First, I would like to express how honoured I am to be here at this long-standing academic platform. Dear friends, let me start my speech from Yemen;

my country that has completed five years in a situation of war and non-State, plagued by a regional intervention that has turned it into a proxy sustainable battlefield between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Dear brothers and sisters,

Five years after the Saudi-Emirati coalition intervened on the pretext of supporting the Yemeni legitimacy, the Houthi coup militia still has the ability to mobilize and recruit, and is in attack position. Today, the coup militias are pushing thousands of fighters to the frontlines in the destroyed Yemeni cities, among them hundreds of children are being recruited and taken to the crematoria instead of being sent to school. They try again and again to subjugate the Yemenis, with the complicity of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi that have found in these militias a trump card to misappropriate Yemen and split it into mini-states of external influence.

The Houthi coup opened the doors of Yemen to the war and the military intervention by the Saudi-Emirati coalition, and to its aims to divide Yemen. For five years, the two parties have exchanged the roles of destroying and fragmenting Yemen. The coalition is pulling the strings and controlling the war in a way that helps keep Yemen as a non-State and its political decision be made in Riyadh.

Five years have passed since a criminally motivated war was orchestrated simply to devastate Yemen in pursuit of regional hegemony by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Iran.

The longer the devasting war on Yemen goes on, the greater the putschist militias and the Saudi-led guardianship coalition gain at the expense of the life, present and future of the Yemeni nation.

The war, which has caused enormous suffering and hardship for all Yemenis, has been employed to enhance the Houthi coup militia in Sana'a, help UAE-backed separatists to create another coup in Aden, and make the Saudi guardianship over Yemen an alternative to the international-recognized government in flagrant violation of Yemeni and international legitimacy and United Nations Security Council resolutions on Yemen.

 

Dear friends,

Let's highlight the role of international actors, specifically the American one, with regard to burning conflict issues in the Arab region in general and Yemen in particular.

With the U.S. decline in the Middle East, competing regional powers have come to the fore as major players playing a pivotal role in the wars of the region, such as Russia in Syria and France in Libya, while America focuses almost solely on the issue of "terrorism", which cannot in fact be isolated from the complex landscape of challenges arising from a combination of local, regional and international conflicts. Iran-affiliated sectarian regime in Iraq has passed its own war against Iraqis under the cloak of the Global Coalition against ISIL.

Washington allowed Qassem Soleimani waging Iran's cross-border wars in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen. Then once he completed the basic task of flattening cities and towns, displacing and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, they began drawing attention to him. Hadn’t a few missiles been fired at the US embassy in Baghdad, America would not have paid attention to the threat posed by Qassem Soleimani.

In Yemen, the human tragedy is further compounded due to the war and militias’ control over the country’s two most important cities, Sanaa and Aden. Yemen has become a war zone limited to the Saudi-Emirati intervention and Iranian influence, while global major powers, particularly the United States, have turned deaf ears and blind eyes to this case subjected to bargains and deals in favour of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi.

Such stance clearly gives a green light for the Saudi-led coalition states to act as they want towards a poor country caught in the trap of a cross-border plot; its capital has been taken over by the Houthi militia; its internationally-recognized government has been put under house arrest in Riyadh; and its second capital, Aden, other southern provinces have been seized by the UAE that relentlessly and shamelessly went creating militias, waging wars against the Yemeni state and its legitimacy, taking over islands and ports and committing violations amount to war crimes without fear of punishment or blame.

Yemen has been abandoned to its fate in the face a Saudi-Emirati coalition that does not care about international values and conventions, nor about the right of neighborliness and common destiny. Standing proudly on the United Nations platform, the UAE delegate talked about the killing of hundreds of soldiers belonging to the military of the Republic of Yemen, deployed in the vicinity of Aden.

Emirati warplanes unlawfully killed approximately three hundred soldiers, and then the representative of the aggressor State rushed to kill them again from the platform of the United Nations by accusing them of terrorism, while his counterparts of global major powers were listening in complete silence!

“Terrorism!” it is an easy word with enough power to cover up even crimes against humanity. In order to say it and easily wash hands stained with the blood of hundreds if not thousands, all you have to do is just be unscrupulous.

Regrettably, some members of the Security Council responsible for the maintenance of international peace and security have concluded multi-billion-dollar arms deals with countries that do no respect for human rights, and these weapons today are used to kill Yemenis, flatten their cities and destruct infrastructure.

