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Yemen does have one advantage, though, which is that no one really cares about Yemen.
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compared with, say, Kyrgyzstan?
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Actually, I should rephrase that. Yemen is no longer a place for superpower and regional rivalries to play out by proxy, but there are people who do care about Yemen, namely al-Qa'ida. The point was that whatever path to democratization Yemen might otherwise have been on was thwarted by Soviet, Egyptian, Saudi and others' meddling to empower their proxies. The main external powers who are concerned about Yemen today because of al-Qa'ida (primarily the US and Saudi Arabia) don't have a particular dog in the fight. The rivalries that concern Yemenis don't really matter to us, as long as there is a consensus among the main factions against the terrorists. This differs from Iraq, for example, where the major external actors - the US, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey and Syria - have different agendas and lean toward different sides.
Of course, no one caring about you is a double-edged sword, as without foreign meddling dictators can flourish too. Until 9-11, the West was relatively unconcerned with Central Asia except as it regarded potential oil resources. The Russians played their political games, and the Chinese watched for signs of unrest in their own Central Asian possessions. We care only slightly about Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan today but only because of their proximity to Afghanistan. When was the last time you heard of Turkmenistan in the news? Niyazov's Stalinist personality cult there doesn't get much attention.
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After the Zaydi monarchy was overthrown, the Egyptians tried to use North Yemen as a weapon against Saudi Arabia. Their role in the civil war there was particularly brutal, involving the use of chemical weapons against royalist forces.
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Why would a bunch of Zaydi Nationalists from the north ally themselves with Egyptians who have chemical weapons up their bisht?
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The Zaydis were the royalists. The Egyptians supported the republicanist side.
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Apparently their ostensible ideological differences amounted to nothing.
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I must defer to your knowledge on that subject
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No need to defer; if you have a question, ask. If I wasn't clear I will explain. The point was that in the 1960s the Soviets built up a string of client states who advocated various brands of "socialism" and willingly took Soviet arms. Nyerere's "African socialism" in Tanzania (which at various stages was more Maoist than Marxist) and Nasser's Arab socialism were two prominent examples. By the 1970s, however, many of these states had shown a lack of ideological commitment. But a few went beyond the socialist rhetoric and declared themselves true Communists and one-party states. These included the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen and the People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia.
South Yemen's Yemeni Socialist Party was modeled on the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and was ostensibly the vanguard of the proletariat and all that jazz. As Soviet power declined in the late 1980s, they began to change their tune, and became basically the southern party in unified Yemen rather than an ideological party.
East Germany's SED offers a contrast. After unification, the SED renamed itself the Party of Democratic Socialism and entered German politics as a social democratic party to the left of the Social Democrats. They moderated their ideology (as opposed to the banned Communist Party of Germany) but remain an ideologically-based party. Their power is regionally limited - they have little appeal outside of the former East Germany - but they are not a regional party (unlike, for example, Bavaria's Christian Social Union).