Conflict Transmission 89 all sides of this dispute, the YCA in Birmingham was plagued by a feud with southern members over the use of the building. Nageeb explained, A lot of the friction, the problems, that have happened between the Yemeni Community Association and the separatists were around that building, around that resource. No Yemeni woman in the last ten, fifteen years [had seen the inside of that building]. We were trying to change all of that but we came across so much opposition from those people. “Those people” he was referring to were southerners who had become vehement supporters of separation in 2007. On the other hand, Ali, one of the outspoken leaders of the southern secessionists in Birmingham during this period, argued that northern and corrupt Al-Islah Party–affiliated elites7 controlled the YCA and the local Amaneh Center, a community institution that served the wider Muslim community. Ali described a crisis in 2010 when “they,” referring to the northern YCA leadership, “caged up” the South Yemeni building. Southern Yemenis had to break down the bars with the help of the police. “That’s the only thing that we had left [and] they stole it,” he decried, adding, “The same ideology they use in Yemen, they implement it here, in the UK.” While Nageeb felt that the YCA should be used for everyone and that he had been wrongly slandered as a northern “Islahi,” Ali felt that the prounity Yemenis were attempting to appropriate what little resources the southerners had left. Haashim, Nageeb’s successor and head of the YCA in Birmingham at the time of my fieldwork in 2012, attested that these forms of conflict transmission had made it very difficult to provide services for the community. He believed that southerners were “blaming the unity of Yemen for all of the problems” that had been plaguing Yemen for decades. But Haashim also sympathized with the southern people “who feel let down.” If the community was not so divided over political problems in Yemen, he explained, “we would have been able to build a strong institution.” Instead, he lamented, “We at the YCA haven’t done nothing, even though we [Yemenis] are the oldest immigrant community in Britain.” Because community organizers perceived that home-country politics had polluted diaspora organizations, and community cohesion more generally, leaders credited successful civic efforts with the firm dissociation of their initiatives from politics. The YCA in Sandwell was widely cited by respondents across England as a counterexample to the dysfunctional associations in Liverpool and Birmingham because their leaders had successfully insulated their organization from politics. Saleh, an organizer who grew up in the Sandwell Yemeni community, reported getting together with his friends in the 1980s to try to “do something about the situation about the Yemeni diaspora.” 7 Al-Islah is Yemen’s (“reform”) opposition party and includes the Yemeni branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. For more detailed analysis of the Islah party, see Schwedler (2006). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press