Part I:

Unified Disunity-The Incomplete Merging of North and South

Militiamen loyal to President Hadi in Aden, Yemen. Note the flag. (STR/AFP/Getty Images)

For most of the 20th century prior to 1962, North Yemen was known as the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen, ruled by Zaydi Shi’a Imams from their capital at Sana’a after breaking away from Ottoman rule.

In 1962, a revolution in the spirit of Gamal abdel Nasser and Pan-Arabism overthrew the last Imam and founded the Yemen Arab Republic, setting off a civil war that would last for the rest of the 1960s, even with heavy intervention in favor of the republicans.

It became a proxy war in a region full of them, with Jordan and Saudi Arabia, backed by the United Kingdom and United States, supporting royalist forces, while Nasser’s Egypt and its Soviet backers propped up the republicans. The devastating defeat of Egypt in the June 1967 War with Israel forced their withdrawal from the conflict, and the civil war eventually petered out as royalists and republicans reconciled and joined in a new government. This new arrangement was fragile, though, and North Yemen lost two Presidents to assassinations before Ali Abdullah Saleh took control of the General People’s Congress (GPC), the official state party, and became president in 1978.

“Historical Yemen was a cultural entity rather than a political unit,” as Carapico describes, “its formal divisions stemmed from British imperialism in the south.” The British presence in South Yemen stretches back to the 19th century, when they took control of the strategic port of Aden, and spread their influence and control from there. Their rule persisted until 1963, when another Nasser-inspired rebellion broke out, forcing the British to completely withdraw in 1967, after which the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen was founded, with the Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP) at its helm. Politics in South Yemen were every bit as treacherous as in the North, with the most brutal display coming in 1986.

During a brief civil war for control of the YSP and the government, forces of then-president Ali Muhammad Nassir fought with those of his predecessor, Abdul Fattah Ismail. In a stunning opening move, Nassir actually had his bodyguards open fire during a meeting of the ruling politburo, killing key members. When the civil war was over, after two weeks of bloody fighting, Ali Salim al-Bid was the only one left standing, and so he became the new leader of South Yemen.

North and South Yemen

North and South Yemen engaged in a border war in 1972, and again in 1979. In both cases, the fighting was ended with pledges to pursue unity. A CIA report from 1990 on the possibility of Yemeni unification notes almost sardonically that “North and South Yemen have pursued unity since 1972 in a series of meetings. Their efforts have led to a number of stillborn agreements…that redundantly spell out conditions for a joint state.”

The CIA, like many at the time, were only judging the two states by how they appeared. “Unlike the relatively isolated independent North, where a semi-feudal agrarian society persisted, the South developed capitalist classes, markets, and enterprises,” wrote Carapico. Cold War dynamics didn’t leave out the Yemens, with North Yemen being an American ally and South Yemen being a staunch Soviet ally.

The truth, though, was less readily apparent. South Yemen was never quite as socialist and the North never quite as capitalist as the Cold War mantras had the world believe. The gulfs were bridgeable, and this was helped by the emphasis on unity coming from both governments.

Not that the unity talk was born from purely altruistic motives. As Halliday found, “the assertion of a common Yemeni identity by political leaders served to strengthen the legitimacy of each state with their own populations against outside power and against each other.” North and South Yemen’s respective leaders may not have put much stock in unity, but it had the (possibly) unintended side-effect of actually priming their peoples for unification.

From 1972 onwards, Yemenis on both sides of the border were being convinced that unification was eventually going to happen, and it would be to the benefit of all. Although engaged in near-constant border conflicts and attempts to destabilize one another, these were accompanied by “brief reconciliations and attempts at unification.” What resulted was a 1981 draft agreement on unification. As such, when the force of events in the 1980s had leaders of both countries looking for solutions, unity actually had some well-laid track to ride on.

The 1980s, especially the latter half of the decade, were painful times for both North and South Yemen. As described before, South Yemen was rocked by a brief but destructive civil war, and al-Bid’s hold on power was tenuous at best. Saleh was also not exactly secure, and most were surprised that he had managed to last for so long. “The regime was encountering general resistance to its rule in the northeast,” Weeden points out, “and it could be argued that unification offered a way both to distract attention from efforts to squelch protests there and to secure the help of the more disciplined southern army.”

For both countries, economic factors combined to bring them to the table in a serious way. Sheila Carapico sums up the situation succinctly, saying that “both Yemens faced austerity when falling oil prices, compounded by a drop in Cold War-generated aid, reduced access to hard currency — until the discovery of oil in the border region in the mid-1980s attracted a third type of international capital from multinational petroleum companies.”

