Yemen must not occur in India

http://www.asianage.com/columnists/yemen-must-not-occur-india-488

Apr 13, 2015

Shankar Roychowdhury

The Indian Navy has once again kept the country’s flag flying high, in the emergency evacuation of a large number of Indians from Yemen. INS Sumitra and her sister ships, carried out an evacuation under fire reminiscent of the battle of Dunkirk during World War II. Air attacks by German Stuka bombers were absent of course, but even that factor might have been added had rebel pilots of the Yemeni Air Force joined the fray in their decrepit but still flyable MiG-21s.

So what are the lessons for India from the bloody conflagration that is consuming Yemen? The ans-wer is simple — Yemen must not be allowed to occur in India. The wild-eyed, politico-religious hate figures should be restrained. Religious ideology apart, an equally important question is whether the outbreak of sectarian war in Yemen has some hidden agenda as well?

Could it be oil?

The Arab Spring, which ignited spontaneously in 2010 as a mass movement for restoration of democracy in Tunisia and spread throughout the Arab world, took place in oil-rich countries, but oil or its politics was not amongst the specific causes for the upheaval. . The Arab Spring and the Shia-Sunni jihad it created, has unleashed its own djinns like the Al Qaeda and its local chapter the Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (IS). These have unleashed a reign of Sunni terror pogroms against the hapless religious and tribal minorities of the region, including Yazidis, Alawites, Ibadi Coptic Christians, and Christian Arabs who have been massacred and expelled from their lands.

The Arab Spring seems to have morphed into a demonic mutant — a full-blown Sunni-Shia conflict which had first manifested itself in Syria and Iraq, and has now spread to Yemen. It is pitching Saudi Arabia against Shia Iran, in a savage war for the leadership of the region through terrorist proxies like the Al-Nusra and Hezbollah.

Yemen lies on the fringe of the OPEC heartland in West Asia. It is a troubled land with a population that is 70 per cent Sunni and 30 per cent Shia, a pattern almost made-to-order for instability.