Yemeni Unification - Background

Background

Unlike East and West Germany, North and South Korea, or North and South Vietnam, the two Yemens were relatively friendly, though relations were often strained. Also unlike Germany, Korea, and Vietnam, the two Yemens were not formed by a civil war or occupation. North Yemen became a state after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in November 1918, whereas South Yemen had at that time been a British colony; a South Yemeni insurgency led by two nationalist parties revolted causing the United Kingdom to withdraw from its former colony.

Following the North Yemen Civil War, the north established a republican government that included tribal representatives. It enjoyed modest oil revenues and remittances from its citizens working in the oil-rich Gulf States. Its population in the 1980s was estimated at 12 million as opposed to 3 million in South Yemen.

South Yemen developed as a Marxist, mostly secular society ruled first by the National Liberation Front, which later morphed into the ruling Yemen Socialist Party. The only avowedly Marxist nation in the Middle East, South Yemen received significant foreign aid and other assistance from the USSR.

In October 1972 fighting erupted between north and south; North Yemen supplied by Saudi Arabia and South Yemen by the USSR. Fighting was short-lived and the conflict led to the October 28, 1972 Cairo Agreement, which set forth a plan to unify the two countries.

Fighting broke out again in February and March 1979, with South Yemen allegedly supplying aid to rebels in the north through the National Democratic Front and crossing the border. Southern forces made it as far as the city of Taizz before withdrawing. This conflict was also short-lived.

In the late 1980s oil exploration near the border between the two nations, Ma'rib in North Yemen and the Shabwah Governorate in the South, spurred interest in developing agreements to exploit resources there and lift both nations' economies. In May 1988, the two governments came to an understanding that considerably reduced tensions, including agreements to renew discussions concerning unification, to establish a joint oil exploration area along their undefined border, now called the Joint Investment Area, by the Hunt Oil Company and Exxon. In May 1988 they formed the Yemeni Company for Investment in Mineral and Oil Resources (YCIMOR). In November 1989 Ali Abdullah Saleh of North Yemen and Ali Salim al-Beidh of South Yemen jointly accepted a draft unity constitution originally drawn up in 1981, which included a demilitarized border and border passage by Yemenis on the sole basis of a national identification card, as well as a capital city in Sana'a.