South Yemen

South Yemen, former country (1967–90) along the southern coast of Arabia that emerged out of a British protectorate and was unified with the Yemen Arab Republic (North Yemen) in 1990. Within a few years of its independence, it became the only Marxist state in the Arab world—in defiance of an expansionist Nasserism (Pan-Arabism) that had sought to replace British influence. Although South Yemen was considered better armed and more organized than North Yemen, it depended on the support of the Soviet Union and began disintegrating as Soviet aid dried up in the 1980s. Unification with North Yemen in 1990 was intended to save it from collapse, but grievances that emerged during the transition period had a lasting effect well into the 21st century.

British Imperialism in South Yemen

The British East India Company took over Aden, which was located along the route to India, in 1839, and the Ottoman Empire at mid-century moved into North Yemen. The interests and activities of these two powers in the Red Sea basin and Yemen were substantially intensified by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the reemergence of the Red Sea route as the preferred passage between Europe and East Asia. As the Ottomans expanded inland and established themselves in Sanaa and Taiz (Taʿizz), the British expanded north and east from Aden, eventually establishing protectorates over more than a dozen of the many local statelets to prevent Ottoman encroachment.

With the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, North Yemen became independent while South Yemen remained under British rule, administered as the Aden Settlement at first under the Bombay Presidency and later under the government of India. In 1937 it was separated from British India and became the Aden Protectorate. Friction between Britain and the Zaydī Shiʿi imamate in North Yemen characterized the entire interwar period, as Imam Yahya Muhammad al-Mutawakkil sought to include the south in the united Yemen that he perceived to be his patrimony. The British in the meantime added Hadhramaut and its great valley into the protectorate system—the result of the labors of British diplomat Harold Ingrams, who negotiated the famous “Ingrams’s Peace” in 1937 among the more than 1,400 tribes and clans that had been feuding in that district for decades.

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Independence

Britain’s retreat, Egypt’s Red Sea ambitions, and the Federation of South Arabia

Empire proved increasingly costly for Britain. In 1947 it began its retreat from India, and, losing the rationale to hold many of its other imperial possessions, it gradually withdrew its forces from many of them over the following decades. In 1956 Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal (see Suez Crisis) weighed especially heavily on the empire. A formal policy of a full withdrawal “east of Suez” was eventually made explicit in 1968.

Meanwhile, following the Suez Crisis, the Pan-Arabist president of Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser extended Egypt’s presence into the Red Sea. Only a month after unifying Egypt and Syria into the United Arab Republic in February 1958, Nasser brought North Yemen into confederation with the republic, an arrangement that lasted until shortly after the breakup of the republic in 1961. The prospect that Nasser could aid the North Yemeni imamate in asserting its claim to South Yemen spooked several of the statelets in the Aden Protectorate, and in 1959 six of them agreed to federate. The other statelets successively joined the Federation of South Arabia over the following six years, particularly as a military coup in 1962 in North Yemen, backed by Egyptian forces, brought a Nasserist republic to power. As some 70,000 Egyptian troops gradually engaged in the ensuing civil war (1962–70) in North Yemen, the Egyptians simultaneously aided some of the organizations in South Yemen that were campaigning for independence—e.g., the Front for the Liberation of (Occupied) South Yemen (FLOSY), formed by trade unions in Aden. Concerned about the role that Egypt had begun to play in South Arabia, tribal communities in South Yemen formed a radical alternative movement, the National Liberation Front (NLF). The conflict between the various groups, and especially between the NLF and FLOSY, escalated into open warfare for the right to govern after British withdrawal, which was first announced in 1964. By late 1967 the NLF clearly had the upper hand and had even forcibly incorporated Hadhramaut into the federation. The British finally accepted the inevitable and arranged the transfer of sovereignty to the NLF on November 30, 1967.

Marxist rule

In the years after independence, significant fissures—both ideological and practical—were opening in South Yemen within the ruling NLF and its successor, the Yemen Socialist Party (YSP). South Yemen’s first leader, Qahtan al-Shaabi, refused to implement the more radical elements demanded by the NLF’s Marxist faction and was ousted in 1969. Abdul Fattah Ismail, the major ideologue of the Marxist faction, then became the country’s de facto leader and was the driving force behind South Yemen’s move toward the Soviet Union in the early 1970s. Late in that decade he was opposed by his former ally, leader of the “Chinese faction” in the regime, South Yemeni Pres. Salim Ali Rubayyi, whose visit to China inspired his politics with Maoist ideas. The conflict ended in Rubayyi’s execution on charges that he had been behind the assassination of North Yemen’s president in 1978.

In turn, Abdul Fattah Ismail proved dogmatic and rigid—in his analyses, policies, and methods of implementation—and was deposed in 1980. His successor, Ali Nasir Muhammad, instituted a far less dogmatic political and economic order. In January 1986 the various personal and ideological differences surfaced briefly in an episode of violent civil strife that began with the massacre of Abdul Fattah Ismail and many of his close allies and resulted in the exile of Ali Nasir Muhammad and his faction (including Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi) to North Yemen. It ultimately brought to power a group of politicians and technocrats led by Ali Salem al-Beidh, an associate of Abdul Fattah Ismail, and Haidar Abu Bakr al-Attas, a member of Ali Nasir Muhammad’s government who was out of the country during the massacre, both of whom were from Hadhramaut. They failed to assert authority in the regions of South Yemen that were loyal to Ali Nasir Muhammad or revive a state in economic crisis. The beleaguered YSP, seeking to stabilize the country, undertook negotiations to share power with Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had consolidated authority over North Yemen, and promote the joint exploitation of oil resources that had recently been discovered along the border. The result was a November 1989 agreement to unite the two Yemens, just weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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South Yemen after unification

On May 22, 1990, the constitution of the new republic went into effect. Sanaa was declared the political capital and Saleh the interim president, with Aden as the economic capital, Beidh as the vice president, and Attas as the prime minister. The transition period was set to be 30 months, allowing time to lay the groundwork for elections in November 1992, and Saleh agreed to maintain and fund the large bureaucracy inherited from South Yemen.

But the republic was very quickly destabilized by the Persian Gulf War (1990–91), in which Yemen, then aligned with Saddam Hussein, refused to participate. In response, Saudi Arabia and other states in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) cut all foreign aid to Yemen and expelled hundreds of thousands of Yemeni workers from their countries. With the economy ailing, effective unification was derailed, particularly as Saleh favored his own support network with the limited resources and left behind Beidh and the YSP. The results of the first elections, which were delayed to April 1993, forced a national unity coalition, but it ultimately exacerbated the tensions: The poor showing for the YSP, the only coalition partner representing the less populous southern regions, led Saleh to insist that power sharing could not be equally distributed between the north and south.

In little more than a year after the elections, Beidh and other leaders of the YSP twice left Sanaa for Aden. Sporadic fighting broke out in February 1994 between forces aligned with the north and south, and in May it evolved into a full-scale civil war. Later that month Beidh declared an alternative government in Aden called the Democratic Republic of Yemen. Despite its air and naval superiority, it was swiftly defeated by the armed forces from the north, led by Hadi as the newly appointed minister of defense and aided by the southerners who had fled north in 1986. Beidh and most other leaders of the YSP fled into exile on July 7. Saleh emerged firmly in control of the country, but southern separatists continued to agitate periodically. Most dramatically, separatists formed the Southern Transitional Council (STC) in 2017 and sustained a major front in the Yemeni Civil War (2014– ) until 2026, when it was subdued by Saudi-backed government forces.