POLITICS-YEMEN: North-South Divide Still Scars Yemeni Development

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Dilip Hiro

LONDON, May 10 1998 (IPS) - Approaching its eighth year as a unified state and four years on from a brief, bitter civil war, Yemen, the most populous country in the Arabian Peninsula, struggles to exorcise the ghosts of civil war and north-south Yemeni rivalry .

The south is once more relatively quiet after last week’s violent confrontation between police and supporters of the former president of pre-unification South Yemen, Ali Salim al-Baidh.

A bomb in a Sana’a mosque, that killed two people last month, was widely attributed to supporters of the convicted south Yemenis. On Apr. 28, in Mukalla, al-Baidh’s home base, 600 kilometres east of the southern capital of Aden, police fired on a crowd of protestors, killing two.

Demonstrators were protesting the death sentences passed in absentia on al-Baidh and 14 other southerners who attempted to secede from the union and reestablish South Yemen as an independent state four years ago. Their action set off a civil war that killed more than 10,000 people in just 10 weeks.

The judge sentenced to death five of the accused – including al- Baidh, former vice-president of united Yemen, and Haidar al-Attas, former prime minister – and imposed long prison sentences on another eight. There is presently little chance of the convi cted being extradited from Saudi Arabia, Oman, Egypt and Britain, where they now find refuge.

The authorities still hope to avoid widespread protest in the southern region, amid tension that has built ever since Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Salih’s government decided to progress with the trial even though none of the culprits could be presented in court.

But Salih had his reasons to go ahead with the judicial exercise. He needed to pacify certain influential sections of his government, especially the military commanders, by making sure that the leaders of the armed rebellion were formally charged and punished.

Secondly, focusing on the leading figures of the rebellion enabled the Yemeni president to justify giving a general amnesty to their followers, military and civilian, who stayed on in Yemen. By so doing, Salih aimed to accelerate the reconciliation process.

Besides the domestic imperatives, Salih had also to take into account the Saudi factor. Oil-rich Saudi Arabia has a long running border dispute with Yemen, whose annual per capita gross domestic product of 600 dollars is dwarfed by the Saudi figure.

In order to weaken Yemen, politically, Riyadh encouraged the armed rebellion by the South Yemeni leaders in 1994. But Saudi Arabia’s ploy misfired. A united Yemen under Salih emerged politically stronger from the conflict, though still heavily dependent on Saudi largesse. Salih also needs to ensure Saudi aid comes back to Sana’a and that Riyadh does not take too hard a line on the border issue.

Salih ensured the hearings did not deteriorate into a show trial, and repeated adjournments helped to lower public interest in the case. Significantly, the official announcement of the verdict referred merely to Case Number 5 in (Islamic Year) 1417 in No rth Sana’a Court.

Salih’s political problems, however, have become secondary to his economic woes.

The demonstrators in Mukalla were also protesting against the falling living standards, caused in the main by the cuts in state subsidies on essentials. This was due to economic reforms initiated at the behest of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), wh ich has run into difficulties.

On Apr. 30 prime minister Faraj ibn Ghanem, a westernised technocrat largely associated with the economic liberalisation intitiatives, resigned after less than a year in office.

Ibn Ghanem had quickly became unpopular due to his coupling of stiff economic measures with a drive against corruption and a refusal to play by the norms of tribal bargaining that is an integral part of the way of Yemeni life.

Ghanem, 61, educated in Poland and previously Yemen’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, had urged Saleh to grant him special powers to cut back the country’s budget deficit, which has been aggravated by a drop in oil prices and a system of patr onage that has boosted the number of civil servants to 900,000 in a country with a population of 15 million.

But he also wanted to oust finance minister Alawi Saleh al- Salame, transport minister Abdel Malek al-Sayyani and fishing minister Ahmed Mussaed Hussein. All are members of the president’s ruling General People’s Congress. Ibn Ghanem also backed a law requiring government officials to declare their assets and wanted a stronger government to counter tribal leaders who have traditionally wielded influence among the ruling class.

A country like Yemen, with its recorded history dating back to the times of the Queen of Sheba, has its traditions and ways of doing things. For the past 20 years all or part of it has been ruled by Salih, who received only rudimentary education as a child. who joined the army as a private, and rose through the ranks before becoming the president of North Yemen in 1978.

The new prime minister, Abdul Karim al-Iryani, foreign minister and secretary general of the ruling GPC since 1995, comes from a notable family in the north, relation of a consumate politician, Abdul Rahman al-Iryani, president of North Yemen between 196 7 and 1974.

Salih will expect him to blend his reformist zeal with critical respect for traditional ways – if this is possible.