It is finally time for the international community to remember the Yemeni cause, as we are part of this world. Our blood is being shed by typical human rights violators; so do our country. If the United Nations does not act quickly and responsibly to save the Yemeni people, what is going on in Yemen will be a precedent in its history.

We believe that the end of the war and the establishment of peace in Yemen are primarily based on the genuine will of the international community, especially major powers. This begins with putting an end to the Saudi-Emirati coalition by revoking the legal cover for its intervention in Yemen after it became clear that it has taken from the restoration of the legitimacy as an excuse to achieve its illegal goals there.

We desperately need international support to end the war and bring peace, and the United Nations and major powers to use their weight to end the world's most severe humanitarian crisis, achieve peace, stop violence, disarm militias, and help return the state and complete the political transition.

 

Dear friends,

On the ninth anniversary of the Arab Spring revolutions, we can say only weeks after the end of 2019 that last year was the most prominent title of the Arab Spring in its second wave.

Popular uprisings in Algeria and Sudan were a reaffirmation of a never-ending dream; a re-emphasis on the struggle of our Arab nation with its various national entities for its right to self-determination and choose who should govern. With clear impact on the situation in Iraq and Lebanon, the revolutions in Algeria and Sudan have raised our peoples’ hopes for a prosperous future other than promises of sectarian groups and their militias.

Away from sectarian and sectarian affiliations, the Iraqis and the Lebanese have started their long and arduous journey of expressing their demands. These uprisings met with bullets, bombs, and militias have reaffirmed something people have almost forgotten: the fact of civil society (community of citizens), where individuals are linked by citizenship and the right to express themselves isolated from ghettos and walls of sects. The fact that sectarian groups are not our future; the fact that sectarian groups are not our future; the fact that corrupt sectarian regimes have nothing to offer and collide with the interests of their societies..

Citizenship, dignity, and the right of citizens to choose, monitor and change their rulers are major headlines of the Arab Spring. The Arab Spring will not stop at borders drawn by underdeveloped alliances of dictatorships hidden under the disguise of religions and sects.

 

Dear friends and all attendees,

On the other side, in Libya, Yemen, and Syria, the counterrevolutionary forces backed by greed-motivated regional actors continue to fuel transitional wars that represent the other side of the counter-revolutions. The scene of the counter-revolution can be summarized as follows: The counterrevolutionary scene can be summed up in three words: state collapse, war, sectarianism.

The Arab Spring revolutions erupted in a region with long-lasting rulers who have turned their countries into booby-trapped ones. States there had not yet emerged into states of law representing all of components of societies. It can be said that terrorism is a product of dictatorship. Authoritarian regimes have served as fertile environment for terrorism and extremism. 

Such booby traps, which have exploded in the face of the Arab Spring, have not arisen from the Arab spring and its peaceful civilized revolutions, but they were existing despotism-made phenomena.

With support from international allies, regional actors have decided to fuel transitional wars. But trusting in the revolution is greater than shocks aimed at spreading collective fear of revolutions, and the desire to achieve victory for dignity outweigh fears of reprisal wars. 

Sectarian conflicts are the fruit of despotic regimes that employed all forms of conflict and divide-and-rule policy to prevent any popular uprising for dignity and to protect themselves from bringing-down. Wars would not have continued and posed threat to our societies had not it interfered with proxy wars fought in the Arab Spring countries.

 

Dear friends,

In conclusion, I would like here to emphasize the fact that attempts to rebuild genocide regimes through wars, sectarian militias, terrorist groups or by terrorizing societies in our region would never work.

Given their reality, people recognize the need for life and decent living, and for struggling and sacrificing for the sake of a state of law that protects their rights and freedoms. This is what prompted our societies to unite and take to the streets in 2011 and 2019. It is the urgent need to change the reality, break taboos designed to restrict peoples and prevent them from freedom of expression and participation.

These sectarian and terrorist wars and militias are the deadly option chosen by the old regimes that crumbled under the feet of the female and male Arab Spring youth in 2011. Horrific vengeance wars will make us more believing in our cause’s justice. It is time for the old regimes to be buried, and for a new world to take shape. We are confident enough that neither revenge wars nor sectarian militias or terrorist groups will be able to impede or delay it.