Negotiating chaos

It was like a scene from a great novel: Yemen’s most famous feminist screaming incandescently at the country’s most powerful tribal sheikh. Cameramen gathered round, eager to record history as Amal Basha told Shiekh Sadiq al-Ahmar exactly what she thought of him inside the conference hall that hosts the country’s already faltering National Dialogue. Like most good rows, it started over something seemingly innocuous – the choosing of chair of a committee. The day before it seemed that consensus had been reached behind closed doors meetings that feminist Nabila al-Zubair would take charge of the body debating the future of the disputed city of Sada’h. But Ahmar, under pressure from his religiously conservative Islah party, changed his mind, sparking Basha’s ire. For both the Islah movement and the Houthis of the north, Sada’h has particular resonance. It has been the scene of many of the most brutal clashes in the