Abdul Karim Al Eryani, Yemen’s ‘last statesman’, dies at 81

Abdul Karim Al Eryani, a Yemeni former prime minister and diplomat who helped bring about a peaceful change of Yemen’s government during the Arab Spring of 2011, died Sunday in Frankfurt, Germany, where he had flown for medical treatment. He was 81.

His son, Hazim Al Eryani, confirmed the death.

Al Eryani was a scion of a prominent family that had held government posts in the region for 700 years. A scientist educated in Egypt and the United States, he was considered a father figure and a voice of reason in Yemen, a country infamous for long, bloody tribal feuds and more recently an expanding franchise of Al Qaida on the Arabian Peninsula.

When huge pro-democracy demonstrations rocked Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, at the beginning of the Arab Spring in January 2011, Al Eryani was an early proponent of ceding power to a younger generation. He eventually brokered a transfer of power that, at least for several years, forestalled the chaos and anarchy that marked similar transitions elsewhere in the Middle East.

The demonstrators demanded the resignation of then president Ali Abdullah Saleh, whom Al Eryani had served as prime minister, foreign minister and adviser. The transition plan, which was largely Al Eryani’s handiwork, called for the president to resign and be replaced by an interim government, a new constitution and national elections.

“Al Eryani was the wise man; if Saleh listened to anybody, it was Al Eryani,” said Abdul Rahman Al Rashid, a veteran Saudi columnist and the former general manager of Al Arabiya, the Saudi-owned news network. “He convinced Saleh to save himself, to save Yemen, to keep Yemen united.”

Throughout the negotiations, Al Eryani never lost his impish sense of humour. When Saleh agreed to sign the deal in April 2011, Al Eryani told friends that he would not cut his hair until he saw the president’s signature on the agreement. It was a vow he later laughingly had to break, since Saleh did not sign until November. In February 2012, Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi was inaugurated as president.

Even before the deal was signed, the seeds of its unravelling were sown in June 2011 when a bomb ripped through the mosque in the presidential compound during Friday prayer, killing seven men and gravely wounding Saleh.

Saleh aligned himself with Al Houthis, a zealous Zaidi Shiite militant group in the north that is linked to Iran. With his backing, they drove out Hadi as president and occupied the capital in September 2014, plunging the country into civil war.

Asked this spring about Yemen’s descent into violence, Al Eryani described it in almost Shakespearean terms. The assassination attempt and a long, painful rehabilitation, he said, had left Saleh angry and bitter, determined to regain his lost power and to wreak revenge on his enemies.

Al Eryani, in failing health and losing his sight, went into exile in Cairo. While various factions implored him to initiate peace talks, Saleh attacked him as “senile”.

Al Eryani was born in Eryan, a village in the central highlands of Ibb, on October 12, 1934. Most of his politically prominent ancestors and relatives were qadis — Arabic for judge — and an uncle, Abdul Rahman Al Eryani, served as president of the Yemen Arab Republic, in the northwestern part of what is now Yemen, from 1967 to 1974.

Al Eryani won a scholarship to study in America and, after stints in Texas and Georgia, obtained a PhD in biochemical genetics from Yale in 1968.

A progressive Arab nationalist, he returned to Yemen in 1972 and held a string of ministerial posts, including in development, education and foreign affairs. He was prime minister of the Yemen Arab Republic from 1980 to 1983 and held the same post in the united Yemen from 1998 to 2001.

Among other achievements, Al Eryani was instrumental in uniting North and South Yemen in 1990; played a key role in negotiating a 2000 border agreement with Saudi Arabia; and introduced liberal ideas in many fields, including agriculture.

“What he tried to do was to bring the country from a semi-medieval life to a modern life, and he tried to do this through dialogue and without violence,” said Abdullah Al Saidi, a minister in the exiled government and a former ambassador to the United Nations.

Al Eryani’s survivors include his wife, six children and nine grandchildren.

He was equally at home quoting pre-Islamic poetry or frequenting jazz clubs in New York. At dinner with friends, he could converse about history, archaeology, biology and new scientific discoveries, switching from one subject to the next with ease.

Mustafa Noman, a former ambassador to Spain, called Al Eryani “the last statesman Yemen had, and will have, for another generation”.