Mr. Al-Beidh was much better with tighter lips

I must say that I really had an extremely high respect for the former President of the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY – Former South Yemen) and Vice President of the unified (now and forever) Republic of Yemen. I was almost convinced that he had a genuine patriotic rhetoric that truly had a sense of how the Yemenis in the street felt about affairs of state in Yemen used to wait vehemently for his speeches, especially during the tense days of the political squabbling that led to the unfortunate Civil War of 1994. I am still convinced that he surely would have favored that the war did not occur and that he may have been railroaded into the war, by both the wily Northern ruling establishment led by the current President of the Republic, Ali Abdullah Saleh (may he recover soon to tend to the urgent security collapse of the country with a better realization that the current situation calls for drastic sincere and serious steps that would start with better accountability and transparency in the management of affairs in the Republic), not to mention the selfish opportunists that surrounded Ali Salem, who actually advised Al-Beidh that he could actually confront the more militarily experienced Saleh in a military showdown, in which he was outclassed and outgunned. When you add to that the sucker the Saudis made out of Al-Beidh with the belief that the Gulf States were right behind him, one can see that Al-Beidh was not oriented towards making wise and rational critical political decisions. Actually he should have known better that the Saudis (and the Americans) wanted nothing more than to see a former puppet state of the former collapsed Soviet Union fall down like its counterparts everywhere else in the world.

Mr. Al-Beidh is indeed commended for introducing democracy into the Republic, something that the Northern elite in the tight net regime of President Saleh (and their Salafi allies) were intellectually and politically not willing to fall into with much flare. Nevertheless, Mr. Al-Beidh erroneously thought he could still salvage his crumbling state machinery, even though many of his colleagues and friends have advised him strongly not to go the path of secession. That may have been his suicide as a Yemeni leader, notwithstanding his somewhat convincing rhetoric against the corruption and the gross mismanagement that has characterized the Saleh regime almost from the start. However, his first declaration of secession completely took me by surprise. I really thought that he would not forget that he really had a lot of support among the population in the Northern governorates and thus would carry on the fight (in 1994) for all Yemenis, many of whom (North and South) had gripes about the Saleh regime. From the very beginning of that regrettable and somewhat naïve call for a secession, this observer knew full well that the futile declaration for the reinstatement of South Yemen as an independent state was - simply put - foolish and far from ever being desirable in the hearts and minds of most Yemenis. Oh sure, one could not help but wonder how such a call may have actually been the reason for the doom of the remaining elements of the fledgling South Yemeni regime. What one hoped for was that THE formerly popular Al-Beidh would try to maintain what ever elements of power he had then to keep an erstwhile fragile balance of power within the political configuration that made up the newly established Republic. That would have been more challenging for the Saleh regime to live with than what turned out to be a failed secession, which thank God never got a chance to get anywhere beyond the microphone by which the declaration of independence was made.

Having said all that, one would think that Mr. Al-Beidh was intellectually more mature than to be railroaded into a lost cause politically, militarily and historically. Perhaps this (http://www.yementimes.com/article.shtml?i=1257&p=opinion&a=1) would help make it clear that, historically and politically, there is simply no such thing as a Northern Yemeni identity or a Southern Yemeni identity (as the callers for secession are claiming) . Moreover, nothing would been more helpful to the regime in Sana'a than the same foolish recent statement by the former Vice President of the Republic. One really feels astonished at the logic that such foolishness emanates from. How can Al-Beidh actually expect to achieve now at a distance, what he could not achieve when (in 1994) he had all the machinery of a state at his disposal and at close range?

It is very difficult now to see how Al-Beidh can salvage any political hopes he might have had, either in the Republic of Yemen or in his hallucination that the PDRY could ever see a revival again, even given the almost failed state situation that the Republic of Yemen is now sadly enduring. It is also very difficult to see how President Saleh and his colleagues in the regime in Sana'a can hope to proceed with business as usual unless he carries out a serious and sincere program of REAL reforms, including the axing of several of the icons in his regime that have turned his regime into a pathetic state of failure in all facets of statecraft, considering

Yemen Times Issue 1282 27 July 2009