Catherine Shakdam, my guest this week,is a geopolitical analyst and commentator on the Middle East with a special focus on Yemen and the Gulf countries, and was recently named head of the Yemen Unit at the Next Century Foundation in the UK. She writes for Citizen Truth, New Eastern Outlook, Huffington Post, the website of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the Katehon think tank, among others. She is the author of a number of books including “A Tale of Grand Resistance: Yemen, the Wahhabi, and the House of Saud”, “Arabia’s Rising: Under The Banner of the First Imam”, and “From Mecca to the plain of Karbala”. Her website is http://www.catherine-shakdam.com/
In this broadcast, we discuss her recent article “How Yemen’s War Stands to Redefine the Region’s Future” in New Eastern Outlook.
Since the topics we discussed are complex, I am providing a full transcript below.
Charles:
Catherine, you've just taken a new position at the Next Century Foundation. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about the foundation and what your role is there
Catherine:
Sure. The Next Century Foundation is essentially a peace building organization. So we are a think tank, and we are particularly interested in curating good and healthy relationship between different actors in the Middle East, but not just the Middle East , some of our interests extend to Africa, and I'm serving as the head of the Yemen unit.
We have launched a peace initiative recently, and what we're trying to do, because people tend to get a little bit confused when I say peace initiative, they just assume that we have those ambitions, thinking that we can actually broker peace in Yemen and bring everybody to the table. That is not what we are trying to do. What we're trying to do is act as a soundboard for all the different local and regional actors.
The team and the think tank in general has enough gravitas and enough connections across the Middle East to force certain conversations, and maybe gently nudge people to look at the conflict a bit differently, and to act as advisors as well, to try to find some kind of common ground and some consensus as to what needs to happen in Yemen in order to not launch the region into complete disarray.
If there is a consensus about one thing, it is that things cannot continue as they are, and if they do, we will face hell. And when I say we, I mean not just the immediate region, but the international community because Yemen is a very sensitive country by its geography. And if we don't want to see a repeat of Afghanistan, Libya or potentially something worse, we need to really get things together now. The humanitarian catastrophe is just one of the areas where we could see things devolve quite rapidly into an ugly, ugly vacuum of we don't know what, and I don't like not knowing what could happen when it comes to politics.
We try to avoid black swans, and I think that Yemen is fast becoming one. We don't want to get suddenly blindsided and then say, "Oops, we didn't see that coming". So this is what we are trying to do. We're trying to reassess the situation differently in that we're trying to look at Yemen not from the who's right/who's wrong perspective, but rather how can we make sure that all the parties get something and that the people are offered a good future. We want to be there for the Yemenis, not so much for their political parties or the various factions involved in this war. We want Yemen to get a chance at being reconstructed and people getting out of poverty and away from the humanitarian crisis they're facing right now. This is our view because we don't want to be political. We don't want to defend one party or the other. We just want Yemen to be offered the chance to decide what it wants for its future.
Charles:
Excellent. I want to get back to that a little bit later, but certainly Yemen is in the news. Of course, the latest thing is this bombing of a Saudi Aramco facility that's in the empty quarter of Saudi Arabia. So we
