Protesters at Sa’naa University. The dialogue has made concerted attempts to involve youth in refashioning the political landscape. Photo by AJTalkEng via Flickr.

Abed Mansour Hadi has somehow managed the impossible. The unassuming president of long-suffering Yemen has gotten his country into international headlines, without any mention of child brides or drone strikes. In the last few months, Yemen has found itself lauded with unusual praise, most of it directed at Hadi’s pet project, the ongoing National Dialogue Conference. The conference, which began in March, is in steady progress towards a constitutional revision and likely restructuring of the state. For a country once deemed likely to fail after the 2011 Arab revolutions, this has come as a genuine surprise, as Yemen now seems poised to surge ahead of its once-hopeful regional neighbours, Egypt and Syria, in achieving the promise of the Arab Spring.

Such a turnaround would have been unthinkable a year ago. Hadi was viewed as a stand-in for his brutal boss, former strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh, and the country was widely seen as a failed state waiting to happen, with a restive south likely to break away. But it was the critics who were surprised when the dialogue finally got underway in March this year. Of the dialogue’s 565 participants, 30% were women, and groups with a history of enmity with the government, such as the Southern separatists and Northern Houthi movements, were invited to participate. The Dialogue boasted a wide range of individuals from every conceivable walk of life – academics, civil society activists, youths and rural workers – instead of a mere line-up of staid government officials. Even more surprising were the compromises the government seemed willing to make. To appease reticent, distrustful Southern leaders, the government promised them 57% of the seats in Dialogue meetings – a number far beyond the 30% of the population they represent. In an interview with Al-Sharq al-Awsat, a pan-Arab newspaper, Hadi committed himself to a dialogue that “does not exclude any partisan, political, cultural and sector of society”, and promised to “restructure the armed forces and security services”. These promises seem largely kept; in particular, Hadi’s expulsion of Saleh’s own son, Ahmed Ali, from the feared Republican Guard seems to hint at a genuine clean break from the tainted legacy of the ruling General People’s Congress (GPC).

Southern comfort

Still, as significant as his initiatives have been, Hadi is a long way from restoring legitimacy to his government. Saleh remains the nominal head of the ruling party, and his loyalists continue to dominate other areas of government, a fact which continues to deter other parties from participating fully in the conference. So while the dialogue has achieved astonishing progress, it would be foolhardy to assume that a few months of talks can persuade Yemen’s fractious groups to work together for the common good.

Nowhere is this more telling than in Yemen’s long-running southern conflict, perhaps the most divisive of all the issues on the table. Despite Hadi’s reconciliatory overtures, analysts warn that the dialogue might not accomplish anything beyond a sense of goodwill, with no party willing or able to discuss the deeper issues that underlie the desire for separatism. “We have not gotten to a solution,” admitted Abdulghani al-Eryani, a political advisor to the dialogue. In fact, Saleh recently took to television (on his privately owned channel, Yemen Today) to slam the government for agreeing to a federal state system, which would give the restive southerners more autonomy. The South’s leaders exhibited behaviour that was not much more encouraging; their largest faction leader, Mohamemed Ali Ahmed (regarded in some southern circles as a criminal), has walked out of the conference with his Al-Hirak movement, blaming the Sa’naa government for “foot-dragging”.

While these untimely disruptions may have cost the dialogue some credibility, the real problem facing dialogue participants is that the elusive reconciliation they seek will require much more than a simple commitment to federalism. Observers have noted that in the quieter meetings, negotiators from both the GPC and the pro-Islamist Islah (the two main groups fighting for a centralised state) have admitted that real power needs to be devolved to the South, and a new regional framework will require a fairer distribution of Yemen’s scarce resources, particularly water basins. Helen Lackner, an expert and observer in Yemen, warns that measures might need to go even further. According to Lackner, Southern separatism stems not from a dubiously-defined Southern Yemeni identity, but from a long history of distrust with the northern government. Much of Yemen’s politics rests on a complex network of tribal and familial relationships, and as president, Saleh was instrumental in cultivating it for his own ends. Under a ‘divide and rule’ policy, followers were lavishly rewarded, while opposing tribes, such as the Ahmar family (who fought the government in a violent 2011 conflict) and the Houthis, another group with separatist intentions, were met with the full force of the state,. A few months of talks will not undo this distrust, and with a discussion on the constitution set to follow the conference, the South will expect substantive change to a federal structure that currently appears to favour the North.

To succeed, therefore, the conference must undertake the hard work of rebuilding capacity and confidence in state institutions, while involving regional and tribal leaders in redesigning the current governate borders. This means that the dialogue will need to be even more inclusive than it already is (the balance of power in most committees still seems to lie with the GPC elite), and it will need to focus on more than just the Southern issue, but also the moribund state of the economy. There is lingering popular conern over state corruption that is keeping donor money (over $8.1 billion in promised funding) away, and a broken system of food and water supplies that causes Yemen to be wholly dependent on wheat imports. If Hadi is to win over the South, he will need to prove that he can deliver on the issues where his predecessors failed.

After years of neglect and misrule, Yemen has finally captured international attention for a brave new start. But contrary to the popular perception, the hard work has only just begun. If Yemen is to escape the spectre of state failure that has already begun to plague its neighbours, Hadi’s government must build on the momentum which they created at the start of this conference, and take the bold steps Yemen needs to stay in the spotlight.