A Spectre is Haunting Arabia

Front matter

Miriam M. Müller

A Spectre is Haunting Arabia

How the Germans Brought Their Communism to Yemen pt] Political Science

PART II - The GDR in Yemen

Chapter 8. The GDR and the “Arab World”: A Small State’s “Fill-In Policy” | 157 1. The Middle East between Washington and Moscow - Pawn or Player? | 158

. The GDR’s “Policy of Recognition” translated to the Middle East | 167

3. The GDR and the Middle East: During the “High Times of

Diplomacy” | 172

. Means to an End - The GDR’s Foreign Policy Strategies in the Arab

World | 175

. Conclusion: the GDR in the Middle East — A Showcase of East German

Foreign Policy Strategies | 183

Chapter 9. Forging a National Identity in Yemen’s South - Social Change between Foreign Interference and a Fragmented Nation | 187

3. 4.

On the Relevance of Identities for this Study | 187

From Tribal Lands to a Divided Yemen: A History of Foreign Interference | 190

Determining a Yemeni identity in the South | 195

Ideological Templates: Political Influences from the Middle East and Europe | 209

Synthetic Politics in Yemen’s South: A Marxist State from Scratch | 221

Chapter 10. Methodological Prelude: Connecting the Case Study, the Foreign Policy Phase Analysis and the State- and Nation-Building Approach | 229

Two Germanys, two Yemens and the Cold War: How East-Berlin “lost” the North and “won” the South | 229

Phases of the GDR’s Involvement in South Yemen: Internal Developments determine External Foreign Policy Engagement | 235 Factionism, Alliances and Executions as a Political Means — The Unstable Milieu of South Yemeni Politics | 236

4. The Major Hypothesis: The GDR’s Foreign Policy as a Policy of Socialist

State- and Nation-Building | 238

FOREIGN POLICY PHASE ANALYSIS: THE GDR’s ENGAGEMENT IN SOUTH YEMEN

Chapter 11. Phase 1: The Phase of Sampling and Creation from 1963 to 1969/70 - A Constitutional Draft and the Road to Recognition | 245 1. The Revolutionary Phoenix from Aden’s Ashes: Opting for a Socialist State | 245 2. Soviet Engagement in South Yemen: When Aden shed its Geostrategic Invisibility Cloak | 250 3. The Phase of Sampling: From First Contact to Socialist Nation- and State-Building | 252 4. Conclusion: East-Berlin’s new ally by the Red Sea | 261

Chapter 12. Phase II: The Phase of Establishment and Expansion 1969/70 to 1978 - Incorporating Marxism-Leninism in a Tribal Society | 265 1. Internal Developments: The First Steps towards a Socialist State | 265 2. Soviet Interests and Fields of Engagement: From Suspicion to “Best-Friends-Forever” | 270 3. The Phase of Expansion: The GDR as the Director of “Civilian Matters” of Socialist Nation- and State-Building in South Arabia | 275 4. Conclusion: South Yemen as the Model Case of a Possible East German Foreign Policy | 293 z

Interlude: South Yemen - A “Rough State” in the Region and in the World | 297 1. Aden - Actor and Pawn in the Cold War Game | 297 2. Between Conspiracy Theories and Security Policy: East Berlin, Aden and International Terrorism | 302

Chapter 13. Phase Ill: The Phase of Continuity and Consolidation from 1978 to 1986 - German Guidance and Yemeni Emancipation | 307 1. Aden hovering between the Peak and Abyss of its Political and Economic Development | 307 2. Aden - A Soviet “First-Priority Goal” in the Arab World | 312 3. Consolidation and Continuity of East German Socialist Nation- and State-Building: How the GDR’s foreign policy tied in with the YSP’s approach | 316 4. Conclusion: East-German Engagement Swings from Enthusiasm to Disillusion | 326

Chapter 14. Phase IV: The Phase of Neglect from 1986 to 1990 - The “Ice Age” of relations and the End of Socialist State-Building | 329 1. Internal Developments: The Last Throes of a Wounded and Dying State | 330 2. “Soviet dilemma at the Gate of Tears”: Between Influence, Imposition and Lack of Control | 335 3. The Caesura of 1986 and its Aftermath during the Phase of Rejection: SED-State or Honecker-Centered Policy? | 341 4. Conclusion: Belated and Unfortunate Self-Confidence: East-Berlin wanders off the Soviet Course | 351

