Superpower Antagonism on the Periphery: The Two Yemens During the Cold War
Panel 218, 2011 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, December 4 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
The recent surge in historical studies on the course of the superpower conflict in the Middle East has unsurprisingly concentrated on external involvements in the Arab-Israeli conflict and Persian Gulf security. Other parts of the region have often been ignored or treated as second-rate to the above conflict settings with their presumed global strategic importance.
This panel starts from the assumption that the lesser-known and peripheral superpower interventions along the periphery of the region had momentous consequences both for the affected countries and for the course of the regional competition between the Blocs. During the dormant phases of the main Middle Eastern antagonisms, global and regional Cold War(s) centred upon peripheral regions, thereby superimposing their rivalries on local actors. South Arabia experienced this development during the (North) Yemeni Civil War in the 1960s and the escalating Cold War confrontations of the 1970s and 1980s between the two Yemen(s).
Using South Arabia as an example, this panel will assess recent influential interpretations by Odd Arne Westad and Rashid Khalidi that superpower interventions in the non-European world were predominantly ideology-driven and that they at the same time exerted decisive influence on political, economic and social developments of the societies targeted by them. South Arabia offers the unique example of a Middle Eastern sub-region where Soviet influence was predominant for a limited period of time with the PDRY often regarded as the only fully-fledged Soviet client state in the region. The papers comprising this panel will examine these claims by analyzing the interactions between external great powers, regional antagonists and local actors during the Cold War phase. Using recently declassified archival evidence from both Western and Eastern origin, they will shed light oft the attempts of peripheral actors to draw in bigger external powers in order to get support for their own objectives and the effect of these processes on the progress of both the Arab and the global Cold War.
The January 1986 intraparty leadership struggles in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) are sometimes cited as the decisive turning point in USSR-Third World relations when Moscow and, foremost, General Secretary Gorbachev finally came to the conclusion that previous policies towards client regimes on the periphery had to be abandoned. The bloody events of January 1986, claiming over 10.000 lives amongst them a large part of the Politbureau of the ruling Yemeni Socialist Party, ended the ascendancy of President Ali Nasir Muhammad who was forced out of office after an attempt to assassinate most of his political opponents, thereby killing the majority of previous Southern Yemeni leadership. The exile of the former President in the Yemen Arab Republic subsequently contributed to the deterioration in relations between the two Yemens, culminating in border clashes in late 1987. For the Soviet patron state, these developments threatened its long-defended position in the Gulf of Aden and the Horn of Africa. Based on newly declassified sources from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and records of the former East German intelligence service and Communist party records, this paper will offer the first document-based analysis of this crucial event during the late Cold War. It will demonstrate the strategic surprise in both Moscow and Washington in the course of the ’13 January conspiracy’ and the various attempts by both superpowers to take control of the situation. It will also demonstrate the escalating effect of sub-regional differences between the two Yemens, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Ethiopia as both Moscow and Washington tried to assuage their regional clients and to prevent their military or covert attempts to intervene in Southern Yemeni affairs.
On September 25, 1962, Yemeni revolutionaries, supported by Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser, overthrew the country’s autocratic ruler, Imam al Badr. Fearing Nasser’s imperialist intentions, Saudi Arabia gave refuge to the deposed Yemeni Imam and provided his followers with military and financial assistance. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations were reluctant to force Egyptian forces out of Yemen. This policy was driven by an ulterior motive of trapping Nasser and Arab Nationalism in the perpetual conflict of the Yemeni Civil War while limiting those hostilities to the geographical confines of Yemen. Although Nasser openly used Soviet arms and received Soviet economic and military aid during the Yemeni Civil War, Kennedy, Johnson, and their staff considered Nasser an obstacle to Soviet influence in the Middle East.
This paper aspires to examine the ways in which after he came to power Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser both directly, and indirectly influenced the South Yemeni nationalist movement, and at the same time look at the counter-strategies that were employed by Britain, and her South Yemeni clients against the tide of both nasserist ideology, and material support emanating from Egypt.
The role of the Sawt al-Arab broadcasts in forming South Arabian public opinion, and preempting the actions of the colonial authorities, and movements hostile to Nasser; the shifting Egyptian policies towards the NLF and FLOSY, and their forced merger, the ways in which the ‘Arab Cold War’, and Nasser’s hostility towards the Movement of Arab Nationalists were played out on the ground in South Yemen; and British policies aimed at containing Egyptian influence in the region are themes that would form part of the paper.
The research material in support of this study comes from my own fieldwork in 2009-10 in archives in Yemen and Egypt, supported by materials from the British Colonial Office Archives in London, and will also draw significantly from the personal interviews I conducted with leading figures of the NLF and FLOSY as well as former local rulers, and supporters of Nasser.
