By Vestnik Kavkaza
Morteza Sarmadi, the special envoy of the Iranian President, stated yesterday that the military campaign against Yemen should be stopped immediately. “Those who had started the aggression made a huge mistake. They won’t achieve a victory. Air strikes on Yemen by Air Forces of Saudi Arabian coalition kill peaceful citizens and destroy the country,” the representative of Tehran said.
According to the UN, since March 26th, when the coalition started bombing the country, more than 300 peaceful residents have been killed in Yemen, including 74 children. Nevertheless, the Saudi Air Forces together with the Air Forces of Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE continue the operation ‘Storm Determination’ against the Shiah militants from the Ansar Allah Movement (the Houthis). Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan and Sudan have joined Saudi Arabia’s coalition.
Meanwhile, Boris Dolgov, a senior scientist of the Center for Arab Studies at the Institute for Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, thinks the crisis in Yemen is complicated and multidimensional: “It does not have a religious character, it is not about the clash of Sunnis and Shiites or of the Houthi movement with other confessions. Yemen is among the poorest Arab countries. 40% of its population lives below the poverty line. There have been many acute conflicts. In 1990 Yemen was united. Back then when there were two states I visited South Yemen, these were two very different countries. There is a big difference between South and North Yemen. The religious component has always been very strong in North Yemen. In South Yemen there were more civic society organizations, the political aspect was more expressed.”
According to Dolgov, the crisis in Yemen is a part of the 'Arab Spring': “If we remember the beginning of the revolution in Yemen in 2011 it was a part of the 'Arab Spring'. The population rose against the corrupt regime, against the unresolved socio-economic problems, against the lack of democracy. President Ali Abdullah Saleh had been ruling for more than 20 years and used all the advantages of that endless rule, and of course this provoked protests on the wave of the Arab revolution. Then there were attempts to resolve that social crisis, the crisis that was expressed in the social protest in Yemen.”
