Secessionists in southern Yemen have agitated for independence for almost as long as there has been a unified Yemeni state. But since unification in 1990, a common complaint among foreign diplomats and Yemeni government officials was that the secessionists were too diffuse and too poorly organized to credibly demand independence or even political relevance. They were seen as a noisy rabble with no real platform or strategy. Yemen’s civil war has changed that, as a group of secessionists is now moving to build a state within Yemen’s state of chaos. In late January, clashes in the southern port city of […]
