By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal
Due to their involvement in the current Gaza war, the Houthis of Yemen are on the front pages of newspapers and in television news broadcasts everywhere.
More formally known as Ansar Allah or Supporters of Allah, the Houthis are Zayidi Muslims associated with Shi’ite Islam, and live almost exclusively in Yemen. The movement is named after its first influential leader, Seyyed Badr al-Din al-Houthi, who claimed to be a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad.
Zayidi Muslims make up only about 35 per cent of Yemen’s population; the rest are Sunni Muslims. Yet, despite their minority status, Zayidi Imams ruled Yemen for some 1,000 years.
Backed by Iran, the Houthis have been at war with a Saudi-led Suni Muslim coalition since 2015, a conflict which has led to the deaths of more than 350,000 people. Nine years on, the Houthis now basically control the country.
But what few people realize is their virtual enslavement of underprivileged Yemenis. According to a 2019 article in Asharq Al-Awsat, an Arabic international newspaper headquartered in London, “The Houthis are working tirelessly to restore slavery in Yemen, nearly 70 years after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and decades after the 1962 revolution in Yemen.”
These people are known as “Al Akhdam,” the servants, though they prefer to be known as “Al Muhamasheen,” or the marginalized ones. They form a kind of hereditary caste at the very bottom of Yemen’s social ladder. They are reviled as outsiders, descendants of an Ethiopian army that is said to have crossed the Red Sea to oppress Yemen before the arrival of Islam.
For centuries, they have been excluded from mainstream society, and they continue to be subjected to severe forms of descent-based discrimination. Their living conditions are appalling. Today, the most common job for male Akhdam is street cleaning.
They also work as porters, foot soldiers and shoemakers. Women and children beg. Since there is no enforcement of legislation that criminalizes abuses against them, persecution, discrimination and exclusion go unpunished.
Reports of violence targeting them, including gender-based violence, have been rife. The fact they fall outside Yemen’s social structures means they have had little access to redress or mediation.
Their condition dates back to the pre-1962 rule by Zayidi Imams in Yemen and was used to classify the society into three sectors: Seyyeds, people with family connections to the Prophet Muhammad; other citizens; and, lastly, slaves.
But where Yemen’s other hereditary social classes, even the lower orders like butchers and ironworkers, slowly dissolved, the Akhdam retained their separate position.
So although they are Muslims, prejudice against them is based on their “lack of origin” compared to northern Arab Yemenis. Their debased status is a remnant of Yemen’s old social hierarchy, which collapsed after a 1962 revolution struck down the rule by Zayidi Imams.
The NGO Walk Free is an international human rights group focused on the eradication of modern slavery in all its forms. That includes forced labour, forced or servile marriage, debt bondage, forced commercial sexual exploitation, human trafficking, slavery-like practices, and the sale and exploitation of children. All involve the removal of a person’s freedom.
For over a decade, Walk Free has studied the number of people living in modern slavery around the world. They estimate that currently there are at least 85,000 victims of slavery in Yemen. They add “that due to the impossibility of conducting surveys under conflict, data likely underestimated the problem.”
A 2022 U.S. State Department “Trafficking in Persons Report” noted “vulnerable populations in Yemen were at an increased risk of human trafficking due to the protracted armed conflict, civil unrest, lawlessness, and worsening economic conditions.”
In an introduction to the report, then Secretary of State John Kerry, wrote: “Ending modern slavery must remain a foreign policy priority. Fighting this crime wherever it exists is in our national interest.”
The U.S. Department of Labour’s “Child Labor and Forced Labor Reports” for the same year found that children are particularly vulnerable to exploitation in slave-like conditions, and are subject to commercial sexual exploitation, human trafficking, and forced combat in armed conflict.
Houthis also subject Ethiopian women who try to cross into Saudi Arabia from Yemen to sexual slavery and abuses. A 2023 report by the Danish-based Mixed Migration Centre, a global network engaged in data collection, research, and analysis, found that large numbers of them are systematically being killed on the border between Yemen and Saudi Arabia on a daily basis.
“Women are facing sexual violence and harassment by all parties on the ground,” according to Mwatana for Human Rights, a Yemeni NGO that documents atrocities in the country.
How do the Houthis rationalize this practice? They have come up with various ways to own slaves without violating Islamic rules, by bending definitions of slavery. Because the Akhdams were not originally Muslim, and converted only after becoming slaves, they argue that it is “legitimate” as it falls under this allowance.
They also extend slavery to children as the use of them as soldiers is permitted under certain circumstances under Islamic law – although it is widely considered a form of slavery in the modern world.
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