Yemeni Protesters Defy Government Crackdown

I’ve been working as a human rights observer since the very beginning of the protests, monitoring them for Hood, a Yemeni human rights organisation. We are monitoring the violence in general, how the security services are behaving, who are supporting attacks on demonstrators, what kind of arms are being used, what kind of pressure the government is putting on the protesters to disperse - basically anything interfering with the citizens’ right to demonstrate freely.

At the beginning, the protests were quite peaceful. Then the government started sending thugs to disrupt them, something reported by various human rights groups and journalists. The ruling party also pays for pro-government rallies, supplying them with food, for instance – the government isn’t even hiding this.

There have been hundreds of casualties from the use and misuse of CS gas, with people developing breathing difficulties and other complications. Other problems include the recent use of live rounds. Eight people have died in Sana’a and Aden as a result of this.

We have already seen an escalation as the government puts more pressure on the demonstrations. In one of the major incidents on February 22, hundreds of thugs descended on the protest area. Two people died and about 40 people received gunshot wounds.

But perhaps I think what concerns me most is that five western journalists were deported this week. This is critical as it might indicate that there are about to be more human rights violations committed by the government in the coming days.

The protests started with tens of people and now there are about 200,000 in the university area in the capital. They are a diverse crowd, people from different tribes, form the north and south, students, teachers – this is something new. In Yemen, where there were previously tribal divisions, it is unusual to see people from a range of backgrounds rally together.

The government is now trying to tighten the entrance and exit from the areas where people are protesting. They are not using the security forces to do this, however, but getting local people to build walls and roadblocks so there are only a few places you can enter. It is quite scary as I am afraid that the protesters and people from the local neighbourhoods will start clashing.

The government attacks have been nearly continuous - people are injured more or less every day, some with minor and others with more serious injuries, although so far all the protests are intended to be peaceful ones.

The strategy is to keep the protesters under pressure. But the protests have grown an incredible amount, and after each demonstration is attacked more people take to the streets; more people become sympathetic to the protest movement. People are even resigning from the ruling party. This week the Yemeni ambassador to Geneva resigned.

What’s clear is that the number of protesters is growing and nothing will stop them. But the government has not got the message from the Tunisian or the Egyptian revolutions - that using force just makes the demonstrators stronger.

Yemen is more or less a tribal society and has a heavily armed population. This week there were clashes with the military and an attack on an oil pipeline. The fact that demonstrations have been kept mostly peaceful so far has been quite an achievement, but if more force is used then they may become violent. I am quite worried that we face what we see in Libya right now, rather than the outcomes witnessed in Egypt or Tunisia.

Out of the different scenarios that we face, the best option is for there to be a consensus between the protesters, the opposition and the ruling party. If we could all agree a road map to commit to for the next two years, then we could move on from this phase safely. If there is absolute opposition – then we are going to face the threat of civil war.

Ibrahim Mothana is a history student at Sana’a university of Science and Technology.