Word: yemen
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...most of South Yemen's 2.3 million Muslims, the 21-year experiment with strict Marxism was not a success. The country's zealously ideological rulers sketched a brief history of war and intrigue against three conservative Arabian peninsula neighbors and dissipated their power in vicious infighting among tribal and political factions at home. Between 1967 and 1986 the top party leadership changed five times, each regime more radical than the last. For its unflinching march down the socialist road, South Yemen won high ranking among the poorest nations on earth...
...signal for change came in a hail of machine gunfire inside party headquarters in 1986, when one party chief rubbed out four of his leading Politburo opponents. For 15 days South Yemen blazed with a Communist Party civil war, even forcing most of the country's 5,000 Soviet advisers and their dependents to flee. When it was all over, 5,000 Yemenis lay dead, $500 million worth of Soviet military hardware had been destroyed, and some 65,000 men had fled to North Yemen...
Moscow chose as the new Secretary-General of the Yemen Socialist Party Ali Salem al Beedh, a Politburo member who was wounded in the abortive coup. He is pressing a drive initiated last year to improve South Yemen's long-troubled relations with its neighbors. He wants to end ruptures with Oman and Saudi Arabia, and especially to advance on-again off-again efforts to merge with North Yemen. Al Beedh is planning an early resumption of relations with the U.S., broken...
Another of South Yemen's leaders, President Haidar Abu Bakr al Attas, who ranks No. 3 in the leadership hierarchy, candidly admits his country's "mistakes in the past" of trying to export socialist revolution and says, "We are not exporters of our ideas. We are here for one purpose, to develop our country so that we can improve the lives of our people...
...generation have such moderate noises emanated from Aden. For ten years South Yemen has topped the State Department's list of countries that support terrorism. Aden kept an open door to leftist revolutionaries, including terrorists such as Japan's Red Army and West Germany's Baader- Meinhof Gang, who were supported with camps and special training...