Stockholm, Sweden – A senior leader from Yemen’s Houthi rebels says his group hopes upcoming peace talks in Sweden will lead to an “inclusive political dialogue” that will end the war.

Abdul Malik al-Ajri told Al Jazeera that the Houthis, who arrived in the Swedish capital on Tuesday, were looking to discuss a range of political issues at the talks the drafting of a new constitution and the issue of southern Yemen, where calls have been growing since March 2015 for independence from the north.

“We are hoping these negotiations will help end the war,” al-Ajri said. “We will be calling for the land, sea and air blockade imposed on Yemen [by Saudi Arabia and the UAE] to be lifted, and for restrictions on goods entering the country to be lifted.

“A political solution is the only route to save whatever can be saved,” al-Ajri said.

International pressure has mounted on Yemen’s warring parties to end the conflict, which has killed more than 56,000 people, according to a recent estimate, and left more than 22 million Yemenis needing humanitarian assistance.

According to the UN, the planned “consultations”, which could start on either Wednesday or Thursday, will be be attended by the main “parties to the conflict” – even as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which play a leading role in the war, and Iran, which supposedly backs the Houthis, are not invited.

However, all three countries, which have considerable leverage over the opposing sides, have said they support the UN’s initiative to end the war, al-Ajri said.

The Special UN Envoy for Yemen, Martin Griffith, has been hoping to get both sides to agree to a “framework” that “establishes the principles and parameters for UN-led, inclusive Yemeni negotiations to end the war, and restart a political transition”.

“Yemen is a small and simple country. It is culturally homogenous and there are no ethnic or cultural divisions,” al-Ajri said. 

“We hope to engage in an inclusive political dialogue that will lead to a new transitional process.

“We will be calling for a federal Yemen so that there is no longer one centre of power and the country’s wealth can be distributed fairly among everyone.”

Both sides neither have the willingness to end the fight and the suffering of the people nor the readiness to make significant concessions.

Murad Alazzany, professor at Sanaa University

‘Modest expectations’

However, one Western diplomatic source told Al Jazeera that it was best to have “modest expectations” heading into these first round of talks.

“I will be happy if they both turn up, meet face to face for a bit, agree on the prisoner exchange, argue a lot but agree to meet again in a month or so,” the source said on condition of anonymity.

Earlier on Tuesday, Yemen’s government said it had agreed to a large-scale prisoner swap with the Houthis as part of a “confidence-building measure”, with reports suggesting as many as 2,000 pro-government forces could be exchanged for 1,500 Houthis.

The breakthrough came a day after the Saudi-UAE alliance allowed 50 wounded rebels to be evacuated from Sanaa to Oman on a UN-chartered plane for medical treatment.

The Houthis arrived in Sweden late on Tuesday after leaving the Yemeni capital Sanaa in a Kuwaiti chartered plane, accompanied by the Kuwaiti ambassador to Yemen and Griffith.

The arrival was confirmed by Swedish foreign minister Margot Wallstrom who wrote on Twitter that she expected the consultations to “take place soon”.

A Houthi official told Al Jazeera that the head of the Houthi negotiating team, Mohammad Abdul Salam, was expected to head to Stockholm on Wednesday. Meanwhile, a delegation of Yemen’s internationally recognised government was also expected to arrive in Sweden later in the day.

The upcoming round of talks will be the second attempt by the UN envoy to bring the rival sides to the negotiating table, just nearly three months after a previous round in September spectacularly collapsed when the Houthis refused to turn up.

Previous talks also broke down in 2016, when 108 days of negotiations in Kuwait failed to yield a deal and delegates from the rebel movement were left stranded outside of Yemen for three months.

‘Willingness to end the conflict’

Murad Alazzany, a professor at Sanaa University, said Yemenis were not placing high expectations on the talks.

“Both sides neither have the willingness to end the fight and the suffering of the people nor the readiness to make significant concessions,” he told Al Jazeera.

“Instead, the decisions are being made and imposed by a much larger entity – in this case by the allied western powers led by the US.

“Those major players have made their choice clear and have presented a plan to keep the area in conflict and turmoil to secure more weapons deals and rake in larger revenues from oil sales.”

