Ali Abdullah Saleh

Ali Abdullah Saleh (born March 21, 1942, Bayt al-Aḥmar, North Yemen—died December 4, 2017, Sanaa, Yemen) was a Yemeni military officer and president of Yemen Arab Republic (North Yemen) from 1978 until its 1990 unification with the south, after which he served as president of reunified Yemen (1990–2012). His presidency ended after a yearlong popular uprising in Yemen (2011–12) forced him to step down. During the civil war that began in 2014, he sided with the Houthi rebels. Houthi fighters killed him, however, after he independently reached out to the other side to negotiate an end to the conflict.

Early life and presidency of North Yemen

The year of Saleh’s birth is uncertain, but official biographies have typically cited 1942, which most accurately matches the chronology of his military career. Later government documentation, issued after he had already stepped down as president, gave 1947 as his year of birth. He was born near Sanaa in a small rural village, where births were not meticulously recorded. Saleh attended the local Qurʾānic school and joined the army in 1958. Continuing to advance in his military career, he helped to bring Ibrahim al-Hamdi to power in a 1974 coup, but the assassination of Hamdi in 1977 and of his successor in the following year threw the country into turmoil. The result was Saleh’s elevation to the presidency by the People’s Constituent Assembly on July 17, 1978. He survived an attempted military coup later in the year and in 1983 was reelected unanimously by the People’s Constituent Assembly to a new term.

Unification

Several attempts toward the unification of North Yemen and South Yemen (People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen) took place during his presidency and failed. But as Saleh consolidated authority—by extending services and job opportunities into villages while also coopting or undermining the Zaydi royalists who had opposed the government—he opened new room to maneuver in negotiations with South Yemen. At the same time, the impending collapse of Soviet support for South Yemen placed pressure on that government to reconcile with North Yemen. Further motivation for the countries to unify was the discovery of oil and natural gas in both countries at roughly the same time and in roughly the same geographic region (from Maʾrib to Shabwah). On November 30, 1989, Saleh made a historic visit to Aden, where he was greeted by a large and enthusiastic crowd. That day he and Ali Salem al-Beidh, the leader of South Yemen, signed the Aden Accord to unify the country. The merger took place on May 22, 1990, with Saleh as president.

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Presidency of Yemen

In April 1993, in the first elections held after unification, Saleh’s party, the General People’s Congress (GPC), won the largest representation in the House of Representatives (parliament). A full-scale civil war between forces of the north and the south broke out on May 5, 1994, but, when the fighting ended on July 7, Saleh remained firmly in power. In elections held in 1997 the GPC consolidated its control of parliament, further strengthening the president’s position. In the first direct elections for the presidency, held in September 1999, he won more than 96 percent of the ballots cast, although most opponents boycotted the voting.

In February 2001 constitutional amendments put forth by Saleh and the GPC to extend the presidential term from five to seven years and the legislature’s term from four to six years were passed in a national referendum. In the 2003 legislative elections the GPC further strengthened its position in parliament, and in the presidential elections of September 2006 Saleh was reelected to another term as president.

Challenges to Saleh’s rule

In January 2011, as a wave of popular protests swept through the Middle East and North Africa, demonstrations calling for Saleh to step down as president were held in Yemen. After making some economic concessions, in February Saleh pledged not to seek reelection in the next presidential election, scheduled for 2013. The concessions failed to placate protesters, who noted that Saleh had reneged on a previous pledge not to seek reelection in 2006. As protests demanding his immediate ouster continued, Saleh resisted, saying that his departure would cause chaos and that the protest movement threatened the country’s unity. On February 28, 2011, Saleh offered to form a unity government with members of the opposition, who rejected the offer.

Support for Saleh eroded further in March. Deadly clashes between security forces and protesters provoked a number of Yemeni officials, military officers, and tribal leaders to declare their support for the opposition. The defection of senior military officers led to a standoff between units that had sided with the opposition and units that remained loyal to Saleh; limited fighting between the two factions occurred in mid-April.

