Breakthrough for the BRICS, New Silk Road and Hamiltonian Credit System in Yemen

A major breakthrough with international implications took place in the Yemeni capital San’a yesterday May 26 in the annual National Forum for Financial Assessment organized by the Finance Ministry. The two-day conference was sponsored by Mohammed Ali Al-Houthi, Chairman of the Supreme Revolutionary Committee (de facto President of Yemen), and acting Finance Minister Mohammed Naser Al-Jund, and the presence of acting Prime Minister Talal Aqlan, and about 500-700 finance ministry officials, government institutions, private financial and economic corporations and civil society organizations.

The Schiller Institute friend Fouad Al-Ghaffari, chairman of the Advisory Office for Coordination with BRICS, a private advisory group, was invited by the Finance Minister to present his vision for Yemen, in a speech and power-point presentation in the second day of the conference. Al-Ghaffari presented his Office’s policies and principles: Joining the BRICS new economic system, Joining the New Silk Road strategy, Joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, establishing a National Reconstruction Bank on the basis of national credit, and that these economic aspects must be included in any and all current and future peace negotiations currently sponsored by the UN with the Saudi-backed government-in-exile. Three of these demands were included in the final list of recommendations presented by the Forum to the government: 1. Establishing a National Committee for Coordination with the BRICS, 2. Establishing an “operations room” to found a National Reconstruction Bank, and 3. including the economic future of Yemen in the peace negotiations.

In total, there were 18 recommendations forwarded to the government from the Forum, but these were the most important and gained a wide coverage in the Yemeni TV and paper print media. Al-Ghaffari’s speech was featured in the evening news covering the conference. If the governmental Committee for Coordination with the BRICS were to be establishes, most of the other recommendations would be achieved, since the Al-Ghaffari group has already designed solutions for the reconstruction and revitalization of the economy in partnership between the state and private sector.

Al-Ghaffari and his team, which has expanded from a few individuals to dozens in the process of the nationally-covered series of readings of the Arabic translation of the EIR report “The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge”, were invited to participate in this Forum, and they were allowed to distribute hundreds of leaflets of the Office’s program and hang a massive poster of the World Land-Bridge in the courtyard of the conference building. Copies of the EIR report were presented to the top officials on this and other occasions, including to Mohammed Ali Al-Houthi, Finance Minister Al-Jund, The head of the Office of the Presidency of the Republic, the acting Defense Minister, and acting Education Minister.

According to the official news agency Saba News, in the concluding statement of the Forum, the conference attendees denounced the “unjust and criminal economic blockade imposed on the nation by the alliance of aggression, which is tantamount to a war crime as it deprives the people of Yemen from its most basic human needs.” They also called on the government to hasten the process of establishing a national committed for coordination with the BRICS, and establishing an operation’s room for founding a national bank for reconstruction.

The conference also called for activating the contacts with international humanitarian organizations to lift the blockade, and ending the war of aggression, and resuming the export of oil and gas and other national products. It also called for lifting the freeze on national assets, and hard currency abroad.

This is the most spectacular act of resistance against the Anglo-America-Saudi genocidal empire anywhere in the world today. These Yemeni patriotic forces never succumbed to the pressure of war and genocide perpetrated by the Saudi, American, and British weapons and mercenaries against their people to abandon the greatest and highest ideas and visions for the future of their nation. It is time that the world community, and especially the BRICS to react now to support a political solution for the war waged on Yemen today. The day before this conference, Al-Ghaffari met shortly with the Russian Ambassador, Vladimir Dedushkin, who was on a one-day visit to Yemen, in the San’a airport and presented to him his vision for Yemen and handed him a copy of the EIR report. Dedushkin’s resident Charge d’Affaire, Oleg Dorlimov, was also present at the meeting and was instructed by the Ambassador to coordinate with Al-Ghaffari’s Office for Coordination with the BRICS. Russia and China are closely monitoring the ongoing UN-sponsored negotiations in Kuwait between the patriotic forces and the Saudi-backed government in exile. The patriotic forces seem to have drawn a line in the sand implying that any peace in Yemen must include massive economic development at the highest level, with new principles of national credit and application of the most advanced technologies to secure the future for the Yemeni young generations.