UNDERSTANDING THE HOUTHI CONFLICT IN NORTHERN YEMEN:

A SOCIAL MOVEMENT APPROACH

BY

AndrewDumm

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Faculty of the School of International Service

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m

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2010 American University Washington, D.C. 20016

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by

AndrewDumm

2010

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED To my parents UNDERSTANDING THE HOUTHI CONFLICT IN NORTHERN YEMEN:

A SOCIAL MOVEMENT APPROACH

BY

AndrewDumm

ABSTRACT

Since 2004, the Yemeni government has been fighting a bloody civil war

with local Zaydi Shia forces known as the Houthis in the country's north.

Conventional explanations rooted in the recent history of the civil war fail to

adequately account for the rise of the rebels and their fundamental grievances,

however. A social movement approach, which can contextualize the Houthi

rebellion within a historical evolution of Zaydi movements, is used here to

· explain the transition of the Houthis from non-violent social movement to armed

insurrectionary group. The Yemeni regime's anti-Zaydi policies and nationalist

narrative, along with a competing Wahhabi religious movement, led to a series of

inter- and intra-movement disputes that fostered the rise of increasingly

oppositional Zaydi factions like the Houthi. The interplay between the Houthi

leadership's complex framing of Zaydi grievances and escalating regime­

challenger interactions over a public protest movement explains the Houthis'

recourse to violence in 2004.

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... ii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ...... v

Chapter

I. INTRODUCTION ...... !

II. A SOCIAL MOVEMENT THEORY FRAMEWORK...... 5

Rational Collective Action ...... 6

Examining Cultural Fault-Lines ...... lO

Inter- and Intra-Movement Framing Disputes ...... 12

Theoretical Explanations for Violence ...... 17

III. THE HOUTHI CONFLICT SINCE 2004 ...... 21

0 ngm. . o fH ost1·1·. Itles, 2003-2004 ...... 24

A 'Protracted' Conflict, 2005-2010 ...... 31

Houthi Family Leadership ...... 32

Aggressive Tactics ...... 35

Civilian Deaths and Displacement ...... 37

Arbitrary Detentions ...... 38

The Tribal Dimension ...... 39

Failed Mediation ...... 41

Conventional Explanations for the War ...... -43

iii The Counterterrorist Argument ...... -43

A Regional Proxy War ...... 50

The Houthis as a Charismatic Leadership Cult ...... 58

The Houthis as Resource-seeking Separatists ...... 61

IV. ZAYDI CULTURAL IDENTITY AND HISTORICAL GRIEVANCE...... 67

Zaydism within Islam ...... 67

The Imamate and Descent-based Rule ...... 70

Zaydi Responses to the New Republic ...... 73

State Frames of Zaydis and the Imamate: The Role of Past and Present.. 75

V. REVIVALIST CURRENTS: EARLY ZAYDI SOCIAL MOVEMENTS ...... 81

Wahhabi Influence in Saada...... 81

The Revivalist Response ...... 88

Political Opportunity Structure: The Failure of al Haqq...... g2

VI. ZAYDI RADICALIZATION: THE BELIEVING YOUTH ...... 97

Husayn al Houthi and a Militant Believing Youth ...... 1o2

Revisiting the Houthi Slogan ...... 107

VII. EXPLAINING THE USE OF VIOLENCE...... 114

Regime-Challenger Interactions and Framing, 2004-2010 ...... 115

VIII. CONCLUSION ...... 123

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 127

iv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure

1. Historical Evolution ofthe Houthi Movement ...... 17

2. North Yemen ...... 30

3. Yemen: Administrative Divisions, 2002 ...... -40

4. US Foreign Military Financing to Yemen, 1998-2010 ...... -48

5. Population Density in Yemen, 2002 ...... 57

6. Distribution of Ethnoreligious Groups and Key Tribal Areas in Yemen, 2002 ...... 68

7· Cemetery in Saada ...... 87

Table

1. Social versus Insurrectionary Movements ...... 19

v CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Since 2004, the Yemeni government has been fighting a bloody civil war with _local Zaydi Shia forces in Saada and the surrounding provinces in the country's north. The rebels, collectively known as the Houthis (after their succession of leaders from the same prominent Zaydi family), claim to be fighting a reactive war in defense of a 'besieged' Zaydi religious community. For its part,

Sanaa has variously characterized the Houthi leadership and their "Believing

Youth" followers as radical religious extremists, terrorists, and historical revanchists. The intractability of the conflict and its seeming development along religious, tribal, and regional lines has also generated competing explanations for the war from observers outside of Yemen.

While mainstream explanations for the Houthi rebellion offer important, partial accounts of the protracted nature of the war, they fail to explain the

Houthis' fundamental motivations or contextualize the group's confrontation with the regime in 2004. In particular, these accounts do not isolate the exogenous and endogenous factors that led the Houthis to abandon a well­ developed model of non-violent Zaydi Islamic social movements for an insurrectionary protest movement in 2003.

This paper applies concepts of social movement theory literature to account for the rise of a more militant Believing Youth faction within Zaydi

1 revivalism as well as the Houthis' embrace of violent resistance vis-a-vis the Saleh

regime. This study finds that, as a social movement heir to Zaydi revivalism, the

Houthi rebellion is a product of both exogenous and endogenous catalysts for

violence. On one hand, regime-challenger interactions during a non-violent

Believing Youth protest movement in 2003-4led the Yemeni government to

crack down on the Zaydi cultural community at large, intensifying long-held

grievances; on the other hand, rebel leaders' framing techniques effectively

emphasized an escalating and existential communal threat using a critique of the

regime's foreign policy to mobilize armed resistance. It was the specific interplay

between social movement framing and regime repression that led to the Houthis' jump from peaceful protest movement to violent insurrectionary movement in

2004.

The Houthi rebellion, therefore, is not merely a product of traditional social and political group grievances. Although a circumscribed political

opportunity structure in Yemen and persistent socioeconomic underdevelopment in the Saada basin are underlying and contributing factors to the call to arms,

Zaydi movements predating the Houthis confronted these same grievances without resorting to violence. The failure of pre-Houthi political and social movements to redress Zaydi grievances often led to internal leadership debates that bifurcated the wider movement into more moderate and more confrontational factions, but even the latter consistently eschewed violence.

Rather, more overt state repression of Zaydi cultural expression like the public protests and the Houthi leadership's resonant anti-system frames remain the two

2 key elements in the group's recent transition from social to insurrectionary movement.

By moving beyond structural conditions for violence, in other words, this study highlights the role of elite agency and framing (on the part of both Sanaa and the Houthis) in the more proximate causes of the conflict. Decades ofZaydi group grievances and an established regime policy of marginalization actually have less to do with the Houthis' radicalization and militarization than do relatively-recent leadership strategies in both camps. In this way, the Houthi conflict may serve as a valuable case study in the elite-led transition ofhardline factions within peaceful Islamic social movements into armed opposition groups.

To sufficiently account for this transition, however, it is necessary to examine the Houthi movement in both a historical and a social movement context. As such, Chapter II begins with a description of social movement theory, its rational strategies of mobilizing collective action, the theoretical sources of intra- and inter-movement disputes, and explanations for the use of violence. An overview of the current conflict and its conventional explanations in Chapter III then serves a starting point for a deeper and more historical evaluation of the

Houthi movement within a larger field of Zaydi social movements. Because of the

Zaydis' minority sectarian status, cultural identity plays a more salient role in the

Houthi case than in other Islamic social movements. Chapter IV, therefore, provides an analysis of Zaydi historical and cultural grievances that help explain the inital rise of the revivalist movement.

3 Chapter V evaluates the relative failure of both the resource mobilization and framing of the early Zaydi revivalist movement-as well as its attempts at political participation-before examining the role of these failures in radicalizing segments of the Zaydi community. The successive failure of early and more accomodating movements in the minds of some radical Zaydi activists produced a periodization of sorts within the history of revivalism, with subsequent evolutions becoming both smaller and more oppositional. Chapter VI traces the growth of the more militant Believing Youth movement, for example, and particularly the leadership style and strategy of H usayn al Houthi. Chapter VII then analyzes how elements of agentive framing deployed by al Houthi like symbols, rhetoric, and public performance justified the use of violence.

Specifically, al Houthi's frames effectively conflated the twin threats to the Zaydi community from state policies of marginalization and a competing Wahhabi social movement, and then subsumed them under an emotionally-resonant slogan directed at the regime's pro-American and pro-Saudi foreign policy. Sanaa vigorously repressed the resulting public protest movement, in turn, and regime­ challenger interactions only further supported the Houthis' call for armed self­ defense and, eventually, violence.

4 CHAPTER II

A SOCIAL MOVEMENT THEORY FRAMEWORK

This chapter places an analysis of the Houthi conflict within a social movement framework, beginning with a description of the emergence of social movement theory in response to the shortcomings of behavioralist and structuralist explanations for collective action, especially in the Islamic context.

Namely, it gives an overview of three areas of rational collective action-resource mobilization, strategic framing, and political participation in response to shifting opportunity structures-that will be employed in an analysis of Zaydi social movements and the Houthis in subsequent chapters.

This chapter also focuses on the importance of cultural sources of social movement mobilization, arguing that these criteria became hallmarks of the

Zaydi movements. The role of inter- and intra-movement framing disputes in producing a periodization of successively oppositional Zaydi social movements is also discussed from a theoretical perspective. Finally, the chapter deals with social movement theory explanations for the use of violence, or the transition from peaceful social movements to violent insurrectionary movements. Framing and its role in regime-challenger interactions is identified as the key variable in accounting for the militarization of the Believing Youth movement under al

Houthi, especially as it applies to the central point of contention in the outbreak of the Houthi conflict-the slogan-based protest movement of 2003-4.

5 Rational Collective Action

Quintain Wiktorowicz provides both a useful overview of social movement theory and its application to twentieth-century Islamic activism. 1 As Wiktorowicz notes, early social movement theory emerged as a way tore-imagine forces of colleCtive action within democracies. The existing field of analysis on collective action was long-dominated by studies of movements in the United States and

Western Europe and was therefore "heavily contextualized by liberal democratic politics."2 These scholars also employed a linear model rooted in behavioralism that causally linked "structural strain" generated by widespread social transformation to psychological angst and then collective action.3 In the non-

Western developing world, however, this two-step analysis failed to explain high levels of social strain and correspondingly-low levels of collective action.4

To resolve this dilemma, social movement theory emerged with a focus on a number of rational, intervening variables described by the fields of resource mobilization theory (RMT) and, more recently, agentive framing. As its name would imply, resource mobilization theory focuses on the ability of social movements to mobilize followers in collective action through various "strategic resources" including social service organizations, cultural centers, schools, and-

1 In the "Introduction" to his work, Islamic Activism: A Social Movement Theory Approach (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).

2 Wiktorowicz, 4.

3 For an illustrative example, see Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development ofBlack Insurgency, 1930-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

4 Wiktorowicz, 10. 6 in the Islamic context-the "religiospacial" structure of the mosque. All of these resources "use social interactions with local communities to propagate and recruit followers."s

In terms of framing, social movement theory has come to prize the role of leaders in developing effective interpretive frameworks in and outside of mobilizing structures to convey symbolic meaning and sustain-or shift-forces of collective action. A scholarly focus on framing attempts to explain how members of a social movement act on a non-aggregate level, and thus is concerned with "how individual participants conceptualize themselves as a collectivity; how participants are actually convinced to participate; and the ways in which meaning is produced, articulated and disseminated."6 In short, social movement leaders use frames to clearly identify a problem and its source, articulate a specific strategy to redress the issue, and provide a coherent rationale that can mobilize populations in collective action to that end.7

Finally, a third prominent niche of social movement theory focuses on political parties as a specialized form of rational resource mobilization. s Often movements will draw on their array of informal organizing structures and latent collective action abilities to attempt to effect change in the political sphere. At

s Wiktorowicz, 10-11.

6 Wiktorowicz, 15.

7 See David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford, "Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization," in From Structure to Action: Comparing Movement Particpation across Cultures, International Social Movement Research, vol. 1 ed. Bert Klandermans, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Sidney Tarrow (Greenwich: JAI Press, 1988): 197-218.

s Wiktorowicz, 11. 7 times, social movement scholars lament this narrowly-political perspective on otherwise diverse movements. Alberto Melucci, for one, points out that social movements are too often analyzed only insofar as they translate into political movements, or have overtly political implications.9

Nevertheless, many movements (including Zaydi revivalism and a diverse collection of Islamist movements) themselves choose to make the foray into politics. Emphasizing the rationality of such a move, Asef Bayat shows that "if they are tolerated by the incumbent regimes, [social movements] may be able to capture segments of governmental power through routine electoral means."10

However, it is important to keep in mind that political participation exists as just one of many tools of collective action deployed by social movements. As

Wiktorowicz argues, "Control and reconstruction of state institutions .. .is only one of many routes for change. In other words, the state is a means for the production of meaning, not an end."n

While social movements are distinct from power-seeking political parties in the sense that they are primarily concerned with apolitical forms of resource mobilization like charities, social work, and student and professional groups, movements may still "be connected to these groups, share some of their features,

9 Alberto Melucci, Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 287.

10 Asef Bayat, Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007): 195-6.

u Wiktorowicz, 16.

8 or even transform into one."12 Decisions within social movements on whether or not to participate politically are based on the prospects for success in what is described as the "political opportunity structure" of a given state. 13

Within this general social movement context, Wiktorowicz characterizes

Islamic activism under a broad definition of forms of "mobilization of contention to support Muslim causes."14 His purpose is to contest the "exceptionalism" typically attached to social movements of an Islamic nature that renders them

"unintelligible in comparative terms" with the resource mobilization, framing, and political participation of seemingly 'more rational' movements. The unique religious foundations of Islamic activism do distinguish it from areligious social movements in general, but this should not discount the rationality of Islamic social movements; rather "the collective action itself and concomitant mechanisms demonstrate consistency across movement-types. In other words,

Islamic activism is not sui generis." 1s

This focus is of particular import to understanding the Houthi group as well as the series of Zaydi revivalist social movement that predated it. Many of the most prominent conventional explanations for the conflict, detailed in

Chapter III, employ logic that openly or implicitly denies rationality to the Houthi leadership and their followers. In order to analyze how the leadership of Husayn al Houthi movement directed the Believing Youth-in a break with previous

12 Ibid., 18-20.

13 Wiktorowicz, 14.

14 Wiktorowicz, 2.

15 Wiktorowicz, 3. 9 Zaydi social movements-towards the use of violence, the rational use of resource mobilization structures, political participation, and strategic framing by various

Zaydi social movement leaders (including eventually the Houthis) will be evaluated in subsequent chapters.

Examining Cultural Fault-Lines

The Houthi and Zaydi movements are arguably unique, however, in the salience of culture in their emergence and evolution. Cultural sources of Zaydi revivalism originated with the general marginalization of the community following the 1962 republican revolution that deposed the Zaydi imamate, as discussed in Chapter IV. Culture as a rallying tool for collective action is also well- grounded in group psychology and social movement theory.

From a comparative political perspective, religion presents a natural organizing principle for groups. Marc Howard Ross considers religion the

"prototypical cultural basis for political organization."16 Similarly, Abner Cohen finds that religion provides an ideal "blueprint" for mobilizing a community in informal organizations because of its inherent emotional appeal. In an example that may be particularly applicable to the Zaydi case, Cohen uses an analysis of the cultural responses of minority Hausa traders in Ibadan (Nigeria) and minority Creoles in Freetown (Sierra Leone) to illustrate his point. Because using electoral strategies to pursue their economic and political goals would have likely resulted in massive defeats for these minority groups, each chose to organize

16 Marc Howard Ross, "Culture and Identity in Comparative Political Analysis," in Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure ed. Mark Irving Lichbach and Alan S. Zuckerman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 53. 10 around emotionally-resonant cultural issues-namely, a religious revival festival focused on the Tijaniyyi brotherhood (a Sufi order) in the case of the Hausa. 17

The failure of the Zaydi community to reconstitute itself politically and economically during the historic period of marginalization in the early Yemeni republic led to similar communal responses of cultural revivalism.

Because of its natural ability to foment forms of collective action, culture overlaps with many facets of conventional social movement theory. Cultural identity translates relatively easily into elements of resource mobilization theory, for example, in what Melucci describes as the "cultural production" of alternative value systems, discourse, and symbols. 1s Melucci focuses primarily on the mobilizing effects of rhetorical and symbolic resources, but these devices also do not operate independently; socialization in resource mobilizing structures such as

"schools, religious organizations, and kin groups" only works to reinforce cultural messages. 19

In terms of social movement framing, moreover, culture is a particularly powerful tool. Ross explains that cultural organizations heighten group solidarity by reinforcing distinction: "Within-group worldviews are reinforced as groups increase in-group solidarity and out-group hostility increases."20 Such distinctions become powerful framing elements as cultural differences are

17 Ross, 52; See Abner Cohen, Custom and Politics in Urban Africa (Berkley: University of California Berkley Press, 1969): 210.

1s Bayat, 195-6; Melucci, 138.

19 Ross, 66.

20 Ross, 59· 11 elevated to the level ofthreats.21 In-group metaphors of trauma, for example, serve as rallying points for collective action and interpretive frameworks for events that present an existential threat to the community. 22 Thus, framing of cultural history figures prominently in Ross' model, and includes the use of rituals and symbols: "Interpretations of the past are found in how people talk and write about it but are also found in the public rituals and myths built around key events in the national (or ethnic) past."2 3

The forms of resource mobilization and strategic framing employed by

Zaydi revivalist movements that are the subject of Chapter V emphasize these cultural sources of group identity and reinforce in-group/out-group distinctions with official state frames of nationalism as well as Salafi/Wahhabi frames of

Islam-both of which are vehemently anti-Zaydi. The culturally-centered Zaydi revivalist movement was subject not only to competition with these out-group competitors, however, but was periodically bifurcated by internal framing disputes. Thus the theoretical sources of both 'inter and intra-movement framing contests' are of particular relevance to the Houthi case.

Inter- and Intra-Movement Framing Disputes

As mentioned, the Zaydi revivalist movement used cultural framing techniques that emphasized a two-pronged existential threat to the community from both state and Wahhabi sources, and then reinforced these messages

2 ' Ibid., 6o.

22 Ibid., 69.

2 3 Ibid. 12 through historical reinterpretation, ritual, and traditional resource mobilization structures. Zaydi revivalist frames did not operate in a vacuum, therefore, but rather drew in-group/out-group distinctions in direct opposition to the competing frames of the state and Wahhabi activists. It is thus important to analyze the theoretical effects that contested frames have on the direction of social movements.

Generally speaking, Charles Tilly notes that movements are subject to opposing factors of "opportunity" that facilitate collective action and "suppressive factors" that restrict it. 2 4 Suppressive factors can include competing social movements like the Salafi/Wahhabi religious movement operating in opposition to revivalism in Saada. Because competing social movements often deploy similar forms of resource mobilization, these inter-movement disputes play out in framing clashes. As Wiktorowicz notes, movements by their nature are constantly

"embedded in a field of multiple actors that often vie for frame hegemony."zs

The Zaydi revivalists employed all the peculiarities of a culturally-centered social movement. Yet, because the uniformity of cultural communities is often overstated, distinctly-cultural means and ends of social movements (and especially strategic framing) are rarely successful in mobilizing overwhelming majorities. As Ross puts it, "cultural identity is layered and situationally defined.

People hold multiple identities; some identities partially overlap, and the group

2 4 Bayat, 18. See Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (New York: McGraw Hill, 1978): 24.

25 Wiktorowicz, 15. 13 boundaries can shift across issues."2 6 To draw followers and overcome a Zaydi strategy of reconciliation with state and Wahhabi frames, successive revivalist leaders proscribed more aggressive and militant communal identities during pivotal disputes within the community.

Inter-movement disputes, therefore, exist not only among social movements competitors and between movements and regimes, but also between movement activists and non-aligned segments ofthe community.2 7 A Zaydi revivalist movement flourished in opposition to both the exclusionary nationalist narrative and the increasing Wahhabi attack on Zaydi identity, but only as a minority response in the face of majoritarian trends of Zaydi reconciliation and communal redefinition within the new republic. The Zaydi revivalist movement may attempt to define and empower a distinct interpretation of Zaydism as a form of cultural self-defense amidst these shifting boundaries, but it is important to keep in mind that it has by no means been successful in convincing a majority of the community to participate. In fact, the succession of Zaydi social movement factions that emphasized more direct opposition to the regime and Wahhabi movement did so by mobilizing smaller and smaller minorities of the community at large.

Framing disputes also arise within movements themselves. A key aspect of social movements in general, as Asef Bayat notes, is that they "function over a longer time span, during which people can ask questions, debate key issues, and

2 6 Ross, 62.

27 Wiktorowicz, 17. 14 clarify the movement's aims. Often various ideas develop, and divergent tendencies emerge."28 In addition to inter-movement disputes, movements are subject to what Wiktorowicz deems "intra-movement framing contests," in which factions may vie for control of its direction and emphasize competing approaches to redressing the same problem. 2 9

Just as revivalism represents a minority response relative to non-aligned

Zaydi attempts to reconcile and redefine the community within the new republic, for example, even among revivalists themselves a proactive social movement has not always been the preferred strategy. A hijra (sanctuary) movement emerged alongside revivalism, challenging its use of state institutions and forms of resource mobilization and advocating instead a withdrawal from society to develop individual beliefs. Internal framing contests between revivalism and the hijra movement are emblematic of a general competition between Islamic activist movements and daawa movements (sometimes characterized as 'missionary'

Islam) that seek "to affect shifts in individual attitudes towards the role of religion in regulating society and personal behavior," rather than forms of collective action and resource mobilization.3°

The minority factions that evolved in the history of revivalism were distinguished from majority Zaydi responses of acquiescence or reconciliation not only by their increasing militancy but also by their demography. Inter- and

2 s Bayat, 20.

2 9 Wiktorowicz, 18.

3° Wiktorowicz 17; See also "Understanding Islamism" International Crisis Group Middle East/North Africa Report, no. 37 (2 March 2005). 15 intra-movement disputes within the Zaydi community-between reconciliation to the state versus revivalism, and revivalism versus the hijra movement-all tended to play out along generational lines. Younger Zaydi activists were generally more proactive in asserting their cultural identity and thus were more amenable to more aggressive forms of the revivalist movement.

