Splitting At the Seam

By MARGUERITE MICHAELS

As the Yemeni capital of San'a slumbered early last Wednesday morning, a Scud missile slammed into a crowded neighborhood on the northern outskirts of the city. Notoriously inaccurate, the Scud missed its intended target -- the presidential palace -- and destroyed a block of mud-brick houses. Twenty-five residents were killed in their sleep, their bodies scattered amid crumbled masonry and shreds of wicker baskets. Later, as bulldozers pushed away the rubble, workers trained fire hoses on the angry crowd to disperse it. The casualties were the first known civilian deaths in a violent struggle for power between two rival political leaders that has ruptured the four-year-old union between North and South Yemen.

A year ago, the country's voters elected their first parliament, an unprecedented exercise in democracy by the authoritarian standards of the Arabian peninsula. But for the past two weeks, armies from the conservative North and socialist South have waged bloody but inconclusive armor and artillery battles in bitter rivalry over the division of political power and the distribution of oil revenues. "Unity is dead," said an Arab League | official in Cairo, and so were hopes that political pluralism had taken root in traditionally monarchical Arabia.

Despite the enthusiastic support of the Yemeni people, a successful coalition between North and South seemed unlikely. The two countries, notes Peter Rodman, director of Middle East studies at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies, "had different social and political evolutions." While both were dominated for three centuries by the Ottoman Turks, the Southern capital of Aden was seized by the British in 1839. After achieving independence from Britain in 1967, the South became the first Arab Marxist state. The North threw off the Turks after World War I and has been ruled by conservative tribes ever since.

The collapse of Soviet patronage in South Yemen spurred a merger in May 1990. But the leader of the North, President Ali Abdullah Saleh, and the leader of the South, Vice President Ali Salem al-Beidh, bickered incessantly. They refused to completely merge their armies or their economies, and never built up any trust. "The power plays got to a point of no return," says Judith Kipper, guest scholar at the Brookings Institution.

Friction intensified after last year's parliamentary elections, when Saleh awarded 21 of 31 Cabinet seats to his own party and a fundamentalist group from the North. Two months after the fundamentalist leader demanded the repeal of socialist-sponsored legislation last June, Al-Beidh angrily left San'a for the South and never returned.

In an atmosphere of rampant lawlessness -- kidnapping tourists, oil executives and diplomats is a favored way of registering complaints against the government -- tensions between the North and South increased. Al-Beidh's walkout crippled the government's capacity to act, even preventing the passage of a budget for this year. In January hundreds of people protested price rises in the North. With inflation exceeding 100% and devaluation of the Yemeni riyal eroding incomes averaging less than $600 a year, the government feared a recurrence of the food-price riots of December 1992, in which more than 100 people were killed.

An attempt at reconciliation three months ago, brokered by Jordan, collapsed, and clashes quickly erupted between Northern and Southern army troops. Al-Beidh accused Saleh of siphoning off oil revenues from a newly opened field in a Southern province. While Yemen remains one of the Arab world's poorest and most populous states, the discovery of oil 10 years ago gave both North and South hope that their 14 million people would no longer be dependent on the largesse of their wealthy neighbors. Until the Gulf War, Yemen relied on money sent home by millions of Yemenis in the oil sheikdoms of the gulf. But Saleh's support of Iraq so infuriated King Fahd that he evicted nearly 1 million Yemeni workers from Saudi Arabia, severely disrupting the country's fragile economy.

Last month, after a Northern tank brigade attacked and defeated a force from the South in a town northwest of San'a, the country was plunged into war. As the fighting carried on in the rugged mountains that line the former border between North and South, it was impossible to confirm either side's claims to imminent victory. "There is not a military solution to the Yemen problem," said Robert Pelletreau, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, who was trapped temporarily in San'a after a failed mediation attempt.

Last week both sides dispatched emissaries throughout the Arab world. Neither, however, seemed eager for mediation. After separate meetings with Northern and Southern officials in Cairo, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said he saw no sign of an early end to hostilities. While the majority of Yemenis regard themselves as one nation, the blame for the turmoil rests squarely on two leaders who decided to settle their rivalry by starting a war.

With reporting by Dean Fischer/Cairo and Ann M. Simmons/Washington