Yemen - History

History

Yemen has long existed at the crossroads of cultures. It linked some of the oldest centres of civilization in the Near East by virtue of its location in South Arabia.

Between the 12th century BC and the 6th century AD, it was home of the Minaean, Sabaean, Hadhramaut, Qataban, Ausan, and Himyarite kingdoms, which controlled the lucrative spice trade, and later came under Byzantine and Persian rule.

In the 5th century AD, the Himyarite king Abu-Karib Assad converted to Judaism after expanding his kingdom to include most of the Arabian peninsula and parts of East Africa. Following intervention by the Byzantines and the Ethiopians, Christianity was briefly re-established in the kingdom under the leadership of Abraha. In the 7th century, Islamic caliphs began to exert control over the area. After this caliphate broke up, Yemen came under the control of many dynasties who ruled part, or often all, of South Arabia, Mecca and most of Oman. Imams – descendants of prophet Muhammad also known as sayyids – ruled Yemen intermittently for 980 years, establishing a theocratic political structure that flourished and covered at its pinnacle all the area south of Mecca to Dhoffar in Oman and all the way to Aden and the African coast of the Red sea, Gulf of Aden and parts of the Indian ocean adjacent to the Arabian Peninsula and strongly influencing and sometimes controlling sharifs of Hejaz. It survived until modern times.

Egyptian Shia caliphs occupied much of Yemen throughout the 11th century but were resisted by the Imams. By the 16th century and again in the 19th century, Yemen was part of the Ottoman Empire (first as the Eyalet of Yemen, later as the Vilayet of Yemen), and in some periods Imams exerted control over all Yemen.

Aden was occupied by the Portuguese between 1513 and 1538, and again from 1547 to 1548. In between those Portuguese occupations, Aden was ruled by the Ottoman Empire; it ruled Aden again from 1548 to 1645. After Ottoman rule, it was ruled by the Sultanate of Lahej, under suzerainty of the Zaidi Imams of Yemen. In 1838, Sultan Muhsin bin Fadl of the nearby state of Lahej ceded 194 km2 (75 sq mi) including Aden to the British. On 19 January 1839, the British East India Company landed Royal Marines at Aden to occupy the territory and stop attacks by pirates against British shipping to India.

The modern history of South Arabia and Yemen began in 1918 when Yemen gained independence from the Ottoman Empire. Between 1918 and 1962, Yemen was a monarchy ruled by the Hamidaddin family. There was a brief revolution in 1947–48, in which Imam Yahya Muhammad Hamid ed-Din was killed. A rival sayyid family, the Alwazirs, seized power for several weeks. Backed by the al-Saud family of Saudi Arabia, the Hamidaddins restored their rule until 1962–1970 during the North Yemen Civil War. In 1962, North Yemen saw a republic rivaling the Imams with Egyptian Occupiers assistance. The government-in-exile of the Mutawakelite kingdom issued a last Yemeni Rial coin in London in 1965 incribed المملكة المتوكلية اليمنية, "AlMamlakah AlMutawakiliyyah AlYamaniyyah, meaning The Mutawakelite Kingdom of Yemen ., commemorating Winston Churchill by the title Man of Peace in Arabic and English, but Britain still had a protective area around the South Arabia port of Aden, which it had created in the 19th century. Britain withdrew in 1967 and the area became South Yemen. In 1970, the southern government adopted a Communist governmental system. The two countries were formally united as the Republic of Yemen on 22 May 1990.

From 27 April to 7 July 1994, a civil war between the former North and former South Yemen ended with the conquest of the southern capital, Aden. The dissatisfaction of the people in the South with the government of Sana’a led finally to an uprising in the South in 2007. Very soon the "al-Ḥirāk as-Silmī al-Janūbī", the Peaceful Southern Movement was established in the same year to unify all southern activists. The demands on equality of treatment which was ignored by Sana’a developed very soon to the retrieval of the southern state.

The 2011 Yemeni revolution followed the initial stages of the Tunisian revolution and occurred simultaneously with the 2011–2012 Egyptian revolution and other mass protests in the Arab world in early 2011. The uprising was initially against unemployment, economic conditions and corruption, as well as against the government's proposals to modify the constitution of Yemen. The protestors' demands then escalated to calls for President Ali Abdullah Saleh to resign. After an election, power was transferred to the vice president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Al-Hadi, for a two-year term starting in February 2012. Al-Hadi will oversee the drafting of a new constitution, followed by parliamentary and presidential elections in 2014.