Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 52, no. 2, April–May 2010, pp. 83–104
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The high-level meeting in London on Yemen, held at the end of January 2010, was convened at the behest of UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown in response to the attempted bombing of an airplane in the skies over Detroit on Christmas Day. Although the initiative appeared hasty to some, it followed an extensive review of Yemen policy during 2009, as UK government agencies sought to respond to the growing perception of Yemen as a crisis state. During 2009, Yemen’s terrorist networks grew in strength and global reach. An intermittent civil war in the north resumed and intensified, while the security services clashed routinely with grassroots protestors calling for independence in the south.
December’s Detroit debacle accelerated and exposed a recalibration of global risk that was already pushing Yemen rapidly up the list of countries of concern. ‘Stability and Security in Yemen’, the UK’s 18-month strategy finalised in the closing months of 2009, advocates a textbook approach to engagement in fragile states. The strategy identifies the urgent need to improve public-service delivery and strengthen state institutions. The policy is framed on the basis that prevention is better than cure, arguing that ‘Yemen, in a pre-conflict, fragile condition presents an opportunity to act early, prevent state collapse and remove the need for costly intervention later’.
In line with a 2009 White Paper from the Department for International Development, the British policy towards Yemen supports a comprehensive stance. Such an integrated approach places development, state-building and counter-terrorism within a single framework, building on lessons learned about aid effectiveness and donor coordination in Iraq, Afghanistan and other ‘fragile and conflict-affected countries’. The strategy assumes that terrorist threats emanating from Yemen will escalate unless the international community encourages President Ali Abdullah Saleh to tackle underlying challenges to the state, such as the economy and political legitimacy. The prime minister’s decision to host the London meeting handed British policy-makers a timely opportunity to capitalise on high-level engagement while the international spotlight was trained on Yemen.
Their stance carried the day in London on 27 January, when more than 20 countries signed up to a shared analysis of Yemen’s problems. The final statement stressed the need for Yemen’s renewed commitment to political, economic and social reform, but there were no new aid pledges. The participants at the London meeting identified as priorities the need for a new International Monetary Fund programme to help the government confront immediate challenges, reductions in diesel subsidies and improved disbursement of existing aid pledges from Yemen’s Gulf neighbours.3British Foreign Secretary David Miliband and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised Yemen’s ten-point plan for reform, which includes proposals to improve civil-service capacity, resolve land disputes and tackle water depletion, but they stressed the need for swift implementation.
The London meeting also announced the creation of the ‘Friends of Yemen’. This informal network reflects an attempt to treat fragility as a process, not a series of events, and amounts to a mechanism for sustained engagement to keep the process going. Two technical ...
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Ginny Hill is an Associate Fellow at Chatham House in London, where she runs the Yemen Forum.
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