In recent weeks, the UK has grown critical of the Saudi-led coalition’s military campaign in Yemen to recapture the port of Hodeida from Houthi control. Otherwise considered as one of the coalition’s closest Western allies, the UK’s position reflects concern over the potential humanitarian consequences of a disruption to the port, which reportedly handles up to 70 percent of all goods that enter Yemen. Beyond humanitarian concern, however, the UK’s position is motivated by a desire to support Martin Griffiths, a former British diplomat and the UN’s special envoy on Yemen. Appointed by the UN in February, Griffiths had been actively attempting to stymie a military assault on Hodeida by the coalition. Nevertheless, despite the public display of disagreement, the differences separating the British position from that of the coalition do not seem irreconcilable, as a senior Gulf official told me.
British diplomats have gone on the record to register their government’s disagreement with the coalition’s Hodeida campaign since early June. During a debate in parliament on June 11, the UK’s minister of state for the middle east at the foreign office, Alistair Burt, said that “the government are and have been concerned about the potential impact of any assault on the city and port of Hodeida for some time and have made their concerns clear to the Saudi and Emirati Governments.” At the UN, although the UK and the US have reportedly resisted a Swedish proposal for a security council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire, Karen Pierce, the UK’s permanent representative, expressed concern over military escalation and urged “maximum cooperation” with UN efforts to secure a deal on Hodeida.
Meanwhile, the UAE’s minister of state for foreign affairs, Anwar Gargash, whose government is spearheading the operation in Hodeida, has responded by highlighting the outlines of an Emirati aid plan to ease the humanitarian situation. “We have started huge humanitarian operation to aid 1.7 million people. In line with our long-term commitment to assist the Yemeni people. We have 10 ships on-the-way, 100 trucks heading north from Aden and Mukha, and plans for air drops if necessary,” Gargash tweeted. On the Saudi side, moreover, the Saudi ambassador to Yemen, Mohammed Al Jabir, stated in May that the kingdom’s humanitarian assistance to Yemen alone reached around $11 billion.
Crucially, the coalition has also repeatedly argued that allowing the Houthis to retain control of the port would amount to a license for them to further entrench themselves and drag the conflict on indefinitely, thereby multiplying its humanitarian toll.
Humanitarian concern apart, the UK seems driven by a desire to support Griffiths, the UN special envoy and former British diplomat. Griffiths had been openly engaged in a final effort to broker a deal with the Houthis over control of the port, largely to stymie the coalition’s plans for a military assault. During his first briefing to the security council in April, Griffiths warned that an assault on Hodeida “would, in a single stroke, take peace off the table.”
From the coalition’s perspective, however, the Houthis have every reason to delay a negotiated solution, given the port’s value to them as a source of income and military supplies, a pattern seen in previous Houthi refusals of UN overtures. Echoing the coalition’s view, Yemeni foreign minister Abdulmalik Al Mekhlafi had stated his belief back in January 2017 that the only way to bring the Houthis to the table was by changing the military situation on the ground, a goal the coalition says it is determined to achieve while minimizing the humanitarian cost.
Ultimately, despite the present disagreement on Hodeida, the UK’s position on Yemen hardly seems irreconcilable with that of the coalition. At a Chatham House talk in which he launched a new government report on a revised British approach to foreign conflicts, Burt, the foreign office official, noted that “there are some occasions in which there is a calculation at which a conflict might bring a wider conflict to an end more quickly. These are matters of judgements […].” Although Britain and the coalition may disagree in their present judgements on the utility of conflict in Hodeida, their overall objective of bringing the wider conflict in Yemen to an end more quickly remains the same.
I asked Bahrain’s ambassador to the UK, Shaikh Fawaz Al Khalifa, whose country is a coalition member that also hosts the first permanent British naval facility to the east of Suez since 1971, whether UK-Gulf relations are likely to suffer because of the disagreement on Hodeida. The ambassador responded by discounting the prospect of a long-term schism. “The Gulf states are the UK’s third-largest trading partner. Following Brexit, the UK will need its friends in the Gulf more than ever,” he said. He added that the security partnership with the UK in the region was “equally vital for both sides,” reaffirming that UK-Gulf ties would endure.
In the end, the future of Britain’s, and much of the rest of the world’s, support for the coalition will depend on its success in ensuring the continued flow of humanitarian and commercial goods to the people of Yemen, a point that the coalition appears to understand. However, it is also an asymmetry that the Houthis – who unlike the coalition do not see themselves as being bound by international law – are likely to exploit. As Houthi forces lay thousands of mines to block maritime traffic headed to the port, the Hodeida campaign will put the coalition’s ability to manage a massive military offensive and humanitarian operation to the ultimate test.
Hasan Alhasan is a PhD researcher at King’s College London and the National University of Singapore, where his work focuses on Indian foreign policy in the Middle East. Previously, he served as a senior analyst at the office of the first deputy prime minister of Bahrain.
AFP PHOTO/Saleh Al-OBEIDI
