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 North Yemen (1978–1990) until its 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.

Early life and presidency

Saleh attended the local Qurʾānic school and joined the army in 1958. Continuing to advance in his military career, he helped to bring Ibrāhīm al-Ḥamdī to power in a 1974 coup, but the assassination of Ḥamdī 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.

Several attempts toward the unification of North Yemen and South Yemen failed during his presidency, but the merger finally took place on May 22, 1990, with Saleh as president. 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.

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.

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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. Rumours 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, ʿAbd Rabbuh Manṣūr Hadī, 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 Hadī in exchange for immunity from prosecution. The agreement called for presidential elections to be held in February 2012 with Hadī as the only candidate on the ballot. Hadī 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 Hadī’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 Hadī 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 Aḥmad, who remained the head of the Republican Guard, and through several other relatives in high-level military positions. Hadī removed most of those relatives from their commands and reassigned them to foreign postings in April 2013.

Despite losing influence with Hadī’s government, Saleh continued to be a key player in Yemeni politics. In 2014 he aligned himself with a rebellion against Hadī by the Houthis, a Zaydi Shiʿi group based in northern Yemen that had previously staged an uprising against Saleh himself, 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.