A communist government formed in South Yemen a year after the British abandoned the the Port of Aden in 1967. Thus far the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen has been the only communist state in the Middle East. Success is a fairly subjective term, but if you compare it to its northern neighbour the Yemen Arab Republic, you’ll that the communist South did much more to modernise and to build a national identity of out of the very tribal Yemeni culture. Unlike in the South, much of Northern Yemen was and still is effectively governed by tribal groups who run their own militias, build local infrastructure and settle legal disputes, they also often use violence and kidnapping to extort money from the notoriously corrupt central government (both in the YAR and modern Yemen) as was well as waging often deadly blood feuds with rival tribal groups.

Although they were very effective limiting the power of the tribes and reducing tribal violence, the Yemeni Socialist Party was riven with factional bitterness and there were a number of bloody coups and counter-coups over power within the party itself, most notably in 1986 which led to thousands of deaths in only eleven days of factional violence.

In terms of economic management South Yemen inherited a deeply undeveloped economy from their British colonisers. Despite the value of the Port of Aden to international shipping, much of the YSP’s efforts to develop the economy were sabotaged after South Yemen was designated by the US as a State Sponsor of Terror and heavily sanctioned, after this the South relied heavily on Soviet financial support.

The South earned these sanctions for their training camps for communist and leftist fighters from across the Middle East, including the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and Omani communist groups, there were around 3,000 Soviet and Cuban military advisors helping the South run these camps.

Interestingly, many the mujaheddin fighters in Afghanistan were South Yemeni exiles who hoped that after Russians were defeated, the mujaheddin groups would then turn their attention to South Yemen and liberate their homelands from communism.

As the USSR began to fall apart the Soviets announced that would end their financial support of South Yemen and soon after the YSP began talks to unify with their much more corrupt and tribal northern neighbour, forming the unified Yemen Arab Republic in 1990.

Soon after southern leaders found themselves excluded from power and the YSP suffered a wave of assassinations allegedly orchestrated by the North. The South fought and lost a war to leave the union in 1994, many southerners see modern Yemen as an occupation of the South by the North and there remains powerful southern successionist movement who prefer the communist independent southern past to their modern reality.