The protest movement in Yemen has been one of the most consistent, universal, and long-lasting of the recent wave of uprisings in the Arab world. President Ali Abdallah Saleh, who has been in power in Yemen in some capacity since 1978, held on for nearly five months after major upheavals against him began in January. After a seemingly endless array of failed resignation deals, protestors received their first genuine piece of good news over the weekend when Saleh left Yemen for medical treatment in Saudi Arabia, along with a substantial entourage including key ministers of his government; it is a distinct likelihood that he will not return, even if he wants to (though that does not necessarily mean that his regime is finished).
What will happen now in Yemen is beyond me. Saleh's Vice President is Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, and that is more or less all I know about him. Comparatively, though, of the three Arab states to force their presidents to leave power this year, Yemen is in the least advantageous position to emerge as a democracy, or as a functional centralized state of any kind, for that matter. Yemen is currently on the verge of a serious humanitarian emergency. Yemen is the poorest Arab country, with paltry natural resources, the highest birthrate in the world, the lowest rate of women's literacy in the world, and with an Islamic extremist presence of ever-growing concern. It is awash in illegal arms and will run out of water in about ten years. Never a harmonious state, it has suffered years of low-level internecine violence. Saleh was an autocrat like Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt, but he and his government seem never to have had much control over their territory.
Saleh's departure is good news for pro-democracy protestors -- a democratic transition was essentially impossible for as long as he remained in power. However much the chances of such a transition have improved, they remain alarmingly slim. The courage of peaceful protestors throughout Yemen has been inspiring, but it was an act of violence from a tribal militia that eventually sent Saleh packing. As long as armed clans are the power-brokers in Yemen, it will remain a weak state, one with little chance of becoming a successful democracy.
As with the transitions currently underway in Egypt and Tunisia, there are a seemingly limitless number of possible outcomes for Yemen. One possibility that is not shared with either Egypt or Tunisia is that Yemen as we now know it could disintegrate entirely. Considering the spread of violence through the country now, and the difficulty of maintaining order throughout the past fifty years, a national government over all of Yemen may not replace Saleh. It is possible that it could split into northern and southern realms, or disintegrate even further into tribal enclaves and small urbanized statelets around Aden, Sanaa, and the the major cities in between.
In any case, the Arab uprisings continue to demonstrate both the unity and the diversity of the Arab world. While social unrest has swept nearly the entire region, its outcomes have varied significantly in each country. The complaints of the protestors are remarkably similar, but government responses have covered a broad spectrum; outcomes have ranged from brutal crackdowns, to moderately successful appeasement, to government collapse and even civil war. Three states have now managed to force their leaders out of power, but each case is quite different from the other, and illustrative of different and unique trends in modern Arab politics. As events develop in the Arab world they seem less coherent in some ways and more so in others.
However, it is important to note what remains the same -- Arabs everywhere in the Middle East are demanding democratic rights and popular sovereignty. The United States would be unwise to oppose this, but it is caught in a difficult situation because its alliances in the region have been based on support for autocrats. There is no graceful way out of this quandary, but it is essential that American policymakers find a way to support democratic change in the Middle East now. The status quo is shifting under our feet, and to ignore this and pursue business as usual could have dire consequences. Yemen is an instructive example of what is at stake -- while democracy is still a faint hope there, the alternatives could be disastrous and are all too easy to imagine.
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