Yemen: The Arab Spring Revolution

CONFLICTED

Message Heard

Religion & Spirituality, History

4.7 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 15 November 2023

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

2011 was a pivotal year for Yemen, and indeed the entire Middle East. After years of wars against the insurgent Houthis in the North, and with years of protests against President Ali Abdullah Selah’s attempts at radical constitutional changes, the Arab Spring which engulfed so many Muslim countries came to Yemen, too. It saw a bottom up revolution take hold in Sanaa, quickly filtering out across the country. It was a cry for democracy from a people fed up with their strongman ruler’s increasingly authoritarian rule. But would it lead to a new constitution for the Yemeni people, or political chaos which radical groups could exploit for their own gains? In this episode of Conflicted, the third part of our series on Yemen, we welcome back Yemeni journalist and political activist, Baraa Shaiban. He wasn’t just there during the Arab Spring, he played a really significant part in leading it. He tells us his story of leading protests in Sanaa, and all the hope he and his fellow liberal activists had for a new dawn in their country. But was it a dream that could ever be fulfilled? Or would the many other complex factions in Yemeni politics have other ideas? Join our FB Discussion group to get exclusive updates: https://www.facebook.com/groups/450486135832418 Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MHconflicted And Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MHconflicted Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to Conflicted with me Thomas Small, my wonderful co-host, Aimandine, and once again with the now old friend of the show,
0:10.7	Barat Shayban. Barat, you're almost part of the furniture here now.
0:14.5	Yeah, exactly. I don't think I can escape this right now.
0:17.9	Oh yeah, he is part of the furniture right now because we're going to play lots of musical shares today and he will be one of the chairs.
0:24.3	It's true. In this episode, the third of our ever growing series on the modern history of Yemen,
0:31.3	dear listener, you can prepare for some pretty complicated games
0:35.4	of political musical chairs.
0:37.6	And thankfully, we have Barat here, whose firsthand expertise
0:41.2	on the subject is really going to come into its own because today we're
0:45.7	talking about the Arab Spring, a momentous event which we've discussed so many times
0:50.5	on conflicted but one which had a really acutely destabilizing effect on Yemen.
0:56.4	Bara's story is truly thrilling, evocative, an account of the hope and then the tragedy which befell his country back in 2011 and he
1:06.0	was right at the center of all of it.
1:08.9	Let's jump right back in. Now normally on conflicted we look at grand spans of history skipping through decades and even centuries in a single episode.
1:26.1	But today we're going to look at pretty much just one year, 2011, and what a year it was for
1:32.4	Yemeni history.
1:34.0	But of course, before we get there, we do have to set the scene,
1:36.5	which means we have to go back in time a little bit.
1:38.7	In the last episode, we left the Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Sala in the year 2010 having fought six wars against the
1:47.2	huthies. Now I don't have to remind you who the huthies are. They're an armed militant
1:52.3	millinarian group of Shia persuasion, to some extent
1:55.8	allied to Iran and Hezbollah who, beginning in the early Naudis, engaged in a series of wars with the Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Sala based in Sunna the Yemeni capital.
	...

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