ABSTRACT
Any account of the transition from colonial government to independence written from the records left by the metropolitan government is certain to be a partial one and the purpose of the preceding narrative is to fill one of many gaps in the modern history of Yemen and to address a conspicuous omission in the historiography of British decolonization. The turbulence of the last years of British rule and the failures of policy-makers in Whitehall and Aden have been stressed but the subsequent history of the region indicates that many of the problems which confronted imperial administrators were quite as troublesome for indigenous governments. Eighteen months after the British withdrawal the NLF initiated the so-called ‘corrective movement’ in which the pragmatic Qahtan was replaced by a clique of Marxist ideologues including Muhammad ‘Ali Haytham and ‘Abd al-Fattah Isma‘il.1 In 1970 this group declared the creation of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY). North of the border the conclusion of the Yemen Civil War led to the abolition of the Imamate in 1970 and the inauguration of an era of authoritarian politics and liberal economics in the Yemeni Arab Republic (YAR). The new states set to warring with one another: in 1972 a brief conflict flared up and later in the decade the two governments were implicated in assassination plots directed against their rivals over the frontier. In economic terms the PDRY achieved a measure of social development but remained cripplingly poor while in the YAR a period of economic expansion generated new social divisions.2 The union of the two Yemens in 1990 reflected both the regional and global victory of capitalism over communism: the free marketeers in the north effectively annexed the socialist government of the south. Southern resentment flared up in 1994 and caused a brief civil war whose conclusion reconfirmed the northern victory. Since the end of that conflict the government of the united Yemen has struggled to introduce social and economic reforms against a background of rising tensions between the nationalist inheritors of the revolution, socialists and Islamic groups. In the aftermath of the 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, in which a number of Yemenis participated, the country began appearing in British and American news bulletins as a breeding ground for Islamic terrorists.3 Less well publicised were the continuing economic and social problems of the country: Yemen was recently ranked at 148th on the United Nations Human Development Index, placing it amongst the poorest quarter of countries in the world.
