It took exactly seven months, from his first announcement on April 23 that he would step down, to the eventual signing of the agreement on November 23, for Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh to finally bring his thirty three-year grip on power – first, as President of the then North Yemen since 1978 and from 1991 as President of a unified Yemen – to an end. The agreement was sealed only after Saleh had finally been thoroughly cornered by popular internal uprising, abandonment by domestic military and political allies and insistence on the parts of the United Nations, the international community and Yemen’s own allies in the Middle East that he step down.
The eventual agreement is a peculiar one. It comes only after one of the Middle East’s most resilient strongmen had thrice previously evaded such an eventuality. Prior to his first promise to step down in April of this year Saleh had even sought to further tighten his grip on power, by announcing a referendum on a new constitution separating the powers of the presidency from those of the legislature. After he had been flown to Saudi Arabia in June to attend to injuries sustained in an attack on his presidential compound, Saleh passed up the option of simply cutting and running, opting instead to return to what was left of his widely unpopular rule. By then, of course, the die was cast. Several Persian Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia had finally joined Yemen’s internal political opposition in demanding that he step down and popular rebellion was rapidly spreading across the country.
What most makes the agreement an odd one is the fact that Saleh not only gets to retain the title of President until the country holds general elections but also – at least so it would seem – secures immunity from prosecution for the suffering he unleashed on his country. More than that, even now, there appears to be an absence of clarity regarding the extent to which, the agreement notwithstanding, Saleh will continue to play a role in influencing political events in Yemen. At the end of the day, unless there is yet another twist to an already severely convoluted political situation in Yemen, the deposed dictator and his family will probably jet off into a twilight of exile, leaving his broken country to pick up the pieces. No wonder ordinary Yemenis are sore over the deal which their dictator has been able to cut.
The common thread that binds those countries in the Middle East and North Africa that have been besieged by popular protest for almost a year is the fact that they have all been run for decades by maximum leaders who have clung to power through ruthless suppression of political opposition. All of them, it appears, fell victim to the intoxication of power. They had come to embrace the right to rule as though it were a birthright; and when, finally, force of circumstances dictated that their rule come to an end, they simply refused to accept that their time had come. What makes Saleh’s case somewhat different and certainly interesting is its illustration of the fact that even the trappings of democracy sometimes fail to curb dictatorial instincts.
Like his now deposed opposite numbers in Egypt and Libya, Saleh has a military background that elevated him to the rank of Field Marshall. Unlike both Mubarak and Gaddafi, however, Saleh was actually elected in 1978 then re-elected in 1983 to the presidency of the Yemen Arab Republic (North Yemen) by Parliament rather than by popular vote. In 1991, the weaker South Yemen accepted Saleh as President of the unified country. In 1999 he became the country’s first President to be elected by popular vote, so that by all accounts it appears that Saleh, at least in the interim, embraced the virtues of some semblance of democratic rule though even that may be questionable given his ruthless purge of the military within weeks of first being elected President of North Yemen.
What the available evidence suggests is that the wily Saleh spent much of his tenure tinkering with his country’s democratic institutions to cement himself in power. First, the Yemeni Parliament enacted legislation extending presidential terms from five to seven years and creating a presidentially-appointed Council of Advisors with legislative powers. Then, having announced in 2005 that he would not contest the September 2006 general elections Saleh changed his mind, ran again and retained the presidency.
As Saleh was increasingly beginning to discover, however, even a façade of democracy can hinder dictatorial aspirations. If, on the one hand he did not appear to mind the fact that his credentials as a democratically elected President helped burnish his image in the west and in his own region dominated as it is by unelected rulers, Saleh, simultaneously, often demonstrated a fair measure of frustration with the restraints which the trappings of democracy placed on his appetite for absolute rule.
In essence, Saleh was no less a dictator than his unelected opposite numbers, Mubarak and Gaddafi, having himself arrived at a psychological juncture that rendered him incapable of separating himself from power. He, however, lacked the tool of a totally authoritarian regime that rendered the rulers of Egypt and Libya altogether unaccountable to their people. It was this ‘deficiency’ that appeared to hound Saleh up to week ago though his ceaseless tampering with the country’s parliament and with its constitution bared the evident truth about his mindset. Saleh, in the final analysis, was no less prepared than either Mubarak on Gaddafi to unleash military repression to save his rule, but he never ceased in his endeavours to press his country’s ‘democratic’ institutions into service to secure that end.
In the final analysis, however, there are limits to which dictators can conceal their real dispositions even under a cloak of democracy. Over time, that cloak becomes tattered and threadbare, a victim of the constant abuses that it must endure, abuses like the transformation of the parliament into a rubber stamp for the passage of unjust laws, the enfeeblement of the judiciary, the creation of layers of self-serving state bureaucracy, the cultivation of cultures of corruption and cronyism and, perhaps above all else, the increasing concentration of power and authority directly in the hands of the dictator. President Saleh resorted to those measures and more, though, in the final analysis they were not enough to save his regime.
