Yemen's President did well when he called for national reconciliation on the twentieth commemoration of the unification of the two halves of the country, encouraged all opposition parties to participate in a government of unity, and issued an unexpected pardon for detainees from the two rebel movements in the North and in the South, in spite of the broad discrepancy between the Houthis and the Southern Movement, whether in terms of their relation to foreign parties or the size of their arsenal and the extent of their military action against army and police forces as well as against neighboring countries. But will his initiative this time depart from the framework of reconciliations in the Arab fashion and represent a basis for laying down solutions to Yemen's worsening problems and for ensuring that internal and external crises and wars will not be repeated? In the American ranking of “failed states”, Yemen last year rose three steps up and became the eighteenth among the twenty countries on top of the list, a list which at the international and Arab level is headed by Somalia and in which Sudan ranks third. The ranking considers that the definition of “failed state” or of “state likely to fail”, in spite of being a broadly general definition, largely applies to the situation in Yemen, where “the seeds of a storm are gathering”, fed by the depletion of oil and water reserves, the decrease of revenue, the obstruction of balanced growth programs, the influx of refugees from abroad, some of them connected to the Al-Qaeda organization, the growing number of cases of internal migration, the government's acceptance of security by mutual arrangement in the regions and neighborhood of Saada, and its inability to guarantee security in the South, where the number of secessionist movements is increasing and support for them is growing. Certainly opposition leaderships have heard similar reconciliatory speeches by President Ali Saleh before, and they have in the past entered with him into coalition governments that did not last long, but this is the first time in which the country faces a series of simultaneous crises that threaten its stability and unity, as well as threats that call for serious commitment from the different parties to seeking to save it. And certainly the opposition is entitled to ask about what the situation has come to two decades after unification, and about why the state has failed to reassure the country's different social and political constituents. It would also certainly be easy to find answers and point fingers to lay the responsibility on this or that side. However, the situation requires every political side to seize any opportunity available if their goal truly is to draw the country away from the “edge of the abyss”, which is the title that was chosen by the American Brookings Institution for a seminar on Yemen recently held in Doha. Yemeni political parties have issued statements on the occasion of the commemoration of unity, all of which spoke of the difficult political and economic circumstances and of the state of crisis and tension in the North and in the South, the fragile truce with Abdul-Malik Al-Houthi's fighters, the increasing lawlessness in Southern regions, the tremendous rise in the cost of living, the lack of social and economic balance between all provinces, the evading of electoral promises, and much more… And except for accusing the state of being behind all such calamities, and raising general slogans that befit any time and place, none of these statements put its finger on the wound or said what solutions they would suggest. Thus the call made by Ali Saleh to unconditional dialogue which must result in a national unity government seems on the background of such a map to be an advanced step and an outstretched hand that should be met with a positive response from the different parties, especially as the state in Yemen still enjoys broad Arab and international support, particularly from the side of Arab Gulf states which sense more than others the danger of their neighbor slipping into the meanders of divisions.
