Three thousand days have passed since Houthis kidnapped politician and activist professor Muhammad Qahtan, and the terrorist militia is still hiding him and refusing for 8 straight years to reveal information on his fate or disclose any information that gives his family some reassurance or allows them to communicate with him.
Since April 5, 2015, the family of Qahtan, a prominent leader in the Yemeni Islah party was not the one who alone paid the price for the systematic enforced disappearance of Qahtan. Political action in Yemen also ceased to exist due to the absence of one Qahtan, one of political activism most influential voices over the past decades.
Although the UN Security Council issued in April 2015 a resolution calling on the Houthi group to release four pro-government leaders, including politician Qahtan, the Houthi militia ignored this decision and continues to forcibly disappear Qahtan to this day.
In the past weeks, the militia released prominent prisoners from various affiliations, most notably the former Minister of Defense, Mahmoud Al-Subaihi, and Mohmmed Nasser, the brother of former President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi, in addition to Major General Faisal Rajab.
Qahtan's issue:
Qahtan's absence from the political scene for more than 8 years left a great political vacuum within the "Yemeni Islah party" in particular and the Yemeni political work in general, as he was one of the most prominent political leaders and one of the architects of the opposition Joint Meeting Parties bloc. He participated in many political movements and was one of its symbols.
Politician Abd al-Salam Razaz, a former minister in the Government of National Accord, believes that Qahtan's absence created a clear vacuum in the political and national battlefield, stressing that Qahtan has important leadership qualities in addition to his experiences, capabilities and deep understanding of the causes of conflict throughout ancient, modern and contemporary Yemeni history. ".
Razzaz said in an interview with "Al-Sahwa Net": "Muhammad Qahtan is not only a party leader, but a national symbol and a political leader.
He considered that "his abduction and enforced disappearance is a clear indication of the hijacking of political and partisan work in Yemen after the coup against government and national consensus, represented by the outputs of the National Dialogue, in which Qahtan was one of the main actors in its engineering."
He added that the crime of kidnapping Qahtan came as an expression of the Houthi militia's rejection of the national political project that Yemenis of all political and social sects agreed upon in 2013 in order to put an end to conflicts over power and wealth by building a federal, democratic state based on the principle of equal citizenship.