South Yemen
Based on Wikipedia: South Yemen
The Only Communist State in the Arab World
For twenty-three years, from 1967 to 1990, a Marxist-Leninist state existed on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. It was called the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, and it was utterly unique—the sole communist country in the Middle East and the Arab world. This was not some brief revolutionary experiment that flickered out in months. It was a fully functioning state with diplomatic relations, a seat at the United Nations, and close ties to the Soviet Union, East Germany, Cuba, and China.
How did hardcore Marxism take root in one of the most conservative regions on Earth?
The answer involves pirates, steamships, a crashed merchant vessel, and the slow unraveling of the British Empire.
The British Arrive for Coal
The story begins not with ideology but with fuel. In the early 1800s, Britain was building the greatest maritime empire in history, and steamships needed coal. The journey from the Suez Canal to British India was long, and the Royal Navy needed coaling stations along the way.
The British first tried to buy the island of Socotra, a strange and isolated place in the Arabian Sea. The Sultan of Mahra refused, telling the British naval officer that the island was "the gift of the Almighty to the Mahris." Undeterred, the British turned their attention to Aden, a port city at the mouth of the Red Sea with one of the finest natural harbors in the region.
They tried to purchase Aden from the Sultan of Lahej in 1835. He refused.
Two years later, fate intervened. An Indian merchant ship called the Duria Dawla, flying the British flag, crashed off the coast of Aden. Local tribesmen looted it. The British demanded compensation: twelve thousand Maria Theresa thalers, a common trade currency at the time. The sultan couldn't pay. In 1838, he was forced to cede Aden to the British for an annual payment of 8,700 thalers.
On January 19, 1839, Royal Marines landed at Aden. They would not leave for 128 years.
Governing Through Chiefs
The British had no interest in directly administering the vast, rugged interior beyond Aden. Instead, they struck informal protection treaties with the local sultans and sheikhs who controlled the hinterland. This wasn't done out of respect for local autonomy—it was cheaper and easier.
The math was remarkable. For about $5,435 a year in subsidies, Britain secured the loyalty of twenty-five sultans. That's roughly $217 per sultan annually to keep the peace and prevent any unified opposition from forming.
This system worked precisely because the region was so fractured. Tribal conflicts were constant. No single ruler was powerful enough to challenge British dominance or unite the others. The fragmentation that had plagued these lands for centuries now served British interests perfectly. By 1914, the British had protection treaties with nearly every sultan in the region.
But there was a side effect they didn't anticipate. By preventing any political consolidation, the British also delayed the formation of a national identity. When independence finally came, it would be chaotic, violent, and revolutionary.
The Ottoman Threat
Britain wasn't the only imperial power with designs on Arabia. The Ottoman Empire controlled the northwest of Yemen, including the ancient cities of Sanaa and Taiz. In 1913, Britain and the Ottomans signed a convention dividing their spheres of influence with a border that would later be called the Violet Line.
But paper agreements meant little when the First World War erupted. The Ottomans, allied with Germany, saw an opportunity to seize Aden. They gathered forces at Cheikh Saïd and coordinated with local tribes. In a stunning advance, they captured the Sultanate of Lahej and reached the outskirts of Aden itself.
The British were saved by geography and diversion. The Arab Revolt, which Britain sponsored in the Hejaz region to the north, forced the Ottomans to shift their attention. When the Armistice of Mudros ended the war in 1918, Ottoman forces withdrew from Arabia entirely. In their place rose the Kingdom of Yemen, which would soon become known as North Yemen—the counterpart to what would eventually become South Yemen.
Aden Becomes a Crown Colony
Between the two World Wars, Aden's strategic value soared. It sat near the entrance to the Persian Gulf, where vast oil reserves were being discovered. It guarded the shipping lanes through the Suez Canal. Britain formally designated Aden as a Crown Colony in 1937, implementing full colonial administration.
This was a significant escalation. Previously, Aden had been governed as part of British India, first under the Bombay Presidency and then as its own province. Now it answered directly to London. Local rulers found their authority further diminished. Small uprisings erupted, and Yemeni leaders—often with British support—crushed them harshly.
The stage was being set for a larger confrontation.
The Tide of Arab Nationalism
In 1952, a group of Egyptian military officers overthrew King Farouk and established a republic. Their leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, became the face of Arab nationalism—a movement that called for Arab unity, socialism, and the end of colonial rule. His message spread across the Arab world like wildfire.
