SANA’A—The presidential committee assigned to return stolen lands in the South following Yemen’s civil war in 1994 on Wednesday warned against the selling of land slated to be redistributed.
In mid-November President Abd Rabu Mansūr Hadi issued a decree that authorized the government to repossess land from anyone who had more than 1,000 square meters of property that has not been built upon and was seized from the approximately 45,000 Southern Yemenis whose land was taken by Northern forces post-1994. If the seized land has been built upon, per presidential decree, the owner is required to pay the committee a fee.
The committee, which has been working on the issue for almost a year now, said anyone caught selling land before it is restored to them will be prosecuted.
“Anyone attempting to sell lands included in the decree will have to pay compensation,” said Ali Atbūsh, the committee’s spokesperson.
Committee officials say a little over 1,100 individuals are being forced to return land, most of whom have served in the military. They are allowed to keep small plots of that land if they have already built a house on it.
As part of his duties as Yemen’s transitional president, Hadi had a mandate to reestablish relations between the North and the South. This included making right on the land seizure epidemic that swept the South following the war.
The ongoing National Dialogue Conference (NDC) has been supportive and pushed for this presidential decree in an effort to appease the block of Southern representatives who stipulated the issue of land restoration as a condition of their participation in the conference.
But many see obstacles standing in the way of the committee’s newest decree. A journalist who writes on the South, Fathi Bin Lazraq, said it is going to prove very problematic to find those who originally seized the Southern land, as a lot of it has already been sold and resold in transactions that are hard to track.
“This decree will encounter too many problems to be implemented,” he said.
Atboosh said that, to date, the committee has received more than 95,000 complaints in all Southern governorates from residents about seized lands. Almost half of those are from Aden. Only a little over 10 percent of them have been reviewed and approved for compensation. The committee is continuing to review complaints, Atboosh said.
Although many have praised the government for taking positive steps to restore Southern confidence in a transitional government that is trying to keep Southern separatists from pushing to secede, others have said efforts have been shallow and misguided.
For Abdulla Nasher, a social leader in the South, the decree to restore lands is nothing more than an effort to appease Southerners and lacks practical implementation.
“The decree only aims to convince Southerners to agree to the NDC’s outcomes,” he said.
http://almotamar.net/en/8746.htm
