Bloody conflict in
South Yemen
The devastating civil war which broke out in January 1986 in the People's Republic of the Yemen resulted in thousands of victims.' Economically it all but obliterated the material achievements of a revolution in one of the world's poorest countries.
The violence of the war was astonishing, employing the full range of weapons available, including air power. Massacres carried out by both sides gave the appearance of a tribal war fought out with modern arms. This is what explains the terrible scale of casualties (most estimates speak of around 10,000 dead) for fighting which lasted just ten days in a country with a population of scarcely two and a half million.
Of course, this bloody violence could be put down to traditions longestablished in this part of the world. After all, it is a region which has seen the unfolding of the war in Lebanon, one of the most atrocious in modern history. It witnessed the war between Iran and Iraq, one of the greatest holocausts since the Second World War. The Baathist repression in the town of Hama, Syria, in 1982, was at least as great as that of South Yemen. However, if the only remarkable feature of the South Yemeni civil war had been its extreme violence, it would not have been watched throughout the worid, with such shock. It was violence, not between two states, or two religions, or two communities, or even between a state and its adversaries, but between people belonging to the same regime, to the same party, subscribing to the same ideology, and further united by the same foreign allegiances. Even fellow Arab countries, fully used to such violence, were astonished by events in South Yemen.
The imperialist West, for its part, saw the situation in South Yemen as another opportunity for depicting 'Marxist' regimes as blood-thirsty, recalling the massacres of Stalin, Pol Pot and other post-revolutionary exterminators. They, of course, neglected to mention the very long list of im-
90 International Marxist Review perialist massacres reaching from the colonial conquests to Algeria and Vietnam, or Hitler, who was a much more faithful expression of the capitalist system than Stalin was of working class power. This is not to mention, of course, the list of killings perpetrated by imperialism's assorted supporters in the 'third world', nor the bloodshed of capitalism's first epoch, leading up to that of the Paris Commune in 1871. The purpose of reporting these elementary truths is not to absolve the South Yemeni regime, but to cut short any exploitation of events in that country to such anti-Marxist campaigns of the sort undertaken by the various bourgeois media, including those in the Arab region. Having said that, it is our duty as Marxists and revolutionary communists to explain (and not to justify) what happened in the PDRY, which is widely known as the only Arab state led by a regime that claims to be 'Marxist-Leninist'
To explain adequately January's bloody conflict would mean going back to the roots of South Yemen's revolutionary experience, in order to describe the state established less than two years after British colonialism was evicted in 1967, and the developments it underwent through the 1970s leading up to the situation that made January's massacres possible. However, this indispensible analysis which we failed to produce before the events in question—a failure which may be explained, but is not justified, by the relatively marginal position of the South Yemeni state-requires much more than a brief article. That is why we intend to develop it elsewhere, leaving the present article to trace the general features of an understanding of the South Yemeni situation, without going into details. Nature of the South Yemeni revolution South Yemen might have shared the fate of its fellow North Yemen, which remained cut off from the outside world and from modern civilization up until the revolutionary coup d'état in 1962. But the British Empire became interested in the port of Aden as a trading and military staging post, especially after the Suez canal was opened in 1869.
South Yemen possesses no natural resources, either mineral or agricultural, which could provide a source of colonial plunder. Consequently the British only bothered to develop the town of Aden and its immediate surroundings, for the two reasons mentioned before, whilst taking care to keep the other parts of the country in their state of semi-feudal, tribal immobility.
Aden's importance for British imperialism grew during and after the Second World War, as a result of mounting anti-imperialist struggles in the Middle East, embodied by Mossadegh in Iran and Nasser in Egypt. This led to a rapid development of the town in the first half of the 1950s, with a reinforcement of the local British military base and the building of an oil refinery intended to compenstate for Britain's loss of its refinery at
Bloody conflict in South Yemen 91 Abadan in Iran. In this way, Aden-almost completely cut off from the South Yemeni hinterland, except for its imported labour force-came to possess a modern port, a large airport, and one of the biggest and most modern refineries in the world.
This accelerated development of the town of Aden and the widening gulf which separated it from the countryside had two very important consequences for the South Yemeni mass movement; the birth and growth of an influential trade union movement in the town, and an explosion of antiBritish feelings in the rural areas. These two currents were reinforced by the rise of the Arab nationalist movement led by Nasser's Egypt. They experienced a decisive new burst when (in September 1962) a Nasserite coup d'état overthrew the royalist power (the Imanat) in North Yemen, precipitating a war between Republicans, supported by the Egyptian army, and supporters of the Imam, aided by the Saudi monarchy.
It was in the course of these developments that the anti-British armed struggle was launched in the South Yemeni countryside in 1963 (the date of the first operation was 14 October), led by the National Front for the Liberation of Occupied South Yemen (NLF), the backbone of which was the South Yemeni wing of the Nasserite Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM).
