Informing humanitarians worldwide 24/7 — a service provided by UN OCHA

Yemen

Talking to the Houthis: How Europeans can promote peace in Yemen

Attachments

SUMMARY

  • Early Houthi promises to Yemenis of fairer and more transparent government have come to nothing, and the group exerts a rule of brutal suppression.

  • The Houthis now govern over most of Yemen’s population and should be included in efforts to end the conflict and restore peace to the country.

  • The Houthis seek international recognition, face growing internal challenges, and may no longer want to extend their control over southern Yemen. This provides some negotiating space.

  • While the Houthis benefit from Iranian support, they are driven by their own interests and will wage war regardless of Tehran’s position.

  • European states should now increase conditional engagement with the Houthis, looking to widen political and humanitarian space on the ground, while pushing all sides to the negotiating table.

INTRODUCTION

The Houthi movement rose from a highly localised position in the far north of Yemen two decades ago to today fully controlling one-third of the country’s territory, in which two-thirds of the Yemeni population lives. In 2020 it has again been on the offensive. With limited support from Iran, the Houthis have held at bay a Saudi-led coalition of ten countries supported by the United States, the United Kingdom, and EU member states – a coalition that is armed with the most sophisticated and expensive military technology in the world.

For the European Union to assess developments in Yemen and create a strategy to restore some kind of stability and peace to the country, it is essential to understand different aspects of the Houthi movement: its ideological development, the mechanisms it uses to control the population, and the sources of its financial resilience. These are all relevant to explaining its successful resistance to the Saudi-led coalition. Moreover, an understanding of the internal dynamics of the Houthi movement can give European policymakers insight into better ways of dealing with the group.

This paper seeks to explain how and why the Houthis – or “Ansar Allah”, as they call themselves – have achieved their current dominance of the Yemeni political and military landscape. It examines what this means for the future of the country and ending the current war. The paper paints a worrying picture of Houthi control and governance, but nonetheless recommends that the EU and its member states recognise the need to more proactively engage the Houthi movement if political progress is to be made. This engagement should include pushing back against current attempts by the US and Saudi Arabia to designate the Houthis a terrorist organisation, which would only serve to cement the position of hardline forces within the group. European actors should better leverage this engagement to achieve behavioural change on the part of the Houthis, with an immediate focus on the humanitarian space. This would represent a necessary first step towards improving immediate conditions on the ground and strengthening the prospects for a more inclusive political track that involves all parties to the current conflict.