Abd Rabbuh Mansour… a Chapter of Yemen's tragedy

The tragedy of Yemen derives, in part at least, from the rise to power of a figure such as Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi at a particular juncture in history, and from the errors committed by men of his kind both before and after unification. In the present moment, it has become possible to speak of a country shattered into fragments, searching for some formula by which to reconstitute itself, that is, if reconstitution remains possible at all for a state of considerable strategic significance, a portion of which Iran now holds under its sway.

Abd Rabbuh Mansour, whom death claimed just a few days ago, was ultimately nothing more than the expression of a certain political type: the man who arrives from the military apparatus carrying a culture so meager as to disqualify him entirely from governing a country as singularly complex as Yemen. He came to the presidency after spending fourteen years as the shadow of Ali Abdallah Saleh, serving as vice-president, the same Saleh whom the Houthis would later murder, once he had ceased to be head of state.

Abd Rabbuh succeeded Ali Abdallah Saleh, who was compelled to resign in February 2012, and remained president until April 2022. It was at that point that the powers with meaningful influence over Yemen acknowledged his incapacity to lead the country. A Presidential Leadership Council of eight members was convened, headed by Dr. Rashad al-Alimi, who appears manifestly capable of somewhat more effective governance, however marginally so.

How, then, had the late president reached the presidency in 2012, and before that the vice-presidency in 1994? And more fundamentally, why did Abd Rabbuh Mansour himself become one of the constitutive elements of the Yemeni tragedy, through the accumulation of errors he committed, errors too numerous to catalogue in any comprehensive way?

One must first note that Abd Rabbuh Mansour was a native of the southern province of Abyan. He was associated with the former southern Yemeni president Ali Nasser Mohammed, himself from Abyan, who was driven from power by his adversaries in what came to be known as the "January events" of 1986. Abd Rabbuh, who had served as deputy chief of staff in the South, took refuge in Sanaa following Ali Nasser's fall. In the summer of 1994, he joined the southern faction surrounding Ali Abdallah Saleh, in the aftermath of the rupture between Saleh and Ali Salem al-Beidh, the socialist party leader who sought to reverse unification. A bitter war ensued, ending in the defeat of the socialist party. This trajectory allowed Abd Rabbuh to ascend to the vice-presidency, having gone to considerable lengths in his support for Ali Abdallah Saleh in his war against the separatists.

I once asked Ali Abdallah Saleh how he could possibly choose someone like Abd Rabbuh Mansour as his deputy, given that the man possessed no qualifications of any kind whatsoever. He answered me word for word: "I want someone who won't cause problems", drawing on his experience with Ali Salem al-Beidh, vice-president of the presidential council after unification, whom he described as a "complicated" personality who had wanted to be a genuine "partner" in power.

Abd Rabbuh Mansour remained a peripheral figure throughout his tenure as vice-president. He was obliged to endure Ali Abdallah Saleh, who had gradually transformed himself into a temperamental head of state, prone to fits of anger directed at his own aides for no discernible reason.

When Ali Abdallah Saleh was forced to resign in early 2012, Abd Rabbuh Mansour revealed an altogether different character. He left no means of vengeance against his predecessor untried: he made a conspicuous point of refusing to return his calls, while methodically working to dismantle the military institution. His overriding aim was the elimination of any influence that the former president and his son, Brigadier General Ahmad, might retain within the armed forces. The outcome was the destruction of any remaining hope of rebuilding a functional Yemeni army.

Whether fully conscious of it or not, Abd Rabbuh effectively placed himself in the service of the Houthis when he refused to confront them in the province of Amran during their march on Sanaa in the summer of 2014. Ali Abdallah Saleh had urged him to stop the Houthis at Amran, arguing that the fall of the province inevitably meant the fall of the capital. He dispatched four emissaries to him, among them Yahya al-Raï and Aref al-Zouka, carrying an unequivocal message to this effect. Abd Rabbuh nonetheless rejected the advice, declaring that he "refused to settle Ali Abdallah Saleh's scores with the Houthis." What actually happened was that he provided cover for the Houthis' advance and their seizure of the Yemeni capital on 14 September 2014.

In everything he did, Abd Rabbuh Mansour never possessed the minimum of political culture that governing any country requires. He went as far as signing the "Peace and Partnership Agreement" with the Houthis shortly after they laid their hands on Sanaa, an agreement attended by a United Nations representative, which conferred upon the Houthis a legitimacy they badly needed. This did not prevent them from placing him under house arrest. Abd Rabbuh managed to escape that house arrest in Sanaa only through a mediation in which the Sultanate of Oman played a decisive role, persuading the Houthis to look away while he slipped out to Aden.

Abd Rabbuh Mansour was, in the final reckoning, one component of the Yemeni tragedy. A man with no relationship to politics whatsoever found himself presiding over a country in the grip of an existential crisis, a crisis largely provoked by the Muslim Brotherhood, who sought to uproot Ali Abdallah Saleh in order to take his place. Saleh was no angel, and his errors were many, but the Brothers who turned against him failed to grasp that they were playing the Houthis' game, never pausing for a moment to consider what Yemen might become after Saleh was gone.

Yemen had the misfortune of having, at a critical period in its history, a president of Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi's particular stamp. This country deserved someone of finer quality: someone who knew at least something of Yemen itself, of its surrounding environment, and who understood that vengeance cannot serve as a policy, however many personal humiliations one may have been made to endure.