The Great Divide
By Ian Munroe • Aug 3rd, 2009In stark contrast to neighboring Gulf states - which have been busy setting up new home industries and buying up overseas investments, experts say that Yemen is in palpable danger of becoming trapped in a downward spiral. As that realization dawns on GCC states, it’s changing the way they engage with the Arabian peninsula’s most troubled country.
Culminating crises. Since north and south Yemen united in 1990, the government in Sana’a has become accustomed to defusing crises. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, Yemen voted against the United Nations using force to repel Iraqi troops, and promptly had much of its foreign aid cut off. In 1994, a civil war broke out in the south that killed thousands of people. And in 2000, al-Qaeda bombed the USS Cole while it was docked at the port of Aden, killing 17 American sailors and curtailing Yemen’s tourism industry - a key economic driver.
But in 2009, Sana’a is facing what many fear is an overwhelming convergence of problems. “Yemenis will say, ‘
we’ve been through bad things before and we’ll deal with this.’ But they haven’t had a series of crises culminating at the same point,” Boucek says. “Now two or three or four are all going to culminate at the same time. That’s what makes the current situation so devastating.”
Poverty is a familiar affliction for the country’s 22 million people, 60 percent of whom live on less than $2 a day. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has dubbed Yemen the Middle East’s most ‘
food insecure’ territory. Yet the population is expected to double before 2030, and major cities like Sana’a are running out of water.
To make matters worse, the economy is fending off collapse. Oil, which funds 70 percent of the national budget, is expected to run dry within a decade. Tourism, a second crucial industry, is shrinking as political instability and isolated terrorist attacks keep foreigners from visiting the country’s ancient walled cities, medieval mountain forts and famous mud skyscrapers.
