Word: yemen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...made, breakable, the borders etched by diplomats ignorant of or indifferent to ancient claims and tribal hate. Kurds fight for their freedom from Iraq and Turkey; Tamils battle Sinhalese in Sri Lanka; Armenians fight Azerbaijanis in Nagorno-Karabakh; Albanian Muslims and Serbs circle each other in Kosovo. Last week Yemen was the latest country to break apart, as those in the south accused the northerners of attempting to further impoverish them. The struggles can be ancient and visceral, religious and racial, the oppressed against the oppressors. Where the valves of democracy allow for ethnic pressures to escape, differences are settled...