"Democracy in Yemen did not stop, instead it is in a continuous development, there is no other way to follow rather than democracy, it is our national way for building up our country, it was not imposed on us by others"
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Saleh’s line reads like a reassurance and a warning bundled into one smooth, state-friendly sentence. He frames democracy not as an event you either have or don’t, but as a process always “in development” - a convenient formulation in a country where postponement can be sold as progress. If democracy is perpetually becoming, it never has to fully arrive. That lets a leader claim legitimacy while keeping the timeline pleasantly vague.
The rhetorical move that does the real work is the insistence on inevitability: “there is no other way.” It’s less a description of Yemen’s political reality than an attempt to collapse the range of alternatives into a single, sanctioned path. The subtext is discipline: if democracy is the only national road, then dissent can be cast as anti-national rather than merely oppositional.
Most revealing is the defensive clause at the end: “it was not imposed on us by others.” That’s a preemptive strike at both domestic cynics and foreign critics. In the post-9/11 era, Yemen sat in the crosswinds of U.S. counterterrorism priorities, Gulf influence, and international democracy talk. Saleh’s claim of local ownership tries to neutralize the stigma of “imported” politics while still reaping the diplomatic benefits of sounding reformist.
The intent, then, is not just to praise democracy but to domesticate it - to make it synonymous with regime continuity, national identity, and gradualism. It’s a statement engineered to reassure outsiders, flatter citizens, and narrow the space where genuine political competition could grow.
The rhetorical move that does the real work is the insistence on inevitability: “there is no other way.” It’s less a description of Yemen’s political reality than an attempt to collapse the range of alternatives into a single, sanctioned path. The subtext is discipline: if democracy is the only national road, then dissent can be cast as anti-national rather than merely oppositional.
Most revealing is the defensive clause at the end: “it was not imposed on us by others.” That’s a preemptive strike at both domestic cynics and foreign critics. In the post-9/11 era, Yemen sat in the crosswinds of U.S. counterterrorism priorities, Gulf influence, and international democracy talk. Saleh’s claim of local ownership tries to neutralize the stigma of “imported” politics while still reaping the diplomatic benefits of sounding reformist.
The intent, then, is not just to praise democracy but to domesticate it - to make it synonymous with regime continuity, national identity, and gradualism. It’s a statement engineered to reassure outsiders, flatter citizens, and narrow the space where genuine political competition could grow.
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| Topic | Freedom |
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