The war in Yemen, which has been raging since March 2015, has received considerable media attention since the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and critic of Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy.

Western powers have expressed their anger over the killing and have pulled their support from the Saudi-UAE alliance in an attempt to communicate their displeasure.

Germany and Norway have suspended arms exports to Saudi Arabia while the US has said it will stop refuelling the alliance’s warplanes.

However, the Trump administration has refused to cancel a planned $110bn arms deal with Riyadh.

Under the leadership of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the alliance has launched more than 18,000 air raids on Yemen since the Houthis toppled President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s government.

Weddings, funerals, schools and hospitals have been targeted, and the alliance has imposed a raft of punitive economic measures aimed at undermining the Houthis’ grip on power.

According to the UN, the humanitarian crisis plaguing the country means more than 12 million Yemenis will need food assistance next year, making it the country with the “biggest problems.”

Dakar – In April 1966, Senegal’s first president and a poet, Leopold Sedar Senghor ascended the steps of the National Assembly in Dakar to declare his country the temporary capital of Black Civilisation at the launch of the World Festival of Black Arts.

In the following weeks, African luminaries such as Nelson Mandela and writer Wole Soyinka would converge on the Senegalese capital, as would others from the wider African diaspora: Jazz great Duke Ellington, the Martiniquan poet Aime Cesaire, Barbadian novelist George Lamming and American writers Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka.

Dakar would briefly play host to some of the leading black movements of the day. African liberation, the Harlem Renaissance, Jazz, and the negritude movement, of which Senghor was also a leading figure, were represented. Despite their differences, they shared an optimism that people of African descent, wherever they were, would define their own futures.

And as that utopian spirit hung in the air, Senghor stepped up to present a bold, new vision for a post-colonial Africa. Art and culture ought to be at the heart of development. And central to this would be a museum in Senegal that would present the past and present experiences of black people everywhere.

But economic and political realities soon kicked in. Senegal was unable to sustain its audacious investment in art and culture, which peaked as high as 25 percent of government spending under Senghor. Governments came and went. The dream lingered on.

Now, 52 years later, Senghor’s vision will finally materialise. 

The Museum of Black Civilisations will open on Thursday in Dakar to a flourish of dance, drums and acrobatics, and its curator, Senegalese Babacar Mbow, claims it “incomparable to anything in the world.”

Its 14,000 square metres of floor space and capacity for 18,000 exhibits puts it in league with the National Museum of African American History in Washington. Its range of exhibits is, however, more far-reaching. 

The high-ceilinged exhibition halls include Africa Now, showcasing contemporary African art and The Caravan and the Caravel, which tells the story of the trade in human beings – across the Atlantic and through the Sahara – that gave rise to new communities of Africans in the Americas.

These diaspora communities – such as in Brazil, the United States and the Caribbean – are recognised as African civilisations in their own right here.

“Memory in Motion” by Haitian artist Philippe Dodard describes the stages of enslavement from Africa to the slave ship to the Caribbean plantation with floating eyes, wandering souls and chained hands and feet in black India ink against a white background.

Women of the Nation showcases women of African descent, including Angela Davis.

The scale of the project follows that of the Dakar Art Biennale and the Renaissance Monument, in which successive Senegalese presidents have cemented their legacies with works of culture, Mbow says.

“All of the phases of the inauguration of the museum is done by Africans,” he says.

The museum’s disc-like shape is modelled on the rounded walls of the Medieval city of Great Zimbabwe. 

Inside, a vast hollowed-out interior spans the museum’s four floors and gives way to galleries that possess huge copper ribs.

Like a giant snake, a sloping walkway gradually winds itself up and around the atrium, which is inspired by houses of Senegal’s Casamance region, whose roofs are open to collect rainwater.

Mbow said that the museum is an attempt to “finish the decolonisation of knowledge as it pertains to Africa”, citing a preoccupation that was as important for attendees at the festival in 1966 as it is for intellectuals today.

Though decolonisation in a political sense was well under way in the 1960s, Africa still had a long way to go towards recovering its own self-image from the imposition of European ideas and languages.

