VIEW: Revolutionary stirrings in the Arab east — I —Raza Naeem

The revolution in south Yemen astonishingly instituted the greatest popular participation and the most radical political and social programme of reforms

Despite the profusion of recent ahistoric and utterly reductive phrases like “the Arab Afghanistan”, “the next failed state”, “the next biggest worry for the West” and Professor Joe Lieberman’s slightly more adventurous, if scarcely more helpful, “theatre for tomorrow’s war” in the wake of the Nigerian Christmas bomber’s Yemen sojourn, Yemen is a country with a past and a unique recent history that have conspired to place it in the predicament it is in today. Therefore, to view it solely through the prism of its formerly most illustrious citizens — the Bin Ladens once had a Yemeni domicile — is a tragic mistake.

Yemen was a chessboard for both the Ottoman and British empires in the 19th century, the latter occupying Aden in the south and the former becoming dominant in the north. Prior to this, it had remained one of the oldest ancient undivided states along with Egypt, Persia and China. After the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, a feudal anachronistic imamate took hold in the north, which ruled with an iron hand sanctioned by the hammer of the Zaidi sect. The British consolidated their rule in the south of the country, using a vicious pacification campaign, which involved the use of mustard gas (no doubt a dress rehearsal for their later atrocities in Iraq). In a palace revolution that was to shake not only the feudal order in the Arab east buttressed by the al-Sauds in Riyadh, but British colonialism in the region, nationalist military officers inspired by Gamal Abdel Nasser overthrew the hated imam in the north in September 1962, thus completing a remarkable hat trick of revolutions in the Arab world within a decade — Egypt (1952), Iraq (1958) and Yemen.

It was natural that such intransigence against the moribund old order in Sana’a would not go unpunished, especially after the revolutionary contagion in the north infected the south, where a full-scale guerrilla war — one section of the revolutionaries more Nasserite in orientation while the other, more radical Marxist-Leninist wing inspired by the Cuban, Chinese and Palestinian struggles — erupted in 1963, complemented by a militant trade union movement. Those who would hurriedly dismiss Yemen as a stronghold of beards and burqas would do well to study this revolutionary upheaval in the heart of feudal Arabia that shattered all previous stereotypes about desert societies floating on a sea of oil with passive and benighted citizenries bought off by decades of oil largesse. In a counter-revolutionary aggression reminiscent of the tripartite aggression by Britain, France and Israel against Nasser in 1956, the Yemeni revolutionaries were ranged against another foreign alliance comprising monarchical Saudi Arabia, Iran and Britain and initially, Zionist Israel. Nasser’s support of the guerrilla struggle in south Yemen with a commitment of 70,000 troops (until his own forces were called away and then defeated in the catastrophic 1967 Arab-Israeli war) did much to bolster this most radical of Arab revolutionary forces.

The popularity of the People’s Wars in the north and south led to the British withdrawal from the south in November 1967 and victory for republican forces in the north in July 1970. At one stroke, one of the oldest feudal orders in the Arab east had been dismantled, alerting pasha, emir and colonel to the need for vigilance if they were not to lose their own caps and crowns. While the north soon reverted to a military-populist regime typical of other radical Arab regimes and in confrontation with socialist guerrillas opposed to them, it was in the south that the revolution was really consolidated, first by the newly victorious guerrillas of the National Liberation Front and from 1978, as the Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP).

Analogies of south Yemen as the Cuba of the Arab east were not farfetched, as the new revolutionary regime set about emancipating women, distributing land to the peasants, nationalising the nascent industries and eliminating illiteracy and disease. The revolution in south Yemen astonishingly instituted the greatest popular participation and the most radical political and social programme of reforms, more than all the radical colonels in Cairo, Baghdad, Damascus, Tripoli and Khartoum put together. However, because it was a popular revolutionary regime unlike its other Arab counterparts, the radical reforms of the south Yemeni revolutionary regime were quarantined and checked by harsh opposition from the counter-revolutionary north and conservative Saudi Arabia on the one hand and its dependence on the Soviet Union on the other. Add to that the consistent ideological and personal battles between the leadership of the YSP and the leaders in power in Aden that ate away whatever revolutionary gains had been made in this tiny Arab revolutionary outpost.

By the 1990s there was no real ideological difference between the regimes in power in Sana’a and Aden, and this difference reflected the general turn in the Arab world towards family dictatorships or monarchies in thrall to Washington and tamed by Tel Aviv. Still, the threat of a communist Arab state amidst a sea of dictators and autocrats alarmed the Saudis, especially in the aftermath of another revolutionary upheaval in Tehran in 1979. Therefore, with Saudi money and blessings, the unification of Yemen was brought about in 1990.

(To be continued)

The writer is a Pakistani national working on his PhD in History from the University of Arkansas in the US. He can be reached at razanaeem@hotmail.com