Featuring representatives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation, and other Yemeni government bodies, the KAS Regional Programme Gulf States organised a closed-door dialogue titled “The Government of Yemen in Domestic Politics and International Relations: Expectations, capabilities, and areas for strategic intervention” at the Villa La Collina on the secluded shores of Lake Como, Italy from 19-21 May 2024.
By giving Yemeni civil servants the opportunity to debate how best to confront the country’s myriad crises, the dialogue communicated KAS and Germany’s unequivocal support for the Aden-based government while simultaneously encouraging thinking centred around the people it serves: Yemen’s citizens. The thoughtful inputs provided by participants throughout the discussions underlined their patriotic dedication to working towards a brighter future for their country.
The conversations produced the following takeaways:
- The Government of Yemen must develop a cohesive, unified narrative of the conflict and vision for the country. Due primarily to deep disagreements between the factions that together make up the Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), this discursive gap left by the government cedes the narrative space to the Houthis to position their cause in a more advantageous way to audiences at home and abroad.
- That being said, Yemen’s European and multilateral partners make it harder for the government to accentuate these differences. First, the frequent framing of the war as a humanitarian crisis obscures the fact that at its core, the conflict pits the country’s legitimate government against the Houthis, a rebel group that carried out an illegal coup against it. Furthermore, certain practices of the international community – including making concessions to obtain permission for humanitarian aid to enter Houthi-controlled territory and sometimes bypassing Aden-based institutions in delivering assistance to the governorates – damage the government’s legitimacy and unnecessarily strengthen the Houthis. As one participant said, “The Houthis require the international community, the United Nations, and the Office of the Special Envoy, not the other way around.”
- To strengthen its Aden-based ally in Yemen, European partners should engage the government directly. Participants proposed measures including budgetary assistance along the lines of grants given by Saudi Arabia, along with dedicated institution-building support, which Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom already provide. The international community should also support the Government of Yemen when it fights Houthi fire with fire of its own, as exemplified by the recent decision to require Yemeni banks to move their headquarters to Aden and submit to the Central Bank of Yemen’s authority. Economically, such support would consolidate Aden’s control over monetary and exchange-rate policy, in addition to alleviating the fiscal stress of chronic budget deficits. Politically, it would position the government as Yemen’s unrivalled institutional interlocutor with the outside world.
- In terms of improving service delivery and local governance, the decentralisation of political authority in Yemen must be approached with caution. The central state is weak as it is: institutions like the central bank and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were built from the ground up in Aden and Riyadh after the Houthis took over Sana’a, the capacity to tax citizens and transfer these revenues from the governorates to the centre is low, and the state’s monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force is limited, even in Aden. Therefore, care must be taken not to strengthen the local at the expense of the centre. Instead, empowered governorates and local councils must exist alongside strong Aden-based institutions, whose ultimate authority everyone recognises. In this regard, the German federal system, with its purposeful distribution of power between Berlin and the Bundesländer and established mechanism for redistributing wealth between them, could constitute an example worth emulating.
Building on the success of this initial political dialogue, the Regional Programme Gulf States intends in the future to provide additional platforms for representatives of the Government of Yemen to engage in critical discussions with one another and exchange ideas with their counterparts in Europe.