The work of Senegalese historian and anthropologist Cheikh Anta Diop, an attendee in 1966, sought to challenge the biased assumptions held by many Eurocentric scholars and found in school textbooks that Africa was dark and savage, devoid of civilisation.

Key to his arguments was the African origins of homo sapiens, widely accepted now, but considered controversial at the time. Shunned by academic elites, his mission to decolonise African knowledge influenced a new generation of African scholars.

Among them was Kenyan Professor George Abungu, curator of the inaugural exhibition The Cradle of Humankind.

In the cavernous hall at the heart of the museum, it will tell the story of our early origins in Africa through to the Stone Age in line with the latest scientific research, and display the original stone tools our earliest ancestors once used.

“When you talk about technology that eventually led to computing, it all started from here. That’s a major contribution that Africa made to the world,” says Abungu.

Carole Boyce Davies, professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University in the US, said that while the museum is a fulfilment of Senghor’s vision, the work of decolonising knowledge must continue.

“It’s just a drop in the bucket, we need to do a lot more.”

Boyce Davies, who is from Trinidad and Tobago, will be joined by other scholars from across Africa and the diaspora for an academic symposium following the opening entitled Reclaiming Black Civilizations. Finishing the decolonial process.

The continued investment in English and French departments, at the expense of indiginous languages, is a sign that “the African university is still colonised”, she says.

She envisages the museum to become a focal point for modern-day discussions surrounding decolonisation, which also includes issues of gender and class and the classification of disciplines in academia.

Citing the British-based “Why is My Curriculum White?” campaign, whose key membership includes people of African descent, it is a “good time to recognise the links between Africa and the Diaspora”.

Fifty-two years ago, just after Senghor had hailed Senegal as the capital of Black Civilisation at the opening of the festival of Black Arts, a French minister moved forward to give a speech. 

A minister from a foreign country will also address the nation on Thursday, but this time they will be Chinese.

Chinese signage in the museum’s concrete back room is a reminder that it was built in part due to a large financial donation from the Chinese, their latest projection of soft-power on the continent.

Cultural relations with France, Senegal’s former colonial master, remain strong. 

But Senegal’s pivot towards China is unmistakable given the Chinese hand in a succession of defining cultural projects. In July, Chinese leader Li Xinping visited Senegal to open a vast arena devoted to wrestling, Senegal’s national sport, also built with Chinese help. 

An emboldened Senegal, buoyed by news that France will be returning artworks to Benin, also requested its own back last week.

And while most here will welcome the museum as a powerful symbol of decolonisation from France, the jury is still out on China.

Tunis, Tunisia – Almost seven years after the uprising that toppled one of the Arab world’s longest serving autocrats, a looming political stalemate is threatening the stability Tunisia desperately needs to revive its stagnant economy.

Late last month, the general-secretary of Tunisia’s ruling party Nidaa Tounes, Slim Riahi, initiated legal proceedings in a Tunis military tribunal against current Prime Minister Youssef Chahed and a number of other officials, accusing them of plotting to stage a coup against President Beji Caid Essebsi.

Riahi’s move came in response to a recent partial cabinet reshuffle led by Chahed – himself a member of Nidaa Tounes – that created a high-level standoff between the prime minister and the party.

The ruling party had called on its members in parliament to boycott the reshuffle. Instead, a number of them resigned from the party and voted in favour of it.

Nidaa Tounes, Arabic for the “Call of Tunisia”, has seen almost half of its 86 MPs defect since 2014, several of them joining rival factions, feeding speculation that the collapse of the ruling party is imminent.

But Nidaa Tounes has been breaking apart in ways that analysts have been predicting for the past six years.

‘It’s not a party’

Nidaa Tounes’ state of “fragmentation” today was “expected, and will only continue,” Jomai Gasmi, a Tunisian political analyst, told Al Jazeera.

Founded in 2012 by President Essebsi, Nidaa Tounes is a self-styled big tent “secularist” party that patched together diverse actors, including wealthy businessmen, progressive liberals, secular leftists, trade unionists, and even former regime members.

The varying party members shared no coherent political ideology or vision for the country’s ailing economy. Instead, what bound them together was the common objective of curbing the dominance of the then-ruling party, Ennahda, over the political and public spheres, explained Gasmi.

