On July 2, 1979, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein took to the podium before an audience of senior Baath Party members. Iraqi officials had attended believing it would be a regular meeting to discuss party business. It was anything but. In order to assert his authority and crush opposition, real or imagined, Saddam announced he had uncovered a plot to undermine him and his agenda led by people who sat before him in the room. He then proceeded to read out the names of sixty-eight officials whose torture and execution he had already predetermined.
Saudi Arabia’s recent conference of Yemenis was not much different. While Rashad al-Alimi, a former Yemeni Interior Minister under the Ali Abdullah Saleh dictatorship, in theory convened the meeting, he is little more than a Vichy ruler. His sole claim to legitimacy rests on his appointment by Saudi Arabia, and he lives in Riyadh, not Yemen.
The Saudis were upset by the push by Zoubaidi’s forces into the Hadramawt and Mahra provinces that previously remained permissive toward weapons smuggling and terrorist penetration.
Saudi authorities ordered Alimi to call the meeting given the rapidly shifting situation on the ground. The only forces to both govern territory and counter army smuggling and terror were those belonging to Aidarus al-Zoubaidi’s Aden-based Southern Transitional Council and Tareq Saleh’s Mocha-based National Resistance. The Saudis were upset by the push by Zoubaidi’s forces into the Hadramawt and Mahra provinces that previously remained permissive toward weapons smuggling and terrorist penetration due to the dual loyalties of the local tribal patchwork and the Saudi-backed Muslim Brotherhood affiliate. While the Red Sea port of Hodeidah remains the supply port for the Houthis, the Muslim Brotherhood and local tribes in Hadramawt had supplied weaponry across traditional smuggling routes to Marib, where Houthis continue their efforts to seize local oil fields.
As in Sudan, Libya, and Syria, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is less concerned with ground realities than he is with his rivalry with Emirati President Mohammed bin Zayed. Mohammed bin Salman would rather have Yemen remain a hive of terror and failure than to have any group supported by the United Arab Emirates outperform his own puppets—never mind that the Emirates cultivates groups attuned to local realities that can govern while Saudi Arabia leaves behind groups that exist more on paper than on the ground.
When the Southern Transitional Council members arrived, Saudi authorities confiscated their phones, beat several of them, and demanded they agree to the disbandment of their group. Under duress, they did, though their members who did not attend the Saudi consultation conference reject the gun-to-the-head diplomacy. They fear it could be Mohammed bin Salman’s imprisonment and torture of his rivals in the Riyadh Ritz Carlton all over again, if not Saddam’s 1979 Baath conference.
While Saudi authorities spike the football and Saudi-sponsored trolls mock both South Yemenis and the United Arab Emirates and, perhaps behind the scenes, the State Department, British Foreign Office, and Omani Foreign Ministry cheer, the Saudis essentially seek to build a policy that ignores the realities of Yemen. Mohammed bin Salman and his team fail to understand that a skyscraper built on termite-ridden foundations will collapse.
South Yemenis marched against the Saudis, their National Shield Forces, and the Muslim Brotherhood whom Mohammed bin Salman now promotes.
The Saudi-funded and trained National Shield Forces took Mukalla, assumed control over the Socotra airport, and marched into Aden on the backs of bombings by Saudi-piloted jets and shuttled by Saudi-piloted helicopters. Perhaps they expected a hero’s welcome. They did not receive it. Instead, South Yemenis marched against the Saudis, their National Shield Forces, and the Muslim Brotherhood whom Mohammed bin Salman now promotes. They waved the South Yemeni flag and cheered for Zoubaidi, who apparently escaped via Somaliland and Somalia to the United Arab Emirates.
Perhaps Zoubaidi’s sin in the Saudi mind was calling for an internationally monitored plebiscite to determine South Yemen’s future. Saudi authorities, like the State Department and British Foreign Office, repeat the benefits of Yemeni unity as a mantra, no matter that the evidence points to forced incorporation of southern Yemen into the country as a source of instability.
Aden and the broader South Yemen have been separate from Sana’a and the interior of Yemen for nearly two centuries. Only in 1990 did North and South Yemen combine. It was a marriage made in hell, which South Yemeni leaders sought to reverse in 1994. A brief civil war followed, and South Yemen was forced to stay in its unhappy union. Even northern Yemenis acknowledged this. In my first trip to Yemen in 1995, anti-aircraft guns and artillery still pointed south. I asked Yemenis about this and they responded, “Why move them when we are only going to need them again?” The forced exile of southern Yemeni leaders did not stop the drive for a separate state, however. When Saudi incompetence enabled the Houthis’ rise and their seizure of Sana’a, it was Zoubaidi and his Southern Forces who liberated Aden from both the Houthis and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
History and culture matters. An Imamate—the predecessor to the Houthis today—controlled the interior of Yemen while the British worked to Westernize the south. Trade and travel also liberalized the south. This should not surprise, as it is a common phenomenon across the region. Jeddah, the gateway to the Hajj, is more tolerant than Riyadh. Basra is more progressive than Baghdad. Long before Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, Alexandria was more Western-facing than Cairo. The same holds true for Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Muscat and Manama.
The forced exile of southern Yemeni leaders did not stop the drive for a separate state.
South Yemen follows the same pattern, but on steroids. While the Houthis and Saudis both crush sectarian diversity, South Yemenis speak openly about the pre-Islamic Jewish Himyarite Kingdom whose territory overlapped with southern Yemen. Other southern Yemenis describe themselves as Indian since they migrated to South Yemen during the period of British rule and then stayed behind.
The Soviet-backed People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen may have cut the south off from the world—and North Yemen—but it also left an indelible imprint on its culture. The Marxist government promoted literacy and women’s rights. They did not destroy tribal identity, but they downgraded its importance. Today, North and South Yemen are fundamentally two different countries with two different, irreconcilable outlooks. If decades of political evolution did not erase that, Bin Salman’s putsch will not. Indeed, much more sustained efforts by Saleh and others to crush the south only solidified southern identity.
What the south demanded should not have been antagonistic to Saudi interests unless Bin Salman is tacitly acknowledging that Saudi control over previously independent regions like Hijaz is less solid than it appears.
Yemen, however, should not suffer from Saudi Arabia’s own obsessions. When the British withdrew, they sought to leave behind a Federation of South Arabia an umbrella for a collection of emirates, not unlike how seven separate emirates and sheikhdoms united under the umbrella of the United Arab Emirates. With the Hadramawt still demanding autonomy and Aden rejecting Saudi rule, South Arabia remains the only model that can put Humpty-Dumpty back together again. The only question is how many Yemenis and Saudis die before Mohammed bin Salman recognizes that.
