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152 17. TAWAKKUL KARMAN AS CAUSE AND EFFECT STACEY PHILBRICK YADAV Political activist Tawakkul Karman brought Yemen’s revolution to New York in October 2011, speaking directly with Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and organizing rallies at the United Nations headquarters in lower Manhattan.The purpose of her visit was to keep pressure on the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution that reflected the aspirations of the overwhelming numbers of Yemenis who had sustained peaceful calls for change for the nine long months since protests had begun in late January.Arriving newly anointed by the Nobel Committee, which named her as one of three recipients of the 2011 Peace Prize, Karman feared—as did much of the Yemeni opposition, in its many forms—that the UN would merely reiterate the approximate parameters of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) initiative put forth in April.That plan, which enjoyed support from the United States, as well as Yemen’s GCC neighbors, gave legal immunity to President ‘Ali ‘Abdallah Salih, whose crimes against Yemeni protesters had multiplied in the months since the spring. Her fears were well founded:The UN resolution announced on October 21 demanded that Salih sign the GCC resolution immediately. Karman thus ended her week in New York as she had ended so many weeks in Sanaa in previous months—at the head of a protest. That the Yemeni revolution was being led symbolically by a woman was an attractive concept to many international observers. Karman’s biography, however, and her record of activism were more complex than the Nobel Committee’s citation suggested. She was unquestionably worthy of the international recognition attending the Peace Prize, but not necessarily for the reasons given. The Committee recognized Karman, along with two Liberian activist women,Ellen Sirleaf Johnson and Leymah Gbowee,“for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peacebuilding work.” Yet Karman was at the UN demanding trenchant political reform, of the kind that would enhance the political freedoms of Yemeni men, women, and children, and produce a new regime more accountable to the public. She was decidedly not calling for “women’s rights.” In its citation, the Committee reduced the scope of the work of a multidimensional activist whose efforts had been resisted inside and outside the party from which she emerged. Without understanding Tawakkul Karman as both a cause and an effect of change in state-society relations in Yemen, it is difficult to see precisely what she represents or why so many Yemenis from different backgrounds were so responsive to her call for sustained non-violence. 153 YEMEN | TAWAKKUL KARMAN AS CAUSE AND EFFECT Partisan Origins Yemen’s revolution developed into a post-partisan affair, but its origins undoubtedly lay in the decade of partisan opposition and alliance building that preceded it. Whereas the revolutionaries of 2011 were calling, first and foremost, for the end of the Salih regime, the partisan opposition was primarily focused on procedural reforms that would expand their opportunity to hold the country’s leadership accountable.There was good reason for drawing this distinction between reformist and revolutionary activism,because the failures of the reformist project fed the frustrations that sustained the revolutionary movement, even as partisan actors stepped in to help organize (and, according to some, attempt to coopt) the momentum of the youth. The partisan opposition is composed of several small leftist and nationalist parties, as well as the Yemeni Socialist Party, which has performed poorly in elections, but nonetheless carries weight as the ruling party of South Yemen prior to its 1990 unification with the north. But by far the largest opposition party is the Islamist Yemeni Congregation for Reform, or Islah. Beginning through a series of informal linkages between mid-level and senior leaders of the Socialists and Islah as early as 2002, a robust (if procedure-minded) political opposition named the Joint Meeting Parties (JMP) alliance became an important feature of Yemen’s political landscape in the succeeding decade. After running a candidate against Salih in the 2006 presidential election, however, the grand coalition was unable to achieve most of its political aims.Its letdowns stemmed largely from divisions among (and within) the constituent parties, and what critics viewed as a preoccupation with the court politics of Sanaa, at the expense of constituencies in the periphery,particularly in the south.Feeling neglected by their nominal representatives in the capital, southern activists mounted massive popular demonstrations beginning in...

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