The conservative Ennahda party ruled in a tripartite coalition government with two secular parties, dubbed the “Troika,” roughly from 2011 to 2014. In this transitional period, Tunisia was rocked by the assassination of two opposition leaders and saw hundreds of youth joining armed groups, while the country continued to struggle with the same economic issues that catalysed the 2011 revolution.

Caricaturing Ennahda as uncultured and retrogressive, Nidaa Tounes held it single-handedly responsible for the country’s woes.

Nidaa Tounes would go on to win a plurality in the October 2014 legislative elections, securing 86 out of a total 217 parliamentary seats. Ennahda came in second with 69 seats. A month later, Nidaa’s founder, Essebsi, would win the presidency.

The legislative and presidential elections marked the end of Tunisia’s transition period.

Branding itself as the “national modernist and democratic” alternative, Nidaa Tounes secured a “strategic vote” against Ennahda, said Gasmi.

Structural and ideological unity is the defining factor a political party’s sustainability relies upon, something Nidaa Tounes lacked from the beginning, he explained.

“This movement did not evolve into a [political] party,” he said. “I can’t call it a party.”

Cracks within the party

It didn’t take long for the cracks within Tunisia’s new ruling party to begin to emerge. Its founder, now president of the republic, Essebsi could no longer continue as the head of the party.

That is when “the first disagreements within the party began… triggering the conflict over his [Essebsi] legacy,” said Julius Dihstelhoff, a research fellow at the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies.

Today’s crisis is a “mirror of this struggle for Essebsi’s succession,” Dihstelhoff added.

Once a close advisor of Tunisia’s founding father, Habib Bourguiba, and a veteran of the country’s struggle for independence, Essebsi was seen by supporters and party members alike as the “old wolf” statesman capable of modernising the country and bridging its political divide.

Left to its own devices, Nidaa Tounes witnessed a leadership crisis that pitted the president’s son and party heir, Hafedh, and his supporters, against those who opposed a perceived attempt of hereditary transfer of power and return to autocratic rule.

The internal dispute over leadership split Nidaa Tounes into two opposing camps – their approaches were so irreconcilable that violent brawls began to break out in party meetings.

By 2015, dozens of party members had resigned, including leading figure Mohsen Marzouk, who went on to form his own party: Mashrou’ Tounes, or the “Tunisia Project”. 

Marzouk, who formerly served as Nidaa’s secretary general, said he took issue with Hafedh’s sudden rise to power, telling French newspaper Le Monde at the time that there was an attempt to empower a certain individual in the party for no other reason than his name.

The schism over the party’s internal structure and appointments was further exacerbated by another key dispute over its political direction.

Nidaa Tounes had to make a decisive choice: either enter a coalition government with its rival, Ennahda, which became the largest bloc in parliament following the resignations of dozens of Nidaa Tounes MPs, or form a coalition with opposition forces.

The camp supporting the president’s son, mainly made up of the old regime, argued that rejecting an alliance with Ennahda meant alienating a third of voters.

On the other hand, the Marzouk-led camp saw the alliance as a betrayal of voters who considered Nidaa Tounes to be a counterweight to Ennahda, weakening the party’s standing as the defender of Tunisia’s secularist tradition.

Following lengthy political wrangling, Nidaa Tounes and Ennahda wound up forming a coalition government, with an independent technocrat as prime minister.

Joining forces against Hafedh

Nidaa Tounes’ members would grow divided once again, as the compromise prime minister, Habib Essid, was sacked – and young technocrat and Nidaa Tounes member, Chahed, was appointed in August 2016.

Chahed fell out of favour once he began making changes to his cabinet in late February 2017, sacking Nidaa Tounes-approved ministers without consulting his party.

“We have not put [Chahed] in this position so that he could appoint collaborators that we do not know or that he treat ministers from Nidaa Tounes in such a way,” Hafedh is heard saying in a leaked audio recording of a party meeting in 2017.

Chahed would go on to declare a “war on corruption” later that year, targeting wealthy businessmen, including members of his own party. Corruption, still rife in Tunisia, was one of the main catalysts of the uprising.

