Sunday, August 2, 2020

Yemen's Multilayered Civil War: A Brief History

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Anant Jani

Article Title

Yemen's Multilayered Civil War: A Brief History

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Global Views 360

Publication Date

August 2, 2020

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Children in Yemen

Children in Yemen | Source: Rod Waddington via Flickr

This is the 1st part of a short explainer article series on the current crisis in Yemen.

Since 2015, Yemen has been at war on two different fronts, 1) The Civil War between the Iran-backed Houthi rebels and the UAE-Saudi Arabia backed government headed by Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, and 2) the war against the local terrorist outfits of Al-Qaeda and ISIS.

However, last year one more complexity was added to the conflict when UAE withdrew from the coalition backing Hadi government and later threw its support behind another secessionist force in southern Yemen, which seeks to re-create the State of South Yemen, as it was before the unification of Yemen in 1990.

As of early this year, it has added another layer to the war: the failing healthcare infrastructure and the rise of COVID-19.

The staggering cost of this war in the past five years has prompted the UN to name it the worst man-made humanitarian crisis in history, with Some 24 million Yemeni people - 80 percent of the country's population - requiring assistance or protection.

This series of articles seeks to build historical context to follow the current events in Yemen, believing much of the recent media coverage to have been ignored, or otherwise made wholly uncontextualized in the process of following the crisis for over a decade.

Yemen and the greater neighbourhood | Source: Google Map

The History

Much of the current conflict can only be understood as a result of the events of the latter half of the 20th century. Here is a brief look at the history that has shaped today’s wars in Yemen.

At the heart of several issues in the conflict is the fact that modern day Yemen was initially divided into North Yemen and South Yemen until 1990, when it was unified.

Yemen and the greater neighbourhood | Source: Wikimedia

North Yemen:

The Yemen Arab Republic (YAR), a coalition in North Yemen, overthrew the Mutawakilite Kingdom in 1970, which had been ruling since Yemen’s decolonization, in 1918. The YAR established their capital at Sana’a, a site which will often be the site of conflict in the following years.
This part of Yemen, during the cold war  was backed the countries aligned with the anti-communist block like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the US, the UK and West Germany. The influence of Saudi Arabia and their relations with the US will come to play a greater role in the following decades.

South Yemen:

This referred to the region that was under the British Raj as the Aden Protectorate, since 1874. It consisted of two-thirds of present-day Yemen. In 1937 it became a Province of the British Raj, and in 1963, it collapsed and an emergency declared. The collapse was the joint effort of the National Liberation Front (NLF) and the Front for the Liberation of Occupied South Yemen (FLOSY).

Aden was used by the East India Company as a coal depot, and to stop Arab pirates from harassing British-India trade. Until 1937, Aden was part of British India, officially titled the Aden Protectorate.

Aden, like Sana’a will come to be the capital of southern Yemen, and the site of many conflicts.

This part of Yemen, during the cold war was backed by the Cummunist bloc countries like USSR, Cuba, and East Germany.

The Unification:

North and South Yemen united in 1990, after several years of conflict with one another. The leader of North Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, was named President of unified Yemen in 1990. He was to continue ruling over Yemen for over three decades.

The unification of Yemen finally fulfilled almost a century of struggle that started during the British occupation and continued at different paces throughout the monarchy and cold war period. This unification also took away the privileges and power vested with many important tribes and people. Unlike the political forces, the armed forces of North and South Yemen were not unified at the time of political unification of the country.

The disgruntled former elites and the partisan army provided the fertile ground for the first civil war of Yemen which followed shortly after the unification.

Link to the second part.

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February 4, 2021 5:21 PM

The Toxicity in Video Games and Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077, the most awaited video game was released on consoles and PC on 10th of December, 2020. The game went under 10 years of build-up and had kept gamers waiting for over 8 years. Cyberpunk 2077 is inspired by a cult-favourite tabletop roleplaying game. The video game was designed by well-known Polish studio, CD Projekt Red. Cyberpunk was the studio’s first big console game since The Witcher 3: Wild hunt which was an extraordinarily triumphant game that won numerous awards after its launch in 2015.

The popular video game, when released, faced backlash from the gaming community and non-gamers for several reasons. To many observers and gamers, Cyberpunk 2077 even proved to be an absolute failure. Several gamers called out the game developers for the promotion of sexiest ideologies and transphobia. However, the reviews weren’t well received by the fans. Cyberpunk 2077 fans responded with unacceptable abuses, harrasing and hateful messages and even rape and death threats.

