A conflict that for weeks has pitted Yemenis against each other and driven a rift between two powerful Gulf allies appeared to come to a head on Friday, when an official from a separatist faction at the heart of the row announced that the group was disbanding.
However, the circumstances of the televised announcement raised serious questions about whether the group had made it of its own volition.
The separatist faction, the Southern Transitional Council, wants to carve out an independent state in southern Yemen called South Arabia and has received substantial backing from the United Arab Emirates.
That set the group on a collision course with Saudi Arabia, which supports Yemen’s internationally recognized government. On Tuesday, a delegation of officials from the Southern Transitional Council traveled for talks with the Saudi government in Riyadh, where the group announced on Friday that it would disband.
Yet members of the delegation have been largely unreachable via mobile phone — by colleagues abroad, family members and Times reporters — since they arrived in Saudi Arabia early Wednesday.
“The delegation was coerced, in a disgusting and farcical display, into announcing the dissolution,” a senior official with the Southern Transitional Council, who is currently in the United Arab Emirates, wrote Friday on X. The Saudi government did not immediately respond to requests for comment on that assertion, nor did the Emirati government.
Several officials who spoke to The Times said that the delegation did not speak on behalf of the entire council, but they demurred from saying explicitly whether their colleagues in Riyadh had been coerced into announcing the group was disbanding.
The separatists upended Yemeni politics early last month when they seized chunks of territory from the Yemeni government.
Saudi officials denounced those moves, which encroached on a region bordering the kingdom, saying they threatened national security. Over the past week, forces allied with the Yemeni government recaptured most of the territory, plus some additional areas, with Saudi support and reasserted control over the city of Aden.
The fighting has effectively become a proxy clash between Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, in which Yemen’s sovereignty and the fate of its people, already suffering one of the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophes, hang in the balance.
On Friday, one of the delegates in Riyadh, Abdulrahman al-Sebaihi, appeared on Yemeni state television and Saudi-owned channels reading the dissolution announcement from a piece of paper, in a stilted voice.
It is certainly possible — indeed probable — that there is dissension in the ranks of the Southern Transitional Council, particularly after they suffered such a resounding and swift defeat on the ground in Yemen.
Some Yemeni analysts and Southern Yemenis have blamed that defeat on what appeared to be grave political miscalculations by Aidarous al-Zubaidi, the separatist leader, whose whereabouts remains unknown.
But some analysts say that the delegation in Riyadh was left with no choice but to give in.
Farea al-Muslimi, a Yemen specialist at Chatham House, a London-based research institution, said the manner of Friday’s announcement was humiliating for the delegation, whether coerced or not.
“Whatever you think about it, you do not dissolve a political organization of a country outside the country,” Mr. al-Muslimi said.
Mohammed al-Sahmi, a representative for the Southern Transitional Council in Britain, said by phone that the decision to dissolve the separatist group was not valid because it was done in Saudi Arabia without the full council’s vote. He also said he had tried to contact his colleagues in Riyadh, to no avail.
A family member of one official in the delegation said that his relative had made a single one-minute call on Thursday to reassure them that he was OK, but they had not heard from him since. The family member requested anonymity, saying that it was out of fear of endangering his relative .
Several of the delegation members gave recorded interviews to Saudi state-controlled television networks after the announcement and denounced the group’s leader, Mr. al-Zubaidi, and the past month’s developments. Each of the men appeared to be exhausted and unshaven.
There is a history of prominent political figures’ giving statements in Saudi Arabia that later turned out to have been made under pressure.
In 2019, Mr. al-Zubaidi was held against his will in Saudi Arabia for months during negotiations over power-sharing in southern Yemen, according to two people briefed by Mr. al-Zubaidi about the episode. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation from the Saudi government, which did not respond to a request for comment on the allegation.
In another case, which drew a great deal of attention in 2017, Saad Hariri, then Lebanon’s prime minister, traveled to Riyadh and resigned on Saudi television. After leaving the kingdom, he withdrew that resignation. It later emerged that he had been stripped of his mobile phones, shoved and insulted by Saudi security officers, handed a resignation speech and forced to read it on television.
That same week, dozens of Saudi princes, billionaires and officials were detained in the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh and pressured to sign over their assets to the state in what Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his deputies described as an anti-corruption crackdown.
In Yemen, Saudi Arabia will be hoping to turn the page on a difficult chapter that has strained relations with the United Arab Emirates.
Following the announcement from the Southern Transitional Council on Friday, the Saudi defense minister, Khalid bin Salman, said on social media that the “southern cause,” referring to the long-held demand by people in Yemen’s south for greater political representation and autonomy, is now on a “real path nurtured by the Kingdom.”
For years, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates moved in near-lockstep on regional foreign policy issues. But their governments have become increasingly at odds in recent years, backing rival groups in Yemen and Sudan.
Some Yemeni analysts say that the separatist group has reached a point of no return.
“The Southern Transitional Council is more or less banned in southern Yemen at this point,” said Mohammed al-Basha, a U.S.-based analyst focused on Yemen, “whether it was by coercion, by pressure or with a negotiated political settlement.”
Ismaeel Naar is an international reporter for The Times, covering the Gulf states. He is based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
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