air strikes against Iraq, despite the fact that the island is home to the U.S. Fifth Fleet.

Washington also has a wary eye on Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who has shown himself to be an independent-minded leader in waiting, determined to put the interests of Saudi Arabia firmly above those of the United States. It seems Washington fee ls it could use additional friends in the region by way of insurance against the unexpected.

Then there is the inexorable rise in U.S. oil imports, from 31 percent to 52 percent of consumption between 1983 and 1996. In 1996, only about a quarter of U.S. oil imports came from Canada and Mexico, its North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) pa rtners. The rest came from non-NAFTA sources, especially the Middle East, more specifically the Gulf region, which contains two-thirds of the globe’s proven petroleum reserves.

Accordingly senior U.S. strategists are looking for ways to diversify its means of maintaining its hegemony over the Gulf and securing the flow of its oil. It is not yet clear how Yemen will be expected to fit into their grand plan.

The Yemenis, of course, have not become any less independent of spirit since 1990. A week before receiving U.S. General Zinni in Sana’a, Salih was welcoming Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the spiritual leader of the Palestinian Islamic radical organisation Hamas,

a group very high up Washington’s ‘terrorist’ hate list.

So Washington is starting its courtship of Yemen gently, with a request to store oil for the U.S. military at the vast oil refineries that now ring Yemen’s eons-old strategic port at Aden.

As for leasing bases on Socotra, the U.S. will have to try harder. Clinton will need all his legendary charm to win over the wily Salih.