Keanu Reeves in Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 released ample previews, trailers, motion pictures and marketing material. Aside from this, the appearence of popular Canadian actor, Keanu Reeves as a character in the game carved the expectations of gamers and promised a sexy and kinky world of futuristic and revolutionary action. CD Projekt Red, one of Europe’s most successful video game company announced Cyberpunk 2077 project in 2012 and released the first trailer in 2013

The game is set in an alternate timeline in the city of California. The streets in the game are owned by tyrannical corporations. Everyone in the game modifies their body with illegal technology. Much of the state in the video game setting is said to be suffering from the impacts of a major nuclear attack which happened years ago. Every player gets to be a cyber-enhanced human who has to fight against physical and psychological threats to their survival. The game character of Keanu Reeves comes in as your sidekick.

In 2018, the developers insisted and had assured the gamers that Cyberpunk 2077 would not include in game purchases. CD Projekt Red did not want to lock any content behind a paywall. The studio was also insistent that the game would come out only when it was completely “ready”. They announced that the release would take place in April 2020 but it was delayed multiple times due to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as other quality problems that the game was facing. When it was finally released in December 2020, gamers expected their experience of the game to be “worth the wait”. However, the video game wasn’t well revived by all. In spite of several months of work that went into making and developing the game, the game was launched with several technical issues. Players on both PC and consoles were having terrible experiences. As a result of multiple glitches and technical problems, the characters’ faces were obscured and the game would reset randomly. Some of the environments or areas of the game map was unappealing. The game even caused consoles to crash repeatedly and sometimes sacrificed players’ progress. One glitch led to characters’ breasts and penises being exposed. The characters’ genitals would poke out of their clothes. CD Projeckt Red offered refunds to players who were disappointed with the product. In fact, they updated a self-review discouraging gamers from playing the game on console until the game was fixed and improved.

Cyberpunk 2077 was roundly criticized by reviewers, game designers, industry insiders and other gamers across the gaming community. The wait and hype for the game had already created a fanbase which turned toxic by harassing reviewers who criticised the game.

There is another reason why the game wasn’t well received. Cyberpunk 2077 transphobia was apparent in the game contradicting the fact that the developers had claimed that the game was ahead of its time. The game has an incredibly detailed character creation menu. The players can control several aspects of their character’s appearance including the shapes and size of the genitals. The game even allows players to decline the option of including genitals to their characters. However, this isn’t the problem and is in fact appreciable. The idea of not determining gender by the character’s genitals in fact made many trans players happy. But this soon turned into disbelief and disappointment. The gamers realised that the game actually assigned the gender to the characters not based on their genitals but rather by the voice. Characters with higher-pitched voices were identified as females and characters with deep-voiced characters were assigned male pronouns. This purports the toxic idea that people’s gender can be determined by certain traits. A non-sexist video game would determine the gender of a player’s character based on an independent choice made by players themselves. This is uninfluenced by other physical traits or qualities.

Several reviewers called out Cyberpunk 2077 for promoting sexist ideologies. Unfortunately, toxic fans harassed the reviewers. “You just KNOW when you're going to get harassed. If the game with all the hype has anything wrong with it, and you're honest about that, or even just want to provide any context outside of ‘it's fun’, you're going to get harassed. It's a given.” These were precisely what Susan Arendt, a podcast host quoted. She even second guessed herself whether sharing her true opinions was worth the hateful, threatening and harassing messages that she received.

Controversial Tweet by Cyberpunk 2077 Twitter Handle

In the early days of arcade, gaming was a family activity. The popular male dominance and stereotype that only boys or men are good at video games were perpetuated in the past three decades. We observe this change due to sexualisation of video games. Today, most video games aren’t family friendly as they include explicit and sexual content. This, in fact, is a marketing tactic used by developers to target the male population. In 2018, a Cyberpunk 2077 fan who was awaiting the game at that point of time tweeted that the user wanted to see more from the “guys” at CDPR. In response to this tweet, CD Projekt Red tweeted, “Did you just assume their gender?!”. On the look of it, the tweet seems innocent but it is a joke at the expense of the trans community. After receiving backlash to the tweet, CDPR took it down and issued an apology staying sorry to “all those offended”. The apology seems like another targeted mockery and CDPR did no right by not taking responsibility for its actions.

Not only is Cyberpunk2077 transphobic and sexist, it is non user friendly as well. The game has several epilepsy triggers without any warnings about it. There are several instances and situations in the game where the effects and the graphics are brighter, louder and flashing. This is a general trigger for seizures. Liana Rupert, a player of Cyberpunk 2077 suffered a major seizure and at several moments felt that she was close to another one. After bringing this to the notice of CD Projekt Red, the company agreed to add trigger warnings wherever necessary.  

The gaming industry has definitely taken a few steps forward in terms of inclusivity of all genders but has also taken a few steps backward. While all genders are welcome, they still face harassment and judgement for simply existing in the community and need a lot more improvement.

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