c.1935 - 1978
Politician and government leader of South Yemen.
Salim Rabiyya Ali (or Rubiyya Salim Ali, or Salmine) came from the up-country of South Yemen, northeast of Aden, and first made his name fighting in the national liberation struggle against the British and their feudalist allies in the Radfan region during the mid-1960s. He was president of the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) throughout most of the 1970s. He and his colleague and rival Abd al-Fattah Ismaʿil were founders of the National Liberation Front (NLF), early leaders of its left wing, and allies in the successful effort to rout its right wing in 1969; they were essentially co-rulers of the PDRY for the next decade, with Rabiyya Ali serving as president and Ismaʿil as secretary-general of the NLF. At the same time, they were bitter rivals and represented different perspectives on South Yemen's Marxist revolution: Rabiyya Ali, the Maoist, was identified with populist, grass-roots organizing as well as state institutions, whereas Ismaʿil, inspired by the Soviet model, was identified with the ruling party and its cadres. Their intraparty struggle for control of the revolution intensified and in mid-1978 erupted into armed conflict triggered by Rabiyya Ali's continuing efforts to improve previously hostile relations with North Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and the other Arab Gulf states, and more immediately by mutual accusations about responsibility for the assassination of North Yemen's president, Ahmad Husayn Ghashmi. Forces loyal to Rabiyya Ali lost the fight and he and two of his senior colleagues were summarily tried and executed.
Bibliography
Bidwell, Robin Leonard. The Two Yemens. Boulder, CO: Westview; Harlow, U.K.: Longman, 1983.
Lackner, Helen. P.D.R. Yemen: Outpost of Socialist Development in Arabia. London: Ithaca Press, 1985.
— ROBERT D. BURROWES
