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24 April 2015

Yemen’s long shadow

April 24, 2015 

Most critics of a ‘willing’ Nawaz Sharif government were given pause when columnists started writing about how an exodus of Pakistani workers from the Gulf, most of them unskilled and semi-skilled, could destabilise Pakistan and cause the government to fall. 

Pakistan was in two minds over going to the aid of Saudi Arabia and the GulfCooperation Council (GCC) states in the Yemen war, its government swearing allegiance but parliament ordaining “neutrality”. Then the UN Security Council imposed an arms embargo on Yemen’s Houthi rebels, former President Ali Abdullah Saleh and his son, who heads the rebel troops, thus clearly siding with Saudi Arabia and its Arab League friends. It imposed a global asset freeze and travel ban on Abdul Malik al-Houthi and Ahmed Saleh. It demanded that the Houthis withdraw from areas they had seized, including the capital, Sanaa, and “resume negotiations on the democratic transition begun in 2011, when Ali Abdullah Saleh was forced to hand over power to [the pro-Saudi] Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi following mass protests”. 

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