Of even more import to the Houthi case, the successive bifurcation of revivalism into more youth-focused Zaydi movements fostered the emergence of increasingly aggressive forms of collective action like the Believing Youth-and eventually the militant strategy of the Houthi movement (represented as

'moderate' versus 'conservative' factions in Figure 1). As mentioned, the key factor in guiding all intra-movement disputes is framing contests. The distinctions in framing between factions of revivalists are important to accounting for this gradual radicalization among Zaydi social movement activists, but they are also crucial to understanding the transition to violence within the

Houthi movement.

16 ~- Fallofimamate l

IZaydi Cultural Disenti·anchisement• State Nationalist I Narrative

+ I I Renunciation• Reconciliation Revivalism• I ' I I I Wahhabi Social Movement ~ ~ I Hiira Movement I Political Engagement (alHaqq)

I Believing Youth I + + I Conservative I lVloderate I

Houthis • grievances/framing I • arming vs. existential threat • regime-challenger interactions

I Recourse to Violence • Husayn (1999-2004) • Baddredin (2005-2006) • Abdel lVlalik (2006-present) Figure 1. Historical Evolution of the Houthi Movement.

Theoretical Explanations for Violence

Social movement theory provides several-at times competing, at times overlapping-explanations for the use of violence. The debate mirrors other social

17 movement divisions more generally, but with important implications for understanding the recourse to violence in the Houthi case.

Scholars who largely adopt the strain-mobilization link of collective action literature pre-dating social movement theory also extend this causal relationship to the use of violence. In Ted Gurr's "relative deprivation" thesis, for example, the gulf between a group's "value expectations" and "value capabilities" (essentially motives of grievance and greed), when combined with social and economic reversals, generates a group psychology prone to violence. 31

Even Gurr emphasizes the role of leadership and framing in his "process model" of violence, however. 32 New ideational justifications for violence are quite similar to the frames of a leader trying to mobilize non-violent collective action, in fact. Violence must be conceived of as appropriate-by tying its use to past group grievances-and as a reaction to those parties responsible for historical wrongs. 33 In a frame peculiar to justifications of violent forms of collective action, though, a leader must also propose that a sense of community can be reestablished only through revolution.

Social movement literature explains the recourse to violence as a more rational and tactical response of leaders. Wiktorowicz, for example, argues that in many cases violent evolutions of social movements are a response to "shifting opportunity structures that emerged under particular conditions and

31 Ted Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970): 24.

32 Gurr, 349 (see diagram).

33 Gurr, 202-8. 18 circumstances."34 Often shifting conditions and circumstances only develop amidst crucial periods of 'regime-challenger interactions' that naturally emphasize framing disputes and further polarize the initial positions of each side.

The characteristics of regime-challenger interactions between Sanaa and the

Houthi protest movement are critical to accounting for the group's use of violence, as charted in Chapter VII.

Finally, Bayat creates a typology of social versus insurrectionary movements to distinguish the two on a number of axes, including the use of violence. Bayat's analysis provides a useful framework within which to evaluate the Houthi adoption of violence, and his analysis presented in Table 1:

Table 1: Social versus Insurrectionary Movements. Based on a typology presented in Bayat, 18-21.

establish alternative institutions I value systems structured and durable transitory

large number of members small number of committed participants diverse activities, resource frontal attack on mobilization techniques government: riots, street protests, armed clashes clarity of purpose and internal ambiguity of precise goals differentiation and group unity Egyptian Muslim Early Iranian Islamic Brotherhood Revolution

As explored in the following chapter, by 2003-4 the Houthi movement was distinct from its Zaydi revivalist predecessors-and even the more radical

34 Wiktorowicz,. 19 Believing Youth faction-on a number of axes in Bayat's typology. As a small faction within an already minority communal response of revivalism, the Houthis were comprised of a relatively small number of committed partisans with little space for internal differentiation between moderate and conservative elements.

The Houthi use of public street protests bordering on open riots was also a clear departure from earlier embodiments of revivalism. As the rest of this study will demonstrate, however, it is not clear that al Houthi and his followers sought to

'negate the existing order' nor wage a 'frontal attack on the government.' The key intervening variables in the transition from Believing Youth social movement to the Houthi insurgency, absent in Bayat's typology, are the unique frames of the

Houthi leadership and the escalating regime-challenger interactions they reproduced.

A social movement framework, as discussed in this chapter, is a novel approach to understanding the Houthi conflict. In contrasts markedly with conventional explanations for the war (explored below) that tend to essentialize the motives of the Houthis and obscure the historical roots and Zaydi revivalist periodization that predate the emergence of the Houthi group. In fact, the social movement approach of this study emerged as a direct consequence of the shortcomings of the conflict's mainstream explanations.

20 CHAPTER III

THE HOUTHI CONFLICT SINCE 2004

An account of the Houthi rebellion since 2004 nevertheless provides a useful starting point for a deeper and more historical analysis of the Houthis as a radical outgrowth of an older and larger Zaydi revivalist social movement. For one thing, the vast majority of news reports and many scholarly analyses of the insurgency are largely ahistorical, placing the origins of the Saada conflict only as far back as the first round of fighting in 2004. To the extent that they give deference to the roots of Zaydi revivalism in the 1980s or the emergence of the

Believing Youth as a radical faction in the 1990s, they often do so only in passing reference to the overthrow of the Zaydi imamate back in 1962.

This trend in analysis of the war is in one sense logical; the recent conflict is complicated enough in its own right, and the actual armed clashes between the

Houthis and the Yemeni army that provide the impetus for most reporting do not predate 2004. In another sense, however, such a limited window of analysis tends to draw international connections in what remains a largely subnational conflict. It also obscures long-term and more fundamental motivations for the emergence of the Houthis, like growing Wahhabi influence in Saada and a corresponding Zaydi revivalism, and stops short of fully contextualizing the

Houthis' use of violence.

21 Inconsistent local and regional media coverage of the war since 2004 make navigating the competing claims of the regime and the Houthi leadership an extremely difficult task. A already complicated chronology, rough and sometimes contradictory statistics, and the polemical allegations levied by both sides have only been exacerbated by a news and travel embargo in Saada imposed by the government from the war's earliest stages.3s

As a result, some conventional explanations of the conflict tend to overemphasize the importance of the Houthi's anti-US rhetoric and largely adopt

Sanaa's counterterrorist framing of the rebellion. Others make inferences from allegations of foreign meddling, viewing the conflict in the end as a proxy war between regional antagonists Iran and Saudi Arabia. Still others focus on the inherent charisma of successive frontmen from the Houthi family-Husayn, his father Baddredin, and brother Abdel Malik-and their ability to imbue followers with fanatical devotion to a kind of 'cult of the leader.' Finally, even some accounts that give weight to local causes of the conflict highlight rebel motivations of material gain and resource or rent capture (consistent with 'greed'

35 Many scholarly and well-researched studies include such disclaimers: "Because of the [Yemeni] government's blackout on information from and travel to Sa'dah province during the conflict, few indisputable facts are available. Unverifiable estimates of causalities vary widely ... " See J.E. Peterson, "The al-Huthi Conflict in Yemen." Arabian Peninsula Background Note, no. APBN-oo6 (August 2008): 3; "The full scale of the violence and its impact remain unclear... Total casualties (civilian, rebel and military) are subject to much conjecture by local journalists and civil society." See "Yemen: Defusing the Saada Time Bomb." International Crisis Group Middle East Report, no. 86 (27 May 2009). http:/ jwww.crisisgroup.org/homejindex.cfm?id=6113 (accessed March 19, 2010): 5 (footnote 21). 22 explanations of insurgency), rather than 'grievance' motives that are arguably more applicable in the case of the Houthis.36

None ofthese explanations are 'straw man' arguments; all have some foundation in the course of the rebellion since 2004 and contribute important, partial explanations for the spread and-importantly-intractability of the war.

The role of external actors (Saudi Arabia intervened militarily against the

Houthis from its southern border in November 2009) may be a particularly cogent case of reality catching up with rhetoric.

Nevertheless, some of these mainstream explanations fall victim at times to the influence of the propagandizing of each side. More importantly, all suffer from a degree of myopia by excluding a historical social movement approach that can explain the rise of the Believing Youth and the Houthis within Zaydi society, and thus isolate their root grievances and goals. Given this context, vital to grasping the what the Houthi movement represents is appreciating what it does not (but is often purported to) represent. To the extent that they offer competing levels of analysis to social movement theory, moreover, an evaluation of mainstream explanations for the conflict is useful in justifying the approach of this study. It is therefore important to place conventional explanations in as detailed and objective a history of the war as possible, before evaluating the theoretical underpinnings and explanative power of each, in turn.

36 For an explanation of the greed and grievance typology, see Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, "Greed and Grievance in Civil War." The Center of African Economies Working Paper Series, no. 160 (2002). http:/ jwww.bepress.com/cgijviewcontent.cgi?article=ll61&context=csae (accessed March 19, 2010). 23 This chapter begins with an examination of the events surrounding the outbreak of war between the Houthis and the Yemeni regime. Because Husayn al

Houthi's mobilizing slogan and the Believing Youth's subsequent protest movement are key elements of the transition from social to insurrectionary movement analyzed in subsequent chapters, the early history of the conflict is an important (and natural) starting point. The chapter then moves to a characterization oflater rounds of the war, examining six hallmarks of its progression from 2005-2010 that lay the foundation for many mainstream explanations. Finally, this chapter evaluates the theoretical underpinnings and causal power of each conventional explanation, identifying gaps in the analysis that can be filled by a social movement approach.

Origin of Hostilities, 2003-2004

The outbreak of war can be traced to January 2003, when members ofthe

Believing Youth began shouting anti-American and anti-Israeli slogans during

Friday prayers in Saada.37 The ritual itself originated in a sermon Husayn bin

Baddredin al Houthi delivered to worshippers at the Imam al Hadi religious institute in Marran (in Saada province) a year earlier. In the wake of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001 and early in the run-up to the Iraq war, al

Houthi urged followers to resist what he saw as "American ignorance" and encouraged them to integrate his slogan into the movement:

37 According to local sources, the shout became: God is great! Death to America! Death to Israel! Curse upon the Jews! Victory to Islam! See "Yemen: Defusing the Saada Time Bomb,"3 (footnote s). 24 For how long more should we keep doing nothing in response to the American ignorance .. .I say to you, my brothers, shout! Don't you have the ability to shout: God is the Greatest ... Death to America and Israel...Victory for Islam and Muslims? Don't you think that it is possible for every one of you to make this shout? This shout is a great honor for us to have, right here in this school. By making this shout now, we will be the first who made the shout, which, is sure, will be made not only in this hall but in other places. With God's will, you shall find those who will make the shout with you in other places. Make this shout with me: Death to America and Israel!38

The phenomenon alarmed President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who-observing the disruption first-hand at a Saada mosque-interpreted the refrain as a veiled threat to the state. By no means disavowing the critique of US and Israeli policies in the region generally, Saleh was wary of the implicit challenge to his regime at a time when Yemen was quietly intensifying cooperation with the U.S. in specific counterterrorism operations. Close coordination between U.S. and Yemeni intelligence and military apparatuses began with the investigation of the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, and deepened further still after September 11, 2001.39

Viewing the demonstrations and their incitement against the US as a threat to the legitimacy of his regime, the Yemeni president accused al Houthi of"harming

Yemen's stability and interests."4°

Sanaa initially responded to the demonstrations with attempts at reconciliation, inviting al Houthi to the capital to discuss Zaydi grievances. AI

38 Khaled Fattah, "Yemen: A slogan and six wars," Asia Times Online, 9 October 2009, http:/ /www.atimes.comjatimesjMiddle_EastjKJo9Ak02.html (accessed March 19, 2010).

39 Mark Katz, "U.S.-Yemen Relations and the War on Terror: A Portrait of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Salih," Terrorism Monitor, vol. 2, is. 7 (19 May 2005), http: I jwww .jamestown.org/ single/?no_cache= 1&tx_ttnews%sBtt_news%sD=404 (accessed March 19, 2010).

4° "Yemen: Defusing the Saada Time Bomb," 3 (footnote 6); Brian Whitaker, "Conflict in Saada." Middle East International. 9 July 2004. 25 Houthi resisted the overture, however, and began encouraging locals in Saada to withhold taxes to the central government-an affront not lost on the regime.41

Throughout 2003 and early 2004, moreover, Believing Youth members heeded al

Houthi's call and began taking protests out of the mosques and into the streets.

His supporters scrawled the refrain on the sides of government offices in Saada and distributed leaflets decrying the Saada governor, Brigadier General Yahya al

Aamri, as a CIA agent. 42

Tensions with Sanaa finally came to a head when the Believing Youth moved the street demonstrations from Saada to the capital, mobilizing hundreds of members in and outside the city's Grand Mosque by June 2004. Complicating matters for the regime, Friday prayers at the Grand Mosque are regularly televised, bringing national attention to the protestors' cause when they unfurled a "Death to America, Death to Israel" banner.43

In a rapid response, the government arrested and temporarily jailed some

6oo-8oo Believing Youth and Zaydi protesters in Sanaa in June, and announced a police action campaign to arrest al Houthi in his stronghold in the mountains of

4 1 Jack Freeman, "The al Houthi Insurgency in the North of Yemen: An Analysis of the Shabab al Moumineen." Studies in Conflifct & Terrorism, val. 32, is. 11 (November 2009), 1009; al Haqq (Zaydi party) Secretary General Hassan Zaid lamented al Houthi's delay, believing "The meeting could have eliminated Saleh's fears about Husayn's [al-Houthi] intentions," see "Yemen: The conflict in Saada Governorate- analysis." Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN), UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 24 July 2008, http:/ jwww.unhcr.orgjrefworldjdocid/488f180d1e.html (accessed March 19, 2010).

42 Khaled Fattah, "Yemen: A slogan and six wars."

43 Lisa Weeden, Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 153. 26 the Hayden district southwest of Saada city.44 In his indictment, Husayn al

Houthi was variously charged by the government with establishing a militia, supplanting the national flag, inciting sectarian strife (fitna),4s and spreading extremist ideology. 46

Expectedly, al Houthi and his supporters did not take the indictment lying down. Preparing for an incursion by the paramilitary police initially dispatched to arrest their accused leader, the Houthis undertook preemptive guerilla action in the Marran region of Saada province. Tribal supporters of al Houthi blockaded the major highway from the capital, preventing the entry of al Aamri (the Saada governor, and a military appointee) into Hayden. Houthi fighters also occupied government buildings in Saada, overran strategic mountain-top posts, and attacked local police checkpoints.47 Sanaa responded to the violence by

44 Accounts vary as to the scale of the arrests. See Iris Glosemeyer and Don Reneau, "Local Conflict, Global Spin: An Uprising in the Yemeni Highlands," Middle East Report, no. 232 (Autumn, 2004): 44; "Yemen: The conflict in Saada Governorate- analysis."

45 Fitna can be a loaded term; sometimes translated as "sedition," the Arabic here may have been used as a conscious allusion to the 'First Fitna' or Islamic Civil War, between Muawiya and Ali (hailed by Shiis as the first imam) over the succession of the Caliphate. As Humphrey Fisher, a researcher at the Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Bergen in Norway, notes,"in whatever particular context.fitna may be perceived, it is almost always a context within the Muslim community setting believer against believer." See Fisher, "Text-centered research: Fitna as a case study and a way forward for guests in the house of African historiography," Sudanic Africa, vol. 5 (1994): 225-260, http:/ fwww.smi.uib.no/sa/05/5Fisher.pdf (accessed March 19, 2010).

46 Weeden, 153; J.E. Peterson, "The al-Huthi Conflict in Yemen," 5; SABA (Yemeni state news agency), as quoted in Hammoud Mounasser, "Mediators Try to Persuade Yemeni Scholar to Surrender," AFP, 27 June 2004.

47 Glosemeyer and Reneau, 44-45. 27 dispatching a large convoy of Yemeni regular army reinforcements to engage the

Houthi fighters, who probably numbered in the hundreds at the time.48

Characteristic of the opposing Houthi and state narratives imposed on each of the conflict's six rounds, the government also stepped up its rhetoric. On the eve of war in late June military and government officials accused al Houthi of adopting his own flag, "roughing up" students of local Sunni religious schools, and-in a provocative reference to the Zaydi imamate that fell in the 1962 republican revolution-declaring himself imam. Saleh, speaking on behalf of what he deemed the "will of the nation," also brushed aside the anti-American and anti-Israeli protests as a "pretext" to win al Houthi popularity. 49 In the midst of the press offensive, the Saleh regime also dispatched a last minute mediation party consisting of three members of parliament, including (Zaydi party) al Haqq lawmaker and Husayn's brother Yahya al Houthi, to convince Husayn to disarm and surrender.

When mediation stalled, al Houthi fought back in the war of words, attempting to defuse the situation in a handwritten letter to Saleh, reprinted in the Yemen Times on June 28, 2004. In his appeal, addressed (rather deferentially) to "His Excellency, President of the Republic, Brother Ali Abdullah

48 Figures vary. An estimate of 200 Houthi fighters at the outbreak of hostilities was made by al Haqq Secretary General Hassan Zaid. See "Yemen: The conflict in Saada Governorate­ analysis." Other sources put al Houthi's Believing Youth supporters at the time much higher, at several thousand. See Andrew McGregor, "Shi'ite Insurgency in Yemen: Iranian Intervention or Mountain Revolt?" Terrorism Monitor, vol. 2, is. 16 (10 May 2005), http:/ jwww.jamestown.orgjsinglej?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=367 (accessed March 19, 2010).

49 Whitaker, "Conflict in Saada;" Mounasser, "Mediators Try to Persuade Yemeni Scholar to Surrender;" Weeden, 153. 28 Saleh,"so al Houthi drew on unifying concepts such as the nation and the umma and went to lengths to contextualize the contentious slogan:

.. I have met with [the mediation party] and we talked about many issues, including your displeasure with me. This has astonished me since I am certain that I have done nothing that would have led to such a feeling. I do not work against you, I appreciate you and what you do tremendously, but what I do is my solemn national duty against the enemy of Islam and the community... America and Israel. I am by your side, so do not listen to hypocrites and provocateurs, and trust that I am more sincere and honest to you than they are. 51

AI Houthi's appeal had little effect. Also characteristic of the conflict's later stages, the regime eventually resorted to force to capture the rebel leader while negotiations were still considered ongoing. Such a move is dangerous in the

Yemeni context, in particular, because attacks during periods of mediation are strictly condemned under triballaw.S2 What began as a police action quickly escalated into a bloody two-month long battle as Houthi fighters dug in to the surrounding mountains in Marran. The rugged terrain helped to slow the army's advance and afforded the Houthis excellent defensive positions via networks of caves.s3 Some observers drew parallels between the insurgents' use of narrow

so Whitaker, "Conflict in Saada."

51 Weeden,155.

52 Glosemeyer and Reneau, 45·

53 The rugged terrain in much of Saada province-and the mountains of Marran in particular-are contributing factors to the longevity and intractability of the conflict. See Freeman, 1013. The salience of the terrain variable is supported by research. In a Iarge-N study of the conditions that breed insurgency and civil war, Fearon and Laitin show a significant relationship between mountainous regions and rates of civil war, finding "insurgency is favored by rough terrain." See James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, "Ethnicity, Insurgency and Civil War," American Political Science Review 97 (February 2003): 76, 85; Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler also find a small, but significant relationship between civil war and mountainous terrain. See Collier and Hoeffler, "Greed and Grievance in Civil War." 29 mountain passes as choke points and a historic Zaydi victory over a column of invading Ottoman soldiers in 1904.s4

Figure 2. North Yemen. Photograph by Nadia Sala Aisha, 24 October 2008.

Although the government claimed it had seized Houthi heavy weaponry such as rocket-propelled grenades and anti-personnel land mines, the relatively lightly-armed Houthi fighters were severely outnumbered and outgunned by a military offensive that came to include over 2000 troops, tanks, jets, and helicopter gunships by July.ss A final combined assault was successful in killing

54 Andrew McGregor, "Shi'ite Insurgency in Yemen: Iranian Intervention or Mountain Revolt?"

55 Peterson, "The al-Huthi Conflict in Yemen," 6; McGregor, "Shi'ite Insurgency in Yemen: Iranian Intervention or Mountain Revolt?" 30 Husayn al Houthi and a number of fighters on September 10, 2004, with government declarations that the war was over.s6

A 'Protracted' Conflict, 2005-2010

Sanaa's assertion that the rebellion had been put down was to prove premature, however. The civil war raged on and off through five more stages- with sporadic clashes even during periods of relative calm-until early 2010, when the Houthis accepted conditions for a ceasefire to bring a (likely temporary) end to the fighting as of this writing.s7 Each round bore new evidence of an escalating conflict-in terms of a succession of leaders from the Houthi family, an expanding battlefield in and outside of Saada, an increasingly aggressive posture by both Houthi fighters and government forces, mounting civilian casualties and damage to infrastructure, a growing tribal dimension to the fighting, and seemingly fruitless mediation efforts. Understanding how each of these six factors have contributed to the intractability of the conflict is important to contextualizing the logic behind many conventional explanations for the rebellion over the last six years. As Gregory Johnsen notes, "The protracted nature of the war has also led to evolving justifications for the continuation of the conflict."s8

56 J.E. Peterson, "The al-Huthi Conflict in Yemen," 7·

57 Robert F. Worth, "Yemen's Government Agrees to a Ceasefire with Rebel Forces". New York Times. 11 February 2010. http:/ jwww.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/world/middleeast/12yemen.html (accessed March 19, 2010).

58 Gregory D. Johnsen, "The Sixth War in Sa'dah." Islam and Insurgency in Yemen (Waq al Waq) Blog, entry posted 25 August 2009, http: I I islamandinsurgencyinyemen. blogspot.com/ 2009/ o8I sixth-war-in -sadah.html (accessed March 19, 2010). Johnsen is a PhD candidate, researcher, and Yemen expert at Princeton University. He has authored numerous publications and articles relating to the Houthi conflict 31 Houthi Family Leadership

Through the course of the war, various members of the Houthi family have maintained exclusive leadership of the rebel group. Within a year of Husayn's death, his father Baddredin al Houthi, a respected Zaydi religious figure, assumed leadership of the Believing Youth.s9 Baddredin claimed that his son

Husayn had merely sought to defend Islam and denied accusations that he sought to restore a Zaydi imamate. He declared that "any just believer" had the right to rule Yemen, but insisted that President Saleh was unwilling to address core issues left over from the opening stage of war-such as a general prisoner release.6o Under Baddredin's leadership of the Houthis, a second and third round of war raged in 2005-6.

With the elder Baddredin's death from natural causes in February 2006, his son (and Husayn's brother) Abdel Malik took the reigns of the rebellion.

