Yemeni government forces killed at least six people and wounded dozens in Aden and Shabwa in Yemen in February during protests against the dissolution of the Southern Transitional Council, a prominent UAE-backed separatist organization, Human Rights Watch published in a report on Tuesday.
The government decided in January to dissolve the STC, a choice seen to have been heavily influenced by Saudi Arabia.
At the end of December, Rashad al-Alimi, head of Yemen’s Presidential Leadership Council, had declared a 90-day nationwide state of emergency following the STC’s takeover of Hadramout. Only a week later, Saudi-led coalition forces and government forces pushed the STC out of territories where it had gained control.
Protesters had also demonstrated over economic grievances. Yemen’s civil war, terrorist influences in the country, and the climate crisis have left over 17 million people food insecure and 4.8 million people internally displaced, according to the World Food Programme.
Human Rights Watch concluded that the forces aligned with Yemen’s government used excessive force against those participating in the demonstrations and arbitrarily detained dozens across three governorates.
Deadly crackdown on STC protests reported
“The Yemeni government has long purported to stand up for free expression, and yet their actions don’t match their words,” said Niku Jafarnia, Yemen and Bahrain researcher at Human Rights Watch.
“The government should be ensuring that Yemenis’ rights are respected during this period, rather than violating their right to free expression,” she said.
After interviewing 13 people between February 10 and March 6, including protestors who had been arrested, witnesses to government forces’ use of force, and representatives of the STC, and looking at verified photos and videos of the use of force, the NGO said it wrote to the Yemeni government about the apparent rights violations, but received no response.
Government forces fired on demonstrators at Seiyun airport, in the Hadramout government, on February 6, HRW found, though it noted that apparently nobody was hurt in the confrontation.
A day after the incident, government forces were said to have detained dozens of protesters and two STC leaders at their homes. The leaders were charged with inciting people to protest, while the four protestors interviewed by HRW said they had not been charged and were released after several days in detention.
Protests in the Shabwa governorate were also met by fire from government forces after demonstrators attempted to replace the Yemeni flag with the STC flag from a municipal building. HRW noted that some of the activists also fired on government forces.
The armed confrontation led to five deaths, and 39 people were wounded, the deputy head of the Shabwah General Hospital Authority, Rami Lamas, told Al Jazeera.
Government forces later killed one person and wounded 27 as pro-STC demonstrators attempted to storm the presidential palace in Aden on February 19, according to the STC.
Researchers identified at least three incidents of security forces firing upward when they reviewed footage of the incident, including shots from a machine gun mounted on an armored vehicle.
In another video, an armored vehicle is seen accelerating toward protesters but suddenly stopping before reaching them.
One human rights activist told HRW that 28 people were detained during the demonstration and denied due process. They were allegedly held for over two weeks without being taken before a judge or charged with a criminal offense, according to the activist, making the detentions arbitrary.
The father of one of the detainees told HRW that authorities had not allowed his 19-year-old son to call to inform his family that he had been detained.
“My son didn’t get back home [the night of the protest], and we thought he went to stay over at one of his relatives’ homes.
“The next day, when he wasn’t back, and we saw the pictures of the protest, and people said that there are detainees, so we started looking for him, and that was when we learned he was detained in Ma’ashiq Palace,” the father said.
“The security forces in Ma’ashiq kept telling us that they would release [the detained protesters] tomorrow or the day after, but they didn’t and [instead] transferred them to the central prison in al-Mansora on February 26.”
HRW noted that while under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly are protected, over the past decade, both government and STC forces have suppressed people’s right to demonstrate.
“As power changes hands in southern Yemen, the warring parties need to end the cycle of violations,” Jafarnia said.
“The Yemeni government needs to provide accountability and justice for the STC’s violations in areas previously under its control and not repeat the same violations that it previously condemned,” she concluded.