Saleh, al-Bid, and their subordinates recognized that the only way for the full-potential of oil-funded development to be met was by cooperating. There was also the question of Saudi Arabia. Oil had also been discovered on the unmarked border with Saudi Arabia, and there was a feeling that only a unified Yemen could stand up to their more powerful neighbor, and the Saudis were seen as a possibly obstacle to unification.

The stalemate wasn’t particularly painful, but there was growing sentiments in both Yemens that unification offered far better prospects for prosperity than the status quo. Supporters of unification would argue that a “stable, peaceful, enlarged Republic of Yemen would act as a magnet for the funds of foreign investors as well as Yemenis overseas; in particular, they made much of the untapped potential of well-located Aden, the “economic capital” of a unified Yemen, as a free port and industrialized zone. It seems like as much of a win-win situation for North and South Yemen as it did anything else.

Conditions appeared ripe and the end of the long-standing conflict and rivalry in sight. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 only provided an added impetus for unification, and fostered feelings of hope. The 1981 draft agreement was supposed to be put to a referendum in 1990 and unification completed by the end of the year. However, popular sentiment was so strongly in favor of immediate unification that the plans for a referendum were scrapped; Yemen was unified and the Republic of Yemen declared on May 22, 1990.

Al-Bid, left, and Saleh, right. (Life)

Hopes were high for the success of the new government, and new plans seemed on the surface to be quite sensible. The cabinet seat were split almost evenly between northerners and southerners, and the deputies for each would be from the other in order to foster harmonious relations. The Presidential cabinet, composed of five members, was split 3–2 in favor of the Northerners. At the top of the government, Saleh would be president while al-Bid served as vice president. A judiciary was established, and representation in the new parliament (known as the majlis) was divided evenly.

There was something of a honeymoon period until August 1990, when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait. Yemen chose to side with Hussein (Saleh was staunchly pro-Hussein), and suffered the consequences; hundreds of thousands of Yemeni workers were expelled from other Gulf countries and had to return home. Remittances, a vital source of income for the country, dried up, and the new government now had nearly a million unemployed citizens to care for. Inflation skyrocketed, and food prices with it. Yemenis demanded their government do something and start making due on the promises of prosperity they had heard so often.

The lead-up to the 1993 elections only made the situation worse. By then the power-sharing unity government had “become purely a matter of gamesmanship,” as Day puts it. Ministers and their deputies worked against each other, contrary to the purpose of their positions. More importantly, though, was the dramatic rise in political violence, as assassinations and intimidation targeting YSP members drove feelings of persecution among southerners. Al-Bid and other YSP members saw it as a deliberate ploy on the part of Saleh to undermine them and drive them out of politics, and also that he was using Islamists to do his dirty work.

It did not help that both Saleh and his GPC and al-Bid and his YSP had no realistic vision for the elections. Neither had participated in genuine elections before, and therefore had no idea how to temper their expectations nor how to interpret the results. The old territories of South Yemen had a fifth of the total population of the new republic, and yet the YSP remained convinced that they must retain a 50 percent share in the power. Despite signing on to an agreement that included elections, al-Bid and the other YSP leaders appear to have believed that they would remain equal partners with the GPC in the government no matter the results of the elections. Not that the YSP thought they would have any trouble, though. Al-Bid was certain that the YSP would have a great showing, bolstered by northerners who were not aligned with the GPC.

They were, however, campaigning for seats in an assembly that had been purposefully made weak. “In dividing the structure of the unified state,” Sharif finds, “the two unifying parties, the GPC and the YSP, made the majlis inferior, if not totally subordinate, to executive authority. Al-Bid and the YSP did not remember this, though, when they came in third in the elections, behind a solid majority for the GPC and a surprising second place victory for the Islamist Islah party, which had been nurtured by Saleh and was headed by a close tribal ally.

It was only after their loss that the YSP became fearful of their situation and began voicing regrets about the unification agreement. It became evident that Saleh’s main motive was to “absorb the south within the larger northern system, while marginalizing southern socialists as a dying relic of the Cold War,” and a spoils system ran rampant. Bringing in Islah to form a blocking coalition against the YSP, Saleh began to cease even paying lip service to governing with the other party in “unity.” Interestingly enough, though, the GPC, uncomfortable with its prospects for the elections, had actually offered the YSP the opportunity to merge and run a joint ticket, which was rejected as being another part of the plot to sideline southerners.

When northerners began asserting dominance throughout the government bureaucracy, the YSP began frantically calling for devolution of powers and the creation of a federal system. These calls were seen as fostering separatism, and southern complaints about widespread corruption linked to Saleh and his inner circle “were dismissed as groundless and designed to fan popular discontent.” Continuing political violence against southerners caused the YSP to accuse Saleh of using the security services, controlled by his brother, of actually trying to provoke southerners into secessionist positions, that way he could move in and crush them.

