Red South Yemen

Other forms of more humane Socialism that accommodate democracy, worker control and spiritual transformation of the kind Rosa Luxemburg (another highly influential “mainstream” Marxist) advocated, were not the defining features of the PDRY from 1969 and throughout the 1970s. Instead the PDRY was highly authoritarian. It cultivated a centralized state that kept South Yemen under the strict party control of the NLF and then later the Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP). Models of party management used by the Communist Party of the USSR were implemented by the YSP (a Politburo, a Central Committee and a Presidium that supplied the national leadership chosen by an elected Supreme People’s Council). The PDRY was ruled through vanguardism (professional revolutionaries who would work to protect the Socialist revolution by directing the working classes by force and the use of centralized planning to undermine individualism – an idea propagated by Lenin). A Higher School of Scientific Socialism was established for the purposes of indoctrination in Marxism-Leninism. The party was a mechanism for enforcing the decisions of the Presidium [15] . Trade unions were put under party control; the worker committees were monitored by the party and the military and civil staff of government were subjected to what would amount to an inquisition in order to cleanse the government of those who had been trained by the British or with British advice during the colonial era. A secret police agency, a Stasi (Ministerium für Staatsicherheit  – Ministry for State Security) was created with the assistance of East Germany for domestic political surveillance and to obliterate any dissent from the revolutionary path being taken [16] . Dr. Noel Brehony, who has completed extensive study of the Near East and who lived in the PDRY in the 1970s, states that in the apologist narrative of the PDRY’s history “the abuses of the early 1970s are glossed over” [17] . This is not to suggest that South Yemen did not benefit at all from its alignment to the USSR, far from it. There was much cultural cooperation as well as technical, financial and economic collaboration. Archived Russian footage reveals that Russians would travel to Aden to instruct South Yemenis in the art of classical music.

           

Marxist South Yemen was ambitious. Not content with revolution at home, South Yemen threw itself into support for revolt in Oman, a country with no political parties or legislature, that continues to retain the death penalty and where the chief of state was and still is a sultan who operates as an absolute ruler [18] . The repressive, suffocating character of Oman was clearly provocative to the exponentially more radical South Yemen. More potently, Oman was a British colony in fact if not in law and fronted by a stooge: 

Morally, it is easy to see why South Yemen backed revolt in Oman. The Sultan of Oman from 1932 to 1970 (Said bin Taimur) can safely be described as a despot. At the end of his rule, Oman had only three primary schools, only one hospital, there was no press and the literacy rate was at 5 per cent [20] . He passed a law which designated all people of African descent in Oman as slaves and he is known to have kept an arsenal of weapons at his palace in Salala that included rockets [21] . Before he was deposed (officially by his son Qabus bin Said but in reality by the British Government of 1970 under the Conservative Party of Edward Heath) he had made the sickening decision to close the three primary schools on the ground that they were centers of Communism but was prevented from doing so [21] . The Omani revolt eventually came in the form of the People’s Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG) in the late 1960s. The PFLOAG was alternatively known as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf and eventually splintered into different organizations. PFLOAG had deep roots, emerging out of the ANM like the NLF and a backdrop of armed struggle in Oman that had begun in 1957.  South Yemen gave all manner of support to the PFLOAG, including fire cover for its guerrillas. The PFLOAG’s weekly news bulletin entitled Saut Al-Thawra (Voice of the Revolution) was issued from its office in Mualla, Aden and even posted from there to Members of Parliament in Britain. One edition, declassified by Britain in 2004 and made available by the Arabian Gulf Digital Archives, from 10 November 1973 after the Yom Kippur War reads:

  

The Government of Oman’s war against Socialism still reverberates in the contemporary period long after it eliminated the threat posed to its system of autocracy by the PFLOAG in and around 1976 [24] . In April 2020, Oman finally acceded to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) of 16 December 1966. However, it made a reservation to Article 8 of the ICESCR which deals with the rights of workers.  The reservation in practice means Omanis are forbidden from forming trade unions and from taking industrial action in the form of strikes [25] .

After war against the British had succeeded in 1967, the next war South Yemen fought was against poor living standards and domination from other nations.  Prosperity and continued independence had to become the new rallying calls in its post-colonial existence: 

  

In 1967, only 18% of the population was literate. In an attempt to raise this, South Yemen emulated a Cuban literacy program. By 1977, 73,000 South Yemenis had taken literacy courses. The number of people in the schooling system was raised from 64,500 to in excess of a quarter of a million. Boarding schools were also set up. Enrollment into university rose from 362 in 1970 to 1,700 in 1977. 7.4% of the country's gross domestic product was spent on education by 1975. A College of Technology was developed with assistance from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In 1979, 75 of its 560 engineering students went on to complete a master’s degree [27] . Progressive measures were taken to liberate the female population. Legal changes in 1974 forbade child marriage and polygamy. Efforts were made to add more women to the labour force, particularly to jobs in the urban economy and greater access to healthcare, educational services and the right to vote was afforded to South Yemeni women [28] . In the battle for development we see an obvious tension and contradiction between the official internationalism of the PDRY and the practical concerns of the nation, namely which had primacy, national or Marxist values?

Fast-forward, and it is now 32 years since PDRY ceased to exist. Despite the passage of time, the restoration of a separate South Yemeni state has clear popular support from many residents in South Yemen and from the diaspora of the former state. Firefights have ensued against the regular forces of the united Yemeni Government and the question of Yemen fragmenting has definitely entered the arena of contemporary history.  Internationally, astute observers of the region recognise the “Southern” dimension to Yemen’s makeup that led to the movement for restoration, known as Al-Hirak and then to the formation of the Southern Transitional Council (STC). What is not clear, is the future internal structure of an independent South Yemen and upon what ideology it will be based other than nationalism itself.  In an interview with Al Jazeera, Ali Salim Al-Beidh (steeped in the history of the PDRY as General Secretary of the YSP, former leader of the NLF and who faced the northern war against South Yemen) proposes a tabula rasa:

To twist the delicious opening of Marx and Engels’s 1848 Communist Manifesto, the spectre of Communism is not (according to Al-Beidh anyway) haunting South Yemen.