ReflectionsWhy are most Yemeni brits northerners? [Archives:2005/840/Opinion]

By Yahya Al-Olfi
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We all know that the British occupied South Yemen for nearly 130 years. This fact has led some Yemenis to consider themselves responsible for the area which was under the British by legitimizing the transient status of occupation as if it is a deciding factor. Indeed despite the creation of the then supposedly Twenty-Two Sovereign States which used to have their own make-believe armies, customs authorities etc.

The British used to receive the heads of those nonsensical entities with usual honors despite the fact that all of them used to receive British monthly salaries. The British applied here the rule: ” Divide & Rule” in addition to “Kodah Method” which is applied in taming wild elephants in India.

Moreover, it was ironic to notice that despite British occupation of South Yemen, the flow of people from north to south and vice-versa at the time went unhindered which was not the case when the southern Yemeni revolutionaries evicted the British and later established the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen as an independent state and later a staunch ally of USSR. After independence, several wars were waged between the pro eastern bloc south and the pro west conservative North. Opportunely, destiny made it possible for both to unite peacefully on 22 May 1990, following the demise of USSR. This introduction was necessary in order to let you know how and why most Yemenis in the UK come from the North.

The South is scarce in population due to its harsh arid desert and semi-desert nature. Hence the bulk of the population there were mostly centered in few mountainous regions such as Yafea and others which were later annexed by the British, e.g. Dhalea which was occupied by the British only for forty years and made an emirate with a population of merely 5000 inhabitants, likewise there were readymade sheikhdoms and Sultanates formed by the British of those days.

The North was at the time occupied by the Turks who following their 1st world war defeat ceded power in 1918 to Shiite Clerics who in their turn avowed to the people their being Zaidi-Sect followers (a currently misrepresented moderate Shiite interpretation). While their clandestine rituals confirm their being all along adherents of the extremist Hadaoist version ( a new manifestation of a religious political interpretation innovated by Alhadi Yahya Bin Alhussain) following his control of Yemen. Who was a native of Tabaristan in Northern Iran and divulged it clandestinely and exclusively amongst Yemenis of Persian Stock who are remnant of the prislamic occupation of Yemen and whose family names are still Persian until this day and count 100,000 to 200,000 only.

Now they claim being Arab Nobles i.e. Hashemites which was originally a pretext to maintain their prestige which was menaced by Maan Bin Zayidah, a lieutenant of the Abbaside Caliph who are now unrelated to the Zaidi creed population of the north whom they wilily try to illicitly represent (e.g. Houthi and his likes). The North was under oppression and extreme backward rule, hence the people were made so destitute.

Aden the city which the British declared as a colony was luckily predominantly inhabited originally by people from a northern Yemeni region named Hujjariya. Later on after the lapse of many years a British wrote a book entitled “Shifting Sands” in which he touched upon this fact and considered it as the reason why Yemen was not separated as a final point.

It is to be noted that the Nomads and rural population flocked later on to the city mostly following British evacuation. Thus, it must be kept in mind that the original dwellers of the Aden colony are from Hujjariya in the North. This is why a rumor goes that the British in 1994, decided not to give citizenship to Aden dwellers because the ones with authentic British documents are northerners, apart from few Indians and Somalis, as other south Yemenis belonged to their respective regional British made entities which were termed “British Protectorates”.

Under the British, Aden was prosperous and was the main link between east and west. Northerners flocked into the city and from there they visited the different Twenty-Two entities where they bought passports and left for Britain to work in steel factories as manual labor or on British Ships as Coal Shovelers.

Most Yemenis in the UK were uneducated and although the British at the start were racist towards Yemenis and aliens in general. Yemenis too, looked down on the British in continuation of the feeling carried from past centuries where Arabs had the upper hand and used to call Europeans in scorn “Children of the Yellow” let alone the defeat of the British King by Saladin and his shameful arrest. Considering themselves being white and Europeans are either pink or yellow, this feeling made them abstain from gaining British citizenship, and only recently did they discerned that they should review their decadent ideas and look at the at it from a different perspective.

Anyhow, in my opinion the after world war, the British got rid of their self-complacency and the supremacy feeling and are now far more developed than any in their attitude and approach towards other humans and the world in general. To conclude the subject I would like to give you a living example:

“My grandfather entered Britain in 1930/1940s with a passport from Qaaiti Sultanate. My uncle entered Britain with a passport from Dhalea Emirate and my father entered Kuwait with a Passport from Mahra Sultanate while we are natives of Ibb province in northern Yemen.
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