Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Yemeni Thicket

2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/dh/dhy004

1467-7709

Salim Yaqub,

African history and culture analysis

Year in and year out, the Yemeni crisis grinds on. Victorious rebels, precariously perched on the seat of government and drawing sustenance from a defiantly disruptive regional power, struggle vainly to subdue a fractious polity. Ousted government forces, chagrined by their defeat, enlist the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in their bid for restoration. The United Nations labors futilely to end the fighting, its efforts undone by the obstreperousness of local actors and the cynicism of international ones. Ghastly war crimes are routinely ignored. Too many other outrages clamor for the world’s attention. While these words evoke the events in and around Yemen today, they could just as easily describe the civil war that wracked that country for most of the 1960s, the subject of Asher Orkaby’s lively, eye-opening, richly researched, and insightful new book. The conflict began in September 1962, when Yemeni army officers, inspired by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, seized power in the nation’s capital, sending the monarch, Imam Muhammad al-Badr, into internal exile in the northern part of the country. To prevent al-Badr and his followers from forcibly returning to power, the newly proclaimed Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) appealed to Nasser for support. Nasser, eager to regain some of the regional prestige he had lost in previous inter-Arab skirmishes, and determined to weaken Britain’s position on the Arabian Peninsula, sent tens of thousands of Egyptian troops to Yemen. The royalist insurgency, meanwhile, gained the backing of neighboring Saudi Arabia. For the next several years, both Cairo and Riyadh remained engaged in the conflict, each refusing to pull back until the other showed a greater willingness to do the same.