اقرأ المحتوى باللغة العربية
For the past few years, women have been abducted in northern Yemen, disappeared, tortured, raped, forced into false confessions of prostitution, and left traumatized and stigmatized, their punishment for publicly contradicting Houthi authorities. This has been an open secret in Sana’a that independent Yemeni journalists on the ground should have been investigating, corroborating and publishing to shine light into every shadowed corner that nurtures such atrocities.
It is impossible, however, for journalists in northern Yemen to do the sort of work that holds authorities to account when any dissenting voice that rises above a whisper is silenced, whether press, activist or ordinary citizen. Independent journalism hasn’t existed in Sana’a since the Houthis seized power in September 2014 and media organizations began shutting down, leaving only hand-picked sectarian propaganda outlets in their wake. Along with the closures, 10 journalists were abducted in 2015, jailed and tortured. Such a climate of fear breeds self-censorship among those left standing — play by the rules or lose your job, your freedom, your dignity, and perhaps even your life — and silences important stories like those of the abused women.
The climate was only poisoned more on April 11, when a deeply flawed “trial” concluded for the abducted journalists, whose charges included spying for the anti-Houthi military coalition. Four of them — Abdel-Khaleq Amran, Akram al-Walidi, Hareth Hamid and Tawfiq al-Mansouri — were sentenced to death, and six others convicted with them were ordered released on time served. By month’s end, only one, Salah al-Qaedi, was free. The journalists had been forcibly disappeared for six months, tortured, denied medical treatment and deprived of their right to due process. The Houthis lack any legal or constitutional legitimacy to run courts, meaning carrying out the sentences would amount to extrajudicial killings.
Houthi authorities are well aware of the threat independent journalism is to a regime that relies on corruption, intimidation, violence and abuse — though their animosity runs surprisingly deep. They have shown reckless disregard toward journalists again and again, including when they held Abdullah Kabil and Yousef Alaizry captive in 2015 in a building that had been repeatedly bombed only for them to be buried in its rubble on its next hit. Furthermore, since the war began, the Houthis have exchanged prisoners with Al-Qaeda, released hundreds of enemy forces’ fighters and, most recently, offered an exchange for five Saudi soldiers including a pilot shot down over Al-Jawf in February, but have rejected every call for the release of the journalists now on death row, rebuffing foreign and domestic mediation attempts. A soldier may kill you, but apparently it’s worse if a journalist reveals your true nature.
Laudable international calls to protect journalists are being made now around World Press Freedom Day — including some urging the Houthis to quash the verdicts and free Yemen’s jailed journalists. Yemeni journalists outside Houthi-run territory shouldn’t be forgotten either in media freedom calls, where journalists have been intimidated into silence or other professions and attacked and detained by various forces, though generally released more quickly than those who fall into Houthi authorities’ hands.
These days, in light of the broader threat of COVID-19 and the inability to socially distance in prisons, many regional countries including Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan and Turkey have freed prisoners as part of their efforts to curb the spread of the virus. For the most part, releases thus far haven’t included political prisoners held on the sort of security charges that would include journalists. In Yemen, the government and the Houthis also have released several hundred prisoners combined to ease crowding, but journalists and political opponents don’t appear to have been among them. With coronavirus spreading now in Yemen, authorities on both sides of the frontlines must go further and release political detainees, including all of the journalists held by the Houthis.
As long as journalists worldwide are vilified for doing their jobs and disagreeable news is dismissed as “fake news,” the Houthis and others in the region who take undermining independent journalism to its extreme will feel little pressure to change their ways. However, efforts to restart the political process in Yemen have picked up steam, and there is a risk Houthi human rights abuses toward any independent thinkers will be tacitly accepted for the greater goal of ending the war. That cannot be allowed to happen. Any such compromise of basic rights — allowing all unscrupulous sides to reach a consensus that these rights don’t matter — will, in the long term, only lead to more bloodshed and oppression.
Regional authoritarian regimes cannot be expected to show concern for such human rights abuses, so the United Nations and European countries will need to push the Houthis, and other parties, to free journalists and other political prisoners. If such behavior remains unchallenged and expediency trumps human rights in a cease-fire and political settlement, the world is once again saying that when it comes to persecuting journalists, activists and dissidents, brutality is acceptable toward your own people if it provides stability and protects the interests and borders of your wealthier neighbors.
This editorial appeared in War and Pandemic – The Yemen Review, April 2020.
Previous Sana’a Center Editorials:
- March 2020: End the War Before the Pandemic
- January/February 2020: Humanitarian Agencies as Prisoners of War
- November 2019: The Minefield of Combating Corruption in Yemen
- October 2019: Signing Over Sovereignty
- September 2019: The Brinksmanship of a SAFER Disaster
- August 2019: Where Coalitions Come to Die
- July 2019: The March on Al-Mahra
- June 2019: War by Remote Control
- May 2019: A Houthi Masterclass in Dystopia
- April 2019: Yemen’s Game of Parliaments
- March 2019: Saudi Arabia’s ‘Deportation Storm’
- February 2019: The Apology of Aid
- The Yemen Annual Review 2018: Beyond the Brink
- November 2018: Yemen’s War Profiteers Are Potential Spoilers of the Peace Process
The Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies is an independent think-tank that seeks to foster change through knowledge production with a focus on Yemen and the surrounding region. The Center’s publications and programs, offered in both Arabic and English, cover diplomatic, political, social, economic, military, security, humanitarian and human rights related developments, aiming to impact policy locally, regionally, and internationally.