Abdel Malik, a longtime field commander for the fighters, seemed to use the relative calm of 2006 to rearm and regroup before fighting renewed in a fourth

(and others) in Yemen, and together with Brian O'Neill (a former writer for the Yemen Observer and published Yemeni analyst his own right) maintains a widely-regarded blog called Waq al­ Waq (cited above).

59 Though probably as a spiritual leader, as the elder Baddredin had not participated in the first round and lacked combat experience.

6o "al-'Alama Baddredin al Houthi to al Wasat: The government has not handed over Husayn's body and I doubt his death." al Wasat (Sanaa weekly). 9 March 2005. As cited in Shaun Overton, "Understanding the Second Houthi Rebellion in Yemen." Terrorism Monitor, vol. 3, is. 12 (17 June 2005), http:/ jwww.jamestown.orgjsinglej?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=508 (accessed March 19, 2010). al Wasat, a Sanaa-based weekly, had its license revoked by the Yemeni government in 2008, citing violations of the Press and Publications Law, and specifically, harming Yemen's relationship with Saudi Arabia. 32 and fifth round in 2007-8. Abdel Malik remains the Houthi's current leader, and led supporters in the sixth and most deadly round of fighting (August 2009 -

February 2010) that also drew Saudi Arabia into clashes with the rebels along the northern border.

A final member of the family has played an integral role off the battlefield.

After a short stint as a mediator in failed negotiations with his brother Husayn in

2004, Yahya al Houthi quickly achieved prominence as an expatriate spokesperson for the rebels. From exile posts in Sweden, Libya, and more recently Germany, Yahya has given frequent interviews and press statements in an attempt to preserve the Houthi counter-narrative in the face of Sanaa's news blackout. Although by 2007 Sanaa sought Yahya's extradition from Libya and began a process to strip him of parliamentary immunity, he represented Houthi interests across the table from regime officials at the Doha accord negotiations in

2008 and continues to give a voice to Houthi grievances. 61

The prominence of a single family in the rebellion, and their relative success in guiding it through each of its six stages, is often interpreted as a factor in the stubborn persistence of the conflict. The semi-hereditary leadership of the rebel group, together with the apparent fanatical devotion of their followers, is

61 Peterson, "The al-Huthi Conflict in Yemen," 10. Recall that Yahya al Houthi was a Member of Parliament in 2004. While it may seem strange that Sanaa would dispatch Husayn al Houthi's brother as part of a mediation party, he was well positioned as an intermediary on account of being both a lawmaker and a sayyid (a lineal descendent of the house of the Prophet, and traditionally valued in Yemeni tribal dispute resolution). Interestingly, Yayha was initially quoted in 2004 as saying Husayn was a "criminal" and an "embarrassment," laying the blame for the negotiation's failure squarely with his brother (only later, after the involvement of his father and what he viewed as an overreaction by the government, did Yahya embrace the rebel cause). See John R. Bradley, "A Warning from Yemen, cradle of the Arab world," The Daily Star. 13 July 2004, http:/ jwww.dailystar.com.lbjarticle.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=s&article_id=6182 (accessed March 19, 2010). 33 cited as evidence for an explanation of the rebellion as a charismatic leadership cult surrounding the Houthi family. According to Hassan Zaid, Secretary-General of the al Haqq party, followers of Husayn al Houthi did refer to the leader as sidi

(my lord).62 In addition, Believing Youth co-founder Mohammed Ezzan claims that under al Houthi's leadership starting in 2000, the group's strong reverence for the sadah (singular sayyid) and complete deference and respect for an almost-holy al Houthi split its ranks; Ezzan alleged that only a radical fraction of the Believing Youth actually followed Houthi into battle in 2004.63

Other forms of charismatic legitimacy arose only after fighting broke out.

One source notes that the "martyrdom" of Husayn al Houthi in 2004 and his elderly father's quick rise to leadership helped to solidify the legitimacy of the family-led movement in the eyes of the local population.64 A Houthi supporter confirmed the view, arguing that the death of Husayn does not diminish his charismatic claims to the movement's leadership:

It doesn't matter if he is alive or dead. What matters is that he is the leader. That is, in terms of ideology and the Houthis' philosophy, Hussein is the leader ... The Houthis' strategic outlook and ideology are taken from Hussein's books. Even [his brother] 'Abd Al-Malik says this. He says, 'everything we have comes from my brother, Hussein.'6s

62 "Yemen: The conflict in Saada Governorate- analysis."

63 Hakim al Masmari, "Interview: Mohammed Yahya Ezan, Founder ofthe Believing Youth (Houthis First Movement)," Yemen Post, 9 November 2009, http:/ jwww.yemenpost.net/Detaih23456789.aspx?ID=1oo&SubiD=1546&MainCat=4 (accessed March 19, 2010).

64 Freeman, 1009.

65 "Yemeni Shi'ite Cleric and Houthi Disciple 'Issam Al-'Imad: Our Leader Houthi is Close to Khamenei; We Are Influenced Religiously and Ideologically By Iran." Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Special Dispatch No. 2627 (2 November 2009), http:/ /www.memri.org/report/en/o/o/o/o/o/o/3757·htm (accessed March 19, 2010): excerpts 34 For his part, current leader Abdel Malik al Houthi has been described as a

"charismatic" speaker gifted in delivering eloquent, impromptu speeches.66

Aggressive Tactics

A growing humanitarian footprint also became a hallmark of the war's successive rounds. Damage to homes and infrastructure and increasing levels of civilian casualties stemmed from more aggressive tactics by the Houthis and government forces that expanded the battlefield well beyond Saada. In 2005-6, for example, fighting was initially concentrated in mountainous rural areas north and west of Saada city (as in Husayn's last stand in 2004). After suffering heavy losses, however, the Houthis changed tack and took the fight from rural highlands into cities and towns. 67

The rebels adopted bolder guerilla tactics throughout the war, at one point activating a cell of fighters for grenade attacks on military convoys and assassination attempts of key security personnel in and around the capitaJ.68

More recently, Sanaa has accused the Houthis of perpetrating brazen and deadly attacks on civilians and security personnel at pro-government and

Salafi/Wahhabi mosques in and around Saada-charges the rebels vehemently from a 28 September 2009 interview given by Issam al Imad to Iranian news website ayandenews.com.

66 Hamida Ghafour, "Rebel without a Clear Cause," The National, 21 August 2009, http://www. thenational.ae I a pps/ pbcs.dll/ article?AID= j20090822/WEEKENDER/708219838 (accessed March 19, 2010).

67 Peterson, "The al-Huthi Conflict in Yemen," 8; Overton, "Understanding the Second Houthi Rebellion in Yemen."

68 Overton, "Understanding the Second Houthi Rebellion in Yemen;" Freeman, 1013. 35 deny. A shootout between alleged Houthi supporters and police at a mosque in

Harf Sufyan (Am ran province) in 2006 killed four, a gun battle at the Sunni

Islamist school in Dammaj (north of Saada city) killed several students­ including a Frenchman and Briton-in 2007, and a Yemeni soldier was killed in a firefight during Friday prayers at a mosque southwest of Saada in 2008.69

Likewise, three were killed and more than 30 injured when suspected Houthi fighters burst into a mosque in Amran in 2007 and set worshippers on fire, and a motorcycle rigged to explode outside a mosque in Saada in 2008 killed dozens of soldiers.7°

For its part, the government also increased its aggressive posture throughout the war, relying more and more on heavy artillery and airstrikes to pound Houthi positions. If civilians in the early fighting faced food and medicine shortages from military blockades of key access roads in Saada, the regime's use of artillery, tanks, and jets against Houthi fighters in populated areas in the war's later stages caused hundreds of civilian casualties and widespread displacement and destruction. When the military's shelling of a petrol station killed 15 civilians in May 2007, for example, the government defended the attack by framing the location as a key rebel fuel depot.71 Despite difficult access to affected areas, the

69 Peterson, "The al-Huthi Conflict in Yemen," 9-10, 12.

7° Peterson, "The al-Huthi Conflict in Yemen," 10, 12.

71 Peterson, "The al-Huthi Conflict in Yemen," 11.

36 increasing devastation to civilian populations prompted an official inquiry from

Amnesty International.72

Civilian Deaths and Displacement

Both the Houthis' strategic decision to expand the battlefield well beyond

Saada and the government's indiscriminate shelling have steadily increased the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs), and further complicated ceasefire attempts. By 2008, the Red Cross alone was providing shelter and potable water to as many as 8o,ooo IDPs and the European Union had pledged a million-euro relief package.73 In 2008-9, six IDP camps had been established around Saada city to house some of the more than 175,000 displaced Yemenis.74 One camp in

Mazraq holds 15,000 people alone, with 900 (mostly women and children) arriving daily.7s Many of those arriving are fleeing farmland vulnerable to the military's aerial bombardment, exacerbating the food crisis in an already low- productive period in local agriculture.76

72 McGregor, "Shi'ite Insurgency in Yemen: Iranian Intervention or Mountain Revolt?"

73 Peterson, "The al-Huthi Conflict in Yemen," 3·

74 IDP figures,tend to underestimate dislocations, as many Yemenis fleeing the fighting seek shelter with extended family living outside the conflict zone. See, "Yemen: Thousands of IDPs unable to return home," Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN), UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 28 July 2008, http:/ jwww.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportiD=79474 (accessed March 19, 2010). The figure may now be as high as 250,000. See Jeffrey Feltman, "Yemen on the Brink: Implications for U.S. Policy" (remarks delivered to House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Washington, DC, 3 February 2010), http:/ jwww.state.gov/p/nea/rlsjrm/136499-htm (accessed March 19, 2010).

7s Sudarsan Raghavan, "Rebel conflict heightens humanitarian crisis in Yemen." Washington Post. 21 November 2009, http:/ jwww.washingtonpost.com/wp­ dynjcontent/article/2009/11/2o/AR2009112004052.html (accessed March 19, 2010).

76 "Yemen: Thousands ofiDPs unable to return home." 37 Arbitrary Detentions

The regime's use of mass arrest sweeps since 2004 has exacerbated the

conflict as well. Independent Yemeni NGOs and human rights groups claim that

as many as 3,000 citizens have been detained throughout the war, the vast

majority of whom were jailed incommunicado and often remain unidentified by

family members who fear backlash if they report detainees officially.77 The waves

of arrests, many on the basis of mere suspected family, tribal, or political

connections to the Houthis (or simple Zaydi religious affiliation), play a key role

in aggravating the conflict.

First, they galvanize local latent support for the Houthi cause by affirming

the rebels' claims that the government is inherently anti-Zaydi.78 Second, they

blur the line between the Zaydi al Haqq party, which has eschewed violence, and

the Houthi fighters. AI Haqq Secretary-General Hassan Zaid claims that the

government frequently arrests al Haqq party activists simply "to prevent them

from joining the Houthis."79 Third, although often paired with mass pardons or

amnesty, large-scale arrests may have the unintended consequence of directly

fueling the insurgency, as released prisoners often have a new or renewed interest

n Abdul-Rashid al-Faqih, head the local NGO Hiwar Forum, as quoted in "Yemen: The conflict in Saada Governorate- analysis."

78 A case made by Mohammed Ezzan, co-founder and former member of the Believing Youth. See Hakim al Masmari, "Interview: Mohammed Yahya Ezan, Founder of the Believing Youth (Houthis First Movement)." Yemen Post, 9 November 2009, http:/ jwww.yemenpost.net/Detail123456789.aspx?ID=1oo&SubiD=1546&MainCat=4 (accessed March 19, 2010 ).

79 Hakim al Masmari, "Interview: Hasan Zaid, President of the Opposition Parties (JMP), General Secretary of Al-Haq Party," Yemen Post, 6 July 2009, http:/ jwww.yemenpost.netjDetail123456789.aspx?ID=3&SubiD=1012&MainCat=4 (accessed March 19, 2010). 38 in supporting the rebels.8o According to Radiyah al-Mutawakel, a local human rights activist, "Such practices have played a role in extending the war. The first thing they think when they are set free is how to go and support the al-Houthi group."81

The Tribal Dimension

The expanding battlefield and growing numbers of civilians displaced or killed during fighting has also been a direct result of the involvement of tribal militia in the conflict's later rounds. A tribal dimension may have emerged as early as 2005, when clashes between pro-government and pro-Houthi tribes probably sparked the third round of fighting. 82 As the Houthis accused the government of deploying Saudi-financed tribal militia from the Hashid federation, fighting in 2007-8 spread well outside Saada to neighboring Amran,

Hajjah, and Dhamar provinces as well as the Bani Hushaysh area just north of

Sanaa. In 2007, Prime Minister Ali Muhammed Mujawwar conceded that thousands of "volunteers" had been recruited by Sanaa to combat the rebels. 83

so To Sanaa's credit, in addition to prisoner releases, the government took several steps at reconciliation during the second and third rounds-including sustained mediation efforts, a pardon for Baddredin (which he ultimately rejected), and compensation for the families of Husayn al Houthi and the descendants of the last Hamid ad Din Imams. See Peterson, "The al­ Huthi Conflict in Yemen," 8-9.

Bl "Yemen: The conflict in Saada Governorate- analysis."

s2 "Yemen: Defusing the Saada Time Bomb," 3.

83 Peterson, "The al-Huthi Conflict in Yemen," 10. 39 Yemen Administrative Divisions

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The involvement of tribes in the conflict has led many observers to argue that it has become the principle cause of the protracted war. Although the government may have recruited militia from the Hashid federation, Houthi destruction of Hashid farmland in Saada and Hashid responses of kidnapping may indicate that tribal feuds (thar) are breathing life into the conflict even during periods of detente and ceasefire. 84 The alignment of tribes into pro- government Hasid tribesmen and pro-rebel groups of the Bakil federation (its

84 Johnsen, "The Sixth War in Sa'dah;" "Yemen: Defusing the Saada Time Bomb," 14. 40 traditional rival) is not so simple, however. A Bakilleader has rejected the notion that the entire federation is aligned with the Houthis; generally, the Bakil group is larger and less monolithic than its Hashid counterpart, resulting in internal divisions and shifting alliances.

Mohammed Thabit, director of the Saada reconstruction fund, blames the media for framing unrelated local tribal disputes as major developments in the war: "The problem is that whenever fighting occurs between two tribes around

Saada, the media tend to describe it as between Huthis and [the] government, based on politics or religion and amounting to a ceasefire breach. It is none of the above."ss Still, the involvement of tribes in the Houthi conflict-along federation lines or a product of local disputes; real or imagined-has played a significant role in extending the life of the war.

Failed Mediation

Finally, the regular failure of mediation efforts throughout the conflict­ more a symptom than a cause ofthe prolonged war-is intimately related to all of aggravating factors just mentioned. Increased destruction to populated areas in

Saada from the military's inaccurate (or indiscriminate86) bombing raises the stakes in negotiations by requiring a provision for reconstruction and refugee relocation efforts. The Houthis' guerilla tactics and assassination of military and security leaders, in turn, reduce Sanaa's confidence in having a good-faith

ss "Yemen: Defusing the Saada Time Bomb." 14.

86 "Yemen: Defusing the Saada Time Bomb," ii.

41 partner in peace talks. Houthi fighters captured by Yemeni soldiers and mass arrests of suspected supporters, as well as Yemeni soldiers held by the rebels,87 also complicate mediation efforts. Finally, the involvement of tribal groups allied to each side increases the likelihood that (often unrelated) tribal disputes flare into open conflict, drawing in the principle belligerents and prematurely ending periods of calm during and after mediation efforts.

The only outlier in a pattern of failed mediations was the short-lived success of a Qatari effort that produced a peace accord in Doha in February

2008-including disarmament protocols and (promisingly) Qatari-pledged reconstruction funds. 88 By 2008, the history of the conflict and frayed trust between the Houthis and the regime had clearly warranted this kind of third- party strategy. As with internal mediation attempts, however, peace unraveled quickly due to sporadic (often tribal) clashes and difficulty in sequencing the parties' ceasefire obligations. 89 The implementation and verification of ceasefires and peace agreements, a difficult task under ideal circumstances in any war, has become a Sisyphean challenge in the Houthi conflict.

87 The Houthis are not above politicizing prisoner releases either, making the subject a sensitive one in negotiation attempts. In September 2009, a Houthi statement announced the release of captured Yemeni soldiers of southern origin, in solidarity with southern secessionist leader Tariq al Fadhli. See Hammoud Mounassar, "Yemen troops pound northern rebels with artillery," AFP, 29 September 2009, http:/ jwww.google.com/hostednews/afpjarticle/ALeqMsgTJQKwao6WhkCobttXml_dQqM?mw (accessed March 19, 2010).

88 "Yemen: Defusing the Saada Time Bomb," 21.

89 The Qatari mediation party accused both sides of failing to implement key protocols, especially prisoner exchanges. Qatari representatives laid more blame on the Houthis, however, whom they claim had violated the ceasefire (as elements of the Doha peace accord were being implemented) as many as 200 times. See Peterson, "The al-Huthi Conflict in Yemen," 11. 42 Conventional Explanations for the War

Against this backdrop of the war's outbreak in 2004, and evolution and

entrenchment from 2005-2010, conventional explanations for the conflict stake

their claim. These mainstream explanations broadly draw on four narratives that

characterize the Houthis as either a terrorist group; a charismatic leadership cult;

pawns in a regional proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia; or, finally,

resource-seeking separatists. While these accounts are in competition with each

other, all also oppose the general logic of a social movement approach used in

this study. By evaluating their explanative power , this section seeks to isolate

areas in each narrative that fail to account for the emergence and radicalization of

the Houthi movement and that can be more accurately explained under a social

movement analysis.

The Counterterrorist Argument

One common trend by observers, for example, has been to characterize the

Houthis as neither rebels nor insurgents but terrorists. The counterterrorism framing has at least three origins. First, ahistorical explanations for the conflict seize upon Husayn al Houthi and the Believing Youth's anti-US and anti-Israeli sloganeering in 2004 as the primary cause of war. Second, on a tactical level, the

Houthis' strategy has allegedly evolved to include acts of terrorism alongside traditional guerilla maneuvers. Third, the Yemeni government (largely for political purposes) has effectively portrayed the Houthis as terrorists from the conflict's outset through official statements, speeches, and state-controlled media. 43 While the Houthis deny they have perpetrated terror attacks, it is difficult

to imagine that at least loosely-affiliated Houthi fighters were not behind the

brazen shootings, bombings, and immolation of mosque worshippers in Saada

during the war's later stages. Part of the tactical change from guerilla to mixed

guerilla-terrorist operations may have reflected the group's leadership changes.

As one civil society activist put it in 2009, "We trusted Husein al Huthi and knew

that he would not attack foreigners, but we now feel less confident with the new,

more ideological militants."9°

More generally, by taking the fight from mountain passes into populated

areas in 2005, the Houthi are partially to blame for mounting civilian casualties

during recent fighting. In this, perhaps, reclassifying the Houthis as something

other than rebels or insurgents is probably apt. James Fearon and David Laitin

define insurgency as "a technology of military conflict characterized by small,

lightly armed bands practicing guerilla warfare from rural base areas." They also

note that these methods have often been deployed by "Islamic fundamentalists,"

among other characteristic groups. Leaving aside the ambiguity of the phrase

"Islamic fundamentalists," under this definition the Houthis have clearly

augmented the rural defensive posture of Husyan in 2004 to include urban

offensives (and, likely, isolated acts of terror) in the war's successive rounds.

Moreover, Sanaa has seized upon the shifting Houthi tactics to repeatedly brand them as "terrorists." By 2009, the Yemeni government had grouped the

Houthi rebels with known al Qaeda operatives in a single list of wanted

9° "Yemen: Defusing the Saada Time Bomb," 13 (footnote 87). 44 terrorists.91 The logic behind this move is easy to infer, according to Gregory

Johnsen, given the post-9/11 relationship between Saleh and the US:

The Yemeni government has learned that in order to attract the attention (and aid) of the international community, it must link its domestic problems to larger regional or American security concerns. To this end, Yemen has deliberately confused Houthi supporters withal Qa'eda, blurring the lines between the two groups by including members of both on a single list of wanted terrorists. This tactic, it believes, will allow it to pursue the war against the Houthis under the guise of striking at al­ Qa'eda.92

Lately, Sanaa has gone as far as to allege that some al Qaeda operatives have flocked to the Houthi cause. 93

By the conflict's later rounds, the Yemeni government had deployed special forces like the US-trained and equipped Counterterrorism Unit (CTU) in the Saada war. 94 Sanaa has also made good on its rhetoric by trying Believing

Youth activists and 'sympathetic' journalists under a special criminal court established in the wake of September 11.95 Finally, the Yemeni government has

91 Radwan Faria, "Yemeni Intelligence Services Publish a List of Wanted Arabs and Yemenis,"Mareb Press (independent Yemeni online news website), 16 February 2009, http:/ jwww.marebpress.net/news_details.php?lang=arabic&sid=15135 (accessed March 19, 2010 ). [AR]-here and elsewhere, this denotes a source in Arabic.

92 Johnsen, "The Sixth War in Sa'dah."

93 "President of Parliament: Yemen's preoccupation with the war on the Houthis have led al Qaeda remnants to migrate to them," Mareb Press, 26 January 2010, http:/ jmarebpress.netjnews_details.php?sid=21838&lng=arabic (accessed March 19, 2010). [AR]

94 Michael Knights, "Strengthening Yemeni Counterterrorism Forces: Challenges and Political Considerations," Washington Institute for Near East Policy, PolicyWatch no. 1616 (6 January 2010), http:/ jwww.washingtoninstitute.org/templateCos.php?CID=3158 (accessed March 19, 2010).

95 Ali al Jaradi, "Stance of U.S. administration on Houthi movement: Houthis and Al Qaeda mixed cards between Washington and Yemen," Yemen Post, 28 December 2009,

Western diplomats inside Yemen have been quick to deny the government's accusations that the Houthis have planned kidnappings and terrorist attacks against Western targets inside Yemen.97 They have, however, remained relatively silent on the government's general counterterrorist framing of the rebellion, due in part to "ill-defined" Houthi demands that cannot fully contextualize the clear anti-Western bent of the Believing Youth's original slogan-the third, and arguably most important factor in the terrorist narrative adopted by independent observers.98 While it is clear the Houthis have done a poor job in articulating specific grievances-in a July 2008 interview Abdel Malik claimed that the group did so to emphasize the reactive nature of the war99-the context of the Believing Youth slogan in 2004 deserves special attention.

