People stand on the ruins of a building destroyed in an airstrike in Sanaa, Yemen, Aug. 25, 2017. Picture by Mohammed Mohammed/Xinhua News Agency/PA Images. All rights reserved. Last
month, a
329-page report tabled
at the UN Security Council by a panel of experts on Yemen was made
publicly available. The report announces that “after three years of
conflict, Yemen, as a State,
has all but ceased to exist”. “The authority of the legitimate
Government of Yemen has now eroded to the point,” the report
continues, “that it is doubtful whether it will ever be able to
reunite Yemen as a single country.” 

The
existing “threats
to peace, security, and stability of Yemen”
listed in the report hint to the Hobbesian “state of nature.” The
authority of the legitimate government
is not only challenged in the north.
It is also struggling to assert itself in the south,
where the Southern
Transitional Council (STC) has recently been formed. The STC seeks an
independent South Yemen. And of course, the Huthis in the north
“have
now taken unilateral control of all State institutions within their
territory.”
The report goes on to mention the proxy groups funded by the Kingdom
of Saudi Arabia and the
United
Arab Emirates in
addition to
terrorist outfits such as al-Qaida and the Islamic State. 

Yemen
seems to be in a state of disarray. There are multiple enemies
fighting the government but also fighting one another, and making the
revival of the state almost impossible. The erosion of the Yemeni
state and its authority is exemplified by the proliferation of
different forces, which in turn have been inflicting death, pain, and
suffering on innocent Yemenis.

But
is it the disappearance of the Yemeni state that has resulted in the
suffering of Yemenis? Or was it rather the specter of the Yemeni
State, making its presence felt in its most destructive articulation, which
came back to haunt their everyday life?

Carl
Schmitt’s concept
of the political may
help us understand Yemen today. To him, the state
as a political entity exercises the right to decide on the domestic
enemy. When it constitutes the friend-enemy distinction it also
affects the “utmost degree of intensity of a union and separation,
of an association and dissociation.” This includes calling upon its
subjects to be ready to kill or be killed in the name of securing
peace and order within its territory.

Yemenis
have been denied even the right to recognize the brutality brought
upon them on a daily basis

In
Schmitt’s rendition, it is not the possibility of war with an enemy
that constitutes the political but the nature of the friend-enemy
grouping. And it is in the realm of the friend-enemy grouping that
the state’s authority is exercised. Should a war materialize out of
this grouping, then, according to Schmitt, the war itself is the
normal state of the political.

In
2015, it was in
the name of the Yemeni state,
that
the Hadi government
called upon the regional and international powers to intervene to
protect the Yemeni state
from falling at the hand of the state enemy: the Huthis,
described as the agents of Iran.

Earlier,
in September 2014, it
was the
Huthi-Salih alliance who
captured
the state
institutions in Sana’a claiming that they were protecting the
integrity of the Yemeni state
from the Hadi government
which had become an instrument in the hand of the
international-regional powers.

Both
factions declared each other as the ultimate enemy that needed to be
liquidated. Both have mobilized their allies internationally,
regionally and nationally, and are prepared to kill and be killed.

Had
the Yemeni state
really ceased to exist, why then are both factions
inflicting violence on one
another
and on innocent Yemenis in the very name of protecting the state?
Does that not seem to indicate that the spirit of a dead state
has been incarnated in its perpetual signification of the public
enemy and wreaking of violence on Yemenis?

Yemen
as a state, with effective legal and constitutional norms, may well
have ceased to exist. But its specter continues to haunt the lives
and bodies of innocent Yemenis and subjects them to death, loss,
pain, and suffering. The so-called international community is
complicit in perpetuating this suffering on the Yemenis, and
complicit otherwise in this state of affairs in Yemen.

Yemenis
have been denied even the right to recognize the brutality brought
upon them on a daily basis. It is not the state that has ceased to
exist. What has really ceased to exist, and perhaps even left behind
no trace that would remind humanity that it once existed, is the
ethical responsibility of the so-called international community,
international law and the international institutions whose
responsibility it is to prevent suffering and death. With such a
state of indifference to their suffering and pain, Yemenis have been
given the brutal gift of a spectral state that thrives and survives
through violence, while they have been dispossessed – deprived of hope
that a peaceful existence will one day arrive.