What led Yemen down this path to chaos? After all, the country includes the former People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, the only socialist state in the Arab world. In the 1970s, the other Yemeni state, the Yemen Arab Republic, had a strong rural movement based on community and tribal solidarity, which organized, financed, and managed development initiatives. The Republic of Yemen, born in 1990, was the only democracy in the Arabian Peninsula. However flawed, it held real multiparty elections. [...]
In this context, it is worth remembering that 70 percent of Yemen’s population lives in rural areas and depends on cultivation and livestock. The first decade of the twenty-first century, however, saw a shift from agriculture to casual urban labor as the primary source of rural households’ incomes. In towns and cities, men congregated in search of casual unskilled employment, where living conditions were also affected by water scarcity. [...]
Ordinary citizens, especially young people and women, demanded the downfall of the Saleh regime and an end to his regime’s corruption and nepotism. They also wanted jobs, a national economy that would benefit the population as a whole, and true democracy. Participants were often young — not surprising in a country where 80 percent of the population is under thirty-five. [...]
The coalition has maintained a blockade that is claimed to be designed to prevent Iran from providing weapons and ammunition to the Saleh-Houthi alliance, but its primary impact has been preventing food and fuel imports, which the Yemeni people need to survive. Due to population increase, climate change, and other factors, Yemen depends on imports for the overwhelming majority of their fuel and basic staples — 90 percent of wheat and 100 percent of rice, tea, and sugar come from external sources.
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