Playing the tribal card in Yemen’s political arena [Archives:2008/1134/Local News]
Khaled Fattah
Doctoral candidate
University of St. Andrews, U.K.
As the Middle East's most enduring social entity, the tribe has played a significant role in shaping not only the Arab Middle East's history and culture, but also the process of state formation and maintenance.
For this reason, the study of tribe and tribalism has attracted historians, anthropologists and political scientists alike. While anthropologists have invested their academic energies in conducting anthropological micro-studies of specific communities, historians have favored studying particular historical case studies, mostly related to tribes within Islamic Empires.
Political scientists, on the other hand, have shown their interest in investigating the tribe's role in shaping and reshaping the region's mode of governance and state-society relations.
For various reasons, there's scarcely a more appropriate part of the Arab Middle East where researchers may study the tribe's influence in shaping today's sociopolitical life in the region than the Republic of Yemen.
In this economically underdeveloped and sole republic amid a neighborhood of wealthy sheikhdoms, the tribe isn't just an ancient social unit of solidarity; rather, above all, it is a powerful political institution capable of pulling the rug out from under a government's feet.
In light of this, with varying emphases and quite different agendas, numerous Yemeni, Arab and Western political scientists have attempted to answer the following question: Despite urbanization, education and party pluralism, why do political elites in united Yemen continue to be vulnerable to the political ideologies of tribal life?
One convincing answer is that united Yemen's political elites have failed to build a successfully integrated state able to transcend regional and tribal affiliations. In successful political communities around the world, political elites rely upon the conviction of all groups in all regions and provinces of the state that they are free citizens who enjoy equal political and legal rights.
However, this type of elite-sponsored political engineering requires one important condition, namely, the existence of an effective state. In other words, successful national integration cannot occur without building responsive administrative, judicial and legislative bodies equipped to carry out important state duties such as providing social services, security and justice, in addition to facilitating participation and the peaceful transfer of political power.
A mountaintop view of united Yemen's political landscape reveals the reluctance of its political elites to invest national resources in building effective state institutions, focusing instead on adopting a strategy of survival. Indeed, it's this reluctance and this strategy that have enabled tribalism to continue its expansion and dominance in the nation's 21st century political life.
In my view, the tribe's growing influence within Yemen's political arena isn't an indicator of the success of tribal activism in the form of conferences and alliances; rather, it indicates the disastrous failure of government institutions, political parties and civil society.
Tribalism makes much sense from the perspective of socio-cultural affiliations because it's an extensive web of kin-based relations constituting an important safety net and an identity network providing economical, emotional and psychological shelters. Additionally, it binds its members through relations of solidarity and mutual trust.
For these reasons, tribalism shouldn't be completely discouraged from playing an important role in Yemeni society.
The experiences of tribes in the former People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, as well as in the Central Asian republics during the Soviet era, teach us how – despite harshly imposed regime-orchestrated social reforms – tribal socio-cultural institutions have managed to survive and retain their values system.
However, contemporary tribalism in Yemen isn't represented by activists defending noble tribal values, but rather by a group of politically influential individuals playing the tribal card in politics. The main objective of their game isn't promoting their tribesmen's socio-economic interests, but rather the personal acquiring of ever larger shares of the shrinking Yemeni national cake.
Therefore, it is tribal elitism – not tribes and tribalism – that should be blamed for distorting the picture of state-society relations in united Yemen. However, it must be noted here that the roots of this tribal elite's attitude are structural and not personal in nature.
Among others, these structural roots include the geopolitics of the Arabian Peninsula, the failure of united Yemen's Constitution to become a national consensual document able to domesticate citizens' traditional loyalties to the unified Yemeni nation-state, and the credibility gap of the political administration and political parties. Such gap results from the seasonal evoking and provoking of national aspirations toward democracy and development without providing concrete solutions or fulfilling promises.
Current inter-clan relations within the political cadres of united Yemen and the unstable balance between public institutions and tribal tendencies are causing – and will continue to cause – further disturbance of the state-building process and the deepening of the growing mistrust of state institutions by a large segment of society.
No breaking of both the current deadlock on a series of political issues and the vicious cycle of socio-economic instability in Yemen can occur without banning the playing of the tribal card in politics for personal gain. To prevent such card playing, united Yemen's governing mechanism should reposition itself to become proactive in building its citizens' confidence in national modern institutions.
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