During the four years of the liberation war, which ended on 29 November 1967 with the evacuation of the last British soldier, the National Front established itself as the hegemonic leadership of the South Yemeni mass movement in all parts of the country, including in the town of Aden where the Front succeeded in controlling the poor neighbourhoods and the main trade union federation. At the same time, the NLF underwent a profound political radicalization, led by the 'second-line leadership'. These were the leaders of the struggle inside the country-both in Aden and in the countryside-headed up by men like Abdul Fattah Ismail (a former refinery worker) and Salem Rubayi Ali (a former rural primary school teacher, and the son of poor peasants). These militants found themselves opposed to the "eminent persons' of the central leadership as represented by Qahtam al-Shaabi.
The ANM's organisation in North Yemen played a pioneer role in this radicalization. The result was the majority current of the NLF cutting adrift from Nasserism, both as an ideology and as a regime, and even from the central (inter-Arab) leadership of the ANM, which remained divided between unconditional Nasserism and critical Nasserism up until 1967. The leaders of the NLF majority adopted the Marxism which they had begun to study after the behaviour of the Egyptians in North Yemen, especially Nasser's attempts to reach a compromise with the Saudis. (In this case the Yemenis were a step ahead of other branches of the ANM, whose illusions were not dispelled until after Egypt's defeat in the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967)
The NLF majority even adopted revolutionary Marxism, influenced by their reading of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, as well as by the Cuban exam-
ple. Another influence was the Chinese radical movement before the end against colonialism and against the Front for the Liberation of Occupied
South Yemen (FLOSY)-the NLF's rival organisation, supported by the
Egyptians until 1968—made it impossible to resolve the political conflict between the proletarian tendency and the petit-bourgeois tendency within the NLF. They continued to co-exist right up to the seizure of power following British withdrawal and the NLE's victory over its rival.
After the British evacuation, a situation of dual power existed in the country, between on the one hand, the popular fighting organisations of the NLF, led by the left of the Front, and on the other hand, the 'South Arabian Ar-
, created and supplied by the British to replace them in controlling South more, enjoyed considerable influence amongst the ranks and noncommissioned officers of the SAA. The attitude towards the state apparatus inherited from the colonialists, and especially its armed forces, became the main subject of conflict between the two fractions of the NLF. To this was later added the conflict over the social measures to be put into practice.
President al-Shaabi played the part of a Kerensky, trying to adopt a
Bonapartist role withinn the dual power situation, whilst doing his best to resolve it in favour of a consolidated bourgeois state, relying on the army for his support. But he failed in this attempt, just as his famous predecessor had failed, and the proletarian current was a large majority within the NLF
The situation of dual power was thus resolved in favour of the armed popular organisations, led by the Marxist left of the NLF. The new power undertook a radical transformation of the army, purging it, reorganizing it and drafting into it revolutionary fighters and political commissars. In
1973, a popular militia was created alongside the army on the Cuban model.
capable of bringing together a hundred thousand people when mobilized
In addition, a few months after taking power, the revolutionary leadership nationalized all foreign and local capitalist firms of any size. The only exception was the refinery which, if nationalized, would have ceased to function, given that the oil it refined was entirely imported and that supply of oil from the Gulf was at the time completely dominated by imperialist companies. In 1970, the revolutionary government organised peasant insurrections in the countryside, which it backed up with a very radical agrarian reform law. In 1972, after popular demonstrations had been held in the capital, Aden, the revolutionary government introduced a law nationalising all rented accommodation not occupied by its owners, and bringing down rents into line with incomes. In 1974, it passed the Family Code, which represented an enormous qualitative leap towards the equality between men and women which was stipulated by the constitution which the
92 International Marxist Review of the 'Cultural Revolution' my'
Yemen after the country achieved its 'independence' particularly the agrarian revolution.
by 22 June 1969, the date of his overthrow.
(as was shown during last January's fighting.)
• However, the circumstances of the struggle
'. The NLF, further-
Blood! conflict in South Yemen 93 new state had adopted in 1970. (This leap is, of course, relative to the extremely backward social and religious traditions which prevailed before the revolution.)
Examination of the South Yemeni revolutionary process—which is virtually unknown outside of South Yemen. and especially outside of the Arab region-shows that the power established in June 1969 was a proletarian dictatorship supported by the poor peasants and bearing many resemblances to the Cuban experience, as the NLF leaders themselves, moreover. affirmed. It can even be said that the South Yemeni revolution had a leadership which was closer to the Bolshevik-Leninist than any since the Russian reviolution, taking up an explicitly socialist programme that favoured councils or "soviets'. They put into practice the social measures contained in this programme—to the point of exaggeration in the direction of collectivization and were forced subsequently to introduce a sort of New Economic Policy of the kind decided on by the Bolsheviks in 1921. They also quickly realised that the proposal for soviets was utopian in relation to the reality of Yemeni society with its overwhelming majority of illiterates and the considerable inertia of tribal loyalties. Bureaucratic degeneration Proletarian revolution triumphed in South Yemen in one of the poorest and most backward countries in the world, where illiterate peasants made up the majority of the population. Both within the Arab region, and on a world scale, the new proletarian state was subject to suffocating isolation. The only state in a position to give effective support was the USSR. However, Moscow preferred in those early years to keep its aid within very narrow limits, irritated as it was by the revolutionary policies proclaimed by the new power and keen not to upset its main Arab allies, especially Egypt.
