“Yemen unity remains a mirage” Halliday
Nice historical analysis, this is just a bit at the end but its all worth a read at the Gulf News. Its true, Yemen has not accomplished unity yet, and the north has not paid the price of unity which is equality. Unity at this point requires the displacement of the northern elite, not an easy proposition but not impossible.
The years that followed only served further to sour the initial and genuine popular enthusiasm of May 1990. The northern elite around Saleh saw unification as an opportunity to take hold of the resources of the south – oil revenues, British colonial villas in Aden, local trade.
The negotiated merger of 1990 soon gave way to conflict and in May 1994 the President launched a war to destroy the military and political presence of the YSP in the south: in ‘The Seventy Day War’, which ended with the occupation and pillage of Aden in July 1994, the northern army, with superior weapons and numbers, the benefit of surprise and, not least, the support of Islamist militia forces linked to Al Qaida, prevailed.
The story since then has been one of increased tension, and resentment, between the two former states. Some measures have been taken to disguise this process: some of the southern political and military leadership were incorporate into the northern state; periodic, but in effect meaningless, elections were held for parliament and the presidency; gestures of reconciliation and political reform were made to assuage credulous western governments and NGOs.
In the south, however, these meant little and southerners came increasingly to resent northern intrusion, referring to northerners as atrak, ‘Turks’, a reference back to the Ottoman occupation of the nineteenth century, and dahbashah, the name of a criminal family in a TV series.
Regime spokesmen are these days blaming foreigners and enemies of Yemen for the crisis: however, the main responsibility for this conflict, and for the squandering of what was, in its inception, an important and positive unificatory initative, must lie with Saleh, his close associates and his relatives: ‘Abu Ahmad’, as he is known, the architect of Yemeni unity, has also been the person who has done more than anyone else to destroy it.
Fred Halliday