C. FINDINGS

Chapter 15. On the External and Internal Empirical “Limits” of East German Foreign Policy | 357 1. External Determinants of East German Foreign Policy | 357 2. Internal Limits of Foreign Policy: Between Economic Exhaustion, “Double Standards” and Political Friction | 363

Chapter 16. South Yemen as the Model Case of a Possible East German Foreign Policy | 369 1. Best Friends with Benefits: Soviet and East German Engagement in South Yemen as Part of a Regional Strategy in the Region | 370 2. Advocacy for an East German Foreign Policy in its own Right | 373 3. The GDR in South Yemen: A Phase Analysis of Foreign Policy | 375 4. South Yemen as the Exceptional Case and an Approximation to the “Ideal Type” of East German Foreign Policy | 379

Chapter 17. Moscow, East Berlin and the “Hawks of Hadramawt” - Nation Building or Neo-Colonialism in Southern Yemen? | 383 1. How to explore the “Limits of Foreign Policy” | 383 2. The GDR’s Policy of Socialist State- and Nation-Building: Motives and Strategies | 385 3. The Impact of Socialist Nation-Building on South Yemen and its Society: A truly Marxist State in the Arab World? | 388 4. South Yemen: Subject or Object of Foreign Policy? | 391 l. Bibliography | 397 Il. Archival Documents | 425

Abbreviations (in German and English)

ADN - Allgemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst

AGM - Arbeitsgruppe des Ministers (des MfS)

AHB - Außenhandelsbetrieb

ASR - Akademie für Staats- und Rechtswissenschaft der DDR (Potsdam-Babelsberg)

ATUC - Aden Trades Union Congress

AzAP-BRD - Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland

BCD - Bewaffnung und Chemischer Dienst (MfS); Verw. 1972-1989

BKK - Arbeitsgruppe Bereich Kommerzielle Koordinierung

BStU - Bundesbeauftragte(r) für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehem. DDR

CC - Central Committee of the SED (German: Zentral Komitee)

CSCE - Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe

DzAPR-DDR - Dokumente zur Außenpolitik der Regierung der DDR

FDJ - Freie Deutsche Jugend; English: Free German Youth

FLOSY - Front for the Liberation of Occupied South Yemen

GDR - German Democratic Republik (Ger: Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR)

HIM - Hauptamtlicher Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter (category for inofficial employees ofthe MfS)

HIM/A — Hauptamtlicher Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter/Aufklärung (category for inofficial employees of the MfS)

HIME - Hauptamtlicher Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter im besonderen Einsatz (category for inofficial employees of the MfS)

HVA - Department of Surveillance (Ger: “Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung”)

IMB - Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter der Abwehr und Feindverbindung /zur unmittelb. Bearbeitung im Verdacht der Feindtätigkeit stehenden Personen - ab 1979 (English: category for inofficial employees of the MfS)

IMS - Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter zur Sicherung

A Spectre is Haunting Arabia - How the Germans Brought Their Communism to Yemen und Durchdringung eines Verantwortungsbereiches; bis 1968: GI bzw. GHI ((category for inofficial employees ofthe MfS)

JSP - Jemenitisch Sozialistische Partei (English: Yemeni Socialist Party)

KoKo - Kommerzielle Koordinierung - Sonderbereich des Ministeriums für Außenhandel

MAN - Movement of Arab Nationalists

MfAA - Ministerium für Auswärtige Angelegenheiten (Eng: Department of Foreign Affairs)

MfS — Ministerium für Staatssicherheit; English: Ministry for State Security

NLF - National Liberation Front (of the PDRY)

OPK - Operative Personenkontrolle - Konspirativer Vorgang zur Aufklärung und Überwachung von Personen

PDB - Personendatenbank der DDR (des MdI)

PDU - People’s Democratic Union (of South Yemen)

