In mid-2022, the war in Ukraine has dramatically worsened a humanitarian crisis around the world. Although there may be an easing of the blockade preventing Ukrainian and Russian wheat traveling through the Black Sea, both world demand and the inadequate harvests in India and other places suggest that prices will remain high and availability limited for the foreseeable future. These developments will compound the many problems already facing the peoples of the Middle East.

For twenty-three years toward the end of the last century, there was an avowedly socialist state in the Arabian Peninsula. Indeed, it was the only such state anywhere in the Arab world as a whole. How did this come to happen? And why did the experiment end? What kind of system was it for the two million Yemenis who lived in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY)?

Very little is known about the PDRY today, for a number of reasons. There has been a deliberate effort at obscuring its history by the regime which took over the whole of Yemen at unification in 1990 and eliminated all traces of PDRY rule after the 1994 short civil war. Moreover, the vast majority of Yemenis from the region alive today were born after it ended. In a wider context, there have been dramatic changes in international worldviews which have suppressed the positive aspects of socialist experiences everywhere, demonizing them and focusing any reference on their most negative aspects.