This article was translated from Italian into English by Phil Harris for IDN-InDepthNews, flagship agency of the International Press Syndicate. We thank Phil Harris and Roberto Savio for the friendly concern. [Red Utopia]
IN DUE LINGUE (Inglese, Italiano)
IN TWO LANGUAGES (English, Italian)
IN TWO LANGUAGES (English, Italian)
The US government intends to increase military aid to Saudi Arabia in its war against Yemen, according to recent reports. For the vast majority of the general public the news may be surprising, given that the ongoing conflict in Yemen is almost “non-news” as a result of the almost complete silence of the mainstream media. More importantly, most people probably do not know the causes.
FROM MONARCHY TO REPUBLIC
A summary reconstruction of the troubled and bloody history of Yemen can start in 1962, when a military coup backed by Egypt deposed the last monarch, Zaydi Shiite Muhammad al-Badr, and the Republic was proclaimed.
However, mountain tribes - supplied by Saudi Arabia - continued to support the king, leading to a bloody civil war in which Egyptian troops intervened directly (it was Nasser’s “small Vietnam”).
The civil war ended in the late 1960s (partly because of Egypt’s disengagement as a result of defeat in the Six-Day War against Israel) thanks to agreements between Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which essentially “dropped” al-Badr. Victory went to the Republicans. So much for the north of Yemen.
In the south, controlled by Britain, which had set up the Federation of South Arabia, the National Liberation Front (Marxist) started a guerrilla war in 1963 against the British, finally forcing London to grant independence to South Yemen, where the People’s Republic of Yemen (which became the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen in 1970) was established in 1967 with Aden as its capital, and with the distinction of being the only communist state in the Arab world.
Attempts at unification between the two Yemeni Republics date back to the early 1970s, but to no avail until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In 1990, North and South Yemen reunited. It was an unhappy union, because the communists in the south soon realised their error and in 1994 tried to secede. The army remaining loyal to the unity government, much stronger than the secessionist army and also supported by elements in the south, subdued the rebellion during the same year.
It is interesting to note that the rebels had received help from Saudi Arabia which, regardless of the profound ideological difference with them, did not look kindly on Yemeni unification, which it considered could become a dangerous pole of attraction for the hegemonic pretensions of Riyadh over the Arabian Peninsula.
At this point we jump to the present century.