Political Stalemate Continues: Yemen’s Peace Efforts Hampered by Noncompliance over Oil and Gas Revenue Distribution

In a recent disclosure, Mahdi Al-Mashat, president of the Supreme Political Council, shed light on the stubbornness exhibited by the coalition countries and their patrons, particularly regarding the demand to distribute public sector salaries from oil and gas revenues. His revelations present a clear indication that the enemy’s engagement with peace efforts is limited to evasion and stalling, a strategy previously predicted by the revolutionary leader. This implies that the coalition’s calculations do not include any genuine solutions, regardless of whether the current deescalation continues or not.

President Al-Mashat’s revelations highlight the concerted effort of the coalition countries to evade the solution of allocating the country’s revenue for the payment of public sector salaries. While the United States and Britain have categorically rejected this demand, Saudi Arabia has attempted a workaround by proposing that the oil and gas revenues continue to be delivered to the Saudi National Bank, transforming the salaries into a Saudi ‘grace’.

The Saudi evasion clearly indicates that from the outset, Riyadh entered the negotiation table with a defined limit that it cannot surpass. The payment of salaries from the country’s revenues represents a legitimate and natural demand, but Saudi Arabia behaves as if it’s an “impossibility”. Incidentally, this is the description previously used by the United States to describe the demands of the Yemeni people, topped by the issue of salaries.

This attitude reaffirms the accuracy of the revolutionary leader, Sayyid Abdel-Malik Badreddin Al-Houthi’s reading of the stance of the coalition countries and their patrons towards peace in Yemen. He had previously clarified that the Saudi regime’s resort to deescalation in Yemen was initially within the margin of movements allowed by the United States, simply to buy time and create room for the execution of other aggressive projects. This means that the fulfillment of the Yemeni people’s demands was never included in Saudi Arabia’s calculations or those of its patrons.

The conduct of the Saudi regime and its international patrons throughout the deescalation period clearly demonstrated this fact. Even the terms of the ceasefire agreement, facilitated by the United Nations, were sought by Riyadh to be fragmented and converted from agreed-upon formal commitments into bargaining chips subject to its political whims, despite the minimal benefits provided by the agreement, which are, in essence, legitimate rights.

Since the end of the ceasefire, despite Saudi Arabia’s assurances of its desire to extricate itself from the Yemeni quagmire, it has not taken any tangible steps to translate this desire into action. Instead, it has clearly insisted on not exceeding the boundary of evasion permitted by the United States. Even though Sana’a has made efforts to encourage Riyadh to surpass this boundary and enter into a genuine peace process, the latter has behaved as if there is only that boundary. Its provocative proposal regarding oil and gas revenues is a clear indication of this.

In other words, Saudi Arabia’s conduct over more than a year of deescalation has reaffirmed that it sees the American boundary as more important than its own security and economic interests. This suggests that giving it more opportunities will likely not change anything, as it will always try to circumvent the demands of the Yemeni people in a way that does not exceed the American desire. Given that the latter stands wholly against the Yemenis’ demands, the amount of progress that peace efforts can achieve will always be extremely meager compared to the required response.