To northerners, they had given the old YSP its chance, and they had lost; they were just being sore losers. Although Saleh’s party had actually done relatively poorly in the elections, with the YSP winning seats in the north and Islah snatching away seats that would have gone to the GPC, he looked at the results and saw it as a mandate from all of Yemen, which it most certainly was not. Ever the survivalist, Saleh saw complaints from al-Bid and the YSP as just the latest in a long line of challenges to his rule that he would need to overcome.

“The logic of the situation,” from both the GPC and YSP perspectives according to Hudson, “was probably ‘zero-sum;’ any gains for the YSP was a loss for the GPC, and vice versa.” Saleh was also caught between the YSP and Islah, which was calling for changes to be made to make the constitution more in line with shari’a law, and was playing the part of a spoiler of sorts in attempts to broach compromise between the YSP and GPC. Political gamesmanship in the beginning had morphed into a full-scale crisis.

The two institutions that could have shepherded Yemen through these turbulent times were the army and the majlis. Nearly four years on from the declaration of unification, though, the armies of North and South Yemen had still not yet been integrated. The northern army was a bedrock of support for Saleh, and he was not about to let go of loyal commanders. Instead of integrating the forces, portions of each were sent to the other region, so there were some southern units in the north and some northern units in the south, each operating independently of each other (and, according the YSP, the north was receiving training and support from Iraq).

As the crisis grew more intense, it was only made worse by the fact that each party had a military at its disposal. There was no trust left between the YSP and GPC, certainly not enough to make them give up what means of force they had. As Barbara Walter notes, “once they lay down their weapons and begin to integrate their separate assets into a new united state, it becomes almost impossible to either enforce future cooperation or survive attack.”

Though elected in what was considered an acceptably fair and open election by the international community, the majlis that was assembled in 1993 was an “uncommonly powerless and inefficient institution” according to Sharif. Saleh, for his part, undermined the majlis by encouraging Yemenis to appeal directly to him through their sheikhs, creating an important patronage system at the top of which he sat. Increasingly, Yemenis saw their elected assembly as not being the place where legislation was being crafted and policies decided upon.

(Courtesy of sanaabureau.wordpress.com)

As the political crisis grew worse, and some members of the majlis spoke of the legislature playing a mediating role, Prime Minister al-Attas actually told the majlis “to stay out of politics and pay attention to its business. What business was that, exactly? Nothing, of course. From a liberal international relations perspective, this lack of useful institutions would be considered a major blow to Yemeni hopes for peace and cooperation.

Surprisingly enough, the third party intervention didn’t come from the United Nations, the United States, or even any Arab state; it came from the Yemeni people themselves. Frustrated at the lack of action from the majlis, a national dialogue committee was organized by Yemenis from across the country to try to find a way out of a stalemate that looked all to ready to break out into civil war.

This committee took it upon itself to mediate between the YSP and GPC, and it had a significant claim to legitimacy purely through the level of participation it enjoyed. “It resulted from a genuine dialogue among a broad cross-section of north and south Yemenis led by prominent social figures who were concerned about the future.”

The dialogue committee represented nothing short of a rebellion against the leadership of the GPC and YSP, away from their destructive logic that was spiraling out of control. It was an indication that consultative government could happen in Yemen, that perhaps there was a chance for liberal democracy. It produced the Document of Pledge and Accord (though the document itself has different names depending on the source), signed in Amman by Saleh and al-Bid.

The euphoria of success didn’t even last the trip back to Yemen. Al-Bid went to Riyadh on his way back, which sent the north wild with accusations of collusion with Saudi Arabia. It did not help that he didn’t return to Sana’a to take up his position as vice president, instead opting to stay in a self-imposed exile in Aden.

The unintegrated armies began to prepare for war, which came in late April as fighting broke out between southern units in the north and local northern forces. General hostilities commenced on May 4th, as their respective air forces bombed their respective capitals. Al-Bid declared the South’s independence, despite a surprising amount of opposition from the YSP leadership, but it was short-lived; Aden was sacked on July 4th and resistance ceased a few days later. Saleh marshaled all the forces he could to fight al-Bid, including al-Bid’s old foe Ali Mohammad Nassir, whose loyalists fought alongside Saleh’s, while religious rhetoric in the north pushed the image of the war as a jihad against “infidel socialists.”

Both sides had their backers. Iraq stood solidly behind its old ally Saleh, while Saudi Arabia and Kuwait pushed for the United States to extend recognition to the new South Yemen, although the United States did little besides vote for UN Security Council Resolutions demanding an immediate ceasefire. Russia, hoping to put its once important position in Yemen to use, launched a failed diplomatic effort to become the mediator, but nothing short of victory was going to stop Saleh.