Post-Truce: Yemen in Peril of War Again

Yemen stands on a knife-edge. There is a depressing view that the country may now descend into an all-out civil war again after the heart-on-the-chest hope Yemen was wrapping up its civil war that begun in 2014. 

Today all this is being dashed again because the warring sides - the Houthis and the Saudi-led war coalition and their allies have failed to renew the ongoing UN-brokered armistice deal that has been in operation since 2 April and renewed every two months. 

With putting swords into ploughshares so to speak, many, especially the civilian population, armed factions, parties, allies, tribes surrounding states and the United Nations have been happy to see the soaring violence in the country which has killed hundreds of thousands of people drastically decrease.

Through different 'confidence-building measures' the warring parties have managed to renew their ceasefire deal and allow the country to take a "breather" from the fighting that included skirmishes on the ground, from the air and from the sea and which literally destroyed the country in an atrocious way and has seen 4.3 million Yemenis displaced while 23.4 million dependant on international humanitarian aid. 

The deal - a set of piece-meal strategy tirelessly pursued by different UN officials and its myriad agencies - brought hope after April, into July and September - through meaningful dialogue that brought the partial opening up of the Sanaa Airport allowing civilian planes to travel to different Arab countries like Jordan and Egypt and allowed the Hodeidah Port in the east of the country to start receiving badly needed products and energy supplies.  

Things appeared to be moving despite the fact there remained a stumbling bloc around the strategic city of Taiz that linked the south west and north of Yemen together. It has long been under blockade and negotiations have been going on for the past months to remove the embargo which is controlled by the Houthis. Their negotiators agreed to open some roads, but this has never been enough for the government forces which have been kicked out of Sanaa in 2014 and now want to be reinstated as the legitimate government of Yemen through mainly Saudi and UAE help as part of a broad Arab coalition. 

While Taiz may have turned the screws on the current negotiations that involved Omani and Jordanian mediators and where different warring factions met in Amman to try and reach a permanent solution, the Yemeni conflict has become more complicated with lots of sinews and demands made on different warriors like the Houthis and their protagonists, the militias that now support the 2014 government and who is today saddled in Aden after moving back from Riyadh. 

Today two added complications may have contributed to the renewed deadlock and the fact that the Houthis no longer appear to want to renew the armistice deal. Over the past three months at least the UN may have become somewhat "over-confident" for they were now looking for longer armistice deals, not the two months everyone had been getting used to, but six-month stretches - an agreement were the warring factions would sign an accord for a ceasefire that would last for six months at a time - and in effect mellow the parties into a "framework" where permanent peace would be the logical outcome. 

Maybe the UN Yemen Envoy Hans Grundberg and/or the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres were thinking too far ahead. With the benefit of hindsight, it may have been better to have continued to think "piecemeal" because, after all, progress on flights from the Sanaa' Airport and the Hodeidah Port were partial with the same on Taiz that continues to be blocked except for a few roads, and not the ones demanded by pro-government parties. Further to that, the Houthis were now demanding money to pay government workers and their salaried staff, after all they say they still control 80 percent of the country for the present time. 

The Houthis today are increasing their tempo as if negotiations and truce have not taking place over the past seven months, and this is worrying many, not least of all members of the UN staff in Yemen. Houthi armed forces spokesman Yahya Saree is now giving ultimatums to Saudi and UAE oil companies operating in the country to pack up and go. This means, together with the lack of renewal of the UN-sponsored ceasefire fighting could erupt once again and anytime. 

But this maybe a political ploy on the part of the Houthis for they had long been calling for a complete lifting of the embargo on the Sanaa Airport and on Hodeidah with their latest actions designed to get the other parties to agree to their demands. For the time being everyone including the UN is watching carefully to see what the next move. So, political brinkmanship is certainly being played at the highest stakes.