PDRY - People's Democratic Republic of Yemen

PFLP - Popular Front for the Liberation of Palenstine

PK - Kontaktperson (MfS, VA)

SED - Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands; English: United Socialist Party

SPC - Supreme People’s Council

VRD - Verwaltung Rückwärtige Dienste (MfS und NVA)

YSP - Yemeni Socialist Party (Ger: JSP — Jemenitisch Sozialistische Partei)

ZK — Zentral Komitee

Preface

“To the desert, and the Bedouin, the coming of the British was a smallwhim of God. There is something enduring about the huge sand dunes, the endless empty horizons, the foul water and solitary wandering camels and the sublimely arrogant Bedouin soul. The Romans, the Abyssinians, the Turks, the British have all in their turn come, and in their turn have gone. Whoever comes next will leave as shallow an imprint.”

ALFREE, “THE Hawks OF HADRAMAUT”, 1967

Of all the possible successors it was the politically dwarfish German Democratic Republic (GDR) following in the footsteps of the giant that was the British Empire. Even though officially without a mission to colonize, or the means to do so, the GDR and its leading party SED? without doubt aimed to leave a substantial “imprint” in Yemen, or more precisely, its southern region. The GDR’s foreign policy in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY)? was designed to reproduce its very own state- and nation-building process, the “planned development of Socialism.” Until its accession to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990,° the GDR had been expanding this strategy step by step and, with the Kremlin’s approval, maintained intensive contacts to the South Yemeni regime throughout the existence of the PDRY.

So why does the impact of a demised state’s foreign policy on another longgone state and nation even matter? First, as this analysis will show, the GDR’s engagement in South Yemen’s state-building process is highly underrepresented

2 | Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands.

3 | The People’s Republic of South Yemen renamed itself in 1970.

4 | German: planmäßiger Aufbau des Sozialismus. Schroeder, 2013, 110ff.

5 | For example, a visit by a South Yemeni delegation of the Ministry of Interior in the GDR in August 1989, in: Bericht über den Aufenthalt einer Delegation des Mdl in der VDRJ, July 25 to August 1 1989, in: BStU MfS HA VII7954, 43ff.

A Spectre is Haunting Arabia - How the Germans Brought Their Communism to Yemen in today’s foreign policy history narratives of the PDRY, the GDR and the USSR alike’ - mostly due to remaining gaps in archival research. As a consequence, this case study also aims to complement recent research on the role of the Arab states in the Cold War. Second, current analyses and assessments by the Western media on the Yemeni transition process after 201 and the abrupt termination of the internationally mediated National Dialogue in the wake of large-scale armed conflict in Yemen in early 2015,’ tend to ignore the complexity of Yemen’s social and political structure and the resulting conflicts. Especially since the launch of Saudi Arabia’s “Decisive Storm” operation against the Houthi movement, Western media and self-declared experts appear to be in favor of more accessible but regularly oversimplified explanations for the current escalation of violence in Yemen. The popular focus on the Sunni-Shiite nature of the struggle, swiftly reinterpreted as a “proxy war” between Riad and Teheran, is only one example among many.

Almost invisible in Western media coverage of Yemen is the history of half the country: the deceased Marxist state in the south and its remnants in today’s Yemeni society.’ In Yemen, the new interpretation of a separate southern identity has been gestating for almost a decade now. Waving the PDRY flag and commemorating the anniversaries of British withdrawal from Aden in 1967 or secession from the north in 1994,” the identity of the Southern Movement draws from integrative symbols and memories of the former PDRY. This case study claims that South Yemen’s state-building process and its actual manifestation as a state cannot be explained in a comprehensive way without taking into consideration Moscow’s and East Berlin’s intensive engagement and presence there. Whether the East German “imprint” has to be considered just as “shallow” as the preceding foreign powers’ is another question of this analysis. This book is not about today’s struggle for peace and stability in Yemen. First and foremost, it is an historic case study of the German Democratic Republic’s activities in South Yemen, the only Marxist state that ever existed in Arabia" and at times the closest and most loyal ally to the Soviet Union in the region. However, this book also aims to raise awareness of the roots of one of today’s major internal divides in Yemen, the identity rift between north

6 | Usually, the GDR’s activity is mentioned in relation to the presence of other states of the Eastern Bloc in South Yemen, such as the CSSR. Halliday, 1990, 207. The same may be said for overviews on the GDR’s foreign policy. Wentker, 2007, 286.