Although the argument will be made later that the slogan was a rallying cry and mobilization tool for radical Zaydi activists in the Believing Youth (and ' one simultaneously drew on both anti-US and traditional local grievances), al Houthi in February 2010, the regime leveled charges of"forming a terrorist group" and "planning to assassinate foreign diplomats in Sanaa," including the US ambassador. See "Yemeni court sentences fugitive Yahya AI-Houthi to 15 yrs in jail," Kuwait News Agency (KUNA), 6 February 2010, http:/fwww.kuna.net.kw/NewsAgenciesPublicSite/ArticleDetails.aspx?id=205988o&Language= en (accessed March 19, 2010).

96 "Yemen: Defusing the Saada Time Bomb," 11.

97 Ibid.

98 "Yemen: Defusing the Saada Time Bomb," 18.

99 Joost R. Hiltermann, "Disorder on the Border: Saudi Arabia's War Inside Yemen," Foreign Affairs, 16 December 2009, http:/ /www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/65730/joost-r­ hiltermann/disorder-on-the-border (accessed March 19, 2010). 46 within the Houthi narrative of 2004 the chant was particularly resonant. At the time, Husyan al Houthi claimed-and the rebels continue to claim-that the group was merely protesting a regime they consider "too dependent on its northern neighbor, Saudi Arabia, and its partner in the war on terrorism, the

United States."100 By 2004, the Houthis had filtered key events in Yemen's post-

9/11 cooperation with the US-such as the presence of US counterterrorism advisors in Yemen, 101 an inundation of US military aid (see Figure 4), and a 2002

Predator drone strike in eastern Hadramawt102-into a narrative that imagined

Yemen as the next invasion site of the "War on Terror."

wo Ibid.

101 President Saleh was forced to respond to the counterterrorism cooperation after the arrival of US advisors was made public: "As for the American anti-terror security experts and technical equipment, it is not we who requested them. It is the U.S. government that said 'prove your genuineness and let the experts in,' so we let them in." See Sami Hadad, "Ali Abdullah Saleh: Yemen and the Issues ofthe Middle East," Al Jazeera, 5 April2002, http: I jwww.aljazeera.net/NR/ exeres/ 6FA4418F- B392-4D89-A427-7F2B8FD21Eos.htm (accessed March 19, 2010). [AR]

102 Craig Hoyle and Andrew Koch, "Yemen Drone Strike: Just the Start?" Jane's Information Group, 8 November 2002,

If) 20000 -o c ro If) ::::J 15000 0 £ lfi 10000 LL 2 LL 5000

0

~ co (J) 0 ~ ("') "

Figure 4· US Foreign Military Financing to Yemen, 1998-2010. Sources: Data adapted from "Foreign Military Financing Account Summaries," Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, US Department of State. 22 October 2009, http:/ jwww.state.gov/t/pm/ppajsatfc14s6o.htm (accessed 19 March 2010). "Foreign Military Sales, Foreign Military Construction Sales And Other Security Cooperation Historical Facts." US Department of Defense Security Cooperation Agency Fact Book 2008, 44-45, http://www.dsca.mil/programsjbiz­ ops/factsbook/FactsBooko8.pdf (accessed 19 March 2010).103

The Houthis' fear was not entirely hyperbolic. According to current and former US intelligence officials, Saleh's cooperation in joint counterterrorism efforts in Yemen was motivated in part by his own fear that the country could be

"next on the target list." The officials added that CIA Director George Tenet "did not disabuse him of this idea."104 While certainly no friends of the United States-

103 Note: Yemen has also received steadily increasing amounts of International Military Education and Training (IMET) funding and Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) of armaments since 2002. "Yemen." Center for Defense Information, http:/ jwww.cdi.org/PDFs/yemen.pdf (accessed 19 March 2010).

104 Dana Priest, "Foreign Network at Front of CIA's Terror Fight," Washington Post, 18 November 2005; Ao1. 48 and even justifying armed resistance to the 'occupations' in Iraq and

Afghanistan-the Houthis have long maintained their critique of Yemeni foreign policy did not amount to a direct political challenge to the regime nor an embrace of violence against Western targets in Yemen. 10S The verbal outbursts were simply aimed at critiquing a regime that Husayn al Houthi considered to be beholden to American foreign policies in the region as part of the 'War on

Terror.'106 Writing in 2008, Yahya al Houthi put it this way:

We are not anti-American per se. Rest assured that we do not have any issues with the American people, but we disapprove of some of their government's foreign policy in the Middle East. Like many people in the Middle East of all faiths, we were opposed to the US led invasion of Iraq and the subsequent killing of civilians. Generally, we hate the use of force in order to solve problems because of the loss of life and the destruction it causes. If [one has ever listened] to mosque speeches in Yemen, he would be aware that both Zaydi and Sunni imams curse America. The Saleh government itself opposed the invasion of Iraq.1°7

More broadly, however, a counterterrorist view of the Houthi conflict obscures key underlying cultural, socioeconomic, and political grievances that predate both the Believing Youth's anti-West slogans and the Houthis' increasingly aggressive tactics in the subsequent war. It also denies agency to the host of tribesmen and unaffiliated Zaydis who have been drawn in to the conflict

105 Some mainstream Zaydis defended, and continue to defend, the Mosque protests as a manifestation of 'democratic' speech and not a veiled call for the overthrow of the regime. See Abdullah al Muayyid, "Terrorism in the Quranic understanding is a preparation of force, not aggression as depicted by America," Al Balagh (Zaydi weekly), 10 March 2008, http:/ /www.al­ balagh.net/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=5551 (accessed March 19, 2010).

106 McGregor, "Shi'ite Insurgency in Yemen: Iranian Intervention or Mountain Revolt?;" Fattah, "Yemen: A slogan and six wars."

107Yahya al Houthi, comment on "The Shia Rebellion in Yemen." Strategy Page Blog. 9 May 2008, http:/ jwww.strategypage.com/htmw/htterr/articles/20080S09.aspx (see comments). The statement must be taken with a grain of salt given Yahya's role as Houthi spokesperson, especially towards western media outlets. 49 as local resentment has built up, but who were notably absent in the initial rounds of clashes sparked by the mosque demonstrations. In the historical and social movement context expanded upon later, the slogan can be more appropriately viewed as a mobilizing tool to give a narrow voice (in a critique of regime foreign policies) to a much wider set of grievances (against regime domestic policy) on behalf of the 'besieged' Zaydi community.

A Regional Proxy War

A second, and wide-spread, reading views the Houthi conflict through the lens of a regional power struggle between Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia, with events in Saada amounting to little more than a 'proxy war' between the two antagonists. Apparently based on Baddredin al Houthi's trips with his son

Husayn to Qom (a center of Shia religious study), some Yemeni officials claim that the Believing Youth were trained in Iran in the 1980s following the Islamic revolution and with the support of Ayatollah Khomeini.108 Ideologically at least, links with Iran probably were important in the radicalization of the Believing

Youth under Husayn al Houthi. Issam al Imad, al Houthi disciple and student in

Qom, maintains that Husayn's relationship with current Iranian leader Ayatollah

Khameini was not unlike that between Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan

Nasrallah and Khameini.109

10s "Yemen: Defusing the Saada Time Bomb," 11.

109 "Yemeni Shi'ite Cleric and Houthi Disciple 'Issam Al-'Imad: Our Leader Houthi is Close to Khamenei; We Are Influenced Religiously and Ideologically By Iran." 50 As a consequence, however, the jump from ideological support and the influence of the Islamic revolution to Iranian material support of the rebellion is often made in these analyses. As one observer characterizes the relationship,

"Hussein Al-Houthi was influenced by Iran's revolutionary discourse and its political ideology; not necessarily its religious ideology... The group started to focus on organized polarization under a strong inclination towards rebellion."no

Others cite the importance of borrowed organizational tactics from the Iranian movement and Hezbollah: "It was al-Huthi's practice of encouraging his followers to engage in the Twelver Shi'i practice of al-hitaf, or slogan chanting

(popular in Iran and in parts of Lebanon, but not in Yemen) ... that particularly irked members of the regime."m

More caustic have been direct accusations by Sanaa of financing, arming, and training ofthe Houthi rebels by Iran and/or Hezbollah since 2004.112

Officials speaking on background claimed that Yemeni air defenses shot down an unmanned Iranian spy drone in eastern Yemen in 2007 and that they had intercepted an Iranian cargo vessel in the Red Sea carrying arms for the Houthis

110 Mohammad Saif Haidar, "What Lies Beneath: Uncovering Yemen's Saada Conflict." The Majalla, 11 December 2009, http:/ jwww.majalla.comjen/cover_storyjarticle12189.ece (accessed March 19, 2010).

111 Weeden, 153 (footnote 10).

112 For a typical example, see Khalid Mahmoud, "Intelligence service uncovered secret meeting in Yemen between a senior official in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and leaders from the Houthis and Hezbollah," As Sharq Al Awsat, 13 December 2009, http:/ /www.aawsat.comjdetails.asp?section=4&issueno=11338&article=s48357&state=true (accessed March 19, 2010). [AR]

51 in 2009.U3 Sanaa has also claimed to have seized "documents" proving the

Houthi-Iranian arms relationship but-characteristically-refuses to produce hard evidence of the link.114

The connection drawn between the Houthi demand and an Iranian supply of arms is not so black and white, though; local sources report that Husayn al

Houthi (and possibly subsequent leaders) faced few problems in simply buying rebel weaponry at Saada arms markets-including the infamous suq al Tahl, the largest black market weapons hub in Yemen-using funds from the Believing

Youth's own coffers: "Flush with cash from decades' worth of khums (a Shi'i religious tax) al-Houthi and his followers encountered little difficulty in financing the operation. They apparently were able to purchase all the materials for their uprising from within the country."us

At times, official statements and third-party analyses have even made the bizarre double-accusation that the Houthis were receiving aid not just from the

113 Faisal Mukaram, "Yemen: Iranian Unmanned Spy Plane Shot Down," Al Hayat, 28 March 2007, http:/ jinternational.daralhayat.comjarchivearticle/161287 (accessed March 19, 2010); "Yemenis intercept 'Iranian ship,"' BBC, 27 October 2009, http:/ jnews.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8327892.stm (accessed March 19, 2010).

114 Husayn al Jarbani, "Yemeni Interior Ministry Announces Seizure of Documents Proving Foreign Meddline in Saada," As Sharq Al Awsat, 1 March 2008, http:/ jwww.aawsat.comjdetails.asp?section=4&issueno=10320&article=408570&search=%C7% E1%ED%E3%E4&state=true (accessed March 19, 2010).

115 Sha un Overton, "The Yemeni Arms Trade: Still a Concern for Terrorism and Regional Security." Terrorism Monitor, val. 3, iss. 9 (6 May 2005), http:/ jwww.jamestown.org/singlej?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%sBtt_news%sD=471 (accessed March 19, 2010). Yemen has an average of over three firearms per person, with large numbers imported under false documentation (from China) through the Saada port of Hudeida. See Arafat Madayash, "Weapons Proliferation in Yemen," As Sharq Al Awsat, 9 February 2010, http:/ jwww.aawsat.comjenglishjnews.asp?section=3&id=19818 (accessed March 19, 2010). Abdel Malik al Houthi himself supported the notion that the Houthis arms budget is entirely internal. See Arafat Madabish, "Abdel Malik al-Houthi: We are not hostages to any regional power and if the regime stops targeting us we will end our isolation," As Sharq Al Awsat, 20 September 2009, http:www.aawsat.comjdetails.asp?section=4&article=s36701&issueno=11254 (accessed March 19, 2010). [AR] 52 Iranians but also from al Qaeda elements in Yemen and/ or the Qaeda-affiliated al

Shabab militants in Somalia. 116 Such connections ignore obvious differences between these vehemently anti-Shia groups and the Zaydi Houthis. Still, the

Iranian subterfuge narrative has played well in regional and international reporting of the conflict.117

The rebels, for their part, levied accusations of Saudi interference in Saada long before Riyadh's military intervention in late 2009. In addition to frequent qualms with Saudi-financed Wahhabi religious institutes in Saada, Yahya al

Houthi claimed that the Saudi government was funneling up to $25 billion to

Sanaa in 2008 to recruit Hashid tribes and to prosecute the war against the

Houthis-a charge the regime denied (Riyadh made no official statements on the matter).118

Saudi Arabia's more recent involvement is undeniable; direct military intervention by the Saudis came in the form of aerial bombardments and engagement of Houthi fighters by Saudi troops along the ill-defined border in north Saada on November 3, 2009. The kingdom accused the rebels of mortar attacks on Saudi military bases, and the Houthi occupation of strategic positions

116 See Tariq al Homayed, "Is al-Qaeda coordinating with the Houthis?" As Sharq al Awsat, 25 November 2009, http:/ jwww.alarabiya.net/views/2009/11/2S/92323.html (accessed March 19, 2010); Haidar, "What Lies Beneath: Uncovering Yemen's Saada Conflict."

117 See R. Green andY. Mansharof, "Iran, Saudi Arabia Face Off in the Media." Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Inquiry & Analysis Series Report No.554 (16 October 2009) http:/ jwww.memri.org/report/enjojojo/o/o/o/3768.htm (accessed March 19, 2010); Olivier Guitta, "Iran and Saudi Arabia drawn to Yemen." Asia Times. 11 November 2009 http:/ jwww.atinies.com/atimes/Middle_East/KKnAkOl.html (accessed March 19, 2010).

118 "Yemen: The conflict in Saada Governorate- analysis." 53 atop Jebel Dukhan (inside Saudi territory) seems to have precipitated Saudi involvement.119

Barbs traded between Iran and Saudi Arabia in state media have not helped dispel (or at least contextualize) the regional dimension of the conflict either. The late Iranian Grand Ayatollah Husayn Ali Montazeri accused Sanaa of

"persecuting" Yemen's Shia and Iraqi senior Shia cleric Ali Sistani characterized the Yemeni regime's policies as a "politics of ethnic discrimination."120 Hassan

Firouzabadi, chief of Iran's General Staff, went so far as to characterize Saudi

Arabia's intervention as "the onset ofWahhabi state terrorism."121 Saudi clerics responded by charging Iran with attempting to spread Shia beliefs into the heart of Sunni Islam.122

Accounts that focus on the regional connections to the local Houthi conflict appear to ascribe Saudi and Iranian national interests to the proxy war as much as they cite the polemics of its actual belligerents. Absent direct confrontation between these two regional powers, proxy conflicts in Lebanon,

Iraq, and indeed Yemen become arenas for the rational self-interested strategy of balancing. Within this mindset, fear of the consequences of not intervening, of

119 Gregory D. Johnsen, "The Houthis, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and the Politics of a Mountain." Islam and Insurgency in Yemen (Waq al Waq) Blog, entry posted 5 November 2009, http:/ /islamandinsurgencyinyemen.blogspot.com/2009/11/huthis-saudi-arabia-yemen-and­ politics.html (accessed March 19, 2010); Johnsen, "The Sixth War in Sa'dah."

120 Weeden, 154 (footnote 15).

121 Susan Raghavan, "Rebel conflict heightens humanitarian crisis in Yemen."

122 Ibid. 54 risking even minimal gains in the adversary's power and regional influence, motivates foreign meddling in Saada.

While failing to account the initial cultural revivalist movement of the

Believing Youth, a regional explanation of the Houthi insurgency may help clarify the expansion of fighting in each of the war's successive six rounds. Still, a regional take on this local, intrastate conflict denies too much agency in the end to the Houthi movement itself, especially as a non-state actor, and probably overstates the national interests of Iran (if not Saudi Arabia) in interjecting themselves in the civil war in Saada.

Significantly, the 'natural' religious affinity between the Shia regime in

Iran and the Zaydi Houthi (and the corresponding hostility ofWahhabi Saudi

Arabia) that analysts use to assume the interests of these two states in the Yemeni conflict overlooks significant doctrinal differences between Zaydi and J afaari

Shiism (elaborated in Chapter IV), traditional Arab-Persian distrust, and historic

Saudi support for Zaydi royalists during the 1963-70 civil war. As Mohammed

Saif Haidar has noted:

Observers have tried dissecting this relationship and the circumstances in which it developed by evaluating the beneficial relationship between [Iran] and the insurgents it supports. These two actors do not share a common structure or function, nor are they geographical neighbours. The prospects for the formation of a strong 'organic' relationship that is based on a high degree of trust between the Houthi group, with its Zaidi revival trend, and Iran seem unlikely. This is mainly due to the fact that Yemen's Zaidis are traditionally opposed to Iran's Twelver Shiism.123

It is also not clear that the realist benefits to the regimes in Tehran and

Riyadh outweigh the risks of becoming bogged down in a third-state civil war.

123 Haidar, "What Lies Beneath: Uncovering Yemen's Saada Conflict." 55 The diplomatically-isolated government in Iran, also confronting domestic challengers, would be hard pressed to add intervention in north Yemen to an already full plate of proxy interests in neighboring Iraq and its long-established support of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Although unrest in Saada is arguably much more of a direct threat to Saudi Arabia than Iran-in terms of spilling over its southern border (as Riyadh notes happened in 2009), and possibly fomenting strife within its own sizable Shia minority-even these interests are probably mmor.

A much larger part of Riyadh's stake in securing the southern border lies in preventing cross-border smuggling of arms and operatives by terrorist elements like al Qaeda in the climate of insecurity created by the Houthi rebellion. Indeed, just over a month before its military intervention, an al Qaeda suicide bomber nearly killed Saudi counterterrorism chief Prince Muhammad bin

N ayef near the Yemeni border after announcing his desire to surrender in person to Saudi authorities.124 The prospects of gaining control of the border region, even after the Houthis agreed to withdraw within a 10 km 'buffer zone' inside

Yemen as part of the February 2010 ceasefire arrangementps seem slim, however. The 900-mile long border (see Figure 5) is sparsely populated, stretches

124 Michael Slackman, "Would-Be Killer Linked to Al Qaeda, Saudis Say," New York Times. 28 August 2009, http: I jwww .nytimes.com/ 2009I o8 I 29 jworld/middleeast/ 29sa udi.html? _r= 1 (accessed March 19, 2010).

125 Huma Yusuf, "Yemen marks cease-fire with Houthi rebels," Christian Science Monitor, 12 February 2010, http:/ jwww.csmonitor.com/World/terrorism-security/2010/0212/Yemen­ marks-cease-fire-with-Houthi-rebels (accessed March 19, 2010). 56 along rough terrain, and attempts by Riyadh and Sanaa to exert control over crossings inevitably run into established claims of tribal autonomy.126

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Figures. Population Density in Yemen, 2002, produced by the Central Intelligence Agency and available at University of Texas Libraries.

Still, both the Houthi and the Saleh regime continue to accuse the other of being manipulated and armed by these external actors, suggesting that the regional dimension has gained important currency in prolonging the conflict as part of framing processes prominent in a social movement analysis. Accusations and counter-accusations in the media tend to undermine trust between the

126 Joost R. Hiltermann, "Disorder on the Border: Saudi Arabia's War Inside Yemen." 57 Houthis and Sanaa, giving each the impression they are battling much larger forces.

In the case of the Houthis, in particular, the regional dimension effectively mirrors more fundamental grievances of a Saudi-backed Wahhabism that threatens Zaydi identity in Saada and the north. As the Houthis have come to view Sanaa as complicit in Zaydism's doctrinal demise since the republic revolution and particularly after the spread of Wahhabi and Salafi influence in

Saada, Yemen's alliance with Riyadh only serves to further in-group j out-group distinctions between the rebels and the regime. When applying concepts of social movement literature to the Houthis, therefore, the specter of Saudi involvement has to some extent been embraced and reappropriated by the rebels in support of their claims of cultural and religious self-defense.

The Houthis as a Charismatic Leadership Cult

While less common than some of the other mainstream arguments, a third characterization of the rebellion as a charismatic leadership cult is yet another justification for the war's intractability-framing the Houthi as committed and uncompromising partisans. Such an interpretation supports Sanaa's argument that the conflict is an isolated uprising, and that a Zaydi cause has been hijacked for personal and familial aggrandizement rather than on behalf of a victimized community (as the Houthi claim). It also aids in Sanaa's case that negotiations

58 with the fanatical Houthis are pointless because, as Prime Minister Ali

Mohammed Mujawwar has put it, "they understood nothing but force." 127

One major drawback to charismatic explanations for the devotion of

Houthi fighters lies in the simple fact that leadership of the rebellion has changed hands between family members with very different backgrounds and, at times, contrasting conceptions of how best to defend Zaydi identity. While Husayn al

Houthi was consolidating his support from a minority of Believing Youth members beginning in 2000, his father Baddredin remained on the sidelines, devoted to an intellectual and religious revivalism that eschewed both political participation and armed revolt. Yahya al Houthi, on the other hand, chose to represent Zaydi interests in direct political participation as a member of parliament from the al Haqq party. Yahya even acted as a government-appointed mediator in talks with his brother H usayn in 2004, initially describing the rebellion as "criminal,"12s before becoming the movement's spokesman in later rounds.

A second shortcoming of the charismatic argument is the internal divisions within populations that support the Houthi cause. Alex Starr argues that, "While the insurgency's 'hardcore' followers consist of committed partisans to the Houthi leadership and ideology, many of its supporters maintain a more

127 Peterson, "The al-Huthi Conflict in Yemen," 10.

12s John R. Bradley, "A Warning from Yemen, cradle of the Arab world," The Daily Star, 13 July 2004, http:/ jwww.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1o&categ_id=s&article_id=6182 (accessed March 19, 2010). 59 tenuous commitment."129 As mentioned, tribal affiliations, arbitrary detentions, and destruction to farmland and homes have pushed many more Zaydis and

Saada residents into the Houthi camp (who may not necessarily be wedded to the larger rebel cause) than are drawn by its leaders' personal charisma alone.

Moreover, there are many Zaydi who do not support the rebellion, in spite of these grievances. Significantly, this contingent includes at least one Houthi family member Abdullah Hussayn, who was quoted in government media outlets in 2009 as saying, "I appeal [to] all Yemenis to stand [as] one hand against this rebellion and to fight with the troops to do their duty towards their homeland. I call the state and the citizens to continue the war in order to put an end for the rebellion forever." 13° A charismatic explanation cannot account for the various motives of Houthi supporters, nor the attrition of a Houthi family member

(arguably most susceptible to the effects of charisma) from the rebel group.

Despite the regime's repeated claims of victory after the military routing or death of successive Houthi leaders, moreover, the movement has survived and even grown since 2004. While the Houthi clan may be adept and charismatic leaders, there seems to be no fatal blow dealt to the rebellion itself between leadership changes (and particularly during the leadership vacuum following the death of Husayn al Houthi in 2004). Abdel Malik al Houthi himself stresses the

129 Alex Starr, "Yemen: Preventing Regional Conflict by Solving Local Problems." World Politics Review. 24 November 2009, http:/ jwww.worldpoliticsreview.comjarticle.aspx?id=4686 (accessed March 19, 2010).

