viewpoint: ben cohen

Yemen may just be the start of a devastating Middle East war

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Back in Roman times, Yemen went by the name “Arabia Felix”—Latin for “Happy Arabia.” It’s hard to think of a greater misnomer for this Arab state on the southern tip of the Persian Gulf, a few miles across the water from the Horn of Africa.

The Romans actually had a pretty miserable time there. Aelius Gallus, who was the Prefect of Egypt in 26 BCE, tried to conquer the territory and was roundly defeated. Through the ages, Yemen maintained its warlike image, with its various tribes doing battle with the Ottoman Turks and the British Empire. The north won independence from the Turks on 1918, while the south remained under British rule. By 1967, there were two states in Yemen. In the north, you had the Yemen Arab Republic, and in the south you had the People’s Democratic Republic of South Yemen; the north was oriented towards the Arab states, while the south was a run by hardline communist government. 

The two Yemens fought several brutal wars throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In May 1990, however, the communist south dissolved itself into a unified Yemeninterestingly, this took place just a few months before communist East Germany was dissolved into a unified Federal Republic.

Any similarity between the two situations, though, ends there. If unified Germany was an attractive combination of a dynamic economy and robust democratic institutions, unified Yemen quickly became a failed state. Political conflict between northern and southern leaders, often degenerating into full-scale violence, continued to plague the country. By 1994, the country was consumed by another civil war. The international community, which signally failed to prevent genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda in the same year, barely noticed.

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