Since its establishment in 1982, the General People’s Congress has emerged in Yemen as a power party. Today, after the death of its founder and powerful leader, Ali Abdullah Saleh, by the Houthis, the challenge of redefining its identity and of looking for another future is still shrouded in mystery. The party witnessed many things like that at different times, most recently after the Houthis overthrew President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi in September 2014 by holding a wing of Saleh the alliance of necessity with the Houthis, and against the wing of the Hadi , wing of the legitimacy. But certainly Saleh’s death makes the matter something else this time.
The “Congress”, as is well known, witnessed a series of divisions that caused it to be shaken and led many of its leaders out of Yemen, many of which no longer have influence and impact at home so we have become in front of more than one conference besides the wing of the Congress represented by Hadi, the larger body and the wider popular weight of the Congress party that spreads in areas under the authority of the Huthi (in the north). Here, it will seem urgent to question the extent of the desire or ability of President Hadi to accommodate and contain the Congress supporters who were in favor of Saleh? Is it possible to seek the activation of the Congress Party and bring together its factions in the context of confronting the incursion of the Houthis in the militarization and bloody liquidation of their political opponents and competitors in the Yemeni arena? In this regard, we must not forget the heavy impact of regional calculations, and the contradictions of the North and the South in drawing the proper answers.
The trends of isolation and exclusion among the Houthis were not surprising. Not long ago, their insistence to eliminate any rival or parallel partisan activity escalated, for example, when, on August 24, when the Houthis rejected the mass rally called by Saleh to commemorate the founding of the Congress Party, described by the Suspicious move “.This brought to mind, from a corner of the angles, what Hezbollah wants from President Michel Aoun’s current: the coverage. But the Houthis were preoccupied with the tendency to be so powerless that they wanted the “Popular Congress” as a “decoration.” When Saleh wanted to protest against this game, he was assassinated and mutilated.
Observers are contradictory in the approach after the killing of Saleh, there are those who see the “death of political action” in Yemen, and the destruction of any actual party, especially in the absence of institutions and the disintegration of state authority, law and the judiciary and the tyranny of Houthi weapons. In contrast to this view, there are those who are optimistic about restoring the momentum of political and partisan effectiveness in Yemen after the reduction of political dimension of the Houthis , and the Mellishawi tendency was overwhelmed in their behavior and policies. We have clearly become in front of a totalitarian movement of sectarian tribal nature that it can not accept the slightest difference even with those who allied with it, which, if it remains like this, it will be less able to absorb the real body of the leaders and bases of the “People’s Congress,” or even “the Reform Party” and others. If the stubbornness of the Houthis is overwhelmed and tempted by the “delusions of divine victory” and “historical and extraordinary days”, the easiest solution for this totalitarian movement will be to create partisan facades from here and there, and perhaps from some elements of the Congress party and others, to suggest that it is not exclusive to Yemen or do not take its people forcibly under arms. There is a great opportunity to increase the costs paid by the Huthis. If the Yemeni political and popular forces do not stand up to this scenario, it will mean a new phase of the imposition of imbalanced equations, the extension of the de facto authority, the empowered by arms , be above the state, and the perpetuation of fighting and chaos.
Mohamed Barhoumah
Al Hayat Newspaper
Rawabet Center for Research and Strategic Studies