7 | Steinvorth, 2015; Stenslie, 2015.

8 | Avenarius, 2015.

9 | “Yemeni” is an onomatopoeic approximation to the Arab adjective “yemenT”. 10 | Madabish, Divisions within Yemen’s Al-Hirak delay announcement of Southern independence, in: Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, December 1 2014; Augustin, 2015, 53.

11 | Historic Term; “Arabia [...] is that great peninsula formed by the Arabic Gulph [sic!], the Indian Ocean, and the Persian Gulph[sic!],” in: Niebuhr, 1792, 5.

Preface and south. The main transition mechanism, the National Dialogue, was the first attempt to acknowledge the different interests of the major factions, but it failed to equally include and bind all parties, among them the Southern Movement. Hoping against hope that Yemen as a state will survive this crisis, Yemenis with the will and the ability to build a new Yemen will have to achieve the impossible: the integration of all social forces into the process of political transition, so that each and every one ofthem can claim this process as their own. We remember former President Ali Abdallah Saleh’s” famous quote: ruling Yemen was “like dancing on the heads of snakes.” Today, Saleh wants the world to believe that he is the only leader able to get Yemen back on track.“ But by perpetuating his system of patronage and corruption, Saleh has turned out to be very much part of the problem. Thus, with the serpent charmer Saleh gone, the key for Yemen’s transformation is not only to leave the old basket and flute behind, but the decision of each and every snake to be part of this transformation, to shed its skin and become a very different kind of political animal for the sake of a common goal: a happy Yemen.

12 | Arabic: Alf Abdallah Saleh; The Party’s leading figure Saleh had already been head of state in the northern Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) since 1978 and had kept his power position in unified Yemen as well.

14 | Schiavenza, Yemen's Wily Puppet Master. Ali Abdullah Saleh, ousted in the Arab Spring protests, has re-emerged as the country's most influential man, March 29 2014.

SECTION A. ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK

CHAPTER 1. Then and Now: Why the Past of Yemen’s South and the GDR’s Role in it matter

„Ban sll cS.) sill «cla gil cali - God, the nation, revolution, unity!”

NATIONAL MOTTO OF UNIFIED YEMEN since 1994

“[Ismail] knew not to unite with the north and he was right, look what happened since 1990. [...] The truth is we really lost our leadership in 1986 after that we went downhill. how we united, i dont know? The fact is if [Ismail and the former leaders of the Left] were still alive; we‘d be better off! [sic!]”?

YEMENI BLOGGER LIVING IN THE U.S. COMMENTING ON A SOUTH YEMENI PROTEST IN WASHINGTON IN 2009

The case of South Yemen is exceptional in more ways than one. After ousting the British from their Crown Colony in 1967, the South Yemeni regime seized power to erect a new, socialist state from scratch. The radical South Yemeni leaders aimed at eradicating both the remnants of British occupation, but also the traditional socio-political structures of Yemeni society. At times in their state’s history, especially during the years of economic growth in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it appeared as if they had succeeded. However, the Marxist experiment turned out to be rather short-lived. After the “1986 crisis”, an inner-party struggle of the Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP) followed by a bloody civil war, the majority of the revolutionary leaders were dead, exiled, or imprisoned. The PDRY never recovered from this political and economic blow. Yemeni unification in 1990 was followed by another civil war, this time between the former north and south. In the end, “Marxist Arabia” disappeared from the map without a trace.’ During Yemeni unification, the former Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) of the north simply expanded its former political system with minor adjustments. The YAR’s major

1 | World Heritage Encyclopedia, National Motto.

2 | South Yemeni Protest in Washington, YouTube Photography and Comments, July 7 2009. 3 | On the role of artificial borders and the construction of social realty through their demarcation on maps: Willis, in: Al-Rasheed, 2004.

