Arab governments move to ease Yemen crisis

Arab League's Amr Moussa to meet president after Yemen government launched offensive against Houthis in August

Yemen may be a faraway land of which the west knows little. But Arab governments are showing alarm at its multiple crises and are stepping up efforts to help amid concern that the poorest country in the region is incapable of dealing with problems that could risk pushing it to the edge of collapse – and benefit al-Qaida.

Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, is due in the capital Sana'a tomorrow for urgent talks with President Ali Abdullah Saleh, one of the Middle East's veteran leaders. Ahmed Abu al-Gheit, the Egyptian foreign minister, warned yesterday that "foreign hands" were stirring trouble – an unmistakable reference to Iran's alleged support for northern rebels.

Abu al-Gheit and Egypt's powerful intelligence chief, General Omar Suleiman, flew from Sana'a to Saudi Arabia, which is also backing the Yemeni government and deeply concerned about the instability of its impoverished neighbour. Egypt, which always aspires to an Arab leadership role, is taking this crisis very seriously and trying to persuade others to do the same.

Yemen's latest trouble erupted in mid-August when the government launched an offensive – codenamed "Scorched Earth" in case anyone doubted its intention – against Houthi rebels from the northern Sa'ada region. The Houthis belong to the Shia Zaydi sect – but Saleh is also a Zaydi, underlining why portraying this as simply a sectarian conflict is misleading. Still, there is no doubt Sunni fundamentalists have gained in strength because of Saleh's intimate ties to the Saudis.

The political temperature rose at the weekend when Abdel-Majid al-Zindani, Yemen's most popular Sunni cleric (he once taught Osama bin Laden and is accused by the US and UN of financing terrorism), blamed Tehran for backing the Houthis. "The way events are moving indicates that Iran wants to export the Shia ideology by force, which we utterly reject," Zindani said.

Otherwise there is a general sense of grievance about resources, marginalisation and the crushing of the independence the Zaydis enjoyed until the 1960s.

In recent weeks unrest has also escalated in the south, where a separatist opposition movement wants to reestablish the south Yemeni state that unified with its northern neighbour in 1990 and failed to secede in a brief war in 1994.

On top of all that, the US, Britain and other western governments fear the unrest may make life easier for al-Qaida, which over the last two years has found a haven in Yemen after being defeated in Saudi Arabia. In August a Saudi al-Qaida fugitive travelled from Yemen to Jeddah and blew himself up in a failed attempt to kill the Saudi security supremo. Yemen's record of tolerance towards homegrown extremists does not inspire confidence about its ability to contain this threat: three years ago 23 al-Qaida suspects escaped from a Sana'a prison en masse, arousing strong suspicions of official collusion.

Yemen, once known as "Arabia Felix" (happy Arabia), is beset today by declining oil revenues, mass unemployment, rapid population growth and crippling water shortages. Diplomats and analysts see it as a dangerously fragile state that is "failing in slow motion". The Sa'ada war has already created some 150,000 refugees, a crisis which Oxfam and other aid agencies warn could ignite into a full-blown disaster unless immediate action is taken to stop the fighting between the government and the Houthi rebels. Arabs and others will be hoping that Egypt's mediation efforts bear fruit sooner rather than later.