Reference News Network, February 6** For more than a century, Yemen has been a place of war between many parties, and the world's major powers and regional powers have been engaged in brutal human wars here. The German weekly Der Spiegel** recently published an article by Dominique Peters, analyzing how Yemen has become a geostrategic hotspot. The full text is excerpted below:
Off the coast of Somalia, elite U.S. soldiers boarded a small wooden boat and seized a shipment of cruise and ballistic missile components. Presumably, the recipient of this shipment is the Houthis in Yemen. Since this assault, Houthi militias have been attacking freighters in the Red Sea almost every day. Britain and the United States are also bombing Houthi positions in Yemen. This is a new conflict in Yemen, a country that has been at war for more than a century, where the world's major and regional powers are engaged in brutal warfare.
Strategically important locations attract colonists.
The reason for the interest of the European powers in Yemen is not the ancient legend of the Queen of Sheba, the mocha coffee or the legendary spice route, but its geostrategic position. The British conquered Aden, located on the south coast of Yemen, in 1839. Queen Victoria's soldiers expanded the city into a transportation hub between Europe, India and Singapore.
Aden was once a global city. Arabs, Africans and Asians who were engaged in ** came to the British-occupied port city. They settled here, built churches, roads, schools, and built a bell tower modeled after Big Ben. In 1954, another British queen, Queen Elizabeth II, personally visited the small crown colony. She attended the inauguration of a hospital named after her, laid the foundation stone for an oil refinery and inspected troops parading on camels. It was not until 1967 that the British withdrew from Aden and the dozen or so small states they controlled in South Yemen.
Taking advantage of the collapse of Britain's global empire, the Arab Marxist-Leninists, with the help of Moscow and East Berlin, established the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen and tried to create a socialist paradise for workers until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 90s of the 20th century, but this attempt ended in vain. In the same year, the Republic of Yemen was established, unifying North and South Yemen. Despite the superficial unification, North and South Yemen remain two distinct countries, as before.
The British have never set foot in North Yemen, and for nearly a millennium it has been the core territory of Zay'd Muslims, ruled by kings and imams of the United Kingdom, who have both secular and religious power. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, they turned North Yemen into a kingdom cut off from the outside world.
The last Zaidiyah ruler in North Yemen was Ahmad bin Yahya, who ruled as the dynasty's 65th imam, a tyrant addicted to drugs and reportedly sex, who died in September 1962.
A month later, the nearly 1,000-year-old kingdom was declared extinct. The young officers staged a coup d'état and established the Yemeni Arab Republic. The result of the coup was a civil war between royalists and republicans.
Many forces have been fighting each other.
In the middle of the Cold War, the two sides of the civil war became fighters on multiple fronts, with unexpected allies behind them: Saudi Arabia and Britain sheltered the royalists, while the republicans were supported by countries such as the Soviet Union and Egypt. Egypt alone sent 60,000 troops to North Yemen to hunt royalist troops.
This condensed version of the world war lasted for eight years and killed more than 100,000 people in North Yemen. The republicans won. In 1978, Ali Abdullah Saleh became the **.
During his administration, the North and the South were united in 1990. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the socialist leaders of Aden had no choice. This unification was in fact a takeover, with Saleh directly imposing his political system on South Yemen.
He governed Yemen like the godfather of the party, pitting his political enemies, prestigious tribal leaders, and warlords against each other, assigning positions in the state apparatus and the army to his own family. On one occasion, he told The New York Times: "Governing Yemen is hard, it's like dancing on the head of a snake." ”
During the Arab Spring in 2010, the revolt against the rulers intensified, and Saleh continued his "smuggler dance". In February 2012, he presented himself as a benevolent father of the nation, pretending to relinquish power. "I implore my people, men, women and children, to forgive me for all the wrongs I have committed during my 33 years in office," he said in a televised address. "And this is just to hand over the ** power to Abdrab al-Mansour al-Hadi, who was his deputy for many years.
With logistical support from the United States and the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia has launched an offensive against Yemen – mainly through air strikes. The United Arab Emirates is also fighting alongside Saudi Arabia. It sent elite troops to Yemen, raised large numbers of drones and mercenary forces in the south of the country, and hired local militias with oil and foreign exchange.
Coalition forces raided Yemen, a country that has become a refuge after the defeat of terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda. The coalition forces then conquered the capital city of Sana'a and the port metropolis of Aden, while Hadi went into exile in Riyadh.
In 2015, as in the '60s, Yemen once again erupted in an uncertain conflict: the Sunni monarchies in the Persian Gulf are not only fighting against former Saleh soldiers and the Shiite Houthis, but also indirectly against Iran.
This is because Iran has allegedly been training Houthi fighters for more than a decade, sending military advisers to participate in the conflict with the Sunni power Saudi Arabia, and delivering rockets, drones and landmines by sea.
To this day, the Houthis still hold the capital, Sana'a, and large swaths of the country – and are threatening international port shipping with rockets and drone swarms.