YEMEN UPDATE
YEMEN
REVIEWS
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- Renaud Detalle,
editor,
- Tensions in Arabia:
The Saudi-Yemeni Fault Line, Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft,
Baden-Baden: 2000 (181 pp. Including
annexes)
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- Reviewed by Sheila
Carapico
- University of
Richmond
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- Yemen Update 43
(2001)
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- This collection was commissioned by the
European Union's Conflict Prevention Network (CPN) through the
Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP) as a policy analysis of
the EU's interests in the Saudi-Yemeni border dispute, and
published to make the papers available to scholarly audiences.
Because heretofore only a handful of European journalists even
considered the question of a European perspective on the
relationship between Saudi Arabia and Yemen, it is a useful
contribution to the literature on Euro-Arabian and Saudi-Yemeni
relations.
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- The book is divided into three sections.
The context of the border conflict is set in the first three
essays. Richard Schofield maps competing claims derived from
Ottoman and British lines as well as the 1934 treaty between Saudi
Arabia and Yemen's imam, while Renaud Detalle analyzes the mix of
social, economic, and political tensions between the neighboring
countries and Horst Kopp points out the important water and oil
resources that lie beneath the disputed territory. Natalie Fustier
and Liesal Graz, respectively, reflect on American and European
interests &endash; in all cases, Saudi oil and Yemeni stability.
Lastly, Eric Watkins and Renaud Detalle consider various scenarios
and European policy options. Detalle, the book's editor and a
long-time resident of Sanaa, sums up the conclusions of the study,
noting "the strong national interests of EU member states in
maintaining good relations with the KSA, a major consumer of
European goods, including weapons, and the biggest producer of oil
in the world," as well as the question of whether Europe's
commitment to democracy "should translate into support for a
Yemeni regime which displays a willingness to change, over a Saudi
regime which rejects participatory politics and gender equality
and expresses strong reservations on the notion of human rights."
(p. 150) In light of these concerns, the European Union "should
not resign itself to letting the USA be the sole influence in a
region where European interests are at least as important as those
of the USA."(p. 162) Instead, the EU has incentives and
opportunities to exercise leadership in peace nurturing, partly by
aiding economic development and the rule of law in Yemen and
partly through diplomacy.
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- Hindsight is always easier than
foresight. In retrospect, the premise of the SWP-CPN series seems
to have directed the authors' attention towards a conventional
bilateral border conflict, albeit one complicated by overlapping
economic and socio-cultural circumstances and Saudi hegemonic
aspirations. The mission to advise the EU on policy toward a
potential armed conflict over the border may even have led authors
to discount the likelihood of the presumably best-case solution to
this conflict: a quick formal demarcation of land and sea
boundaries. In any event, virtually as the book was in print,
between June 12 and July 4, 2000, the two countries announced what
the Royal Embassy in Washington's monthly newsletter termed a
"finalization" of all their common land and marine borders. This
"definitive marking of the permanent border," as the newsletter
put it, (by a private international consulting firm) hardly means
that all sources of tension between and around Saudi Arabia and
Yemen have been resolved. Indeed during the summer of 2000 the
Saudi government expelled many thousands of Yemeni workers and
blamed Yemeni individuals for unrest in Najran among Isma'ili
Shi'as belonging to the Yam tribe. And either government might
worry about the spillover of domestic problems from the other.
Perhaps this was the case in October, when an attack in Aden
harbor on an American navy ship bound for the Persian Gulf was
followed closely by the hijacking of a Saudia Airlines passenger
plane. Without faulting Detalle and his colleagues for failing to
predict the future, readers might wish for another scenario
wherein two neighbors decide to build a gated fence while
recognizing that they nonetheless share an ecology neither nor
both can fully manage.
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