Afrasianet - Abdulsalam Tarawneh - Over the years of the bloody Yemeni conflict, the term legitimacy has been transformed from a political and moral goal that expresses a social contract stemming from the will of the people to a mere tool used in the corridors of diplomacy and managed by the calculations of war and negotiation, where the term has become a barricade raised by the ruling parties in Aden with a wide regional and international cover as an absolute and inexhaustible mandate in the face of Sana'A, which finds itself besieged and is fighting an unequal confrontation in front of an integrated military and diplomatic alliance, while it depends internally on the management of the fait accompli and control of the ground.
The comparison here does not mean dropping the fundamental differences in the balance of power or contexts. Sana'A is facing a regional and international alliance that imposed on it and millions of Yemenis in its area economic isolation and a harsh siege, which has established a historical narrative of oppression and defense of national sovereignty.
However, the essence of the Yemeni predicament remains the nature of calling for legitimacy by all. The diplomatic recognition enjoyed by the government of Aden does not give it self-weight on the ground if security, services and real acceptance are not reflected among the people, just as Sana'a's steadfastness in the face of the coalition cannot alone constitute a definitive cover for ruling a country that is full of diversity and contradictions.
Diplomatic legitimacy was stripped of its soul when it became an external representation, governed by the wishes of the sponsoring capitals and based on seals and decisions written in previous circumstances, and this positioning made it seem as if it derives its permanence from external intervention rather than from internal popular mandate, which has lost its political prestige and the justification for its exclusive representation of a country whose complexities go beyond the corridors of hotels and the statements of the Security Council.
On the other hand, despite the weight of the battle imposed on Sana'A in the face of the coalition, managing the larger population geography with the logic of emergency and fait accompli does not create a sustainable social contract.
Confronting external interference, no matter how present it may be in the popular conscience, remains structurally incapable of exempting any authority from the entitlement of comprehensive national partnership and opening the way for the political and civil pluralism ensured by Yemenis in their historical experiences.
Thus, legitimacy has become a commercial card that is put on the regional negotiating tables to extract gains, where salaries are exchanged, ports are opened, and maneuvers are conducted to share bags and influence in the rooms of Muscat and Riyadh, while the owner of the genuine right, the exhausted Yemeni citizen, remains absent from shaping his destiny.
Getting out of this vicious circle requires abandoning the logic of exclusion completely, as the dictates of the coalition and its diplomatic umbrella cannot break the will of millions of Yemenis in Sana'a and its surroundings, and the logic of force and weapons cannot reduce the fate of Yemen to one party, as real stability begins with ending foreign interventions and lifting the causes of suffering and siege, and is paralleled by an explicit internal commitment to demonopolize the decision by force.
There is no real salvation and no legitimacy that has the character of survival except when the barricades of war are removed and the final word returns to all Yemenis north and south in an equal and independent environment that opens the door wide for the ballot boxes to determine the shape of their state and system of government by free choice that is not dictated by the conditions of external guardianship or the logic of internal dominance.
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