Recent territorial gains by Yemen’s Southern Transitional Council, or STC, have shifted the delicate balance of power in war-torn Yemen’s south.
By Friday, the STC controlled almost the entire south and east of Yemen, including most of Hadramaut and Mahra governorates, local oil facilities and the city of Aden – home to the internationally recognized government.
STC leader Aidars al-Zubaidi has already declared that “the next target should be Sana’a, peacefully or through war, until the people get justice and the aggression is defeated.” The STC has argued that its military advances are necessary to restore stability, fight Houthi rebels, terrorist groups and drug trafficking.
However, University of Ottawa professor and Middle East analyst Thomas Juneau cautions that much is still unknown about what is really going on in south and southeastern Yemen.
“Until 10 days ago, the STC was barely able to govern its parts of the south,” he told DW. “It was a weak and competitive regime.”
Since the beginning of Yemen’s war in 2014, when Iran-backed Houthis ousted the country’s internationally recognized government from the capital Sanaa to Aden in the south, the Yemeni government – which is represented by the Presidential Leadership Council, or PLC – has not been able to politically unify Yemen’s south.
The PLC, backed by Saudi Arabia, wants to gain control of all of Yemen and defeat the Houthis. However, Riyadh has been willing to accept the Houthis as Yemeni rulers in order to end the conflict on its border.
The United Arab Emirates – which supports the Southern Transitional Council, part of the PLC – supports the idea of restoring South Yemen as an independent state, as it was between 1967 and 1990. Abu Dhabi aims to maintain close ties with the south of Yemen, with access to key shipping routes along the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea.
Is there a possibility of Yemen being divided?
“What is happening in the south of Yemen is not a new crisis, but one that has been going on for many years,” Hisham al-Omaisi, a Washington-based Yemeni conflict analyst formerly at the U.S. State Department, told DW.
He recalled, in 1990, when North and South Yemen became the unified Republic of Yemen, people were optimistic. However, over time, corruption, nepotism and marginalization of Southerners increased until it reached the point where a large popular movement is now demanding secession, he said. “I don’t think the call is going to disappear,” he predicted.
Despite this ambition, al-Omaisi does not believe that full southern independence can be the next step.
“Even if you recognize the STC in the south and the Houthis in the north, that will not solve the problem in Yemen, where there are many other parties involved in the increasingly divided country,” he said.
This view is expressed by Marieke Brandt, senior researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. “A formal declaration of independence in southern Yemen would indirectly legitimize the rule of the Houthis in the north and center of Yemen,” Brandt said.
However, the Houthis would reject any southern political project and condemn it as foreign-backed fragmentation, he said.
Brandt said that in the event of an informal partition, Yemen would be left with two rival, unrecognized entities facing each other on a volatile front.
“The war will not end, its shape will change,” he told DW.
For the Houthi group – which was re-designated a terrorist organization by the US in January 2024 – either development would mean the rebels would be conquerors of the weakened PLC in the south, Juno said.
Fragmentation makes the human condition worse
The new balance of power in the south also threatens to push Yemen into open conflict after three years of relative peace following a UN-brokered ceasefire in 2022.
“To be honest, the situation in southern Yemen has been chaotic over the past few days, but we have especially heard that people in the north have been driven out of their homes by STC forces and their affiliated groups,” Nicoo Jafarnia, a Yemen researcher at Human Rights Watch, told DW. At this time, it is not clear what happened to those individuals, he said.
He warned, “Based on past actions I believe that in a context in which the STC is taking control of new areas, it is very likely that we will see an increase in human rights violations in the coming months.”
The latest Human Rights Watch World Report warns that in 2024, all parties to the conflict, including the STC, will continue to arbitrarily arrest, enforce enforced disappearances, torture, and ill-treat detainees in official and unofficial detention centers across the country.
None of these mantras offer any hope of improving the humanitarian situation in Yemen, which is widely considered one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
According to the UN report, about 60% of the estimated 377,000 deaths in Yemen between 2015 and the beginning of 2022 were the result of indirect causes such as food insecurity and lack of accessible health services. 5 million people will remain at risk of famine by 2025.