“Is Yemen going to be another Taliban state?”
This article nails it.
“Anyway, the government has taken care of them and now is starting to take care of the Non-Houthis in the rest of us! Now, anyone who has any inclination of enjoying democracy will submit only to the democratic principles laid out by the Government and anyone who deviates will be rendered as having Houthi tendencies. Thus, they should think twice about becoming too resilient in opposing the Government. In fact, the Houthi stigma is being used as an excuse to do away with any semblance of political and sectarian pluralism left in our marginal democracy, and to do away with what ever remains of civil society.If you have a genuine religious charity, even if licensed and ordained by the Government, the Government will close it down, on the pretext that it is propagating Houthism. Never mind that you have the religious institutions and charities of the so called strategic allies of the ruling party operating freely without any hindrance and they are the ones more suspect of harboring terrorism.
On the contrary, the latter have been given the green light to take over all religious activity in the land and they can storm into any mosque and remove its normal preachers and put their extremist sermon preacher on the platform and their custodians to run and manage the mosques. I am really confused. How can we say we are fighting terrorism, when all of us know that these extremist institutions, that are now enjoying a free hand to impose their dogmatic beliefs on the nation, are the breeding grounds for terrorists and misguided extremists?”
Read the whole thing at the Yemen Times. Well worth it.
Also my article in the Yemen Times.
