Yemen’s new year kicked off while heavy sectarian battles were taking place in the northern part of the country, violence was escalating in the south, and, most important, a humanitarian situation was escalating around the country. Not long ago, Yemenis woke up to one of the most horrifying massacres in their lives when al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) militants attacked a hospital inside the Defense Ministry, killing more than 50 people and injuring more than 100, mostly civilians.

However, despite all that, another subject has dominated the political scene in many parts of Yemen and has been in Yemenis' conversation more than anything else the last few weeks. A few days before 2013 came to an end, the Yemeni president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, and the UN envoy to Yemen, Jamal Benomar, hosted a late-night event for the subcommittee of the Southern Working Group in the National Dialogue Conference. In front of cameras, political party representatives signed a document laying out the solutions for the southern issue in which Yemen will head toward having a federal state, giving Hadi the authority to chair a committee that will decide the number of the regions at a later stage.

The document was not actually signed by representatives to the committee from the General Public Congress (Hadi’s political party) at that moment. The party members rejected signing it, issuing multiple news releases and statements condemning the whole document before signing it weeks later, after local and international political pressure appeared to have been brought to bear. 

Islah, an Islamist Party, signed the document right away. Its ally the Socialist Party, the south’s ruling party prior to Yemen’s 1990 unification, and the Nasserite Unionist Party also did not sign the document — at first. The Socialist Party's main problem with the deal was that it left the choice between having six regions (four in the north and two in the south) or two regions to a to-be-established committee rather than declaring two regions, which had been the Socialists’ demand.