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In late April Saleh announced that he had accepted a transition plan sponsored by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The plan, which stipulated that Saleh should step down after a month in exchange for immunity from prosecution, was cautiously accepted by representatives of the opposition. However, the initiative stalled in early May when Saleh, in an apparent reversal of his position, refused to sign the agreement. In late May, after some formal changes to the agreement had been made, Saleh’s representatives announced that he was prepared to sign. However, Saleh once again refused at the last minute, causing the GCC to withdraw the agreement and suspend its effort to mediate between Saleh and the opposition. Following Saleh’s refusal to sign, heavy fighting broke out in Sanaa between pro-opposition tribal militias and troops loyal to Saleh.

On June 3 Saleh was injured and seven of his guards were killed by a bomb planted inside a mosque at the presidential palace in Sanaa. Rumors quickly circulated about Saleh’s condition, leading his representatives to deny that he had been gravely injured or killed in the attack. Hours later Saleh released an audio statement in which he asserted that he was in good health and condemned the rebel al-Aḥmar tribal fighters as outlaws. On June 4 Saleh was transported to Saudi Arabia for medical treatment, and reports indicated that Yemeni officials had understated the severity of his injuries, which included shrapnel wounds and extensive burns. Saleh’s vice president, Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, took the position of acting president in Saleh’s absence.

A televised address by Saleh—his first since being injured in June—was broadcast in Yemen on July 7. He appeared to speak with difficulty, and his hands were heavily bandaged. In the address, Saleh said that dialogue would be necessary to resolve the crisis in Yemen. On September 23, amid a new round of fighting between forces loyal to Saleh and the opposition, Saleh returned to Yemen.

After several days of negotiations in late November, Saleh signed an agreement to transfer power to Vice President Hadi in exchange for immunity from prosecution. The agreement called for presidential elections to be held in February 2012 with Hadi as the only candidate on the ballot. Hadi would then serve a two-year term as president, overseeing the writing of a new constitution. Under the agreement, Saleh was left with the title of president until Hadi’s inauguration in February.

In late January 2012 Saleh left Yemen, spending a week in Oman before traveling to the United States to receive medical treatment for injuries he had sustained in June during the attack in the presidential palace. The presidential election proceeded as planned, and Hadi was sworn in as president on February 25. Two days later Saleh transferred power to his successor in a public ceremony in Sanaa.

Unlike the other Arab rulers deposed during the uprisings of 2010–11, Saleh continued to live freely in his country after leaving office. In the year following Saleh’s removal, he was thought by many to have retained a great deal of behind-the-scenes influence, much of it through his son Ahmad and nephew Tareq, who remained commanders of the Republican Guard, through several other relatives in high-level military positions. Hadi removed most of those relatives from their commands and reassigned them to foreign postings in April 2013.

Despite losing influence with Hadi’s government, Saleh continued to be a key player in Yemeni politics. In 2014 he aligned himself with a rebellion against Hadi by the Houthi movement, a Zaydi Shiʿi group based in northern Yemen that had previously staged an uprising against Saleh in 2004. In 2015 Saudi Arabia led a coalition including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Egypt in a military intervention in Yemen, which sought to crush the Houthi rebellion with air strikes and a blockade. This brought pro-Saleh forces into direct confrontation with the regional powers that had engineered Saleh’s removal from power in 2012.

In late 2017 Saleh again shifted his alliances, declaring that he was ready to “turn the page” and would hold talks with the Saudi coalition to end the conflict. The Houthi leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, denounced the statement as a betrayal of their alliance, and clashes between Houthi forces and pro-Saleh forces began immediately. On December 4 Saleh was killed by Houthi forces in Sanaa. His nephew, Tareq, subsequently consolidated the pro-Saleh forces into a paramilitary known as the National Resistance Forces (NRF) and began siding with the Hadi government in confronting the Houthi rebels.