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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/naeem01122010.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/naeem01122010.html<br><br>
</a></font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">January 12,
2010<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>The Cuba of the
Arab East? <br><br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">
Yemen's Memories of Revolution and Resistance
</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By RAZA NAEEM
<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=6 color="#990000">Y</font>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>emen 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. <br><br>
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 imam’s 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.
<br><br>
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 Sana’a
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. <br><br>
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
‘<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/039475526X/counterpunchmaga">
Cities of Salt</a>’ quartet).<br><br>
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.
<br><br>
The popularity of the People’s 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 weren’t 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).<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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 Saleh’s 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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
But that hasn’t 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. <br><br>
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 country’s revolutionary
history but also a desire for a break with whatever the unification
entailed – much of which hasn’t been tangible to the people at large.
<br><br>
Such is the history which Yemen’s would-be occupiers in Washington and
their equally spineless satraps in Sana’a 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:<br><br>
</font>
<dl>
<dd>‘We must support the workers,<br>
<dd>We must support the peasants,<br>
<dd>We must support the fishermen,<br>
<dd>And the Bedouin and nomads<br>
<dd>We must eliminate illiteracy<br>
<dd>We must liberate women<br>
<dd>We must arm the women<br>
<dd>And we must eliminate illiteracy!’<br><br>
</dl>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. <br><br>
Raza Naeem</b> is a Pakistani national working on his PhD in History from
the University of Arkansas in the US. He can be reached at:
<a href="mailto:razanaeem@hotmail.com">razanaeem@hotmail.com</a><br><br>
<br><br>
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