13° Nasser Arabayyee, "28 AI Houthi rebels killed in fresh clashes," GulfNews, 1 October 2009, http:/ /gulfnews.com/news/gulf/yemen/28-al-houthi-rebels-killed-in-fresh-clashes- 1.511934 (accessed March 19, 2010). 60 movement is "popular, not individualistic" and thus "will not end with the departure of any [one] person."131

More importantly, the personal and charismatic explanations for the

Houthi rebellion ignore the long arc of its evolution from Zaydi grievances and the revivalist social movement that predated the rise of Husayn al Houthi within the Believing Youth. As will be argued under a social movement approach, any uniquely charismatic qualities of Husayn and the Houthi family are perhaps best explained in terms of their ability to frame long-standing Zaydi grievances, magnified by Sanaa's "scorched earth"132 policies after 2004, to mobilize latent support. As demonstrated by the Houthi movement, charismatic religious leaders are not inherently irrational, but rather employ the same strategic framing elements as much as do more traditional or politically-focused social movements.

The Houthis as Resource-Seeking Separatists

A fourth and final conventional explanation for the Houthi conflict frames the rebels as a subnational group engaging in rebellion to capture state resources.

This argument tends to view the Houthi rebellion in a comparative perspective

(that draws on a host of historical and contemporary cases oflocal insurgencies), and relies on a fairly developed literature on insurgency and civil war that emerged in response to a proliferation of intra- rather than inter-state conflict beginning in the 1990s. Scholars in this field either attempt to account for the

131 Arafat Madabish, "Abdel Malik al-Houthi: We are not hostages to any regional power and ifthe regime stops targeting us we will end our isolation." [AR]

132 Gregory D. Johnsen, "The Sixth War in Sa'dah." 61 salience of ethnicity in civil war or focus on the structural conditions that favor intrastate conflict. Both these approaches are fairly relevant to the case of the

Houthis. The Zaydis may not be an ethnic enclave but they do face the characteristic challenges of a religious and cultural minority. What's more,

Yemen (and particularly northern Yemen) seems to fit many of the structural conditions for insurgency-such as low per capita income, the presence of oil resources, and rough terrain.133

Seeking to isolate causes of civil war, for example, Paul Collier and Anke

Hoeffler test a large set of cases using a group "grievance model" -measuring

"inequality, political oppression, and ethnic and religious divisions" as causes of conflict-and a "greed model," focusing on sources of financing for rebellion. 134

Within the greed model (applicable to economic incentives for the Houthi rebellion discussed here), they show that natural resource dependence and diaspora populations are good sources of rebel finance. These specific criteria are not really relevant to the Houthi case, however. Although oil revenue generates about 8o percent of state revenue, deposits are located in the south and are being rapidly depleted. The Zaydi community, moreover, does not exist in any significant numbers like a diaspora outside of northern Yemen. 13S

133 See Fearon and Laitin; Collier and Hoeffler.

134 Collier and Hoeffler.

135 Christopher Boucek, ''Yemen: Avoiding a Downward Spiral," Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, September 2009, http:/ /carnegieendowment.org/files/yemen_downward_spiral.pdf (accessed March 19, 2010): 4- 5· 62 More importantly, it is not clear that the rebels seek to topple the regime in Saada, especially out of a desire to capture rents. In their own statements, the

Houthi have denied a desire to reestablish the Zaydi imamate. Widespread fighting has not reached further south than the outskirts of Sanaa, and the

Believing Youth fighters' original defensive posture in the mountains outside of

Saada city under Husayn al Houthi in 2004 amounts to something less than a direct military challenge to the levers of control of the Yemeni state.

If the Houthi are seeking some kind of limited autonomy in Saada out of economic incentives, however, which resources-if not oil-are the fighters are hoping to capture and exploit? The local economy of Saada offers one possible explanation. Traditionally, cross-border trade with Saudi Arabia in north Saada has been a lucrative field. As Gerhard Lichtenthaler explains:

The region's proximity to Saudi Arabia and its social and economic links and networks, which extend beyond their disputed political boundary, explain economic activities [in Saada]. During the oil-boom of the late 1970s and early 1980s actors in the Sa'dah basin benefited disproportionately, compared with the rest of Yemen, from the unprecedented flow of goods and services across the Yemeni-Saudi border. 136

Cross-border traffic in the 1970s came to include a burgeoning trade in the mild narcotic plant qat, which Saada farmers began cash-cropping and selling for a profit in Saudi Arabia (where it is considered illegal). 137

By the mid 1980s, however, when lucrative smuggling operations amounted to between 25-50% of total imports to Saada, the central government

136 Gerhard Lichtenthaler, Political Ecology and the Role of Water: Environment, Society, and Economy in Northern Yemen (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003): 5.

137 Lichtenthaler, 120-126. 63 began to increase its regulation of cross-border trade in the province. 138 This forced many Saada residents back into traditional agriculture and became a bone of contention with the state (although it never metastasized into communal protests nor violence). Lichtenthalter argues that to this day smuggling "has remained a preferred livelihood of many and is symbolic of the ability of grass- roots actors to resist the power and control of the state."139 In this context, gradually-consolidating state control over economic activity in Saada may have reached a tipping point by 2004, pushing the Houthi into armed rebellion.

There simply is not sufficient evidence for economic sources of the Houthi rebellion, however. The Houthi family traditionally hails from the town of

Houth-about midway between Saada and Sanaa in Amran province, and far removed from the border with Saudi Arabia. The patriarch Baddredin al Houthi, moreover, was known as a prominent Zaydi religious scholar and not a wealthy local merchant. It is arguably the tribes in north Saada, exerting a control over cross-border traffic that would clash with encroaching state authority, who have more to gain and lose in an economic sense. As sadah (Hashemites), the Houthi family "do not derive their legitimacy from affiliation with any particular tribe.

Hashemites are said to have arrived in Yemen only after Islam's advent, mediating between local tribes."14o

Even if resource-capture motives fail to account for the outbreak of civil war, they may go a long way in helping to explain the conflict's longevity. A

138 Lichtenthaler, 87.

139 Lichtenthaler, 5.

14° "Yemen: Defusing the Saada Time Bomb," 6. 64 complex mix of profit sources springing from the fighting-including the trafficking of weapons, drugs, and diesel along the Saudi border and Red Sea coast-have contributed to what some observers have labeled Saada's "war economy." As fighting has expanded to include not just Houthi fighters and the

Yemeni military, but also Saada's tribes, farmers, and smugglers, a nexus oflocal actors and complex economic incentives give many a perverse incentive to prolong the war.

Junior and senior Yemeni military officers, for example, stand to make a good profit on the fighting:

Senior officials have amassed military hardware and profit from illegal sales of army stockpiles. Continued operations have justified increased military budgets without government or independent oversight. As competition over resources intensified, the benefits of war exceeded its drawbacks-at least for the elites involved. 141

Yahya al Houthi, in an interview withAl Sharq Al Awsat, reinforces claims that both the Houthis and Yemeni soldiers are benefitting from the conflict's arms trade, with the added insight that many of the weapons changing hands are a result of US military aid: "US aid can be represented in supplying the regime with some weapons, and much of these weapons have fallen into the hands of our supporters. Previously, our supporters did not have heavy- or medium-caliber weapons, but now they have a lot."142

141 "Yemen: Defusing the Saada Time Bomb," ii; See also J. E. Peterson, "Saudi-Iranian Involvement in Yemen's War," IslamOnline.net, 23 November 2009, http:/ jwww.islamonline.net/servletjSatellite?c=Article_C&cid=125888o447941&pagename=Zon e-English-Muslim_Affairs%2FMAELayout (accessed March 19, 2010).

142 Munir al Mawry, "Yemeni MP: Clashes May Spread Beyond Northern Yemen," As Sharq Al Awsat, 26 February 2007, http:/ /aawsat.com/english/news.asp?section=1&id=8131 (accessed March 19, 2010). 65 Nevertheless, greed-based motives offer little weight to an explanation of

the root causes of war. Probing the 'grievance model' of civil war and insurgency

literature offers far more fertile grounds for explaining Houthi motives in terms

of socioeconomic underdevelopment in Saada. When combined with (or viewed

through) opposition to a state narrative that excludes the Zaydi community and

i~s common heritage as a foreign 'other,' as well as Yemen's circumscribed

political opportunity structure, the history of state neglect of Saada becomes a

powerful factor in framing collective action in the Zaydi revivalist, Believing

Youth, and eventually armed Houthi movements.

If the Houthis are not (or not fully) anti-Western terrorists, pawns of

foreign manipulation, a fanatical leadership cult, nor narrowly resource-seeking

secessionists, then what exactly are they? 143 This chapter has demonstrated that

while mainstream explanations do offer important partial explanations for the

Houthi conflict, or namely its intractability since 2004, isolating the underlying

causes of the rebellion and the group's transition from peaceful social movement to armed insurrectionary movement requires a historical approach that can

contextualize the Houthis within a social movement framework.

143 Note: some alternative theories-not treated in depth here-for the protracted nature of the war focus on the regime's handling of the war (rather than the Houthis' motivations), arguing that Sanaa is simply not interested in a non-military solution. These accounts posit that the Houthi conflict is either a war against secession, or a battle for succession-and quite possibly both. Some analysts argue that Sanaa's unwavering stance is a not-so-subtle message aimed at preempting the southern secessionist movement from metastasizing into an all-out rebellion like the northern Houthis; others maintain that the war is a struggle for regime succession (Saleh is approaching 70) between his son and head of the Republican Guard and Special Forces Ahmad Ali Saleh, and military commander in Saada Major General Ali Muhsin al Ahmar. One Islamist seemed to support the secession angle, describing the war in Saada as "a game inside the house." See "Yemen: Defusing the Saada Time Bomb," 15 (footnotes 98 and 99); J. E. Peterson, "Saudi­ Iranian Involvement in Yemen's War." 66 CHAPTER IV

ZAYDI CULTURAL IDENTITY AND HISTORICAL GRIEVANCE

Because Houthi leadership framing-albeit through a anti-US critique of

Yemeni foreign policy-has been effective in emphasizing an existential threat to

Zaydi cultural identity, this chapter probes the origins of Zaydi cultural dislocation following the fall of the imamate and communal responses to the new

Yemeni republic. It begins with a doctrinal characterization ofZaydism within

Islam and within Yemen's own sectarian demography. The chapter then analyzes competing responses of Zaydi sadah to the new state, arguing that the republic's anti-Zaydi nationalist narrative provided much of the impetus for the cultural revivalist movement that would eventually give way to the radicalization of the

Houthi faction.

Zaydism within Islam

It is important to understand Zaydi religious beliefs independent of the political structure of the imamate, and to doctrinally differentiate Zaydism both from other Shia sects and Yemen's Sunni majority. Yemen's Zaydi Shia exist as a sizable minority in predominantly-Shafei Sunni Yemen, where there are also small numbers of Ismaili Shia and a growing Wahhabi and Salafi Sunni presence.

The exact numbers of the Zaydi community, clustered in the north, are a matter of some controversy, as there are no official statistics on religious affiliation in

67 Yemen. Some estimates put the Zaydi community as low as 23 percent, but more authoritative sources seem to have settled on a figure of 45 percent.144

Distribution of Ethnoreligious Groups and Key Tribal Areas ''<~ .~.-;,-,:~i~;;,p--'....:14\f.;Bj

~ Hf.. Md '"' Bani _, ~,.31ft *Sllnaa f\11/'H

Majority Groups Ycrntm's Popula!ion Yemen's Population by Ethnle Groop by Religion Shia ,,\mb 01iWf

SunntArab

Socotrar~ (SINJ/StA1ni mix•

Figure 6. Distribution of Ethnoreligious Groups and Key Tribal Areas in Yemen, 2002, produced by the Central Intelligence Agency and available at University of Texas Libraries.

'44 Such as "International Religious Freedom Report 2009: Yemen," US Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. 26 October 2009, http:/ jwww.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2009/12736Lhtm (accessed March 19, 2010); "Yemen: The conflict in Saada Governorate- analysis;" Laurent Bonnefoy, "Varieties of Islamism in Yemen: The Logic of Integration under Pressure." The Middle East Review ofInternational Affairs (MERIA) Journal, vol. 13, no. 1 (March 2009), http:/ jwww.gloria­ center.org/meria/2009/03/bonnefoy.html (accessed March 19, 2010). 68 Zaydis are sometimes known as 'fiver' Shia because they differ from

'sevener' (Ismaili) or 'twelver' (Jaafari) Shia in their recognition of Zayd ibn Ali- rather than his older brother Muhammad al Baqir (both of whom are grandsons of Ali's son Husayn)-as the fifth Rightly Guided Caliph. Prominent in Shiism, but central to the Zaydi doctrine in particular, is the principle of khuruj (or

'coming out') against an unjust ruler. Zayd himself was martyred in a revolt against the Umayyid caliphate (which he considered corrupt) in 742 near Kufa in modern-day Iraq. His brother Mohammed al Baqir, in contrast, abstained from politics.

Although the emphasis on khuruj is one important point of departure from

Sunnis (and was a key implication of al Houthi's slogan-based protest movement), doctrinally Zaydis are actually closer to Yemen's Shafei Sunni than to the Jaafari Shia in Iran and Iraq. Unlike Jaafaris, Zaydis do not believe imams are infallible, receive divine guidance, or can be 'hidden.' They therefore reject the idea of the return of the Mahdi. Moreover, the intellectual history of Zaydism is rather dynamic and shares some overlap with Sunni orthodoxy. Zaydi collections of hadith, for example, borrow heavily from the local Shafei Sunni tradition.14S

The belief in an imamate, and that Hashemite descendants from the house of the Prophet (ahl al bayt) known as sadah represent the spiritual and political

145 See Scott C. Lucas, Constructive Critics, Hadith Literature, and the Articulation of Sunni Islam: The Legacy of the Generation ofIbn Sa'd, Ibn Ma'in, and Ibn Hanbal (Boston: Brill, 2004): 248-9; Bernard Haykel, "The Ahl al-Hadith Scholars among the Zaydis of Yemen," in al-Masar, vol. 2.2 (2001) [AR]; Ella Landau-Tasseron, "Zaydi Imams as Restorers of Religion: Ihya and Tajdid in Zaydi Literature." Journal ofNear East Studies, Vol. 49, No.3 (July 1990): 247-263. 69 heirs to Mohammed, is the most obvious difference between Zaydis and Sunnis.

Like other Shia sects, the Zaydi school emphasizes taqlid-a distinctly Shia belief in following the rulings of an expert in Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), and one that

Sunni schools unanimously reject. Historically, the imam is the premier faqih in

Zaydism. Unlike Jaafari Shia, however, succession in the Zaydi imamate was typically non-hereditary; rather, following Zayd ibn Ali's example, any learned sayyid who asserted and fought for his claim could become imam.146

It is also important to note that, in its recent and modern manifestations at least, Zaydism is far from uniform. Like the internal variations ofYemen's

Sunnis-encompassing at times a mix of Shafei, Wahhabi/Salafi, or alternatively

Sufi beliefs-Zaydi Shia may differ individually on their incorporation of certain

Jafaari beliefs, and (as mentioned) may overlap in many doctrinal areas with the

Shafei mainstream.

The Imamate and Descent-based Rule

Although Zaydis face the challenges of a religious minority community in the modern Republic of Yemen, they were once the social and political beneficiaries of a strong Zaydi state. Understanding Zadyi sadah's privileged status under the imamate is central to the cultural disenfranchisement that the community confronted within the modern Yemeni republic, and that would later give rise to a series of Zaydi social movements.

'46 Under the Hamid ad Din imams, however, hereditary succession became the norm. Yayha Hamid al-Din (1904-1948) transformed the imamate into a de facto monarchy, referring to himself as a king and nominating his son as hereditary successor, in contravention to Zaydi traditions. In fact, his son Ahmad al-Badr coined money with a monarchical inscription in 1948. See Bernard Haykel, Revival and Reform in Islam: The Legacy ofMuhammad al-Shawkani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): 210, 213. 70 Descendants and followers of Zayd ibn Ali established an imamate in

northern Yemen, eventually with its seat in Saada-but extending control also to

Sanaa-beginning in 8g8. It would last over 1,000 years until the republican

revolution deposed the last imam, Mohammad al Badr, in 1962. Of particular

importance to the cultural and religious dislocation of the Zaydi in modern

Yemen, the imamate empowered a relatively narrow group of Zaydi sadah.

Socially, the Zaydi imamate enforced a strict stratification among its

subjects according to descent. The sadah and qadis (those thought to have

descended from the original professional judges in early Islam) formed two elite

classes and occupied the vast majority of religious, military, and political

positions in Saada. Underneath this superstructure, the tribes and lower urban

classes-including 'unclean' professions like butchers and barbers-constituted

an underclass of ahl al thulth, or 'third people.'147

Although it sometimes faced difficulty in exerting internal sovereignty

among the relatively autonomous northern tribes, 148 the imamate was successful

in resisting foreign occupation in northern Yemen. Under the imamate's military protection Saada remained independent both from the Ottomans, who occupied

other parts ofYemen from the 1870s until1918, and the British, who consolidated their hold on the port of Aden after the 1830s under a southern protectorate that lasted until1967.

147 Bernard Haykel, Dissembling Descent, or How the Barber Lost His Turban: Identity and Evidence in Eighteenth-Century Zaydi Yemen." Islamic Law and Society, vol. 9, no. 2, Evidence in Islamic Law (2002): 205.

148 Robert D. Burrowes, "Yemen: Political Economy and the Effort Against Terrorism," in Battling Terrorism in the Horn ofAfrica ed. Robert Rotberg (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005): 147. 71 A failure to enact internal social reforms, however, combined with the

radicalization of the army (many of whom were disenfranchised non-sayyid

Zaydis) in the 1950s and 1960s, laid the foundation for the 1962 Cairo-backed

republican revolution. 149 Inspired by the Egyptian Free Officers movement, the

republicans led a mutiny in the military that, combined with republican tribal

forces, was successful in deposing the Imam al Badr and subsequently defeating

entrenched Saada royalists.

From the earliest stages of the republican movement, anti-Zaydi frames

played a prominent role in garnering support by mobilizing local resentment of

the social immobility under the imamate's inegalitarian system. Egyptian radio

broadcasts in the early 1960s, for example, played upon Zaydi-Shafei tensions

and the imamate's artificial distinctions between the sadah and non-sayyid

tribesmen. 15°

By 1968, the last royalist forces had been defeated or co-opted by the

republicans. The Yemen Arab Republic was established on the ashes of the

imamate in 1970 (although it would take another twenty years to unify with

socialist South Yemen to form the Republic ofYemen in 1990). Following a string

a assassinations of its early leaders, who went about the task of building the new

state, power was consolidated in the hands of the young lieutenant colonel Ali

Abdullah Saleh in 1978. As discussed in the following sections, however, the

149 vom Bruck, 7.

15° Paul Dresch, A Modern History of Yemen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 89. 72 revolution's anti-Zaydi frames would be adopted and propagated within Saleh's republic, conditioning competing responses within the Zaydi community at large.

Zaydi Responses to the New Republic

Like the Zaydi community itself, reaction to the new state was not homogenous. Analyzing the various responses of the newly-disempowered Zaydi community to the nascent republic goes a long way towards contextualizing the emergence of a Zaydi revivalist social movement and, eventually, its more radical

Believing Youth faction. A key factor in determining which segments of the Zaydi community (or Zaydiyyah) came to support a revivalist movement, versus competing strategies of 'reconciliation' or 'renunciation,' is the way in which communal memory has interpreted history andre-imagined Zaydi identity within the Yemeni republic.

Faced with a loss of power and prestige, Zaydi sadah faced three general choices in their response to a new power structure that fundamentally challenged the central metaphor of descent-based identity: renouncing their sayyid heritage, reconciling Zaydi and sayyid identity to the new republic in a process of personal and communal redefinition, or revivalism.

In reinterpreting the history of the fall of the imamate, some Zaydi sadah have intentionally obscured their family lineage in public and have even modified their surnames in a process of'willful forgetting' (or renunciation).151 In an unparalleled social-anthropological field study of the Zaydi community, for example, Gabrielle vom Bruck argues that in the context of the new republic,

151 vom Bruck, 235. 73 communal Zaydi memory expressed in terms of sayyid lineages and the history of the imamate is confined largely to the private sphere to avoid public identification as an 'other.'

Other sadah that privately maintained their descent-based identity nevertheless re-imagined it not in the context of the powerful imamate, but within a long historical narrative of Shia sayyid vulnerability. According to vom

Bruck, "the fusion of the memories of the history of the ahl al-bayt [beginning with the martyrdom of Ali's son Husayn] and of persecution in the 1960s may point to a partial mental escape due to (self-)censoring mechanisms."152 In either case, these twin strategies of Zaydi renunciation and the resulting communal silence speak volumes about a self-awareness (or paranoia) of surveillance in the modern republic.

A renunciation of Zaydi identity (like the revivalist trend discussed later), however, is best characterized as a minority response. Rather, most sadah simply

"adapted to the new regime, many directly supporting it and accepting their own political decline.''153 As they moved out of traditional political posts as local government officials under the imamate system, the sadah often reconstituted themselves in apolitical spheres like the emerging Saada merchant class. 154

Without denying their traditional social status, therefore, many Zaydi sadah simply chose to reconcile their identity to the dictates of power within the new republic.

152 vom Bruck, 21.

153 "Yemen: Defusing the Saada Time Bomb," 6.

154 vom Bruck, s. 74 State Frames of Zaydis and the Imamate: The Role of Past and Present

A process of reconciliation that (unlike renunciation) sought to maintain a modicum of communal religious and cultural identity within the new state became a more difficult task in the face of a nationalist narrative that sought to increase the legitimacy of the new republic by vilifying the history of the imamate and its sayyid beneficiaries. Despite early (and genuine) post-revolutionary attempts to co-opt Zaydis and tribal royalists by offering them access to the lower echelons of state power, a general trend by Sanaa to re-appropriate history in defense of a new national identity-at the deliberate expense of pre-republican identities-has, on the whole, emphasized the exclusion of the sadah within the new state.

