Yemen Arab Republic

The half of Yemen that was never colonised, and spent the 1960s as the battlefield of a war between two Arab republics. Northern Yemen was ruled by Zaydi Shia imams for a thousand years and by the Ottomans intermittently, and after 1918 it emerged as an independent kingdom that deliberately kept the outside world out - no cars to speak of, few schools, almost no foreign contact, a policy that preserved its independence and left it among the poorest countries on earth. Officers overthrew the imamate in 1962 and proclaimed the Yemen Arab Republic. What followed was not a brief coup but eight years of civil war in which Egypt sent as many as 70 thousand troops to support the republicans and Saudi Arabia funded the royalists, and Nasser later called it his Vietnam; Egyptian forces used chemical weapons and the commitment left Egypt badly weakened before the 1967 war with Israel. The republic survived when Egypt withdrew, on terms that brought conservative royalists into the government. Two presidents were assassinated within a year in 1977 and 1978. Ali Abdullah Saleh then held power for three decades. The country's economy depended heavily on remittances from workers in Saudi Arabia. Border wars with the south recurred. Sanaa was the capital and its old city is a World Heritage site. The north held around three times the southern population. It merged with the south in 1990. The republic existed from 1962 to 1990 with Sanaa as its capital. It covered around 195 thousand square kilometres. Its population was roughly nine million by 1990. Yemen's highlands support terraced agriculture at over two thousand metres.

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