A Spectre is Haunting Arabia - How the Germans Brought Their Communism to Yemen party, the General People’s Congress (GPC) led by its President, Ali Abdallah Saleh,* claimed power. Ever since, Yemeni school children have started their school day by shouting the motto of a supposedly unified nation:

iaa N cob gil aii“ — God, the nation, revolution, unity!” This motto must be considered part of the GPC’s, or rather Saleh’s, wider policy to overcome the country’s fragmented and stratified nature to create a unified national Yemeni identity.‘ Thus, the re-emergence of a distinct southern identity about a decade later in January 2007 came as a surprise to the majority of external and even some internal observers. Due to feelings of discrimination and marginalization, former South Yemeni military personnel had initiated protests on the occasion of the anniversary of the “1986 massacre”, as they would call the incident. The appeals of retired officers for equality and compensation drew especially the young, and the loose congregation of protestors mutated into what is called the Southern Movement today, or just “The Movement”: Al-Hirak.’ Fragmentation at this point had not been overcome and after the Arab Upheavals of 2011 and Ali Abdallah Saleh’s downfall the year after, the “Southern Question” emerged as one of the main obstacles to Yemen’s current transformation process.® Waving the PDRY-flag today, a significant part of Al-Hirak has been advocating for secession from the Republic.’ Supported by a weakened YSP” and former PDRY functionaries, the secessionists challenge and thus endanger not only Yemen’s national unity today, but also its possible post-crisis transformation. How and why did this separate and clearly artificially constructed identity survive? Where are its origins and who had an active part in its formation? The historic references to the PDRY used by Al-Hirak, glorification of day-to-day life in former South Yemen,

4 | Arabic: Ali Abdallah Saleh; The Party’s leading figure Saleh had already been head of state in the northern Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) since 1978 and had kept his seat in unified Yemen as well.

5 | World Heritage Encyclopedia, National Motto.

6 | On the history of socio-political fragmentation in Yemen: Dresch, 1993 and 2000.

7 | Arabic: Al-Hirak, Augustin, 2015 and Day, 2012, Rise of the Southern Movement, 227ff. Even though Day’s analytical approach to Yemen’s modern history has to be rejected as overly simple, his account on the events of the last two decades offers an elaborate summary of recent political developments in the country.

8 | Among others like the Houti conflict in the north. On the dynamics of the Houti Conlfict: Brandt, 2013.

9 | Thousands rally for Southern Independence in Yemen, October 12 2013 (AFP), in: ahram. org; Clash between Yemen troops. Southern Separatists wound four, January 27 2014 (AFP) Divisions within Yemen’s Al-Hirak delay announcement of Southern independence, in: Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, December 1 2014.

10 | The Yemeni Socialist Party replaced the National Front as the new “vanguard party” of the PDRY in 1978.

CHAPTER 1. Then and Now: Why the Past of Yemen’s South and the GDR’s Role in it matter and still active insider relations and networks of former YSP functionaries" give rise to demand a more diverse and intensive research on and analysis of the PDRY’s history and especially its development as a socialist state.

South Yemen’s unique history as a Marxist state in the Arab world and its re-emergence as an “imagined community” transition alone render South Yemen an interesting object of International Relations study.” However, to explore the early years of state- and nation-building in the separate south and the formation of a separate identity, a thorough account of external involvement in the process is needed: the emergence of a state led by a Soviet-style vanguard, including the process of “Socialist state- and nation-building” would never have taken place without external influence of East Germany and the Soviet Union. After the British had left and taken their money with them, the conflict-ridden and impoverished fledgling state needed large-scale support to realize the regime’s ideological project, which was readily granted by the Soviet Union and its right hand in the international sphere, the GDR. As a consequence of the interdependence between Moscow’s, East-Berlin’s and Aden’s actions, this par excellence during Yemen’s ongoing case study not only offers a foreign policy analysis of East German engagement, but at the same time includes the internal developments in South Yemen as an essential determinant. “The GDR in South Yemen” is a unique case study in many respects: South Yemen’s recent history provides an intriguing venue for foreign policy engagement by one of the most contested, ignored, and neglected international actors in 20th century history: The German Democratic Republic.”

11 | Like for example Ali Salem Al-Beidh (Arabic: ‘Alf Salem al-Bid), Augustin, 2013.