From that point onwards, according to analysts, Chahed understood that he would need Ennahda’s support to survive a confidence vote in parliament, should it come to that.

He also obtained the support of Marzouk’s camp in parliament. The two found common cause in their opposition to the president’s son, Hafedh, who in turn began pressuring Ennahda to withdraw its support for the prime minister, which the party consistently resisted.

The internal rift culminated in Nidaa Tounes’ suspension of the prime minister’s party membership in mid-September, and Essebsi’s unexpected announcement of the end of his alliance with Ennahda a few days later.

“The consensus and relationship between me and Ennahda has ended, after they chose to form another relationship with Youssef Chahed,” Essebsi said in a televised interview.

Today, “the lines of conflict are similar,” said Dihstelhoff. “The connection with Ennahda is still a major point of contention.”

Dihstelhoff said that while Ennahda cannot be held directly accountable for the division within Nidaa Tounes, its decision to support the prime minister has accelerated the latter’s “internal disintegration process”. 

Ennahda claimed that its support for Chahed stemmed from the belief that an entirely new cabinet would further destabilise the country at a sensitive time.

In effect, the 43-year-old technocrat is the seventh head of government in as many years, and his most recent cabinet reshuffle, although partial, is the 10th major government overhaul since 2011. 

Parting ways with Nidaa 

MP Leila Chettaoui, a former member of Nidaa Tounes and supporter of Chahed in parliament, recently told local media the prime minister was finalising the formation of his own party.

Speaking in parliament last month, Chahed lamented that his government had been forced to work “under random shelling from friendly fire for the past two years”. 

The news of Chahed’s new political project, which Nidaa Tounes has taken as a move to “target” the party, would solidify the shift in Tunisia’s political landscape seen in the exodus of Nidaa members from the party.

Amidst this internal strife, Ennahda’s backing for Chahed is viewed as tacit support for Chahed’s possible candidacy in the presidential election – due to take place later next year.

Riahi’s legal proceeding against Chahed “is part of a political battle between his party and Ennahda,” said political analyst Youssef Cherif in an email interview.

“Nidaa Tounes is relying on the state apparatus to counter Ennahda,” he said, in reference to the military judiciary’s involvement with the legal proceedings.

Ennahda “tried to bypass” Essebsi, so “he’s now counter attacking,” said Cherif.

“Will they find a way out of their disagreement and reconvene? Maybe. But now Essebsi is raising the bar amid a tense climate. That’s dangerous for Tunisia’s stability,” he added.

With unemployment hovering above 15 percent and inflation estimated at eight per cent, Tunisia had its largest general strike in five years take place late last month, and unions have warned there is more to come.

Tunisia is going through “a difficult phase of political turmoil” that has taken the form of “increasing protests and strikes, caused by the deterioration of the socioeconomic conditions of the largest part of the population,” said political commentator Mohamed-Dhia Hammami.

As for stability, Cherif said Nidaa Tounes is “collapsing and it’s been collapsing since 2015”. 

“I don’t think it will recover now.”

On November 25, Russia attacked and seized three Ukrainian gunboats and their crew while they were attempting to transit into the Sea of Azov through the Kerch Strait. The move caused a wave of international condemnation, with Ukraine claiming it signalled renewed Russian aggression and pleading with NATO to confront Russia in the Black Sea region.

On the surface, it seems this is just the latest iteration of the Russian-Ukrainian military and political confrontation which the Maidan revolution sparked back in 2014. In March that year, Russia occupied the Crimean Peninsula and used hybrid forces to start a civil conflict in Eastern Ukraine.

The Kerch Strait separates Russia proper from Russian-controlled Crimea and connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Azov. In the aftermath of the annexation, Russia built a bridge across the strait, which Ukraine never agreed to.

On paper, movement in and out of the Sea of Azov for Ukrainian ships is regulated by a treaty signed in 2003 between Ukraine and Russia, which gives free access to vessels from both countries. Since the Crimea bridge was completed earlier this year, Russia has been impeding traffic of commercial vessels bound for the Ukrainian port of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov and after last week’s incident, it has virtually imposed a blockade on it.