In these circumstances, the leadership of the South Yemeni revolution confronted an extremely difficult situation with considerable courage, encouraging the development of the revolutionary movement in its two neighbouring countries, North Yemen and the Sultanate of Oman (the Dhofar war). But the revolutionary dynamic underway in South Yemen was not enough to counterbalance the general downturn of the mass movement in the Arab region after 1970, a year which saw the massacres in Jordan, the demise of Nasser and the overthrow of the left Baathists in Syria.
Thus, by the mid-70s it became clear that the possibility of a revolutionary victory in North Yemen was a long way off. The liberation struggle in Dhofar was defeated by a joint Iranian and imperialist military intervention which threatened even the revolutionary regime in Aden. The revolutionary government succeeded in achieving only three quarters of the first three-year development plan (1971-1974), as a result of the lack of foreign loans.
94 International Marxist Review
At the same time, the revolution built its state with the best of democratic intentions. But it was forced to use many of the personnel left over from the colonial epoch in the capital of Aden. Conditions of extreme poverty and illiteracy in the countryside, including transportation and communications difficulties, maintained the predominance of the pre-capitalist mentality in social relations. If socialism is, according to Lenin's famous phrase, "electrification plus soviet power" , then these two conditions are far from being realised in South Yemen where only a quarter of the rural population have access to electricity and over half the population is still illiterate, in spite of the considerable efforts put into literacy teaching by the revolutionary government. In the circumstances it was virtually impossible to avoid bureaucratic degeneration, at least without external aid from another workers' state, itself not bureaucratised and materially capable of supplying the aid required. Such a state does not exist in our world today, and the only state capable of it is also the most bureaucratised; that is, of course, the USSR.
Now Moscow, after the loss of Egypt following Sadat's expulsion of Soviet advisers in 1972, became more and more interested in South Yemen. It steadily increased its aid to the regime in Aden, backing up its material aid with political directives and creasing supervision over the development of the young state's various apparatuses. In this way, necessary military aid was accompanied by Soviet control over the training of officers, whilst East Germany took on the training of the security services. Both countries, together with others from the same block, oversaw the formation of a 'Leading party' through a fusion of the small, local Stalinist group within the NLF organisation, in which the former was given representation on the leadership bodies out of all proportion with its real weight. One of the tallest and most modern buildings in South Yemen is the party school, where professional Stalinists from the USSR and Eastern Europe teach their falsified Marxism to the cadres and members of the leading party which was renamed the Yemeni Socialist Party in 1978.
An accelerated process of bureaucratic degeneration in the Stalinist mode, encouraged by the block of Stalinist states, began in South Yemen, especially after 1974. At the head of this process was the new party apparatus, led by Abdul Fattah Ismail who passed from revolutionary Marxism over to Stalinism just as he had previously passed from Nasserite nationalism to revolutionary Marxism-a political evolution closely parallel to that of his old comrade from the ANM days, Nayef Hawatma, leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
However, a faction led by the head of state, Salem Rubayi Ali, opposed the process of bureaucratic degeneration. This faction opposed the absolute hegemony of the party and sought to encourage the initiative of the masses; it also opposed total dependence on the USSR, and consequently sought other sources of finance, even if those other sources were reactionary Arab or imperialist ones (hence the pro-Chinese sympathies attributed to Rubayi
Blood! conflict in South Yemen 95 Ali).
This faction of the South Yemeni revolution's leadership was liquidated by the worst Stalinist methods in June 1978. Salem Rubayi Ali was executed along with two of his allies in the leadership of the party and state, after a secret night-time 'trial'. The next morning the South Yemeni masses thus discovered that one of the main leaders of their revolution, the head of their state, was nothing but a reactionary plotter, who had been accordingly executed. The Stalinist coup d'état of June 1978, followed by the 'purging' from the whole of the party of all supporters of the former president, marked the completion of bureaucratic degenration in South Yemen. Conflicts within the bureaucracy The South Yemeni bureaucracy-like the bureaucracy in the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s—was never homogenous or monolithic. It is made up of three distinct factions, in spite of some cross-over between them; the party bureaucracy led by Abdul Fattah Ismail, the military bureaucracy led by Ali Antar, and the civil service bureaucracy led by Ali Nasser Mohammed (this description is a somewhat schematic simplification imposed by the limitations of this article).
