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From the Dream of Arabic Unity to wars | The Southern People's Struggle Towards Freedom, Identity, and State restoring

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South Eye | Report - Exclusive

On this week, Northern factions commemorate the unification between the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (South) and the Yemen Arab Republic (North), declared in 1990. Once a symbol of Arab nationalism towards a broader unity, this anniversary has now become a source of controversy and discontent, especially in the South.

The unification, announced on May 22, 1990, came after previous attempts between the leaderships of both states, particularly those of the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen. The agreement aimed to form a unified state. However, differences in political, geographical and economic systems soon gave rise to disputes and growing tensions between the two partners.

In 1994, a war broke out between the North and the South, initiated by the northern partner. It ended with northern military forces seizing control over the South, which consolidated the central authority in Sana’a and led to the marginalization of southern powers. This event left deep scars in the collective memory of southerners, many of whom felt betrayed by the unity project.

Since then, resistance movements emerged in the South, initially as armed resistance and later as peaceful protests. The most notable of these was the Southern Movement (Al-Hirak), founded in 2007. It began by demanding reforms to the unity arrangement, then evolved to call for independence and the restoration of the southern state. These demands met with discriminatory policies and marginalization faced by southerners in various areas, including employment, public services, and political decision-making.

On the other hand, there are some political entities that still support the unity but advocate for reforming its path through the establishment of a state that ensures fair distribution of power and resources. This vision was outlined in the National Dialogue Conference document (2013–2014), but it was never implemented due to the complex political scene represened by 2014 events and the ongoing conflict, alongside the southern public’s strong commitment to full independence.

Furthermore, the escalating disputes between the two partners of  unification led to a deep fracture in its foundation. Southerners view one of the most critical causes of this as the series of political assassinations that targeted around 156 leaders of the Socialist Party, serving as an early indicator of a profound trust crisis. Many believe these operations were politically motivated and deliberately aimed at eliminating the southern partner, despite the major concessions made by the South to ensure the success of the unification project chief among them the relinquishment of the southern capital, Aden, in favor of Sana’a as the capital of the unified state, as well as the southern president Ali Salem Al-Beidh’s acceptance of the vice presidency and the unequal sharing of power and wealth in favor of the more populous North.

Amid rising tensions, President Al-Beidh and several Socialist Party leaders withdrew to Aden and refused to return to Sana’a, despite regional and international mediation efforts aimed at reconciling the two sides. However, these efforts failed to bridge the divide, especially as the fundamental differences between the two political experiences became more pronounced. The ruling parties from the two former states namely the General People’s Congress, backed by the Islamist-oriented Islah Party, and the Socialist Party entered into direct conflict, which culminated in the 1994 war that lasted nearly two months.

The war ended with northern forces invading and occupying Aden and the rest of the southern governorates under religious and political slogans such as “preserving unity” and “confronting communist expansion.” These actions were accompanied by extremist religious fatwas used for mobilization, which continue to provoke deep resentment among southerners today. Many, particularly in the South, believe that the war’s outcome aborted the voluntary unity project and replaced it with a logic of annexation and domination through force and the exclusion of the southern partner.

Following the war, President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s regime moved to curtail the role of southern leaders in the state, even those who had opposed the war or did not support secession. This deepened feelings of marginalization and betrayal and is widely seen as a key factor in the eventual disintegration of the unity and the growing calls for disengagement.

After the 1994 war, Saleh’s regime, emboldened by its victory, entered a new phase marked by exclusionary and discriminatory policies targeting southern cadres, especially in the military and civil sectors, despite their well-known competence and administrative experience. Southerners found themselves marginalized in a unified state they had once sought to build. Many decisions were seen not as steps toward national integration, but as expressions of a victor’s mentality, as a result of a perception based on an idea that the north is the origin and the south is the branch.

During this period, the regime empowered traditional northern alliances, including tribal leaders, religious figures, and influential elites. These groups were allowed to confiscate public and private properties in the South under religious justifications such as spoils of conquest reminiscent more of invasion and dominance than of an integrative union between two states whose leaders had voluntarily agreed to merge. Numerous analysts and observers viewed these policies as a veiled form of retribution against the southern October Revolution, which had ousted British colonial rule and established a political system opposed to class and tribal hegemony.

As a result of these policies, crises in the South worsened, especially as southern citizens increasingly felt like strangers in their own homeland. The unity project they had pioneered became, in their eyes, a tool for looting their resources and excluding them from political and administrative decision-making. This deep sense of betrayal and injustice became the fuel for the explosion that occurred in 2007, when thousands of forcibly retired military and hundreds of civilian personnel from the South launched peaceful protests later. These dismissed officers formed the initial core of a civilian popular movement demanding the restoration of southern rights and an end to marginalization as well as demand full disengagement and the restoration of the former southern state.

While the forces in Sana’a responded to this movement with a mixture of denial, repression, and accusations of treason, subsequent efforts to co-opt it, whether under Ali Abdullah Saleh or his southern successor who allied with Islah party later, Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi were superficial and failed to bring about real change. Whether through appointing some southern leaders as advisors or integrating select individuals into government positions, the fundamental issues remained unaddressed. Structural exclusion and systematic marginalization persisted, further fueling southern discontent and reinforcing the widespread belief that unity had become a tool of occupation rather than a partnership.

These sentiments were further reinforced when the Houthi group stormed Sana'a in 2014 and imposed a new, more complex political control, where the unified state itself appeared on the verge of total collapse. For many Southerners, this event symbolized the final death knell of the unification project one that had long lost its moral and political substance, yet had persisted in form until this pivotal transformation.

The Southern sense of betrayal was not born in a moment, but rather accumulated over years of exclusionary and neglectful policies, becoming a sort of “open wound” in the collective consciousness. Amidst this backdrop, Southerners began once again to look toward their own independent national project, drawing upon a historical experience that, while not perfect, had according to its people and leaders succeeded in establishing a civilian state grounded in legal principles. This stood in stark contrast to the North, which remained governed by a hybrid traditional system combining tribal, religious, and military authority, lacking the institutional civil model that had distinguished the South's experience before unification.

While life in the North was marked by a clear class-based social hierarchy, the South despite its relative external isolation was built on the principle of equality before the law. It offered an educational and healthcare system considered advanced by the standards of that time, in addition to achieving acceptable levels of security, social welfare, and self-sufficiency in several key sectors, as confirmed by documented reports.

This stark contrast between the two experiences remains a vivid and influential narrative in the Southern collective memory, and it forms the core of the powerful growing demands to restore the Southern state not merely as a reaction to past injustices, but as a legitimate aspiration to build a more just and effective law-based independent southern state, characterised by reliable model of governance for the future.