The US and British strategy of fighting terrorism in Yemen by focusing mostly on security fails to deal with the poverty that is the root cause of extremism, Yemeni officials and foreign experts said.
Yemen is increasingly becoming a base for al-Qaeda. The terrorist group’s Yemeni branch, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, claimed responsibility for the Christmas Day attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines plane as it approached Detroit.
And rebellions in the south and north are driving the economy deeper into crisis even as the government forecasts that in 10 years it will run out of the oil reserves that fund 70 percent of the budget.
PHOTO: AFP
“The hotbed for breeding terrorism is unemployment, poverty and lack of services,” Abdul-Karim Al-Eryani, an adviser to Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, said in a telephone interview last Monday.
The US and its allies should “be more focused on the future of Yemen rather than the present crisis we face with al-Qaeda,” he said.
A Western failure to address Yemen’s economic and social weaknesses will exacerbate the threat from al-Qaeda in the poorest Arab nation, said Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen scholar at Princeton University in New Jersey. Yemen gets about one-third the foreign aid accorded to equally poor parts of Asia and Africa on a per capita basis.
“You can’t focus only on killing people and not on what turns them into al-Qaeda supporters,” said Mustafa Alani, a security expert at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center.
About 40 percent of Yemen’s population, which is expected to almost double by 2030 to 40 million, lives on less than US$2 a day, the UK Department for International Development said. Foreign aid comes to US$12 a year for each Yemeni, compared with an average of US$33 in African and Asian nations suffering similar levels of poverty, the department said.
A security conference on Yemen hosted by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in London on Jan. 28 isn’t aimed at securing new pledges of aid, said Ed Hawkesworth, a spokesman for the UK Department for International Development.
“It will be about coordinating existing programs and linking them up,” he said by telephone on Wednesday.
The meeting will cover social and economic development along with security, Brown said in a statement.
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