[News] Yemen's Memories of Revolution and Resistance
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Tue Jan 12 13:48:57 EST 2010
http://www.counterpunch.org/naeem01122010.html
January 12, 2010
The Cuba of the Arab East?
Yemen's Memories of Revolution and Resistance
By RAZA NAEEM
Yemen was a chessboard for both 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. A
Free Yemen movement began to take shape in the
North in the 1930s demanding an end to the
imamocracy, a more liberal rendition of Islam and
a greater opening to the outside world. The
rumblings continued and in 1948 a radical
alliance of the constitutionalist movement and
peasants came out on the streets, profiting from
the imams assassination. The old order quickly
reconstituted itself, though the resistance
continued and the contradictions between the
rulers and the ruled made an old-style classic
revolution to displace the Bourbons of Yemen imperative.
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 also 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 Sanaa would not go
unpunished, especially after the revolutionary
contagion in the north infected the south, where
a full-scale guerilla war - one section of the
revolutionaries loyal to the Nasserists 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 which 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 (so
lyrically analyzed by the bard of all Gulf Arab
novelists Abdel Rahman Munif in his
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/039475526X/counterpunchmaga>Cities
of Salt quartet).
In a counter-revolutionary aggression reminiscent
of the tripartite onslaughtn 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, Israel.
That Nasser, who had by then become a veteran of
Zionist and British conspiracies to unseat him,
supported the guerilla 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 Peoples Wars in the north
and south forced 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 werent
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 guerillas opposed
to them, it was in the south that the revolution
was really consolidated, first by the newly
victorious guerillas 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 far-fetched as the new
revolutionary regime set about emancipating
women, distributing land to the peasants,
nationalizing 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 program of
reforms, more than all the radical colonels in
Cairo, Baghdad, Damascus, Tripoli and Sudan put together.
However because it was a popular-revolutionary
regime rather than a populist-military one like
its other Arab counterparts, the radical reforms
of the south Yemeni revolutionary regime were
quarantined and checked from one side by harsh
opposition from the counter-revolutionary north
and conservative Saudi Arabia on one hand and its
dependence on the Soviet Union on the other.
Added to that the consistent ideological and
personal battles between the leadership of the
YSP and the leaders in power in Aden 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 Sanaa
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.
Although the unification snuffed out the only
real revolutionary alternative in the post-1967
Arab world, it was hoped that the former in the
form of a new democratic state would enable a
hitherto passive citizenry in the petrol stations
of the Gulf to put pressure on their own
autocrats. Not to be. Since the unification,
Yemen itself has become a byword for the same
malaise afflicting the Arab world which the
revolution and then the unification was intended
to solve a personalistic family owned
dictatorship under president Ali Abdullah Saleh.
An attempted secession of a disgruntled south in
1994 was dealt with an iron hand. The
pacification of the south meant extending
Northern control over southern property, British
colonial villas in Aden and southern trade. The
Salehization of the whole country has also meant
that whereas once women used to work and move
around the streets of the south unveiled, the
beards have once again taken over. This is a
legacy of the ugly compromises the Saleh
kleptocracy has made with the religious Islah
Party in order to keep the YSP out of the power structure.
What is really happening in Yemen today is the
unfolding of unfinished historical baggage from
Yemeni unification. The Huthi uprising in the
north is led by former allies of Saleh who were
used as mercenaries in the reconquest of the
south in 1994 and have now fallen out with the
ruling elite. Far from being a religious revolt,
the aim of the rebellion in the north is not the
establishment of a Zaidi/Islamic heavenly kingdom
on earth as the alarmist media would have us
believe; in fact what started as an old-fashioned
bar-room brawl over resources and political
influence has now taken on greater proportions
because of Salehs vicious military campaigns
against the rebels, midwifed since last year by
the US and now by its chief proxy in the
peninsula, Saudi Arabia, whose interventions in
the country (as everywhere else) have always been
self-serving and expansionist.
The revolt in the south mainly comprises former
socialist military officers who have seen what
little revolutionary gains they fought for in the
revolution dismantled by the grotesque
combination of military officers and clerics
imported from the north (and quite possibly
Riyadh). So what are the alternatives? Saleh,
unlike Musharraf, Saddam Hussein and the Taliban
is a wily dictator who has managed to keep power
only by juggling amongst US, Saudi and his own
interests on one hand and by doling out oil money
to buy off a pliant opposition on the other. Of
course what has also helped is the ease with
which a passive civil society has accepted the
neoliberal programs shoved down their throats by the aging dictator.
But that hasnt stopped people from taking risks.
Jarallah Omar, the charismatic and courageous
former secretary-general of the YSP, was
assassinated a few years ago for advocating an
end to capital punishment. However moth-eaten and
isolated from the people the aging leaders of the
YSP (like Ali Salim al-Bidh, former president of
the south and now in exile in Oman) have become,
one thing is sure: Yemen is a country where
memory of revolution and resistance remains fresh.
The mood in the old socialist south remains
especially militant: just two months ago
thousands of people came out in the streets in
Aden to commemorate the anniversary of the
British withdrawal, which quickly became a
protest against the misery of the present. The
rebellions in both the north and the south, are
thus a continuation of the old revolutionary
movements in the 1950s and 1960s which shook the
British empire and forces of reaction; and like
the struggles of old, they have no truck with
religion. Only a jaundiced vision would fail to
see them as such and ascribe to them the views of
a fanatical minority. For the rebellions reflect
not only a sharp memory of the countrys
revolutionary history but also a desire for a
break with whatever the unification entailed
much of which hasnt been tangible to the people at large.
Such is the history which Yemens would-be
occupiers in Washington and their equally
spineless satraps in Sanaa and Riyadh want to
deny and whitewash, acts which are not serving
them well in the occupations in Afghanistan and
Iraq. As one of the songs of the revolutionary
wolves of Radfan (the south Yemeni Yunan) from the early 1970s reminds us:
We must support the workers,
We must support the peasants,
We must support the fishermen,
And the Bedouin and nomads
We must eliminate illiteracy
We must liberate women
We must arm the women
And we must eliminate illiteracy!
It would be comforting to believe that such
infectious enthusiasm extends equally towards
combating foreign occupation and its hired
quislings; for those who did not tolerate a
British occupation will certainly not be content
with a possible American one.
Raza Naeem is a Pakistani national working on his
PhD in History from the University of Arkansas in
the US. He can be reached at:
<mailto:razanaeem at hotmail.com>razanaeem at hotmail.com
Freedom Archives
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415 863-9977
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