On one hand, creating in-group/out-group distinctions through historical reinterpretation is a common element of constructing a nationalist narrative. As

Nicholas Dirks argues, nationalism is "a system for organizing the past that depends upon certain narratives, assumptions, and voices, and that continues to have important stakes throughout the social and political order."1ss Yet, even as consolidating a sense of nationalism strengthens a state vis-a-vis external forces, it can also have the unintended effect of eroding its long-term legitimacy in the eyes of groups deemed inclusive to 'the state' but rendered exclusive to 'the nation.'

155 Nicholas Dirks, "Introduction: Colonialism and culture," in Colonialism and Culture ed. Nicholas Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992). 75 In the case of Yemen, the state's anti-Zaydi narrative probably laid the earliest foundations of the reactionary revivalist movement (that would eventual employ its own in-group/out-group framing under the Houthis); this effect, however, is often overlooked by outside observers. As vom Bruck notes, "Scholars challenging the 'politics of identity' approach have rightly taken issue with the analytical essentialisms deployed by colonial and nationalist governments, but have drawn far less attention to the use of category labels by post-colonial and post-revolutionary regimes."1s6

The more hardcore Shafei republicans, for example, emphasized the continued threat the sadah posed to the new state, even in the early days of reconciliation with the republic's former adversaries: "The newly established elite, made up of army personnel of predominantly tribal background, merchants, and technocrats, represent themselves as either 'more Yemeni' than the sadah or disclaim their Yemeni identity."157 Post-revolutionary writings and the state's early official canons of history, likewise, variously labeled the imams as "despotic, racist, sectarian, anti-egalitarian, and reactionary."1ss Because histories penned in the early days of the republic tend to have a certain staying power as defining documents, these labels have endured over generations in mainstream Shafei

156 vom Bruck, 235.

157 vom Bruck, 10.

158 Haykel, Revival and Reform in Islam, 201, 218. 76 Sunni culture and continue to be amplified and disseminated via official organs

like the state press. 159

The clean break with Zaydi past sought by Yemen's new ruling class was

emphasized more than merely rhetorically. In an anecdote Bernard Haykel

employs to illustrate this point, the new structures and symbols of the Yemeni

republic were constructed-quite literally-over the remains of the imamate:

In 1966, four years after the September revolution that ended the reign of the last imam in Yemen, bulldozers were clearing Sanaa's famous Khuzayma cemetery to build an Officer's Club ... Republican officers would now mingle over the concrete and asphalt covered remains of past generations of Sanaa's ulema. 16o

Parallel to the state's process of delegitimizing northern Yemen's identity

under the imamate, Sanaa actively cultivated tribalism as an authentic local

identity to replace the prominence of the Zaydiyyah. The symbolic importance of

tribes in founding the republic is not an accidental historiography; whereas the

imamate sought to establish an Islamic state independent of tribal affiliations,

the new republic sought to ignore religious and familial descent in favor of

encouraging tribal identities.161

Although state frames prize role of Hashid tribes, in particular, in the

establishment of the republic, republican and royalist allegiances during the end of the imamate in 1962 and ensuing civil war did not play out perfectly along tribal lines. Still, the Bakil tribes were generally more ardent royalists and

defenders of the imam while members of the Hashid federation (such as its

159 vom Bruck, 8.

16o Haykel, Revival and Reform in Islam, 1.

161 vom Bruck, 9· 77 leader Sheikh Abdullah al Ahmar) played key roles as pro-republican

'Septemberists."162

Within its emerging post-imamate and tribal nationalist narrative, the state sought to re-appropriate certain elements of Zaydi history to serve the construction of a new Shafei Sunni majority identity. A illustrative case is made by Haykel in his study of the legacy of reformist Zaydi scholar Muhammad al

Shawkani. Although a servant of the Qasimi Zaydi imamate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Shawkani became a major influence in Sunni schools of

Islam (particularly in Yemen) by embodying a reformation of the Zaydi-Hadawi school of law into a more Traditionalist school in line with Shafei interpretations-largely through his writings and hadith scholarship.163

In Haykel's view, Shawkani's infusion of Sunni Traditionalism was a watershed era in Zaydi history, and one that presented a distinct and irreversible break with thefiqh of pre-Qasimi imams. While Shawkani therefore played an important role in narrowing the gulf between Zaydi and Shafei doctrine, his legacy has often been reinvented and reappropriated to serve Yemeni intellectuals who seek to undermine modern adherents to orthodox Zaydi

162 Paul Dresch, "Tribal Relations and Political History in Upper Yemen," in Contemporary Yemen: Politics and Historical Background ed. B.R. Pridham (Centre for Arab Gulf Studies, University of Exeter: Croomhelm, 1984): 170; Paul Dresch and Bernard Haykel, "Stereotypes and Political Styles: Islamists and Tribesfolk in Yemen." International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 27, no. 4 (November 1995): 405.

163 The Hadawi school is the major school of Zaydi fiqh, originating with "followers of the legal school of al-Hadi ila al-Haqq Yahya b. al-Husayn, the founder ofthe Zaydi Imamate in Yemen." See Bernard Haykel, "AZaydi Revival?" Yemen Update 36 (1995): 20-21, http:/ jwww.aiys.org/webdate/hayk.html (accessed March 19, 2010).

78 beliefs. 164 In modern Shafei discourse, Shawkani is often hailed as a Sunni reformer well ahead of his time, seeking to reform and correct the 'impurities' of the Zaydi imamate from within. As Haykel aptly notes, however, "the histories that contemporary Yemenis pen often project backwards current political concerns and can have a distorting effect."16S

Finally, the majority Zaydi response of communal reconciliation and redefinition has also been impeded by elements of the nationalist narrative that link the imamate with foreign rule in Yemen. In addition to emphasizing the

'otherness' of the Zaydi sadah within the new republic, state frames have also ascribed foreign ties to the imams or drawn parallels between the Zaydi and

Yemen's historic external 'others.' While popular opinion largely assumed a sayyid sympathy for Ayatollah Khomeini's regime during the Iran-Iraq war,166 for example, foreign connections have also been deliberately drawn at the highest levels of state power.

In a content analysis of President Saleh's public addresses from 1990-

2009, Elizabeth Young finds that "the histories of the North and South are again paralleled, with the North's rule under the imams and the South's rule under the

British being seen as dark moments in Yemen's past.'' In Young's view, Sanaa deliberately groups the Zaydi imamate with authoritarian periods of rule under the British and Ottoman occupations (in a rather ironic twist of history considering the imamate's success at resisting foreign rule) in order to contrast

164 Haykel, Revival and Reform in Islam, 192.

16s Ibid., 193.

166 vom Bruck, Islam, 201. 79 them with the new multiparty democracy of the republic and link a historic external 'other' with a modern-day internal 'other.' 167

While the fall of the imamate in 1962 deprived the Zaydi of privileged access to social and political power, far more damaging has been the sense of cultural dislocation that has resulted from the new state's exclusion of Zaydi identity as something non-Yemeni. As the strategies of renunciation and reconciliation increasingly failed to preserve the core tenets of Zaydism within the republican context, some Zaydis turned to a third option-revivalism-as a form of cultural self-defense.

'67 Elizabeth L. Young, "Unifying History: An examination of official national narratives in the Republic of Yemen" (paper presented to Transnational Justice Workshop, Irmgard-Coninx­ Stiftung, Berlin, Germany, 21-26 October 2009), http:/ /www.irmgard-coninx­ stiftung.de/fileadminjuser_upload/pdf/Memory_Politics/Workshop_2/Young_Essay.pdf (accessed March 19, 2010): 4, 6 (footnote 12); vom Bruck, 11-12. 80 CHAPTER IV

REVIVALIST CURRENTS: EARLY ZAYDI SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Before analyzing the emergence of Zaydi revivalism in terms of social movement theory and-critically-framing, this chapter characterizes a competing Wahhabi social movement that was equally important in fostering the revivalist response as were the anti-Zaydi nationalist policies of the state. Because

Zaydi revivalism is inherently culturally-based (even more so than it is religiously-based), the chapter also evaluates culturally-specific elements of resource mobilization and framing in social movement theory. The discussion then moves to analysis of the success of factions within the revivalist movement in redressing the community's core cultural grievances-in terms of their resource mobilization, strategic framing, and political participation. The relative failure of revivalists and Zaydi political activists to confront the two-fold threat of state marginalization and a competing Wahhabi movement helped foster the intra-movement framing dispute that led to the rise of the more radical and confrontational Believing Youth.

Wahhabi Influence in Saada

While Zaydi revivalism is emblematic of social movements that employ diverse elements of resource mobilization and framing, so too is an opposing

Islamic social movement that has operated in Saada province since at least the

81 198os-Wahhabi and Salafi Sunnism. 168 The emergence ofthe revivalist movement as a form of cultural self-defense against the republic and its exclusive nationalist narrative must also be understood as a response to its direct Wahhabi competitor. Theoretically as well as practically, this framework of analysis makes sense; as discussed, social movements rarely stand alone and never operate in a vacuum.

Suppressive factors to one movement include competing social movements and, in the Zaydi revivalist case, one that directly challenged the

Zaydiyyah's cultural identity. Although Wahhabi and Zaydi movements in Saada have deployed strikingly-similar structures of resource mobilization, obvious fault lines have been drawn doctrinally and exacerbated through deliberate framing processes.

The Wahhabi movement was introduced to Saada in the 1980s, initially by locals who had studied Islam and converted to the Wahhabi school while working in the petroleum and construction industries in Saudi Arabia. While these migrant workers, a large percentage of whom were from Saada, rearrived en mass after being expelled as a consequence of Yemen's support of Iraq in the 1990-1

Gulf War (and generating an acute economic crisis as a result),169 the roots of

Wahhabism in Saada were established in the local climate of Saada in the early

1980s.

168 Although an equation ofWahabbism and Salafism may be technically imprecise, the largely overlapping movements in Saada are referred to here only as Wahabbism-owing to its intellectual and financial roots in neighboring Saudi Arabia.

169 See Burrowes, "Yemen: Political Economy and the Effort Against Terrorism." 82 The targets of recruitment and mobilization in the early Wahhabi movement in Saada were the same tribal, Shafei, and disaffected Zaydi youth who still harbored resentment for the last vestiges of the imamate's inegalitarian social structure, and who were also targets of the new republic's own nationalist narrative. The overlap between state and Wahhabi constituencies in Saada is more than a just the result of a similar goal of undermining the Zaydiyyah; Sanaa offered financial support to the Wahhabis in the north in the 1980s as a direct counterweight to the secular socialists that ruled the south in a still-divided

Yemen. State-level financial support also came from Riyadh, which is widely cited as sustainingthe Saada movement in its earliest stages. 17°

The existence of a constituency already amenable to the Wahhabi movement probably explains the success ofWahhabi resource mobilization structures and the resonance of anti-Zaydi frames more convincingly than does its financial backing by either Sanaa or Riyadh, however. "Wahhabism may have been sown, as some suggest, with foreign finance and encouragement, but it only took root because the soil was fertile." 171 Saada's fertile soil included many tribal and ahl al thulth residents who found in Wahhabism a refreshingly simple, egalitarian, and unmediated religious model naturally opposed to that of the

Zaydiyyah. 172

17° See, for example "Yemen: Defusing the Saada Time Bomb," 8, 10; Bonnefoy, "Varieties of Islamism in Yemen: The Logic of Integration under Pressure."

171 Shelagh Weir, "A Clash of Fundamentalisms: Wahhabism in Yemen." Middle East Report, no. 204, The Arabian Peninsula (July-September 1997): 22.

172 Ibid. 83 The Wahhabi movement centered itself in the mountainous region of

Razih west of Saada city, but quickly moved into other traditionally Zadyi areas

throughout the province. In terms of resource mobilization, Wahhabi adherents,

in a direct contestation of local relegiospacial structures, took over many Zaydi

mosques or simply established their own. 173 Confrontations inside Zaydi mosques

played out along doctrinal lines, using symbols and rituals to emphasize

distinction. The Wahhabi worshippers took to chanting amin (akin to the

Christian amen and contrary to Zaydi ritual), for example, and genuflecting with

their arms folded-rather than extended as in the Shia practice-during

prayers. 174

Wahhabi activists were also quick to establish Sunni lesson circles and

religious schools, popularly known as al maahid al ilmiyya or 'scientific

institutes.' The Wahhabi schools benefited from the positioning of prominent

leaders of the Yemeni Muslim Brotherhood like Abdel Malik al Tayyib and Abdel

Majid al Zindani in the Education Ministry beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s.

These leaders shared many of the goals-if not precise doctrine-of the Wahhabi

movement in Islamicizing the educational system, albeit for probably more

overtly political motives in the case of the Yemeni Brotherhood. Buttressed also by official Yemeni and Saudi support, the parallel network ofWahhabi schools grew in size and scope in the 1980s and 1990s. Although Sanaa, sensing a threat to the regime's legitimacy from the outspoken Wahhabis and their preference for

173 Weir, 22.

174 Ibid., 23. 84 a strict application of sharia, would eventually distance itself from the scientific institutes and cut their official funding, the expansion was already impressive.

The schools boasted a student body of some 6oo,ooo Yemenis before the network was nationalized and integrated with the state system in 2002.175

The Wahhabi social movement also included key agentive figures who mobilized collective action through framing like the late Muqbil al Wadii-whom

Haykel described as "the Salafi ideologue par excellence in Yemen."176 AI Wadii was a graduate of the Islamic University in Medina where, during his studies in the 1970s, he embraced Wahhabi beliefs and-in a telling parallel to the Yemeni republican narrative-reinterpreted Al Shawkani as a Salafi. Upon his return to

Yemen in the early 1980s, he established a hadith seminary in Dammaj (close to

Saada city, and later the scene of Houthi violence). 177 A vehemently anti-Zaydi figure, al Wadii disseminated mobilizing resources like religious pamphlets and cassette tapes that emphasized a literal reading of the Quran (a direct challenge to Zaydi ijtihad), a rejection offiqh, and a prohibition against evoking the dead.178

In this last framing process, decrying a Zaydi veneration of deceased religious leaders, al Wadii openly advocated the destruction of the domed tombs of Zaydi imams and prominent mujtahids as well as Shafei-Sufi saints-all of

175 Bonnefoy, "Varieties of Islamism in Yemen: The Logic of Integration Under Pressure."

176 Haykel, "A Zaydi Revival?"

m Haykel, Revival and Reform in Islam, 226.

178 Weeden, 165 (footnote 38).

85 which he deemed unlslamic. 179 His attack on Zaydi burial monuments was a natural extension of his treatise against similar tombs-including the Prophet's- in Sunni Saudi Arabia. In a book entitled "Khomeinian Heresy in Saudi Arabia (al ilhad al khumaynifi ard al haramayn)," al Wadii declared the construction of tombs kufr (an act of infidelity) that made it incumbent upon believers to return to the traditional separation of the mosque and grave from the time of

Mohammed.1so In his writings and audio cassettes produced in Saada, al Wadii attacked the practice as part of the overall heresy of Shiism. As a testament to the mobilizing effects ofWadii's framing, his followers acted on his words and desecrated the gravestones of sadah in Zaydi cemeteries just beyond the walls of old Saada city. 1s1

179 Ibid.

I8o Ondrej Beranek and Pavel Tupek, "From Visiting Graves to Their Destruction: The Question of Ziyara through the Eyes of Salafis." Crown Center for Middle East Studies (Brandeis University) Paper Series 2 (July 2009), http:/fwww.brandeis.edu/crown/publicationsfcp/CP2.pdf (accessed March 19, 201 0). The authors point out the irony in al Wadii's writings: "It is noteworthy that al-Wadi'i himself visited in person many such prohibited places in Iran: He twice visited the grave of 'imam of the heresy' Khomeini, and also the graves oflmam Zade Salih, Imam Shah 'Abd al-'Azim, and Imam 'Abdallah."

181 Bernard Haykel, "A Zaydi Revival?" 86 Figure 7. Cemetery in Saada. Photography by Bernard Gagnon, 17 August 1986.

The Wahhabi movement, in sum, is the critical counterpart to the state's anti-Zaydi rhetoric and policies in mobilizing a Zaydi revivalist response and later fostering the rise of increasingly-aggressive Zaydi social movement factions.

Because of the integral role of funding from Sanaa (and the regime's tolerance­ to a point-of external financing from Saudi Arabia), revivalists effectively tied state and Wahhabi forces to the cultural and religious marginalization of the

Zaydiyyah that was worsening in the 1980s. As an inherently defensive movement, revivalism copied the resource mobilization strategies of the

Wahhabis by creating their own parallel educational system in an effort to thwart a 'Sunnification' of Zaydi youth. It also directly confronted the wider Wahhabi message through strategic framing. Finally, more radical factions of revivalism, like the Believing Youth and the Houthis, would later use the specter ofWahhabi influence on Sanaa to help marry local Zaydi grievances in Saada to a foreign

87 policy critique of the regime's dependence on external sources of power like

(Wahhabi) Saudi Arabia and the US.

The Revivalist Response

The revivalist strategy sought to cultivate Zaydi religious and cultural awareness through education, written production, group rituals, and an overall defensive framing of the Zaydiyyah. Again, inhe~ently reactive in nature, the movement developed in response to the state narrative's exclusion of historical

Zaydism and the direct Wahhabi attack of contemporary Zaydi beliefs. Like its

Wahhabi social movement competitor, Zaydi revivalism was guided by key leaders who helped direct its early development through framing processes.

Owing to its distinctly cultural foundations, revivalism emphasized in-group/out- group distinctions through a 'cultural production' of Zaydi values in the educational system. In a precursor to the Houthi public protests movement, it also deployed performance and ritual-bas~3Jraming to defend Zaydi culturaL_____ / identity.

A core strategy of the revivalists was to establish a network of Zaydi religious schools, or madaris al ilmiyya, to stem the influence of the 'scientific institutes.' These Zaydi activists resented the influence of a 'foreign' school of

Wahhabism that, according to prominent Zaydi mujtahids like Muhammed al

Mansur, "failed to take account of the social fabric of the areas in which they were established.'' 18 2 Like the Wahhabi institutes, the madaris al ilmiyya operated in parallel to the state education system, on the fault line of state and civil society.

182 vom Bruck, 240. 88 Concentrated in Saada and neighboring al Jawf province, the Zaydi schools produced their own textbooks focused on introducing Hadawifiqh and hadith teachings to a new generation of the Zaydiyyah.

In an example of the role of cultural history and discourse in social movement framing, revivalists established a teacher training institute in Saada named after Ibn Hariwa. Hariwa was a Zaydi-Hadawi scholar who penned an attack on the reformist Shawkani, his contemporary, and the Traditionalist tendencies of the imam at the time. He was executed for his writings and has since been reappropriated-perhaps because he embodied a form of khuruj-as a

Zaydi martyr. 183 Other religious schools also reflected an effort to preserve the memory and legitimacy ofZaydi figures-like the Imam al Hadi madrasa, in which Husayn al Houthi encouraged followers to adopt the anti-US and anti­

Israeli chant-but invoking Hariwa's memory in the teacher training center was a particularly obvious counter to Wadii's dedication of the Dammaj seminary to

Shawkani.

Alongside Zaydi schools and teacher training institutes, pamphlets and edited religious texts emerged as another form of resource mobilization designed to rebut the state and Wahhabi marginalization of Zaydi historical figures and religious practices. By the early 1990s bookshops in Saada and even Sanaa carried Zaydi works onfiqh, prayer rituals, and politics. In direct opposition to both the state and Wahhabi narratives, much of the revivalist literature

!83 Haykel, "A Zaydi Revival?" 89 celebrated the Qasimi imams and Zaydism own hadith scholars like Muhammad al Wazir. 184

The revivalist movement was guided by prominent leaders like Baddredin al Houthi, who himself wrote a 1979 rebuttal of Saudi Wahhabi ideologue Ibn

Baz'sfatwa attacking prayer behind a Zaydi imam as heretical. 18s Early revivalist leaders helped emphasize a defensive framing of the movement through the content and tone of their discourse. Revivalism was interpreted as a last resort needed "to preserve Zaydism from the Wahhabi-Salafi onslaught and a continuing government policy of neglect and, at times, active persecution." As

Haykel notes, "On no issue was the Wahhabi onslaught more heartfelt among the

Zaydis than over the matter ofZaydi tombs."186

Zaydi leaders also led followers in collective action rituals that embodied the revivalist message through performance. Many ritual expressions of revivalism were centered in Razeh, a hotbed ofZaydi-Wahhabi tension that featured confrontations between worshippers and even armed standoffs in contested mosques. 187 In response to the Wahhabi intonation of am in, for example, Zaydi congregates took to responding with "kathabin" (or liars). 188

Zaydi revivalist leaders also reinstated festivals celebrating Ghadir Khumm, a

184 Ibid.

185 Haykel, "A Zaydi Revival?;" Haidar, "What Lies Beneath: Uncovering Yemen's Saada Conflict."

186 Haykel, "A Zaydi Revival?"

187 Weir, 23.

188 Ibid. 90 commemoration of the moment Shia believe Mohammed designated Ali as his rightful successor, which had been curtailed after the 1962 revolution. In one Eid al Ghadir celebration in Razeh in 1991, for example, Zaydi revivalists gathered in unprecedented numbers, delivering loud speeches and celebratory gunfire in a public display of opposition to Wahhabi encroachment in the area. 189

Characteristic of the plurality of large social movements, an intra­ movement split among the revivalists has played out along generational lines, with younger (and significantly, non-sayyid) scholars often leading efforts to found religious schools and propagate Zaydi writings. 19° Much of the older generation of Zaydi scholars, in contrast, refuse the partial accommodation with the status quo that is required in adopting elements of resource mobilization.

Instead, some of the older and orthodox Zaydis-like Abdullah bin Yahya al

Houthi-have elected to pursue revivalism by withdrawing from contested zones like cities to establish rural hijras (sanctuaries), where Zaydi beliefs can remain uncorrupted by contact with Wahhabi and Shafei-state influences. 19 1

In general, these kinds of internal framing contests mirror the leadership debates that led to the off-shoot Believing Youth movement as well as the hardline Houthi faction in later years. Significantly, however, the revivalism response remained non-violent. Although confrontations with Wahhabi activists in mosques and public spaces sometimes bordered on armed confrontation, there was not an element of revivalist framing that sanctioned violence against either

189 Ibid.

190 Lichtenthaler, 221.

191 Haykel, "A Zaydi Revival?" 91 the forces ofWahhabism or local representatives of state authority. Revivalism was certainly less accommodating than Zaydi responses of renunciation or reconciliation, but it channeled its collective action energy through peaceful resource mobilization structures and remained a defensive reaction to state and

Wahhabi threats to the Zaydiyyah.