Allegiances within the South Yemeni bureaucratic state are also determined, in addition to this factor of social position, by regional and tribal loyalties. These affiliations continue to exert great influence despite all the measures taken by the revolutionary regime in Aden, in its early years, to do away with them, their effects are amongst the most persistent legacies of archaic societies.
Once the bureaucratic alliance had triumphed over Salem Rubayi Ali's faction, its own internal contradictions soon deepened. The president of the council of ministers, Ali Nasser Mohammed, formed a block with the Defence Minister, Ali Antar, against the general secretary of the party and head of state, Abdul Fattah Ismail, who was trying to establish the party's absolute control over all positions of power and to homogenize the bureaucracy under his leadership. In 1980, when it became clear that the balance of forces was against Ismail (all the more so given that his North Yemeni origins tended to isolate him from the masses relative to the rival block) he resigned, and left the country for Moscow where he lived for several years. Ali Nasser Mohammed took over his two posts, thus becoming the main beneficiary of the confrontation, concentrating in his own person the main positions of power. Nonetheless, Ali Antar remained an obstacle to Ali Nasser achieving absolute personal power, especially because of his influence in the army. For this reason Ali Nasser removed him as Minister of Defence in 1981.
This proved to be a serious mistake by Ali Nasser in his race for ab-
96 International Marxist Review' solute power. Ali Antar succeeded in rallying a significant number of cadres in the party, the state and the army against Ali Nasser's ambitions, including his own successor as Minister of Defence. Ali Nasser lost one position after another until it seemed to his opponents that they could now force him to share power, by resorting to Abdul Fattah Ismail.
The latter was recalled and returned to Aden in February 1985 to work with his former adversary, Ali Antar, against Ali Nasser Mohammed. The conflict between the two sides almost erupted at the party congress in October 1985 where the opposition block accused Ali Nasser of falsifying the party rank and file's representation. Nevertheless, the opposition won a majority of one vote on the new Political Bureau. At the same time. Ali Nasser managed to block the functioning of this body until 13 January 1986. the date fixed for a meeting of the Political Bureau to review the allocation of posts and responsibilities.
What followed is widely known; Ali Nasser organised an ambush for his opponents and succeeded in killing Ali Antar and Abdul Fattah Ismail. along with others of their allies. But the news of these killings unleashed widespread civil war, the outcome of which was decided by the majority of the army rallying behind the opposition to Ali Nasser Mohammed. The new head of state appointed, after bloody conflicts, was the ex-prime minister Haydar Abu Bakr al-Attas, who remained neutral in the conflict and had been in Moscow during the fighting (it seems the Kremlin played a decisive role in his appointment). The new general secretary of the party, Ali Salim al-Bayd, is the last of the historic leaders of the left in NLF, but his personal authority seems at the moment to be very limited. It appears that the real leader of the party today is the assistant general secretary Salem Saleh Mohammed
The violence and extent of January's fighting are to be explained by the fact that the two sides enjoyed approximately equal influence within the various state apparatuses before the conflict broke out. Several thousand troops and militia rallied to each of the two sides, according to personal tribal and regional loyalties, in a country bursting with weapons. The fighting developed into massacres along tribal lines, which the victors had great difficulty in halting after securing their control over the country.
Attempts to explain the conflict in terms of the two factions of the bureaucracy having different political lines, that is to say as a conflict between right and left, do not stand up to examination of the way in which alliances within the South Yemeni bureaucracy were formed and broken, after the overthrow of Salem Robaye Ali in 1978. To refute such an interpretation it is enough to refer to the victors' countless declarations of continuity in the regime, both in foreign and domestic policy, whilst attributing the conflict to Ali Nasser's desire to gain a monopoly of power.
This very brief outline allows us to understand recent events in South Yemen. Such tragedies will continue to happen in different parts of the world, so long as proletarian revolutions triumph only in poor and weak
Blood! conflict in South Yemen 97 countries, and so long as new revolutionary governments depend on the Stalinist bureaucracy in power in the USSR. It is this sort of dependence which revolutionary Nicaragua is trying to avoid.
Whilst awaiting a victory of proletarian revolution in one of the big imperialist states, which would transform world conditions, it is essential for revolutionary militants in poor countries to reflect on experiences like that of South Yemen, and to draw the lessons. They have to realise, above all else, that there is a way of breaking out of a young revolutionary state's isolation other than dependence on Moscow; that is, the extension of the revolution to neighbouring countries. All the fundamental lessons which Leon Trotsky drew from the experience of the Russian revolution remain valid, now more than ever.
### Notes
1. This article is a translation from the Arabic original which was published in
Al Mitraqua, a revolutionary communist journal for the Arab region, issue No 2, January-March 1986.
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