Mansour Hayel
Journalist, Writer, and Editor-in-Chief of Al-Tajammu Newspaper
Just as the Imamate regime was a repressive system that drove its people into exile, its throne ultimately trembled and fell primarily at the hands of migrants.
It is well known that the Imam despised the sea, turning his back to it and repeatedly declaring that it was the gateway through which foreigners and evils entered. What he never imagined was that his downfall would come through the very turbulent sea currents, at the hands of the persecuted and displaced who set sail on coal ships and death boats bound for Djibouti, Assab, Hargeisa, Marseille, Liverpool, and beyond.
It is also well known that the Imamate, a regime built on war and plunder, had made migration a condition for its very survival—without realizing that migration would ultimately become the gateway to its demise. Exile was not merely a consequence of oppression; it transformed into a reservoir of strength. The migrant, weighed down by oppression, humiliation, and grief, carried within him the seeds of revolution. He did not catch his breath in exile except to begin amassing the tools and resources for the struggle of enlightenment and change: financing the construction of dozens of schools, training teachers, supporting free revolutionaries and prisoners in the Imam’s jails and in exile, and publishing newspapers in London, Cairo, Aden, and elsewhere.
The first spark of revolution was ignited by migration, and the 26 September 1962 Revolution triumphed with the support and backing of migrants—foremost among them the distinguished expatriates and community leaders who carried money in sacks (al-jawani) to deliver it to the first President, Abdullah al-Sallal, who welcomed them warmly, astonished, saying: “You come bringing money to support the Republic, while many of the sheikhs around Sana’a tighten the siege on us, draining us with demands for money and rifles.”
If the Imamate in the 20th century was a system that expelled its population, bred division and fragmentation, and stood as an impossible project at odds with the movement of history and the currents of modernity, then the return of this nightmare—embodied in the rebranded Houthi Imamate—represents a degrading impossibility. Today, the Houthis reproduce the very same Imamate project, but with even more ferocity and with the use of cutting-edge technologies of brutality. Therefore, it is imperative that the generations of youth who have been displaced and exiled take the lead in dismantling this project. What is available to them in today’s diasporas is far greater, more effective, and more powerful than what was available to their forefathers, who left their homeland with an unshakable determination for a triumphant return.
It is essential that the descendants in exile draw inspiration from the legacy of their ancestors and follow their example, uniting their scattered ranks and launching platforms of revolutionary action by harnessing immense modern technologies, to decisively affirm that there is no place for these anachronistic relics of the past—even if they are more brutal, precisely because they exploit the latest technologies of savagery.
To say that today’s Yemen is “returning to the Middle Ages” would itself be an injustice to the Middle Ages; for in those centuries there were no missiles, drones, snipers, landmines, or incendiary bombs. Even the Inquisition did not burn more than two thousand people over a decade—let alone an entire nation. It did not displace millions, kill tens of thousands, demolish thousands of homes, or transform the majority of a population into hostages in the largest mass kidnapping operation in modern history.
Today, the Houthis are the greatest and most dangerous geopolitical catastrophe, a plague more destructive than any pandemic to both land and people. Their eradication will come only through a popular revolution led by youth—foremost the youth of the diaspora. It is vital to draw lessons from September’s setbacks, to avoid repeating the mistakes or falling into the pitfalls that beset the September Revolution and prevented it from securing the means and conditions for continuity and for realizing the project of a national state: a state of citizenship and law that cannot relapse.
Yesterday, Imam Yahya could not comprehend the impossibility of an Imamate rooted in lineage in the 20th century. Today, his descendant Abdulmalik—clinging to the same cave—cannot comprehend that same impossibility in the horizon of the third millennium. Yet it is within the power of the youth in exile to confront this reality, to correct this grave mistake—indeed, this calamitous historical sin—now weighing upon Yemen, and to liberate the land and its people from the grip of this fascist militia, restoring the dignity of the September Revolution and realigning its course toward a state of citizenship and law.
