Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who as Yemen’s nominal president for a decade, until his resignation in 2022, led a weakened, U.S.-backed government that operated largely from exile, died on Thursday at his home in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. He was 80.
His death was announced on Yemeni state television, which provided no further details. Aden Al-Ghad, a newspaper based in the southern Yemeni city of Aden, reported that Mr. Hadi had a heart attack.
The Yemeni government in the internationally recognized capital of Aden — Houthi rebels control the historical capital of Sanaa — declared three days of national mourning, though Mr. Hadi, long absent from his homeland, had little popular support in a country of more than 35 million people.
A former general in Yemen’s military, Mr. Hadi presided over a task that appeared shaky from the start of his mandate in February 2012: Bring peace to a country, located on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, that was already disintegrating into civil war and staring down a looming humanitarian crisis.
Within hours of Mr. Hadi’s inauguration in Sanaa — after an election in which he was the sole candidate, receiving 99 percent of the vote — an Al Qaeda suicide bomber killed at least 26 soldiers in the southeastern port city of Al Mukalla.
Despite backing for Mr. Hadi from the United States and Saudi Arabia, the attack was a prelude to successive challenges to his authority, which ultimately led to his flight into exile in 2015. He remained outside his country until his death, apart from occasional trips to the loyalist east and south, where his government nominally held sway.
When Mr. Hadi took office in 2012, Al Qaeda and its affiliates already controlled swaths of Yemen’s southern provinces, and the Iran-backed Shiite Houthi rebels were expanding in the north.
Mr. Hadi’s attempts to install his own officials in the country’s military, ousting those loyal to his strongman predecessor, Ali Abdullah Saleh, were partly stymied from the outset by Mr. Saleh, who had been forced out after protests in 2011, part of the Arab Spring uprisings around the Middle East and North Africa.
“Although Hadi served as Saleh’s deputy for 17 years, many Yemenis describe him as a figure who has remained largely in the shadows,” the Christian Science Monitor correspondent Tom A. Peter commented after Mr. Hadi’s inauguration.
The fact that Mr. Hadi was largely unknown, and was relatively untainted by Mr. Saleh’s penchant for repression, appeared promising to some Yemenis.
But he quickly lapsed into the sort of cronyism that had characterized Mr. Saleh’s regime. “In practice most new appointees were from Abyan, Hadi’s own home governorate; this in turn led to accusations that he was filling the posts with his own cronies,” the scholar Helen Lackner wrote in her book “Yemen in Crisis” (2019).
A nearly yearlong National Dialogue Conference organized by Mr. Hadi in 2013 failed to bring peace, and the Houthis continued to press in from the north. By September 2014, the rebel group had seized Sanaa, taking over some ministries and reaching an uneasy power-sharing agreement with Mr. Hadi.
With the Houthis increasingly assertive, Mr. Hadi and his government resigned in January 2015, throwing the country into chaos and confounding the United States, which had seen the hapless president as a principal ally in its war on Al Qaeda. By that March, he had gone into exile, leaving Aden by boat, according to Le Monde.
The taciturn Mr. Hadi switched out the few ministers of his government remaining in Aden “three or four times a year,” Le Monde’s correspondent, Louis Imbert, wrote, quoting a diplomat who said it was a matter of “dividing up the cake.”
“Hadi is part of the problem,” Mr. Imbert quoted one of the leader’s aides as saying. “He’s living in the government guesthouse in Riyadh, while his country is dying of hunger.”
In April 2022, following a U.N.-brokered cease-fire with the Houthis after a murderous Saudi bombing campaign that killed hundreds of Yemeni civilians, Mr. Hadi stepped down. He handed power to an internationally recognized Presidential Leadership Council led by his former minister of the interior, Rashad al-Alimi. The war simmers on, though there has been no major conflict since the cease-fire lapsed in October 2022.
Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi was born on Sept. 1 (some sources say May 1), 1945, in Thukain, part of the British protectorate of Aden, on the southern tip of Yemen. He was a member of a prominent tribe, the Al-Fadl; attended a military academy in the south; and, according to some sources, received military training in England, Egypt and the Soviet Union, including at Britain’s Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.
In the 1980s, he was an officer in the army of then-independent South Yemen, took part in the civil war that broke out in 1986, joined the army of Mr. Saleh’s Yemen Arab Republic, and was made a general, defense minister and ultimately vice president by Mr. Saleh in 1994.
Unlike the charismatic Mr. Saleh, Mr. Hadi had little popular following. But when Mr. Saleh was wounded in an attack on the presidential palace in 2011, Mr. Hadi replaced him as president for four months, putting him in a favorable spot when Mr. Saleh was forced to step down.
Mr. Hadi’s survivors include his wife, Hala, and six children.
Shortly after going into exile, he expressed hope for a unified Yemen, governed from the traditional capital — a hope that still appears distant.
“Our neighbors are certain of what they see,” He wrote in an April 2015 guest essay in The New York Times. “One house in the neighborhood is on fire, and that fire must first be contained and then extinguished lest the entire neighborhood turn to ashes.”
