A UN report or a document of condemnation?

A few days ago, the periodic report of the team of experts formed by the UN Security Council to monitor developments in the situation in Yemen was issued at the various political, economic, security, military, human rights and humanitarian levels. While there were paragraphs about violations committed by the Yemeni government and the coalition supporting it, most of the report was about violations committed by the Houthis, who control the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, and most of the northern territories of the country.

The UN report revealed staggering numbers that show the extent of the economic corruption practiced by the Houthi authority at various levels. It also revealed the extent of the violations committed by that authority against citizens in its areas of control, not to mention the targeting of civilians and civilian property with drones, ballistic missiles and mines. It also included many details about the routes taken by the arms smuggling networks between the Iranian ports and the Yemeni coast, reaching the Houthi authority, with reports of their involvement in drug smuggling.

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The report is truly a clear condemnation of the Houthi practices, most of which documents the extent of their economic corruption, humanitarian and human rights violations and political behaviour.

The report is relatively long, and includes many details, figures, pictures, maps and appendices that document, in detail, part of what Yemenis – or at least some of them – know about the behaviour of that group that appears to be religious on the one hand, and practices all kinds of corruption, including the moral corruption that the report referred to on the other hand. It  noted that there was no evidence proving the death of the Houthi leader, Sultan Zaben, who was accused internationally with serious sexual abuses, despite the fact that he represented the “guardian of virtue” within the Houthi authority, which later announced his death as a result of a coronavirus infection. This was questioned by the experts’ report, which suggested that the militias were harbouring this leader.

On the economic level, the report states that the Houthis received more than 271 billion Yemeni riyals, the equivalent of $540 million, from fuel taxes through the ports of Hudaydah between April and November. These funds are supposed to be allocated to the payment of employee salaries, but the Houthis took control of them without paying salaries, in clear violation of the Stockholm Agreement concluded between the government and the Houthis in 2018 to end the conflict over the city of Hudaydah, whose volume of fuel sales through its port during the aforementioned period amounted to no less than $2.1 billion.

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The report refers to the “parallel economy” created by the Houthis by destroying the banking sector in Yemen by 90 per cent, replacing this sector with their money transfer companies, as well as establishing new companies for them at the expense of the national capital and the well-known trading and industrial houses in Yemen, by imposing exorbitant taxes and royalties on private sector companies. Meanwhile, they exempted companies that belong to them and those close to them. This paved the way for weakening the various economic sectors in favour of the group’s economy, which collects 70 per cent of the country’s tax revenues, while the Yemeni government receives only 30 per cent of the revenues. The Houthis also impose taxes on imported goods that are taxed at the ports controlled by the government in the south of the country, causing the price of goods in their areas of control to rise. The report also indicated that hundreds of billions of Yemeni riyals were collected by the Houthis in the form of tax on the communications sector. In order not to lose this money, they deliberately sabotaged the work of the telecommunications companies that tried to leave the areas under their control to the areas controlled by the Yemeni government.

As for the Houthis’ confiscation of citizens’ lands, the report talked about their confiscation of an area estimated at about 13 million square metres of people’s lands in the Beit Al-Faqih district in Hudaydah governorate, not to mention other lands in the governorate whose value was estimated at $190 million. This explains the Houthis’ keenness to control Hudaydah, in addition to the main reason represented in ensuring the continuation of the arms smuggle.

The report stated that $90 million were obtained by the Houthis as zakat revenues, and that one of the five shares of the spoils of war imposed on production sectors and went directly to the family of Abdul-Malik Al-Houthi, (considering that one-fifth share is a religious right for him and his family). This is the idea that Al-Houthi established specific religious texts for in order to shower it on himself, his family and his relatives.

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There are other important details that are too many to be mentioned here, and one can refer back to the report published by the UN website to see them, but we can note that the Houthis do not provide any of the services they are required to offer the people in their areas of control in exchange for the huge sums they receive. Instead, they refuse to renew the ceasefire unless the Yemeni government pays the salaries of their fighters who are fighting it, which are the demands that the experts’ report said are “unreasonable”.

There is another important point, which is that these huge economic incomes are what push the Houthis to reject all calls for peace, as it is difficult for those who are receiving this money to give it up easily. This is in addition to other political and authoritarian advantages that they obtain from the continuity of the situation as it is. On top of that, the report referred to the fact that the Houthis were “emboldened by the apparent willingness of the international community to concede to their demands.” The report also said the reasons that the ceasefire that ended on 2 October was not renewed, although it continued unannounced, is that the “owing to unreasonable demands by the Houthis for the payment of salaries for their military personnel, combined with their refusal to lift the siege on Ta‘izz.”

Here it becomes clear that the matter is no longer just a political dispute between two conflicting Yemeni factions, but rather that the issue is much deeper than that. The conflict is fuelled by a desire for the status quo to remain unchanged, so that the aforementioned privileges are not lost, and which are obtained at the expense of the Yemenis’ lives, whose blood is shed and their country’s wealth is being looted in an unprecedented manner, according to the UN experts’ latest report. This report amounts to a “criminal condemnation document” that shows the magnitude of the major crime committed against the Yemenis at home, which the Houthi militia succeeded in covering up for many years, using media propaganda methods, and victimhood discourse, with which it deceived many inside and outside Yemen, before the extent of the crime they committed against Yemen and Yemenis became known to everyone.

This article first appeared in Arabic in Al-Quds Al-Arabi on 1 March 2023

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