Political Opportunity Structure: The Failure of al Haqq

The Zaydi revivalist movement, or at least one faction of it, also moved into the political arena with the founding of the al Haqq party in 1990. The flirtation of Zaydi social movement leaders and avenues of political power was relatively brief, but has important consequences for intra-movement revivalist splits that would hasten the rise of more radical factions like the Believing Youth and the Houthis.

The establishment of the party came in the context of a general loosening of restrictions on political alternatives to the ruling General People's Congress

(GPC). None other than Husayn al Houthi played a founding role in al Haqq, and the party's political success (or rather, lack thereof) is an important contributing factor to rise of al Houthi within more hardline circles of revivalism.

Ideologically, al Haqq was an attempt to achieve the same goals as the revivalist social and cultural movement in the political sphere. Ahmad al-Shami, al Haqq general secretary in 1994, stressed that the party's founding was a direct response to (Saudi) Wahhabi inroads in Saada: "Wahhabism is readying

92 conditions in order to colonise us indirectly for the imperialist cause."192 AI Haqq was also a direct challenge to the regime GPC party, which it viewed as complicit in the Wahhabi movement's rise (as a result of ideological and financial support in the 1980s) and which it therefore considered "guilty by association."193

The creation of al Haqq was not met with uniform support among leading revivalists, however. The al Haqq leadership issued a statement shortly after the party's founding essentially abandoning the institution of the imamate, and reiterating that the ruler of Yemen need not be a sayyid.194 Revivalist leaders and prominent Zaydi scholars like Baddredin al Houthi criticized the charter, although they still refrained from expressing direct opposition to the regime or

President Saleh. 195

More generally, many members of the Zaydi revivalist movement simply eschewed political participation, viewing the dominance of the GPC and inherently corrupt electoral system as anathema to the revivalism's real goals. In the case of other Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan, among many others, internal divisions over the practicality and desirability of political participation have been hallmarks of their long histories as Islamic social movements.

In contrast to the political opportunity structures in many states home to nascent Islamic political movements, however, the political system in Yemen in

19 2 Haykel, Revival and Reform in Islam, 227.

193 Ibid.

194 Ibid.

195 Johnsen, "The Sixth War in Sa'dah." 93 the 1990s presented a relatively level playing field. A1 Haqq soon found itself in competition with the Sunni Islamist Reform Movement party (or Islah), founded in 1990 by Hashid tribal federation head Sheikh Abdullah al Ahmar. Islah has little direct relation to the Wahhabi social movement; rather, Sheila Carapico describes the party as a "marriage of convenience" between the Hashid tribes and the urban-based Yemeni Muslim Brotherhood.196 Like its Brotherhood allies in the education ministry, however, Islah generally benefited the Wahhabis' own efforts to influence and convert Zaydi Shia in the north. By drawing on a large tribal constituency, moreover, Islah entered Yemeni politics in the 1990s as a potent force. By the parliamentary elections of 1993, therefore, the Zaydi al Haqq party faced formidable challenges from both the well-entrenched GPC and the upstart Islah.

The political history of al Haqq has been a story of recurrent electoral failure. In the 1993 elections, for example, Islah took a significant minority of 62 seats behind the GPC's 123. Although Islah's MPs came mostly from its tribal, not

Islamist, wing, it also counted as many as 30 sympathizers among the GPC seats

(plus three independent affiliates). 197 Islah was even able to elect al Ahmar to the position of Speaker of Parliament, a post he held (probably through his close relationship with Saleh) for three in consecutive terms until his death in 2007. 198

196 Sheila Carapico, "Elections and Mass Politics in Yemen," Middle East Report, no. 185 (November-December 1993): 3.

197 Ibid.

198 Mohammed al Kibsi, "Sheikh Abdullah Bin Hussein al-Ahmar passes away," Yemen Observer. 29 December 2007, http:/ jwww.yobserver.comjfront-page/10013462.html (accessed March 19, 2010). 94 AI Haqq, in stark contrast, won just two seats in 1993-Husayn and Yahya al

Houthi.

In response to al Haqq's poor debut, as well as ideological differences with other al Haqq leaders, several prominent revivalists resigned from the party.

Among the defectors were Husayn al Houthi, Abdullah al Ruzami, and Believing

Youth co-founders Abdul Karim Jadban and Mohammed Salem Ezzan. Before renouncing political participation altogether, they ran as independent rivals to al

Haqq in the 1997 elections.199

The next two election cycles would witness losses by both al Haqq and

Islah, as Saleh and the GPC organized (sometimes illegally) to consolidate their power. In the 1997 elections al Haqq won no seats, but managed to secure a cabinet post in the Ministry of Awqaf (religious endowments). Islah also did comparatively poorly, taking 53 seats-and no cabinet posts-to the GPC's 187. 200

AI Haqq again was denied seats in parliamentary elections in 2003 (with Yahya al

Houthi elected as a nominal independent), and Islah slipped to 45 MPs versus the GPC super-majority of 230 (over three-quarters of all seats).201

Even in its early days of its own operation, al Haqq demonstrated an acute failure to address Zaydi grievances on the political level. AI Haqq's failure may be a partial explanation for the Believing Youth's ascendancy; revivalism's limited

199 Hakim al Masmari, "Interview: Hasan Zaid."

200 Weir, 26 (footnote 4); and see Brian Whitaker, "Salih's election knockout." Middle East International, no. 550 (16 May 1997).

201 "The April23, 2007 Parliamentary Election in Yemen." National Democratic Institute Report. 23 April2007, http://www.ndi.org/files/1702_yem_elect-rep_arabic.pdf (accessed March 19, 2010). [AR] 95 gains in the educational and political arenas may have demanded a different form of communal mobilization in the eyes of less accommodating Zaydi social movement leaders.

Yet the Believing Youth actually predated the party's founding,.and mobilized a Zaydi constituency that already viewed political participation as a tangential strategy at best. With successive electoral defeats, al Haqq simply reinforced more hardline elements that were already gaining traction within revivalism. As such, the failure of al Haqq and the relative passivity of revivalism laid the groundwork for the rise of other Zaydi social movement offshoots that would deploy more aggressive forms of collective action and stake out a much more confrontational posture vis-a-vis the regime.

96 CHAPTERV

ZAYDI RADICALIZATION: THE BELIEVING YOUTH

This chapter examines the emergence of the Believing Youth as a result of intra-movement leadership debates within Zaydi revivalism. It demonstrates that while the Believing Youth was a byproduct of the failure of revivalism and its attempts to capitalize on Yemen's political opportunity structure, it was also a deliberately confrontational recruitment and mobilization network that arose under the leadership and framing of key Zaydi figures. This chapter also evaluates the Believing Youth's own intra-movement framing disputes that led to a .further radicalization of the group under the direction of Husayn al Houthi.

AI Houthi's period of leadership of the Believing Youth was critical to justifying the recent militancy of the group through cultural in-group/out-group framing. The Houthi-led Believing Youth was distinct from more moderate young

Zaydi activists in arming its followers in defense of the community's existential threats. Finally, because al Houthi was uniquely successful in grouping a critique of Sanaa's domestic policy and its effects on the social, political, and cultural disenfranchisement of the Zaydiyyah within a critique of Yemeni foreign policies towards the United States, this chapter revisits the anti-US slogan and protest movement in 2003-4 from a more theoretical framing perspective.

A split among revivalists can be dated to the late-1g8os, when some activists began to advocate for a more proactive form of the social movement

97 (well ahead of the political failures of al Haqq). In 1986, the Youth Union, an organization aimed at disseminating Zaydi doctrine to a younger generation outside the limits of the madaris al ilmiyya, was established in Saada. 202 The

Youth Union focused recruitment efforts on young Zaydis during summer breaks between the schools' terms, and was able to offer a program of cultural awareness and activism unhindered by a parallel focus on general education demanded by the madaris. Within a year, outspoken revivalists and al Haqq members

Mohammed Ezzan and Abdul Karim Jadban founded al Shabab al Moumineen

(or the Believing Youth) as a successor to the Youth Union. Some sources indicate that Ezzan and Jabdan had contacts with Shia figures in Iran and Lebanon in the

1980s 203 and that the Believing Youth was religiously and politically-based on the Hezbollah model in southern Lebanon. 204

Although it may have borrowed organizational structures from abroad, the

Believing Youth grew in a very local and Zaydi context. As an indigenous offshoot of Zaydi revivalism, the Believing Youth was partly a response to the insufficient gains of the social movement in general and its subsequent foray into politics in the form of al Haqq. As noted, both Ezzan and Jabdan left al Haqq in the mid-

1990s, frustrated with its electoral losses and the relative success of the Sunni

Islah party. As revivalist leaders, Ezzan and Jabdan also lamented the ambiguity of a pan-Zaydi revivalist movement that could not stem defectors in the hijra

202 Haidar, "What Lies Beneath: Uncovering Yemen's Saada Conflict."

203 "Yemen: The conflict in Saada Governorate- analysis."; al Masmari, "Interview: Mohammed Yahya Ezan."

204 Haidar, "What Lies Beneath: Uncovering Yemen's Saada Conflict." 98 movement and a general (and, recall, majority) trend of Zaydi reconciliation to the state.

The Believing Youth therefore emerged under the tutelage of Ezzan and

Jabdan not merely as a response to revivalism's failure or overly-broad scope, but as a deliberately narrower and more aggressive embodiment of collective action.

Strategies of collective action are not spontaneous nor irrational but incorporate decision-making and past lessons-learned under key leaders like Ezzan and

Jabdan.205 It was a desire for more immediate results in defending the 'besieged'

Zaydi identity that led Ezzan and Jabdan to break away from revivalism and frame their own brand of cultural self-defense.

AB an alternative to the pedagogical reforms of the revivalist movement, for example, the Believing Youth founded and administered a network of summer educational and religious camps to capture young Zaydi activists during breaks in the school year. Although Ezzan and J abdan started with just one camp of 35 students, within a decade the Believing Youth had grown to a network of 67 summer centers-nearly two-thirds of which were established in governorates surrounding Saada-that had co-opted at least 15,000 youth. 206 The camps served to continue the Zaydi education that the madaris provided, but were aimed at fostering a new and younger generation of religious scholars and

205 Ibid., 13-17.

206 Fattah, "Yemen: A slogan and six wars."; "Yemen: The conflict in Saada Governorate­ analysis;" al Masmari, "Interview: Mohammed Yahya Ezan;" Haykel, "A Zaydi Revival?" 99 activists who would be more "culturally, morally, and spiritually prepared" to assert and defend Zaydi identity. 2 07

Drawing on external religious mobilization models, some Zaydi observers report that the camps distributed video lectures of Hezbollah leaders like

Mohammed Hussein Fadhlallah and Hassan Nasrallah.20s Like the revivalist movement before it, the Believing Youth reinforced a divide between young activists like Ezzan and Jabdan and older and more traditional Zaydi scholars whom, according to Ezzan, interpreted the new movement as a threat to their religious leadership.

In terms of mobilization more generally, the Believing Youth camps presented a novel model of proactive recruitment networks that contrasted with the more passive madaris al ilmiyyah and text and ritual-based revivalism.

Because no movement exists in a vacuum, recruitment networks like the

Believing Youth camps provide a powerful arena for collective action for social movements that are under threat from competing actors like the Wahhabi influx in Saada. The popularity and growth of the summer camps benefited also from a dearth of job opportunities (especially after the forced repatriation of Saada migrant workers from Saudi Arabia following the Gulf War) and a lack of government-run summer centers that could compete for the patronage of the same Zaydi youth. 209

207 Haidar, "What Lies Beneath: Uncovering Yemen's Saada Conflict."

20s According to Hassan Zaid (Secretary General of al Haqq), see "Yemen: The conflict in Saada Governorate - analysis."

209 Fattah, "Yemen: A slogan and six wars." 100 Like the madaris, funding for the Believing Youth came from prominent

Zaydi patrons and a limited use of Zaydi khums contributions. At one point,

however, the Believing Youth also received some government support. Concerned

about the unforeseen momentum of the Wahhabi movement (that, recall, was

originally a regime stalwart against socialist sentiment in the south), by the end

of the 1980s Saleh agreed to subsidize the nascent Believing Youth to counter

growing public perceptions of Saudi influence inside Yemen's borders. Ezzan

claims they petitioned Saleh for support and received YR 400,ooo-along with a

reminder that the President did not favor one Yemeni sect over another.210

Indeed, when Wadii's death in 2001 fragmented the Salafi/Wahhabi

movement in Saada so that tolerating Zaydi revivalism and the Believing Youth as

a strategic balancer was no longer necessary, official support (never a primary source of the movement's coffers) all but dried up. 211 More importantly, Sanaa's temporary support was minimal compared with years of political and financial backing of the Wahhabi movement in Saada and the surrounding northern

provinces-a fact that left hardline revivalists like Ezzan and Jabdan decrying the

nexus between Saleh and the Saudi-inspired movement.

Even Ezzan and Jabdan refused to embrace violent strategies vis-a-vis the

Wahhabis or the state in their network of mobilizing summer youth camps, however. Despite the outward appearance that the camps provided of a recruitment pool of young Zaydi rejectionist foot soldiers, the camps under Ezzan

2 'o According to Hassan Zaid (Secretary General of al Haqq), "Yemen: The conflict in Saada Governorate - analysis."

211 Weeden, 180; "Yemen: Defusing the Saada Time Bomb," 6 (footnote 30). 101 and Jabdan's leadership emphasized the same core message of cultural self-

defense through education that early revivalism had stressed through the

madaris and religious writings. The camps were certainly geared towards

radicalizing young Zaydis and employed more aggressive and narrower forms of

collective action, but these strategies still sought to counter the Wahhabi threat

through peaceful means.

By the late 1990s, however, the Believing Youth witnessed an intra-

movement framing dispute of its own, as even more radical rivals to Ezzan and

Jabdan rose to leadership positions and sought to take the organization in a more

militant direction. Ezzan dates the split in the Believing Youth to 1999, when

Husayn al Houthi (himself anal Haqq defector) used his influence on the six-

member management board to implement a Zaydi fundamentalism in centers

under his oversight. The network began to be openly divided into moderate and

conservative elements (with the latter even less accommodating to the state), and

with the split sometimes manifesting itself within the same center.212 Eventually,

the oversight board proved unable to resolve the schism and al Houthi and his

followers embarked on what can be characterized as the Believing Youth's

"militant phase."213

Husayn al Houthi and a Militant Believing Youth

In addition to taking a harder tack against the government, al Houthi also seems to have advocated the arming of his followers shortly after the split. Taking

212 According to Hassan Zaid (Secretary General of al Haqq), see "Yemen: The conflict in Saada Governorate- analysis."

2 13 Fattah, "Yemen: A slogan and six wars." 102 the armed standoffs and small-scale clashes between Zaydi and Wahhabi activists at mosques in as a precedent, this move was designed to offer a level of protection to the madaris al ilmiyyah, Zaydi mosques, and the summer camps themselves.

An armed self-defense was also easily justified in the face of the flagrant Wahhabi attacks on Zaydi tombs. With an initial defensive posture and well-integrated in the organization's social service activities (rather than comprising a formal military wing, which did not exist at the time), the armed Believing Youth were analogous to the "rover scouts" of the early Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.214

Al Houthi's ability to elevate the cultural danger posed by Wahhabis and state policies to an existential communal threat necessitating this kind of armed self-defense was accomplished through his framing techniques. Like revivalist leaders before him, al Houthi was tasked with fostering a collective Zaydi identity

(especially a young Zaydi identity) among his followers, identifying the adversary in the form of state and Wahhabi forces, and defining the movement's purpose in its defense of the Zaydiyyah. Unlike both the more passive revivalist movement and more moderate elements of the Believing Youth, in framing the movement's fourth key element-an objective stake in the conflict-al Houthi was able to successfully integrate the possibility of armed confrontation into the group's repertoire. 215

A key ingredient to his success in framing armed self-defense may well have been Husayn al Houthi's own charisma. In a variety of forms of outreach

214 See Brynjar Lia, The Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt: The Rise of an Islamic Mass Movement 1928-1942 (Reading, UK: Garnett, 1998): 170-2.

215 For a theoretical explanation of these four framing tasks, see Melucci, 292. 103 and propaganda, al Houthi emphasized a vein of Zaydism that was culturally and politically uncompromising in its relationship with the state. He tied metaphors of group trauma, like the loss of the imamate, to the modern plight of young

Zaydis in the face of both state neglect of Saada (economically and politically) as well as the well-entrenched Wahhabi ideological threat.

By 2004, for example, al Houthi's charismatic leadership of his Believing

Youth followers drew on traditional resource mobilization media like audio cassettes and pamphlets that reflected his own aggressive interpretation of Zaydi revivalism and denounced the 'Saudi-backed' regime as corrupt and dictatorial (a narrative later Houthi leaders would adopt).216 The Houthis also established a media relations division that at some point established its own news website (al menbar, or the platform) offering a Houthi spin on Yemen's news-and regularly blending government "atrocities" and Saudi "war crimes" in its overall news narrative after fighting broke out in 2004.217

Perhaps more so than early revivalist leaders, Husayn and subsequent

Houthi leaders have been successful in grouping a diverse array of grievances- political, economic, and cultural/religious-under one banner of communal self- defense. Well before the outbreak of war, the vulnerability of the Zaydiyyah was pronounced in the political, economic, and cultural/religious spheres. Ahead of deploying his hybrid foreign-domestic policy critique in the form of the slogan

216 al Masmari, "Interview: Mohammed Yahya Ezan;" Hiltermann, "Disorder on the Border: Saudi Arabia's War Inside Yemen."

217 http:/ fwww.almenpar.net, accessed 16 March 2010. 104 movement, Husayn al Houthi actively worked to further radicalize Zaydi grievances in these areas through framing.

Politically, the electoral adventure of al Haqq and the systematic exclusion ofZaydis from government positions (especially locally, in Saada) were deep points of contention by the early 2000s. The Houthi leadership has not professed a desire to reestablish the Zadyi imamate, but it has refused to accept the current conditions of political integration-namely, the unchallenged domination of a corrupt Saleh and the GPC. As Yahya al Houthi has argued, "the issue is neither imamate nor republican rule. What concerns us is that over the past thirty years, there has been a dictatorship in Yemen."21s In an earlier interview, Baddredin al

Houthi put it this way: "We are for justice. We do not know this democracy you speak of." 219

Recent Zaydi socioeconomic grievances center on what is perceived locally to be a deliberate government neglect of Saada in an already resource-scarce country. The north did not benefit proportionally from the boom years of Yemeni oil production in the early 2000s, and has also been excluded from much of the foreign aid pouring into Yemen from Western donors like Great Britain (in spite of the efforts oflocal and international NGOs operating in Saada). One GPC

218 Yahya al Houthi, comment on "The Shia Rebellion in Yemen."

219 "Al-'Alama Badr ad-Deen al-Houthi to al Wasat: The President was afraid ofHusayn." al Wasat (Sanaa weekly), 19 March 2005, [AR], as cited in Overton, "Understanding the Second Houthi Rebellion in Yemen."

105 member acknowledged that the Zaydi north feels it has been largely excluded from Sanaa's development policies. 220

Even on the issue of water resource allocation, Saada seems to be suffering under the burden of uneven government socioeconomic policy. Because Saada's water table was dropping by an astonishing 4-6 meters per year in 2003,221 the ability of landowners to dig multiple private wells has had renewed importance for local agriculture and pastoralism. However, Sanaa's effort to consolidate its authority in the province, combined with a recent law forbidding unlicensed water wells, has threatened local interests. This brings to the forefront a legal conflict over rights to water resources, pitting Yemen's Civil Law (which favors local landowners) against its constitution (which cedes final authority to the state). As Lichtenthaler argues, "Attempts by the state to establish control over the Sa' dah region have had direct repercussions on groundwater development ... tribal groups feared that the state was out to claim their common land under the pretext of military training, national security and

'development."'222 The ability ofHusayn al Houthi to draw more narrow Zaydi frames along these kind of widespread local grievances are easy to infer because the politicization and state-led capture of resources like water "destroys the essential elements needed for co-operation, willingness, trust and legitimacy."223

220 "Yemen: Defusing the Saada Time Bomb," 13.

22l Lichtenthaler, 20.

222 Ibid., 4·

223 Ibid., 20. 106 Culturally, al Houthi was able to frame grievances both in terms of an

inability to effectively pursue Zaydi cultural autonomy in Saada (due to

government policies banning the parallel educational institutes224 and

discouraging rituals like Eid al Ghadr), and in a growing and general

estrangement from a regime in Sanaa that they considered beholden to Wahhabi-

Saudi and US interests.

AI Houthi was most effective as a social movement leader in this

integration of this diverse array of local concerns (political, socioeconomic, and

cultural) within a foreign policy critique of the Saleh regime in 2003-4. As the

anti-US and anti-Israeli slogans in response to this estrangement became the

proximate cause of violence, moreover, it is worth probing the extent to which the

slogan really did encompass these other, local grievances as well.

Revisiting the Houthi Slogan

As mentioned, the Houthi slogans of 2004 have been misappropriated by

counterterrorist framings of the rebellion. While the anti-Western sentiments

embodied in the slogan are nevertheless authentic, the question remains whether

the protests were primarily a framing technique masking unrelated local

grievances, or whether the slogan primarily represented a resentment of Sanaa's

complicity in US foreign policies in the region.

224 Among specific goals of the Houthi movement that Abdel Malik would cite, he expressed a desire to maintain Zaydi religious schools without the interference of the government. See Arafat Madabish, "Abdel Malik al-Houthi: We are not hostages to any regional power and if the regime stops targeting us we will end our isolation." [AR] 107 On one hand, Islamic social movements themselves tend to emphasize the cultural imperialism of the West in an argument akin to a 'clash of civilizations,'

"whereby mobilization is viewed as a response to insidious Western desires to undermine the culture of Muslim societies."225 In the recent context of

Washington's 'War on Terror,' the Houthis-like Islamist groups in states throughout the Arab Middle East with 'pro-Washington' regimes-simply reflect a more general regional trend in the "de-legitimization of the ruling elites" and

"further radicalization of opposition groups." 226 In this reading, the slogan and protests represented an opportunity for the Houthis to act on an area of widespread regime disapproval 'in defense of Islam (as Husayn al Houthi maintained up until the start of the war) and not necessarily communal interest.

In the Zaydi context, in particular, where historically the imam had been charged with "protecting and fostering the Islamic nature of the country,'' 227 the slogan may have had intrinsic momentum outside of any framing processes that attempted to marry it to a host of local grievances.