In the Aden Protectorate, the sultans and sheikhs who had served as British proxies for decades faced a dilemma. They could see the colonial era ending, but they had no experience with federal governance and little desire to cooperate with one another. In 1959, six protectorate states formed the Federation of the Emirates of South Arabia. More joined over the next few years.
In 1963, Aden Colony itself merged with the federation, creating the Federation of South Arabia. But the union was troubled from the start.
Aden's commercial elite—many of them Indians, Persians, and Jews—feared that Aden's wealth would be siphoned off by the poorer interior sheikhdoms. The sheikhs, meanwhile, squabbled over who would lead the new government. And four sheikhdoms, including the powerful Qu'aiti and Kathiri sultanates of Hadhramaut, refused to join at all, instead forming a separate entity called the Protectorate of South Arabia.
A unified front against colonialism this was not.
The Revolution in the North
On September 26, 1962, everything changed. A group of Yemeni officers calling themselves the Free Officers Movement—inspired by Nasser's revolution in Egypt—overthrew the Kingdom of Yemen and proclaimed the Yemen Arab Republic. Nasser provided troops and support.
The coup electrified the south. Two revolutionary groups emerged. The National Liberation Front, known as the N.L.F., drew its supporters from the rural countryside—places like Radfan, Yafa, and Ad-Dali. The Front for the Liberation of Occupied South Yemen, or FLOSY, had its base in Aden itself, particularly among the trade unions. Both wanted the British gone. They would soon be killing each other over who would replace them.
The Radfan Uprising
The first shots were fired on October 14, 1963, in the mountains of Radfan. Seven thousand armed tribesmen, inflamed by the northern revolution, joined the N.L.F. Their goal was to turn the tribes of the Federation against the British through guerrilla warfare—hit-and-run tactics that would exhaust a conventional military.
By December, the violence had reached Aden. An N.L.F. grenade attack targeted the High Commissioner, Kennedy Trevaskis. He survived, but his adviser and a bystander were killed, and fifty others were wounded. A state of emergency was declared.
The British responded with a three-month bombing campaign in Radfan. It temporarily subdued the insurgents but raised uncomfortable questions in the British Parliament. What was the endgame here? How long would Britain fight to hold a territory of diminishing value?
The Empire Retreats
By 1965, most of the western protectorates had fallen to the N.L.F. The eastern regions around Hadhramaut remained calmer, partly because the British presence there was minimal. Ali Salem al-Beidh and Haidar al-Attas, two figures who would later play major roles in Yemeni politics, joined the N.L.F. in the east and prevented the sultans from returning to their territories—though they allowed the elderly Sultan of Mahra back out of sympathy for his age.
In February 1966, Britain made an announcement that stunned the protected rulers. They would withdraw from Aden and cancel all protection treaties by 1968. The sultans and sheikhs who had served British interests for over a century were being abandoned.
One sultan expressed his terror bluntly: he feared "being murdered in the street."
The insurgents didn't believe the announcement at first. Surely Britain wouldn't give up its strategic base without a real fight. But the British were exhausted—militarily, economically, and politically. By March 1967, they had set their departure date for November of that year.
The Six-Day War and Its Aftermath
Then came June 1967 and the Six-Day War. Israel's devastating victory over Egypt, Jordan, and Syria humiliated the Arab world. Anti-colonial sentiment reached fever pitch. Britain's role in creating Israel after the First World War made it a target for rage. Slogans appeared in Aden: "A bullet against Britain is a bullet against Israel."
The N.L.F. and FLOSY, rivals for power, filled the streets with graffiti proclaiming their acronyms. Their infighting intensified. In Crater, a district of Aden, N.L.F.-directed Arab police mutinied, ambushed a British patrol, and killed three soldiers from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. They seized the entire district.
The capture of Crater was hailed across the Arab world as a significant victory.
A British officer named Colin Mitchell—nicknamed "Mad Mitch"—led his battalion back into Crater and retook it with minimal casualties. But his aggressive methods were deemed excessive. He was eventually forced out of the army. The battle came to be called "the last battle of the British Empire."
An American consul in Aden observed that British tactics against the insurgents had "evolved from attempting to take them unharmed to summary justice in the streets."
The Last Days
The sultans, desperate, tried to negotiate with FLOSY, whom they considered the "lesser evil" compared to the more radical N.L.F. But these talks went nowhere. The British advised them to attend negotiations in Geneva, hoping the United Nations might arrange a solution.
While the sultans were away, the N.L.F. moved. They toppled one sultanate after another and consolidated control over Aden, Hadhramaut, Mahra, and the island of Socotra. On November 7, 1967, the Federal Army declared its support for the N.L.F. The British government was forced to negotiate a hasty handover.
