Yemen has sent its prime minister, two deputy prime ministers and its foreign minister to today’s London meeting to discuss the situation in Yemen, blogs Jonathan Rugman.
Yemen’s Foreign Minister, Dr Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, has a dry sense of humour.
“We know it is an election year,” he said last night of Gordon Brown’s call for a meeting on Yemen in London today. And on the face of it, Downing Street’s response to the attempted bombing of an American airliner on Christmas day – let’s have a meeting – looks like a knee-jerk political reaction to Yemen’s multitude of problems.
The Foreign Office, however, seems determined that today’s gathering of 24 foreign ministers or their stand-ins has a meaningful outcome, even if it is scheduled to last only two hours. Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab apparently joined al-Qaida in Yemen, and though the Yemeni government is sick of being vilified by the world’s press for the past month, Mr Abdulmutallab has usefully concentrated minds on the poorest country in the Middle East.
Mr al-Qirbi set out some of his country’s problems in a speech at Chatham House last night. 65 per cent of the population is under the age of 25. “Everybody under 25 is a revolutionary,” he said. But in a country short of jobs, water and oil, the challenge is to stop Al Qaeda from turning Yemen’s revolutionaries into would-be suicide bombers.
The Foreign Office is calling this a “meeting” rather than a “conference”, partly because the last Yemen conference in London in 2006 produced pledges of $4bn in aid, but only 7 per cent of that aid has actually been delivered – better, then, to lower expectations but deliver more. Key to success today will be persuading the Gulf states in particular to cough up what they promised.
“This has to be the start of a process,” says Ginny Hill, of Chatham House’s Yemen Forum. “The Yemenis are looking for economic commitments beyond concerns about terrorism. This is an opportunity for donors to re-commit to their pledges and the government to re-commit to reform.”
The events of Christmas Day have already led to more intelligence-sharing with the Yemenis, and more pledges of training for their police and counter-terrorist forces, but the fear among many Yemen experts is that a purely military response to Yemen’s problems from the international community will only make those problems worse.
“Al-Qaida is already beginning to build links with the Yemeni tribes by marrying into them,” says Professor Gerd Nonneman, Exeter University’s Yemen specialist.
He warns that even though the group is probably only as few hundred strong, its numbers could increase if a counterterrorist strategy is not carefully calibrated to avoid civilian casualties and to include economic assistance.
Yemen has sent its prime minister, two deputy prime ministers as well as the foreign minister to today’s meeting, in the hope that promises to tackle corruption will lead to an IMF programme of economic support.
But all the money in the world may not be enough if President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s regime, now in its fourth decade, does not know how to spend it properly.
The British ambassador to Sanaa, Tim Torlot, last night told us the president’s reform plans, announced towards the end of last year, had set “too many unachievable priorities”, and that the lack of real change had only made the anger and frustration among Yemen’s dissident factions worse.