1989/2009 Shaping Freedom

In 1990, four and a half month before Germany, Yemen celebrated its unification. For the first time in the history of the country that the Romans called ‘Arabia Felix’, North and South Yemen were joined in a common state. Yet instead of growing together, the country is today threatened with drifting apart.

‘Almanja jemen, nafs nafs’, said the raisin dealer in the market of the Old Town of Sanaa. ‘Germany and Yemen are the same’, he repeats, and in order to illustrate this rubs together his outstretched forefingers. What does the poorest Arab country and one of the richest countries in the West have in common? ‘Unity’, explains the old man in his ankle length white robe; placing his hands on the pommel of his curved dagger and, grinning, he repeats again: ‘Almanja jemen, nafs nafs’.

And as a matter of fact, not only the Germans celebrated their unity in 1990. Four and a half months before, on May 22, North Yemen, located in the southwest of the Arabian Peninsula and ruled by conservative tribes, and socialistic South Yemen joined together to become the only republic in the region. For the first time in the history of Yemen, the country that the Romans called ‘Arabia Felix’, there emerged a common state. But here too an economically and politically stronger part contains three fourths of the total population and has extended its system and its values in the course of the years over the entire country: the North dominates the South.

Promising beginning

‘We are ready to send our experts on questions of reunification to East and West Germany, should there be a need’, offered the President of the newly united land, Ali Abdallah Saleh, in spring 1990. Neither Bonn nor Berlin took the offer seriously – although the Yemeni project of unity sounded extremely promising: politicians from North and South wanted together to build a democracy on the Western model. In a short space of time, two one-party systems became one country with a dozen parties and newspapers.

In the former capital of South Yemen, the red-white-black flag of unity waves above the former Central Committee buildings of the Socialist Party. The German Democratic Republic, the Soviet Union and Bulgaria treated the comrades in Aden, directly on the Arabian Sea, to a magnificent building in the socialist style. Sculpted from white concrete, six workers with naked torsos and their gaze fixed on a boulevard of palms embrace with muscular arms the top floor of what is today the university. Those who work here can count themselves among the winners of unification. Professors earn far more now than before 1990.

‘We fought long for unity’, says Ahlam Hibatulla, Professor for Orthodontics. She speaks in German, and her tone betrays that it was a different unity for which she fought. In the 1980s, the Socialist Party sent her to study in the GDR brother nation; she was familiar from home with the prefabricated concrete slab buildings in Rostock. Every fourth lecturer in Aden has studied somewhere between Greifswald and Karl Marx Stadt and can compare the two unifications from first-hand experience. In Yemen, says Hibatulla, a small, energetic woman in her late forties, everything went too fast. ‘In the South we feel like second-class citizens.’ The promise to adopt the best of both systems, she says, wasn’t kept. ‘For example, education before was very good. There were kindergartens so that women could go to work. And the schools taught girls sports.’

Conservative influence

The equality between North and South, much invoked during unification, is long over. The first free elections in 1993 already issued in a grand coalition of mistrust. When the socialists seceded in May 1994, Saleh’s soldiers marched into Aden, plundered the city and destroyed the single brewery on the penninsula. The most important posts in the South and in the capital of Sanaa are now occupied by politicians from the North; the streets running among the decrepit concrete slab buildings in Aden are now named after Caliphs instead of Marx and Lenin. If in the 1970s tight jeans and colorful blouses were as much the vogue in Aden as in East Berlin, today most South Yemeni women cover themselves in black, like their sisters in the North. The influence of the conservatives from the mountains reached the southern beaches long ago.

Yemenis in the North malign their countrymen in the South as ‘godless beer-drinkers’; Southern Yemenis decry the Northern Yemenis as ‘wild tribal warriors’. Nineteen years after unification, the North and the South seem to be drifting apart rather than growing together. Former soldiers of the South Yemeni army, now forced into retirement, were the first to air their discontent with the ‘occupiers from the North’. When food prices rose dramatically, hundreds of thousands of them went into the streets and raised the old flag of the People’s Republic. How much these protests threatened the rulers in Sanaa may be seen from their reaction: security forces used live ammunition, several people died, hundreds were wounded.

Yemenis in the North still greet German visitors with ‘Almanja jemen, nafs nafs’. But anyone who has travelled through the South has to recognise that this comparison is more wish than reality – or else simply a well-meant greeting.