Given the subsequent exchange of accusations between Ukraine and Russia, it is important to make a number of points clear.

Does Ukraine have the right to send gunboats from Odessa to the Sea of Azov as it did in the prelude to the Kerch Strait incident? Yes, it does.

Can it test Russia’s patience by ignoring demands to get a permit in order to pass through the strait, as these boats did? Sure it can, as per the Russian-Ukrainian 2003 treaty.

Should Ukraine protest the arrest of its men and the seizure of its boats, as well as plead with its Western allies to interfere? It absolutely should.

Is it ok for Ukraine to exaggerate the significance of this incident and claim an imminent Russian invasion is being prepared? Well maybe, if it helps to repel the aggression in the long run.

The discourse on the Kerch Strait incident seemed fairly straightforward until the evening of that day when Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko summoned his defence council for what felt like a pre-rehearsed session aired live on TV. The martial law he invoked at that meeting would have given him the right to ban political parties and rallies, detain people without a warrant, seize property and close media outlets. It also explicitly bans any kind of elections during the state of emergency.

The Kerch incident did not appear to warrant such a drastic measure, especially since nothing like that was introduced at the height of the war in 2014 and 2015, when Ukrainians soldiers were dying by the hundreds, if not thousands, in the battles for Ilovaisk, Debaltseve and Donetsk airport.

Liberal Ukrainian commentators read this announcement as an attempt to tamper with the upcoming presidential elections. With the official start of the campaign just a month away, polls are showing that Poroshenko is set to lose to the firebrand former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko.

Investigative journalist and MP Serhiy Leshchenko, who has come to represent the spirit of the Maidan Revolution, wrote a scathing op-ed, comparing Poroshenko’s martial law with the dictatorial legislation his predecessor, Viktor Yanukovych, proposed in the heady days of the Maidan revolution to suppress the protests. In the first lines of his piece, he also mentioned Wag the Dog, a Hollywood film about a US president staging an imaginary war to save himself from electoral defeat.

As he spoke in the Ukrainian parliament, the Rada, on November 26, Poroshenko was clutching a stack of papers which he claimed contained intelligence data about an imminent large-scale Russian invasion. On many previous occasions, when middle-ranked Ukrainian officials warned about “imminent” attacks, there were few indications of Russia preparing anything and eventually, all of them failed to materialise. But the top level of Ukrainian leadership crying wolf is something entirely new.

Ukrainian MPs didn’t quite buy this fear mongering. After a heated debate, a compromise was reached, which Leshechenko later described as “face-saving“. State of emergency under martial law was introduced to only 10 of Ukraine’s 27 regions for 30 days instead of 60, as suggested initially.

This means that it will end before the official start of the presidential campaign at the end of December. Thus Poroshenko will lose the chance to postpone the election and to shorten his rivals’ campaign by a month while enjoying exclusive daily access to TV as a leader saving the country from aggression.

But even in its diluted form, the state of emergency may serve Poroshenko’s purposes. A key feature of his election campaign is the struggle for the creation of a single Ukrainian Orthodox Church, in place of several churches, the largest of them controlled by Moscow.

He has succeeded in securing the backing of the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I in Istanbul, who has promised to grant it official canonical status. A few days after the Kerch incident, the Constantinople patriarchate announced that the text of this decision had been agreed upon by its council.

But this project can only be completed if property of the church loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate is seized, particularly the highly symbolic super-monasteries known as the lavras.

Days before sending vessels to the Kerch Strait, Kiev tested the waters by rescinding the registration of buildings within the Pochayiv Lavra operated by the church loyal to Moscow in the west of the country. On Monday night, news came in about security agents searching Moscow Patriarchate buildings in Zhytomyr and Kiev on dubious grounds.

However, it is another, infinitely more famous, monastery whose historical and political importance could easily spark a conflict that would justify the imposition of martial law: The Pechersk Lavra in Kiev is the Mount Zion of Russian Orthodoxy. An attempt to seize it would cause an upheaval in Russia and would force Putin to respond, whether he wants to or not. There is little doubt that contingency plans for such an eventuality are being drawn up in Moscow and preparations are being made on the ground. 

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.