13 | In this analysis the discipline of “International Relations” (capitals) is differentiated from the actual relationships between states, or “international relations”.

14 | Gareis, 2006, 49; Schmidt/Hellmann/Wolf, 2007, 30.

A Spectre is Haunting Arabia - How the Germans Brought Their Communism to Yemen

1. AN ANALYSIS OF THE GDR’s Foreien Poticy - A FRUITLESS ENDEAVOR?

“The efforts of small states to reach their goals have to be considered foreign policy nonetheless.”'® HERMANN WENTKER

Due to profound controversies on the scope, quality, and content of East German foreign policy in academic discourse and political praxis, an extensive debate on the GDR’s foreign policy in general is inevitable for the analysis of any case study of East German foreign policy engagement. Furthermore, studies of the GDR’s foreign policy regularly fail to clarify the role and position of the GDR’s foreign activities in relation to its political system and ideology as part of the SED’s “Policy of survival”. To do justice to the interdependence between the system of Real Socialism and East German foreign policy, this analysis explicitly includes the interdependence between the domestic and international sphere while accounting for its two major determinants, the Soviet Union and the “other Germany”.

To this day, German and Cold War studies discourse cannot even agree on the question of whether the GDR was able to pursue an independent foreign policy in its own right. The German Federal Republic’s” international activities, on the other hand, have been considered a comprehensive, full-fledged foreign policy ever since the Treaties of Bonn and Paris came into force in 1955 and diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union were established. According to Helga Haftendorn, “the Federal Republic of Germany claimed its place as an equal member among the community of peoples”! at this point, even though it hadn’t achieved full sovereignty, yet. Further along the way, the West German intellectual Ralf Dahrendorf diagnosed a “sturdy state existence” with a “considerably big scope of action”” in the mid-1970s. Contrastingly, Siegfried Bock, a high-ranking East German diplomat, in hindsight does not consider the GDR “a normal actor in international relations”, as it was “not able to claim the same scope of action and options as other states.””° These opinions clearly demonstrate the huge gap between West and East German self-perceptions, with West Germany expressing far more confidence in their international actions than their Eastern counterparts.

However, the impact of the GDR’s foreign policy during its existence and after cannot simply be denied in one sweeping blow. At least in certain countries

16 | Wippel, 1996, 27; Schmidt/Hellmann/Wolf, 2007, 30; Wentker, 2007, 10. 17 | Federal Republic of Germany (FRG); German: Bundesrepublik Deutschland. 18 | Haftendorn, 2001, 56.

19 | Dahrendorf, Ralf, in: Wentker, 2007, 1.

20 | Bock, Siegfried, 1999, in: Wentker, 2007, 3.

CHAPTER 1. Then and Now: Why the Past of Yemen’s South and the GDR’s Role in it matter and regions, East Germany’s international performance had and still has a considerable influence on the foreign policy of the Federal Republic of Germany and its bilateral relations. In 1990, East Germany officially terminated foreign relations and dismissed its diplomatic personnel. In certain cases, however, reunified Germany drew from relations and connections established by the GDR, that is, in those countries where former West Germany for one reason or the other had not been involved. This long-term impact of East German international engagement so far has widely been neglected in academia, but clearly has to be regarded part of a wider discourse on how to handle the fact of German separation in history and political science in general.

One of the major controversies here is whether the two separate German histories between 1945 and 1990 should be written as one and if so, how this could be done. Initially, this question was addressed by Klemann in the late 1980s.”! He tried to include the history of both German states in his narrative of German postwar history. This concept was resumed about a decade and a half later, and from there, a new discourse beyond bipolar-system thinking has evolved, including a demand for an “integrated postwar history” in German studies.”* Obviously, the discipline is bound to at least partly revise its analytical approach to Germany’s divided past. And while the dictatorial character of the political system of the GDR calls for a conscious debate about the interrelation between the SED dictatorship and the GDR’s policy output, it is not an excuse or justification for ignoring the impact of the GDR’s existence and performance as a state in the international system in its entirety. Studies considering the GDR as a mere object of history exiled to the “footnotes”? without doubt have proven inadequate in explaining the direct and indirect impact of the GDR on other actors within the international community of states.

