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A Houthi-run court in Yemen has sentenced 13 people to executed, on charges relating to homosexuality, a judicial court confirmed this week.
The Houthi movement, officially known as Ansar Allah, is a Shia Islamist political and military organisation that emerged in Yemen during the 1990s. Houthi militants control vast swathes of the country, and the group’s recent attacks on Red Sea shipping has prompted retaliation from both the US and the UK.
The death sentences were handed down in Ibb, an area controlled by the Houthis rebels. According to reports in AFP, quoting an anonymous source, three others were jailed on similar charges and another 35 people were detained in the province, also for alleged homosexuality-related offences.
The court findings are open to appeal and it is not clear when any of the public executions are due to be carried out, but, according to a report by the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor in 2022, the Houthis have sentenced 350 people to death – 11 of who have been executed – since they seized Yemen’s capital city of Sanaa in 2014.
“The Houthis are ramping up their abuses at home while the world is busy watching their attacks in the Red Sea,” Niku Jafarnia, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, told AFP.
“If they really cared about the human rights they purport to be standing up for in Palestine, they wouldn’t be flogging and stoning Yemenis to death.”
According to Amnesty International, the rebels continue to target LGBTQ+ people with arbitrary arrest and torture, including rape and other forms of sexual violence. In 2022, the Southern Transitional Council, a secessionist organisation in South Yemen, and the Houthis arrested at least five people on the basis of either their refusal to conform to “masculine” and “feminine” presentation or their LGBTQ+ activism.
On one occasion, a queer man was pulled off the street and accused of being a “sexual deviant.” He was detained in a military vehicle and only released on the condition that he agreed to help the Houthis capture people who did not conform to gender norms. However, after he was released he refused, and was told by security forces that he was wanted for arrest once again.
In addition, the Houthis’ “mahram agreement” continues to ban women from travelling without a male guardian or written evidence of their consent. Meanwhile, increased restrictions on travel have affected women’s ability to work, resulting in many being unable to access healthcare, with Yemeni female humanitarian workers unable to reach them.
Not saying that I know anything about anything on this matter but the western propaganda machine is really good at twisting narratives, especially when the infosphere of the particular country is weak or nonexistent.
So I’d count Russia as having a fairly strong infosphere, China as having a infosphere that has a good buffer but which lacks much ability to project power (although it has been improving its capacity in this respect), and Iran or Palestine or especially Ansarallah to have a virtually nonexistent infosphere, making them particularly vulnerable to information warfare from the west.
What this means in terms of information warfare is that it’s extremely easy to spin a narrative RFA-style; are a significant number of the people from an ethnic or religious minority? Then it’s clear indications of Ansarallah’s emerging genocidal intent.
Are the people being executed for attempting a coup from a political resistance group? Then it’s a clear case of Ansarallah suppressing any opposing political party.
Are the people being condemned to death for CSA that happened to be same-sex? Then it’s a clear case of executing people based on sexuality.
You get the picture.
[CW: mild discussions of sexual abuse in the abstract ahead]
These pernicious disinfo outlets take a single term from a domestic language that hardly anyone in the west speaks, either through official documents or through domestic media reports, and they turn a word like “sodomy” or “impermissible sexual conduct” into “homosexuality” when in the context of the actual charges it’s just the conventional term or the official legislative or judicial language used to refer to a crime like CSA or the sexual abuse of animals or something.
Fairly recently there was an example of this where a Chinese guy who was an international student in the US, I think, who got put up on charges “for having a twitter account” or “posting things critical of the CCP” when, after looking at the Chinese court documents he wasn’t just “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” but he had multiple social media accounts where he was actively promoting disinfo on telegram groups by trying to rabble-rouse and he was impersonating people including one Chinese citizen whose likeness and identity he had appropriated and he was using that account to attack people and cause drama.
The sort of stuff that would probably slide in most western countries but also it was definitely veering into a legal grey area and the Chinese government doesn’t fuck around with concerns over freedom of speech for people who steal identities and misrepresent their opinions because you cannot maintain a content population of 1.4 billion people if anyone can just start smearing another person’s reputation by defamatory actions like this, so the government is much more likely to crack down in order to get people to knock that shit off.
Not saying that whatever is going on with Ansarallah is true or false but this wouldn’t be the first time some international agency like
AmnesiaAmnesty International will make some spurious claims, release some report, and then it goes into the western media cycle and becomes part of the narrative before it eventually gets exposed as a fabrication or heavily skewed interpretation or it gets quietly retracted after the damage is already done.The timing is super convenient tho, you gotta admit that.
During dah cold wah…
the anti-communist ideological framework (or in this context, colonial)