On November 20, Britain officially recognized the N.L.F. as the new power. The next ten days were spent in acrimonious haggling as Britain tried to reduce its promised aid from sixty million pounds to twelve million.
The last British troops departed eleven hours before midnight on November 29-30, 1967. At the stroke of midnight, the People's Republic of Southern Yemen was born. One hundred twenty-eight years of colonial rule had ended.
On December 14, the new state was admitted to the United Nations.
A Country Born Broken
Qahtan al-Shaabi, a leader of the N.L.F., became president of a country that had never existed before. The problems were immediate and overwhelming.
Civilian workers and businessmen fled. British economic support vanished overnight. The Suez Canal, closed since the Six-Day War, reduced ship traffic through Aden by seventy-five percent. The port that had once been the second-busiest in the world after New York was suddenly quiet.
Members of FLOSY faced a choice: join the N.L.F. or flee north to the Yemen Arab Republic. Most fled.
On December 11, 1967, the new government confiscated lands belonging to what it called "feudal symbols and British agents." The revolution was underway.
The Corrective Move
President Qahtan al-Shaabi was a Nasserist—an Arab nationalist in the mold of Egypt's Nasser. But within the N.L.F., a more radical Marxist-Leninist faction was gaining strength, led by Abdel Fattah Ismail and Salim Rubai Ali.
On June 22, 1969, they struck. In a bloodless coup that came to be called the Corrective Move, they ousted Qahtan and seized control of the state. What had been an anti-colonial nationalist government became an explicitly communist one.
The Marxist-Leninist takeover led to the creation of the Yemeni Socialist Party and the transformation of South Yemen into a one-party socialist state. The following year, the country's name was changed to the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen—the P.D.R.Y.
Friends in Distant Places
South Yemen quickly established strong relationships with the communist world. Soviet military advisers arrived. East German intelligence officers helped build the security apparatus. Cuban solidarity was expressed in aid and personnel. China and North Korea offered support.
In return, South Yemen became a base for revolutionary movements across the region. It supported insurgents in Oman's Dhofar region and became a haven for various Marxist and nationalist groups.
The country's alignment was clear. In the Cold War's global chessboard, South Yemen was a Soviet piece planted in a region otherwise dominated by Western-aligned monarchies and oil states.
Civil War
Despite its small size and remote location, South Yemen could not escape the internal contradictions that plagued many revolutionary states. Factionalism within the Yemeni Socialist Party intensified throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
In January 1986, the tensions erupted into a brief but devastating civil war. Factional fighting within the party leadership left thousands dead in a matter of days. The violence shocked even the Soviet patrons, who had assumed their allies would maintain unity.
The country survived, but barely. The legitimacy of the revolutionary project was badly damaged.
Unification
By the late 1980s, the world was changing. The Soviet Union, South Yemen's principal patron, was collapsing. The economic model that had sustained the P.D.R.Y. was failing. Meanwhile, the Yemen Arab Republic to the north was also struggling—economically weak and politically unstable.
Both Yemens began to see unification as a solution to their problems. On May 22, 1990, the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen and the Yemen Arab Republic merged to form the Republic of Yemen, with Sanaa as its capital and Aden as its economic center.
It was a shotgun wedding. The southerners, having built a functioning (if authoritarian) state, found themselves marginalized in the new unified government. Northern politicians dominated. Southern oil revenues flowed north. The grievances festered.
In 1994, just four years after unification, the south attempted to secede. Northern forces, led by Ali Abdullah Saleh, crushed the rebellion. Aden was looted. Southern leaders fled into exile.
The Legacy
Today, the question of southern identity remains alive. The Southern Transitional Council, backed by the United Arab Emirates, has controlled much of the former South Yemen in recent years, even as Yemen's civil war—which began in 2014—has fractured the country further.
The People's Democratic Republic of Yemen was an anomaly—a Marxist state in the Arab world, born from anti-colonial struggle, sustained by Cold War patronage, and ultimately absorbed into a unified Yemen that never quite worked. Its brief existence demonstrated both the power of revolutionary ideology and its limits.
For twenty-three years, hammer-and-sickle flags flew over ancient Arabian ports. Soviet advisers walked streets that had once hosted British colonial officers. The call to prayer echoed over a society officially committed to scientific socialism.
It was a strange chapter in the history of Arabia—and its echoes can still be heard in the conflicts that consume Yemen today.