This is especially true for the effects on the Federal Republic of Germany. The controversy over the exclusive focus on the German Federal Republic with regard to German postwar history has not yet come to a conclusion. But without doubt, the mutual reference of the two German states had its part in the formation of two separate German identities and thus on both states’ performance in the international sphere: Ever since their “zero hour” in 1945, both German states defined their new identity as states claiming to be the “better Germany”, while inevitably referring to their antipode. As a consequence, the long-term goal of research on German history should not only be to include East German history, but to even overcome the rather restrictive interpretation of the “parallel history of Germany” by Kleßmann. Current discourse suggests using an approach to German history that includes differences and similarities, as well as the interconnected

21 | Kleßmann, 1988. 22 | Möller, in: APuZ 3/2007, 7. 23 | Heym, Stefan, 18 March 1990 and Wehler, 2008, 362.

A Spectre is Haunting Arabia - How the Germans Brought Their Communism to Yemen character ofthe two German states, to identify the long-term impact of separation on unified Germany and thus unified Germany’s foreign policy. This analysis explicitly positions itself within this debate and advocates for a more open and especially more public debate about Germany’s divided past and reunited future in not only academia, but also politics. In 2010 Klaus Schroeder asked:

“Are the Germans off their heads? Even though they have been reunited for over twenty years, they keep emphasizing what separates them, not what they have achieved together.”

If Germany intends to achieve not only a structural unification, but a joint reunion, reconciliation, and merger of the two societies in the long run, “the Germans’ doubled history cannot be overcome separately,” as Weidenfeld noted in the early 19908. This especially holds true for German foreign policy history, as the double existence of two German states in the international realm is not a matter of interpretation, but a fact witnessed by the international community of states for over forty years and thus cannot be ignored any longer.

Regarding the GDR’s foreign policy, the “other Germany” in the West emerged as one of the two major determinants shaping the East German international scope of action. The second determinant, the Soviet Union, for the most part claimed full control over East German international actions. But even though there did not exist an East German foreign policy independent from Moscow, this did not necessarily result in the non-existence of East German foreign policy making in general: regardless of its degree of autonomy, any policy directed by an internationally recognized state towards the international community of states to further its national interest has to be considered foreign policy. Undeniably, relations between the GDR and the Western allied forces exemplify the limits of the SED’s room for maneuver. But East Berlin nonetheless sought and found ways to realize its national interest in day-to-day politics in the international realm. Despite the boundaries of the GDR’s foreign policy being clearly marked, East Berlin discovered other, more modest ways to assert its political interests abroad. The GDR offered education and training for political cadres of Socialist-friendly states and became heavily engaged in the organizations of the United Nations even before its admission as a full member. Other venues for East German foreign policy were the CSCE Process in the early 1970s% and East German engagement in the Middle East” from the early 1960s. Furthermore, some of the so-called

27 | The author opts for a wide understanding of the term “Middle East” and follows Steinbach who defines it geographically as the “Arab world between Egypt and the Indian

CHAPTER 1. Then and Now: Why the Past of Yemen’s South and the GDR’s Role in it matter developing countries’? provided an extraordinary scope of action for East Berlin. Firstly, Moscow explicitly opened the door for East German activities inthe “Global South.””? Secondly, Western Germany as the legal successor of the “Third Reich” had consented to political obligations to the state of Israel.” This approach resulted in severe political pitfalls and restrictions for Bonn in the Near and Middle East. In conclusion, the “developing world,” and particularly the Arab states from the mid- 1960s to the mid-ı970s, became the main venue of East Germany’s “patchwork policy.” Acknowledging the Soviet Union and the Federal Republic of Germany as the two major foreign policy determinants of the GDR, this case study aims to deliver a foreign policy analysis of East German engagement in South Yemen. It follows Hermann Wentker’s argument in which he differentiates between the phases of development of the relationship between the GDR and the Soviet Union, and between East and West Germany: Not only did Bonn and Moscow undergo significant changes during this time, as the GDR itself changed as well and thus these dependencies were not static either.