The alternative interpretation of the slogan is as a purely instrumentalist tool designed to mobilize Houthi Believing Youth followers; accordingly, the actual message (of a foreign policy critique) is only important insofar as it generates sufficient collective action. Mohammed Saif Hadar characterizes the slogan as a "totalitarian method of political recruitment,'' and views it as a mobilization technique designed to reaffirm individual commitment to the

2 2 5 Wiktorowicz, 8.

226 Fattah, "Yemen: A slogan and six wars."

227 Burrowes, 167 (footnote 9). 108 movement and emphasize out-group distinctions. 228 In social movement analyses of Islamist activism, the slogan may simply reflect the use of the religiospacial structure of the mosque during Friday prayers as a natural site of collective action in which to organize contention vis-a-vis the regime. 229

Even without denying importance to the content of the slogan's content, other observers are still apt to view it as a simple mobilizing tool that masks

Houthi religio-cultural, economic, and political grievances. From this point of view, the emotional appeal of the slogan makes it a particularly strong means of generating collective action: "Slogans are headlines crowded with meaning. The more correctly the slogan expresses the dissatisfaction and suffering of the people, the more effective it will be in mobilizing latent emotions.''2 3° Relating the slogan back to regional trends more generally, Fattah adds that "anti-US and anti-Israeli sentiments in the region are serving as an umbrella for sheltering local demands, and as a catalyst for mobilizing local communities against their own central governments."2 31

A third option, advocated in this analysis, is to view the slogan as neither fully ideological nor narrowly instrumental. By 2004, Houthi expressions of

Zaydi grievances has grown to include not only cultural and religious disputes, but local economic interests, a reaction to state authority in the north, and- neither subordinated to nor masking these issues-opposition to international

22s Haidar, "What Lies Beneath: Uncovering Yemen's Saada Conflict."

229 Wiktorowicz, 1.

2 30 Fattah, "Yemen: A slogan and six wars."

2 31 Fattah, "Yemen: A slogan and six wars." 109 issues like undue Saudi influence in Yemen and the extremely unpopular US 'War on Terror.'

That a non-local issue would stand parallel to long-held local and Zaydi grievances in the Houthi movement should not necessarily be surprising. The

Houthis' array of cross-cutting domestic and foreign policy issues, Lisa Weeden argues, "combine to create and refresh political loyalties, thereby intensifying claims of 'groupness,' which themselves may be simultaneously national and pious."2 32 More generally, scholars should be careful of assuming overly-rational calculations in the motivations of social movements, which may actually reflect some of the crowd-psychology of the early strain-collective action literature as much as they do agentive framing:

In our theories of social action we ought to pay attention to local dynamics while resisting the impulse to isolate instrumental or strictly material motives from wider political-moral discourses ... These moral issues are not epiphenomenal, acting as smokescreens or instances of false consciousness that veil the substantive material concerns of actors ... they can appeal to both material and ethical concerns.

The protest movement and general content of the slogan itself are not unique to the Houthi movement, of course. In the wake of September 11 and the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, Islamic activists groups across the Muslim world were successful in staging public protests to vent hostility of US foreign policy, many of which "exhibited a consistent repertoire of contention."2 33

Petitions, banners, symbols, and idioms (like the Houthi slogan) were deployed in various national contexts, but al Houthi was more successful in grouping the

232 Weeden, 149.

233 Wiktorowicz, 3· 110 anti-US foreign policy critique of Sanaa alongside existing Zaydi group grievances

than were other post-gju Islamic activist protests that withered rather than

metastasized under regime repression.

Because al Houthi had already propagated anti-system frames in his

cassettes and pamphlets-deriding Sanaa for the collection oflocal grievances

and its affinity for the Wahhabi movement-adding an emotionally-resonant

anti-US foreign policy grievance to the mix was a sufficient catalyst for violence

(or, more appropriately, a group orientation towards violence if and when it

became necessary). The intense reaction ofYemenis-and many other publics in

Arab and Muslim countries-to US policies in the Middle East and Southwest

Asia could be more effectively channeled into a direct confrontation with the

regime in the Houthi movement versus other post-September 11 protests because

al Houthi filtered it through his existing framing of an existential threat to the

Zaydi community.

When the threat to the Zaydiyyah was married to the clear and present

danger the US seemed to present to Muslims across the region as a result of the

invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, it was not a large conceptual leap for al

Houthi's band of followers to justify a militant response to Sanaa. Just as radical

members of the Believing Youth under al Houthi saw in Wahhabi mosque take­

overs and desecration of sadah tombs a necessity for armed self-defense, al

Houthi's delegitimization of Saleh's regime though its uncomfortable yet close

relationship with the US sanctioned a form of armed offense (or at least brinksmanship ).

111 While the ties between Sanaa and a Wahhabi strain of Islam were lamentable from the perspective of a Zaydi community already marginalized by state policies since the revolution, the post-9/11 relationship between Saleh and a

Western state prosecuting two wars in Muslim countries was used by Houthi to advocate something closer to the core Zaydi principle of khuruj. Recall that, traditionally, khuruj is reserved for insurrections against unjust or corrupt

Muslim rulers. If Sanaa was not only falling victim to external Wahhabi influences but now quietly collaborating with the United States, al Houthi's indictment of the US and its ally Israel was also a challenge to the ability of the regime to appropriately 'defend Islam.'

Moreover, al Houthi had led a conservative faction ofthe Believing Youth that had long advocated for a more aggressive and activist strategy in opposing

Sanaa. By challenging his followers, "For how long more should we keep doing nothing in response to the American ignorance," al Houthi provided the necessary 'tipping point' in his calls for confrontational collective action. Because al Houthi's faction ofthe Believing Youth split off as early as 1999, it cannot be argued that the Houthis are a characteristically anti-US movement. Rather, the protest movement of 2003-4 simply grafted an emotionally-resonant (and mobilizing) foreign policy critique onto a narrative of Zaydi dispossession that al

Houthi had weaved through his audio recordings, speeches, and writings over the previous five years.

A1 Houthi's use ofthe protest slogan is therefore a carefully-layered framing technique that sought to use the emotional and widespread appeal of the

112 anti-US message to mobilize collective action that he hoped to guide towards a defense of more traditional Zaydi political, socioeconomic, and cultural grievances. His strategic framing, however, was less effective in controlling or directing the protest movement once launched. As argued in the next chapter, coupled with regime reaction, al Houthi's loss of control over framing processes led to the actual violent confrontations with Sanaa. Whatever al Houthi's initial motivation for prescribing the slogan movement's strategic framing, the effect of the protest movement and its militant brinksmanship clearly had dire consequences for a movement that had heretofore escaped a direct challenge to its survival.

113 CHAPTER VII

EXPLAINING THE USE OF VIOLENCE

Even if al Houthi effectively justified a protest movement unprecedented within revivalism for its open challenge to the regime-and unique within post-

9/11 demonstrations for its channeling oflocal grievances-violence can only be fully explained by accounting for the motivations in the Saleh regime's own reactions to this aggressive confrontation. This chapter evaluates the Houthi group's place within the theoretical typology of non-violent social versus violent protest/insurrectionary movements in an effort to further contextualize the group's transition to more violent confrontations with Sanaa. A key intervening variable to al Houthi's framing, as this chapter demonstrates, was the regime­ challenger interactions that surrounded the slogan-based Believing Youth protest movement. This chapter therefore views the relationship between Sanaa and the militant Believing Youth on the eve of war in a comparative perspective with other Islamic activist movements that adopted violence in the face of regime repression. Finally, because al Houthi's layering of domestic and foreign policy critiques was viewed as a potential threat to the regime's legitimacy and authority, this chapter probes the extent to which Sanaa may have used the initial protests as a pretext to extend its internal sovereignty north into Saada.

Returning to Bayat's typology (Table 1), the Houthis undeniably fit many of the criteria in the social versus insurrectionary movement framework-

114 including a small number of united partisans, imprecisely-articulated demands, and the use of street protests. It is questionable, however, if the Houthis conceived of themselves before 2004 as a force designed to 'negate the existing order' through a direct attack on the government. They certainly did not publicly profess as much, even though they had been extremely critical of the political establishment and its role in Zaydi cultural marginalization (albeit short of the threshold of violent regime change). The Houthis have conceived of the reestablishment of a Zaydi community and a redressing of group grievances through consistently non-revolutionary means-including revivalist schools and literature as well as the Believing Youth camps. The arming of Believing Youth members in a 'militant phase' under al Houthi was a point of departure from other forms of revivalism, but until 2004 it remained a defensive response to the encroachment ofWahhabism and not a marshaling of force against the state itself.

Regime-Challenger Interactions and Framing, 2004-2010

The Houthi's use of violence is better understood by adding exogenous factors to their in-group motivations and framing-namely, the role of regime- challenger interactions during the protest movement. Regime-challenger interactions often elevate a relatively minor point of disagreement, like the slogans of 2004, into an opportunity for violent confrontation through framing.

As Wiktorowicz notes, a violent regime response via aggressive "protest policing techniques" was shared by many of the post-9/11 anti-American protests in

Muslim-majority countries. But just as the unique layering ofthe Houthi slogan 115 was a distinguishing characteristic of the anti-US protest movement in Yemen, so too are the Yemeni regime's own frames and internal motivations for confronting the demonstrations with undue repression. A focus on these external interactions, therefore, integrates important agency on the part of the regime and also explains the role of state counter-frames in pushing the Houthis towards violence.

Sanaa's military repression of the Houthi protest movement was partly a result of the language and conceptual categories employed in its own framing process. The regime's use oflabels on the eve of violence in 2004 like

"extremists," "terrorists," and ''fitna" (see footnote 11), had the effect of

"effectively prescribing available self-identifications, so that citizens even tangentially related to the designation have little choice but to engage in everyday political conversation and action using this category."2 34 In other words, rhetoric employed by the regime to publicly deride the Houthis helped box them into an armed defensive posture that they had already adopted vis-a-vis Wahhabi threats in Saada.

In an analysis of the use of violence by other Islamist groups, authors in

Wiktorowicz's Islamic Activism provide three alternative models that also go a long way in contextualizing violence in interactions between the Houthis and

Sanaa. Because these models focus on the role of regime-challenger interactions in producing Islamist strategies of violence, they are more important in their

2 34 Weeden, 161-162. 116 ability to explain the unique interplay between the Houthi slogan and Saleh's crackdown in 2003-4.

In one model, al Houthi's anti-regime frames and armed posture were predisposed to meet Sanaa's crackdown on Believing Youth protestors with violence because non-violent political alternatives had already been exhausted.

Mohammed Hafez, writing on the Armed Islamic Groups (GIA) in Algeria during the 1990s, finds a likelihood of violence where political avenues for group advancement are closed and three conditions intersect: first, state repression

"creates a political environment of bifurcation and brutality;" second, Islamic activists create "exclusive and clandestine organizations" (like the Believing

Youth) that increasingly isolate members from society; and third, social movement actors eventually employ "anti-system frames" and a belief in the necessity of violence to mobilize collective action against the regime. 2 35

Alternatively, Saleh's attempted nationalization of parochial schools-both

Wahhabi and Zaydi-in Saada may have prompted a violent defense of these emblems of revivalism. Hafez and Wiktorowicz use the case of the Gamaa

Islamiyya in Egypt in the 1990s to explore the possibility that a government crackdown on apolitical social movement structures like local institutions and social welfare organizations motivates violence when groups feel that-in their

2 35 Wiktorowicz, 21. See Mohammed Hafez, "From Marginalization to Massacres: A Political Process Explanation of GIA Violence in Algeria" (same volume).

117 creation of alternative social spaces-they have something to lose when these same structures are threatened. 2 36

In a third model, finally, harsh regime reactions to public protest movements, as occurred during the Shia uprising against the Sunni regime in

Bahrain in the 1990s, tend to radicalize activists and further "push tactics towards violence."2 37 When pressures on the street cannot be reconciled through political dialog, state measures to disperse demonstrations like the Houthi slogan movement produce violence resistance. As in Bahrain, the official uncompromising narrative and strong-armed repression of the protest movement in Yemen was a tactical regime strategy favored over possible other, non-violent resolution mechanisms.

As noted in Chapters V and VI, Zaydi failures at political participation were not sufficient grounds for violent trends in revivalism. While, like the GIA, the failure of al Haqq within Yemen's political opportunity structure was a partial motivation for defectors like Ezzan, Jabdan, and al Houthi to form the Believing

Youth, political setbacks did not lead to an immediate use of violence even among more radical Zaydi factions. Arguably, though not a perfectly-level playing field, the Yemeni democratic system of the 1990s was a far cry from the Algerian regime's repression of both the FIS and GIA during the same period.

The case of the Gamaa Islamiyya in Egypt is more appropriate, as the

Yemeni government's efforts to close Zaydi religious schools and discourage

2 36 Ibid. See Mohammed Hafez and Quintan Wiktorowicz, "Violence as Contention in the Egyptian Islamic Movement" (same volume).

2 37 Ibid., 22. See Fred H. Lawson, "Repertoires of Contention in Contemporary Bahrain" (same volume). 118 ritual celebrations like Eid al Ghadr represent direct attacks on resource mobilization structures in which Zaydi revivalists (including the Houthis) had invested a lot time and money. Interestingly, on at least one occasion, Yemeni

Muslim Brotherhood leader and prominent Islah member Abdel Majid al Zindani purportedly called on his own followers to take up arms against the state if it shut down the (Wahhabi) Sunni maahid al ilmiyyah. 2 38 However, while probably a contributing factor to the birth of al Houthi's more radical Believing Youth faction, these steps by the regime were never met with violence by the Zaydi revivalists or the Believing Youth.

The case of regime repression in the face of mass protests in Bahrain is most applicable to the Houthi case. Both protest movements presented public displays of discontent from sizable Shia populations (a slight majority in Bahrain and a slight minority in Yemen) directed at Sunni regimes. 2 39 As mentioned, implicit in the Houthi's slogan-based protests in 2004 was a moral and political challenge to Sanaa not unlike that in the Bahraini movement.

Adding exogenous factors of regime framing and strategy to those of al

Houthi is thus important to explaining how the Houthis' posture of armed defense and rhetorical offense led directly to violence. The Houthi stance against a government beholden to Wahhabi policies of Zaydi marginalization internally, and unable or unwilling to defend Islam externally, presented a layered challenge to Saleh's legitimacy that necessitated a decisive response from the regime. In the

2 38 Dresch and Haykel, 410 (footnote 34). Note, the source of the report was the Baathist paper al Hadaf, the objectivity of which should be taken into account.

239 Although Saleh is originally a Zaydi he generally down plays his own religious leanings, and more importantly has surrounded himself in the regime with key Sunni leaders. 119 Yemeni political context, however, it is not a foregone conclusion that Sanaa's response would have been violent repression of the protest movement.

Given Saleh's personal ability and inclination to mediate tribal disputes and co-opt potential regime opponents throughout his reign as president, non­ violent engagement would have actually been the typical response-even to the unprecedented slogan-centered protests. While it is true that Sanaa pursued last minute mediation attempts with al Houthi, as mentioned in Chapter III negotiations took place in the midst of mass arrests and early military maneuvers in Saada. Not only did this break Yemeni taboos of abstaining from violence during dispute mediation, it suggested that Saleh had larger political and military goals in responding to the street protests.

So why did the regime response strategy favor more violent repressive measures and a police and military campaign against al Houthi in 2004? The perceived threat to Saleh's authority and legitimacy encapsulated by the protest slogan may not have been the only factor guiding the government's rather disproportionate military response. Observers of Yemen are usually quick to note

Sanaa's inability to extend effective political authority and sovereignty much beyond the capital itself. 2 4° However, Weeden argues that our typical notion of lawless territory and failed states overlooks a viable; possibly unconscious regime strategy of using divide and rule to impart quasi-control over its territorial domain in a phenomenon she classifies as "reproducing spaces of disorder."2 4 1

2 4° Such as Rotberg, 18.

2 41 Weeden, 180, 185. 120 Sanaa may have dispatched overwhelming force to quell the Houthi protest movement because it gave the regime an unprecedented opportunity to finally assert its sovereignty over an area previously under only quasi-control.

Indeed, the extent of Sanaa's political impotence in Saada was demonstrated in regime-challenger interactions immediately after Husayn al Houthi's indictment in 2004. Until the central government intervened with troops, al Houthi had been effective in setting up pseudo-official road checkpoints and convincing the local populace not to pay taxes to the state. Thus, in Weeden's view, "The central government's control over the western part of Sa'dah province, never strong at any time, was challenged by the movement's growing dominance and the regime felt compelled to act to preserve its wobbly authority." The Houthi war is therefore a strange example of how "a regime's efforts to bring the state into being by 'monopolizing' violence may actually generate more violence."2 4 2

Just as the Houthi protest slogan was a careful layering of foreign and domestic policy critiques, in other words, the regime's own rhetorical framing techniques and strong-armed repression of the Believing Youth likely worked towards both explicit and implicit goals. Like Houthi's loss of control over the protest movement, Sanaa itself also miscalculated its ability to control and direct the regime-challenger interactions surrounding its attempt to arrest al Houthi and extend its authority northward.

A1 Houthi's domestic-foreign critique was arguably designed to invite some form of confrontation between his armed followers and a regime he knew

2 42 Ibid., 185. 121 would need to defend its sovereignty and legitimacy in the face of claims of US and Wahhabi-Saudi patronage. Sanaa, however, was intent on not only dispersing a public threat to its Yemeni identity (coming, ironically, from a leader of the same Zaydi community his regime had long portrayed as an non-Yemeni

'other'), but actively sought a violent confrontation of its own making to accomplish long-held goals of imposing military control over the troublesome north. Forms of escalatory framing by each side fed armed confrontation, which, in turn supported the existing narratives of the Houthis as violent religious extremists and of the state as an anti-Zaydi tyranny.

122 CHAPTER VIII

CONCLUSION

While the social movement foundations of the Houthis are no less complicated than the conflict itself, they do provide critical insights to the long­ term Zaydi grievances the group claims to represent. Despite the Houthis' characterization in the civil war from 2004-2010 as terrorists, a charismatic leadership cult, proxy soldiers in an Saudi-Iranian cold war, or resource-seeking separatists, they are actually the inheritors of a long, historically and culturally­ attuned Zaydi social movement. The transition from Zaydi political and social dispossession after the fall of the imamate in 1962 to a Believing Youth faction that marshaled a public (and eventually violent) confrontation with the government took place over more than four decades, and was far from linear.

In each evolution predating the Houthi movement, collective Zaydi responses grappled with both inter and intra-movement framing disputes that divided the community at large. The revivalist movement, set up to counter both a nationalist republican narrative that emphasized Zaydi 'otherness' and

Wahhabi inroads in Saada, was itself a minority response in relation to the dual alternatives of sayyid renunciation and reconciliation. Even among Zaydi revivalists, open contestation of education and cultural spheres in Saada was opposed by a hijra movement that eschewed public manifestations of revivalism.

123 The subsequent failure of al Haqq to capitalize on the political opportunity structure of the 1990s reinforced existing views on the futility of political participation and encouraged the consolidation of the Believing Youth movement-which, in turn, fell victim to an intra-movement struggle between its moderate and conservative branches. The latter coalesced into a more radical faction under the at times charismatic, at times calculating leadership of Husayn al Houthi.

While each evolution maintained a continuity of message of Zaydi cultural self-defense and deployed similar methods of resource mobilization, each successive faction staked out increasingly aggressive stances vis-a-vis the state and the competing Wahhabi social movement. This suggests, more generally, that internal debates that bifurcate social movements may be as important for their development (especially towards more confrontational postures) as exogenous factors like regime responses. Just as movement leaders play key roles in framing grievances and building effective resource mobilization structures, the same figures also provide crucial justifications for new trajectories within social movements.

Exogenous factors are nevertheless important in the proximate transition to violence. Neither the Yemeni government's steps to circumscribe the political opportunity structure through the GPC nor its arrested efforts to co-opt apolitical resource mobilization structures like private religious schools fully explain the

Houthi's use of violence-possibly because the WahabbijSunni movement faced the same pressures and also resisted an armed response. Rather, a regime

124 overreaction to non-violent street protests, which presented a challenge to both

the legitimacy of the state as the defender of Islam and to its actual territorial

sovereignty in Saada, led to violent conflict. The Houthi movement turned violent

because regime-challenger interactions in 2003-4 reinforced an existing framing

in the Houthi Believing Youth faction that had elevated the cultural

disenfranchisement of the Zaydiyyah to the level of existential threat, and that

had strategically grouped these concerns within a particularly resonant and

mobilizing public protest slogan.

Crucially, the anti-US and anti-Israeli slogan that became the flash point

for longstanding historical, social, and cultural tensions between the regime and

the Zaydis was neither a case of a purely instrumentalist mobilization nor a fully

ideological response to Sanaa's complicity in US regional policy; it was both,

simultaneously. Even in applying relevant social movement elements like framing

and mobilizing resources to the Houthi protests, or their precursors in revivalist

"kathabin" chants inside Wahhabi-contested mosques and assertive public

celebrations of Ghadr Khumm in Saada, one cannot completely subsume their

inherent emotional and religious appeal to the agent-led rationality of social

movements.

In addition, layered framing techniques like the slogan often fall victim to their own success. While the protests may have been an extremely effective strategy for mobilizing Houthi supporters in public opposition to the regime, the slogan movement also demonstrated a relative loss of control by the Houthi leadership. Husayn actively encouraged Believing Youth followers to take the

125 slogan to the streets, but within a year the size and scope of the movement­ owing to its inherent emotional appeal-had invited a regime reaction for which he was, as evidenced in rhetorical backpedaling on the eve of war, wholly unprepared. Sanaa's own desire to extend internal authority to the Houthis' stronghold in Saada may be a partial explanation for the unexpected regime response, but the slogan-based protests also offered a distinct challenge to Saleh's legitimacy nationally. Like the Houthi leadership frames, however, Sanaa was unprepared in its own right for the quick transition of its crackdown on the

Believing Youth to open war.

Thus, as this study has demonstrated, leadership framing plays a key role in strategically mobilizing violent collective action within militant minority factions of wider social movements, although not wholly through narrowly rational and elite-controlled discourse. Social movements may adopt more confrontational postures in response to political and socioeconomic repression, but the extent to which frames resonate both to mobilize latent emotions and to provoke the regime's own uncompromising framing and policies of repression often determines whether elements of each side will be pushed over the edge towards violence. Finally, miscalculations in regime-challenger interactions, fanned by frames' often derisive rhetoric towards the out-group, seem to make non-violent solutions ephemeral.

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